...is thus led to the view that understanding an expression consists in associating it with some idea: Words, in their primary or immediate signification,...nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them.11 Locke takes ideas to be mental images or pictures: an idea of a cube is taken to be a mental...

...consonant to either common sense or the received opinions of mankind. Locke, however, states that " words, in their primary or immediate signification,...soever, or carelessly, those ideas are collected from the things which they are supposed to represent. When a man speaks to another, it is that he may be...