22. Phraseology of this kind, the standing heritage of the philosophy which seeks the origin of knowledge in sensation, assumes that the individual sensation is from the first consciously representative; that it is more than what it is simply in itself--fleeting, momentary, unnameable (because, while we name it, it has become another), and for the same reason unknowable, the very negation of knowability; that it shows the presence of something, whether this be a ‘body’ to which it is referred as a quality, or a mind of which it is a modification, or be ultimately reduced to the permanent conditions of its own possibility. This assumption for the present has merely to be pointed out; its legitimacy need not be discussed. Nor need we now discuss the attempts that have been made since Locke to show that mere sensations, dumb to begin with, may yet become articulate upon repetition and combination; which in fact endow them with a faculty of inference, and suppose that though primarily they report nothing beyond themselves, they yet somehow come to do so as an explanation of their own recurrence. The sensational theory in Locke is still, so to speak, unsophisticated. It is true that, in concert with that ‘thinking gentleman,’ Mr. Molyneux, he had satisfied himself that what we reckon simple ideas are often really inferences from such ideas which by habit have become instinctive; but his account of this habitual process presupposes the reference of sensation to a thing. ‘When we set before our eyes a round globe of any uniform colour, it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted in our mind is of a flat circle, variously shadowed with several degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But we having by use been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us, what alterations are made in the reflections of light by the difference of the sensible figures of bodies; the judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes. So that from that which truly is variety of colour or shadow, collecting the figure, it makes it pass for a mark of figure, and frames to itself the perception of a convex figure, and an uniform colour.’ (Book II. chap. ix. sec. 8.) The theory here stated involves two assumptions, each inconsistent with the simplicity of the simple idea. _(a)_ The actual impression of the ‘plane variously coloured’ is supposed to pronounce itself to be of something outward. Once call the sensation an ‘impression,’ indeed, or call it anything, and this or an analogous substantiation of it is implied. It is only as thus reporting something ‘objective’ that the simple idea of the plane variously coloured gives anything to be corrected by the ‘perception of the kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us,’ _i.e._ ‘of the alterations made in the reflections of light by the difference of the sensible figure of bodies.’ This perception,