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
POWERS therefore justly make a great part of our complex ideas of
substances. He that will examine his complex idea of gold, will find
several of its ideas that make it up to be only powers; as the power of
being melted, but of not spending itself in the fire; of being
dissolved in AQUA REGIA, are ideas as necessary to make up our complex
idea of gold, as its colour and weight: which, if duly considered, are
also nothing but different powers. For, to speak truly, yellowness is
not actually in gold, but is a power in gold to produce that idea in us
by our eyes, when placed in a due light: and the heat, which we cannot
leave out of our ideas of the sun, is no more really in the sun, than
the white colour it introduces into wax. These are both equally powers
in the sun, operating, by the motion and figure of its sensible parts,
so on a man, as to make him have the idea of heat; and so on wax, as to
make it capable to produce in a man the idea of white.
11. The now secondary Qualities of Bodies would disappear, if we could
discover the primary ones of their minute Parts.
Had we senses acute enough to discern the minute particles of bodies,
and the real constitution on which their sensible qualities depend, I
doubt not but they would produce quite different ideas in us: and that
which is now the yellow colour of gold, would then disappear, and
instead of it we should see an admirable texture of parts, of a certain
size and figure. This microscopes plainly discover to us; for what to
our naked eyes produces a certain colour, is, by thus augmenting the
acuteness of our senses, discovered to be quite a different thing; and
the thus altering, as it were, the proportion of the bulk of the minute
parts of a coloured object to our usual sight, produces different ideas
from what it did before. Thus, sand or pounded glass, which is opaque,
and white to the naked eye, is pellucid in a microscope; and a hair
seen in this way, loses its former colour, and is, in a great measure,
pellucid, with a mixture of some bright sparkling colours, such as
appear from the refraction of diamonds, and other pellucid bodies.
Blood, to the naked eye, appears all red; but by a good microscope,
wherein its lesser parts appear, shows only some few globules of red,
swimming in a pellucid liquor, and how these red globules would appear,
if glasses could be found that could yet magnify them a thousand or ten
thousand times more, is uncertain.
12. Our Faculties for Discovery of the Qualities and powers of
Substances suited to our State.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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