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
The SIMPLE MODES of NUMBER are of all other the most distinct; every
the least variation, which is an unit, making each combination as
clearly different from that which approacheth nearest to it, as the
most remote; two being as distinct from one, as two hundred; and the
idea of two as distinct from the idea of three, as the magnitude of the
whole earth is from that of a mite. This is not so in other simple
modes, in which it is not so easy, nor perhaps possible for us to
distinguish betwixt two approaching ideas, which yet are really
different. For who will undertake to find a difference between the
white of this paper and that of the next degree to it: or can form
distinct ideas of every the least excess in extension?
4. Therefore Demonstrations in Numbers the most precise.
The clearness and distinctness of each mode of number from all others,
even those that approach nearest, makes me apt to think that
demonstrations in numbers, if they are not more evident and exact than
in extension, yet they are more general in their use, and more
determinate in their application. Because the ideas of numbers are more
precise and distinguishable than in extension; where every equality and
excess are not so easy to be observed or measured; because our thoughts
cannot in space arrive at any determined smallness beyond which it
cannot go, as an unit; and therefore the quantity or proportion of any
the least excess cannot be discovered; which is clear otherwise in
number, where, as has been said, 91 is as distinguishable from 90 as
from 9000, though 91 be the next immediate excess to 90. But it is not
so in extension, where, whatsoever is more than just a foot or an inch,
is not distinguishable from the standard of a foot or an inch; and in
lines which appear of an equal length, one may be longer than the other
by innumerable parts: nor can any one assign an angle, which shall be
the next biggest to a right one.
5. Names necessary to Numbers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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