"We should see what notions are common to all men, and what notions are clear and distinct to those who are unshackled by by prejudice, and we should detect those that are ill-founded. ...From similar causes arise those notions which we call general... They arise, to wit, from the fact that so many images, for instance, of men, are formed simultaneously in the human mind, that the powers of the imagination break down, not indeed utterly, but to the extent that the mind losing count of small differences between individuals and their definite number, and only distinctly imagining that, in which all the individuals, in so far as the body is affected by them, agree... this the mind expresses by the name man, and this it predicates of an infinite number of individuals. We must, however, bear in mind, that these general notions are not formed by all men in the same way, but vary in each individual according as the point varies, whereby the body has been most affected and which the mind most easily remembers. ... It is thus not to be wondered at, that among philosophers who attempt to explain things in nature merely by the images formed of them, so many controversies should have arisen."