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
There are therefore three ways whereby we get these complex ideas of
mixed modes:—(1) By experience and OBSERVATION of things themselves:
thus, by seeing two men mixed wrestle or fence, we get the idea of
wrestling or fencing. (2) By INVENTION, or voluntary putting together
of several simple ideas in our own minds: so he that first invented
printing or etching, had an idea of it in his mind before it ever
existed. (3) Which is the most usual way, by EXPLAINING THE NAMES of
actions we never saw, or motions we cannot see; and by enumerating, and
thereby, as it were, setting before our imaginations all those ideas
which go to the making them up, and are the constituent parts of them.
For, having by sensation and reflection stored our minds with simple
ideas, and by use got the names that stand for them, we can by those
means represent to another any complex idea we would have him conceive;
so that it has in it no simple ideas but what he knows, and has with us
the same name for. For all our complex ideas are ultimately resolvable
into simple ideas, of which they are compounded and originally made up,
though perhaps their immediate ingredients, as I may so say, are also
complex ideas. Thus, the mixed mode which the word LIE stands for is
made of these simple ideas:—(1) Articulate sounds. (2) Certain ideas in
the mind of the speaker. (3) Those words the signs of those ideas. (4)
Those signs put together, by affirmation or negation, otherwise than
the ideas they stand for are in the mind of the speaker. I think I need
not go any further in the analysis of that complex idea we call a lie:
what I have said is enough to show that it is made up of simple ideas.
And it could not be but an offensive tediousness to my reader, to
trouble him with a more minute enumeration of every particular simple
idea that goes to this complex one; which, from what has been said, he
cannot but be able to make out to himself. The same may be done in all
our complex ideas whatsoever; which, however compounded and
decompounded, may at last be resolved into simple ideas, which are all
the materials of knowledge or thought we have, or can have. Nor shall
we have reason to fear that the mind is hereby stinted to too scanty a
number of ideas, if we consider what an inexhaustible stock of simple
modes number and figure alone afford us. How far then mixed modes,
which admit of the various combinations of different simple ideas, and
their infinite modes, are from being few and scanty, we may easily
imagine. So that, before we have done, we shall see that nobody need be
afraid he shall not have scope and compass enough for his thoughts to
range in, though they be, as I pretend, confined only to simple ideas,
received from sensation or reflection, and their several combinations.
10. Motion, Thinking, and Power have been most modified.
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