 Ideas fall into classes that parallel the Cartesian ontology. Ideas of substances are conventionally associated with ideas of nouns and thus further associated with written and spoken words, which are themselves objects of the word-ideas. Ideas of attributes and modes are associated with abstract nouns such as “hardness” and “justice”, as well as by adjectives such as “hard” and “just” (I.2, 30–31). Words themselves signify objects only transitively, as it were, via ideas of words and then ideas of objects. The Logic often takes the shortcut of writing as though words directly signify things. It depends on the reader to keep the full chain of associations in mind. The logical distinction between general terms and particular or singular ones emerges from ideas of attributes and modes. As noted above, these ideas are most distinct when conceived along with the idea of the substance on which they depend. When they are conceived without attention to their substance idea, they can represent additional objects. This is illustrated with a geometrical example.