An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1: MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books 1 and 2Locke, John
Philosophy
An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1: MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books 1 and 2
Locke, John
Knowledge, Theory of -- Early works to 1800
SECONDLY, sometimes the word time is used in a larger sense, and is
applied to parts of that infinite duration, not that were really
distinguished and measured out by this real existence, and periodical
motions of bodies, that were appointed from the beginning to be for
signs and for seasons and for days and years, and are accordingly our
measures of time; but such other portions too of that infinite uniform
duration, which we upon any occasion do suppose equal to certain
lengths of measured time; and so consider them as bounded and
determined. For, if we should suppose the creation, or fall of the
angels, was at the beginning of the Julian period, we should speak
properly enough, and should be understood if we said, it is a longer
time since the creation of angels than the creation of the world, by
7640 years: whereby we would mark out so much of that undistinguished
duration as we suppose equal to, and would have admitted, 7640 annual
revolutions of the sun, moving at the rate it now does. And thus
likewise we sometimes speak of place, distance, or bulk, in the great
INANE, beyond the confines of the world, when we consider so much of
that space as is equal to, or capable to receive, a body of any
assigned dimensions, as a cubic foot; or do suppose a point in it, at
such a certain distance from any part of the universe.
8. They belong to all finite beings.
WHERE and WHEN are questions belonging to all finite existences, and
are by us always reckoned from some known parts of this sensible world,
and from some certain epochs marked out to us by the motions observable
in it. Without some such fixed parts or periods, the order of things
would be lost, to our finite understandings, in the boundless
invariable oceans of duration and expansion, which comprehend in them
all finite beings, and in their full extent belong only to the Deity.
And therefore we are not to wonder that we comprehend them not, and do
so often find our thoughts at a loss, when we would consider them,
either abstractly in themselves, or as any way attributed to the first
incomprehensible Being. But when applied to any particular finite
beings, the extension of any body is so much of that infinite space as
the bulk of the body takes up. And place is the position of any body,
when considered at a certain distance from some other. As the idea of
the particular duration of anything is, an idea of that portion of
infinite duration which passes during the existence of that thing; so
the time when the thing existed is, the idea of that space of duration
which passed between some known and fixed period of duration, and the
being of that thing. One shows the distance of the extremities of the
bulk or existence of the same thing, as that it is a foot square, or
lasted two years; the other shows the distance of it in place, or
existence from other fixed points of space or duration, as that it was
in the middle of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, or the first degree of Taurus,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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