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
These and the like relations, expressed by relative terms that have
others answering them, with a reciprocal intimation, as father and son,
bigger and less, cause and effect, are very obvious to every one, and
everybody at first sight perceives the relation. For father and son,
husband and wife, and such other correlative terms, seem so nearly to
belong one to another, and, through custom, do so readily chime and
answer one another in people’s memories, that, upon the naming of
either of them, the thoughts are presently carried beyond the thing so
named; and nobody overlooks or doubts of a relation, where it is so
plainly intimated. But where languages have failed to give correlative
names, there the relation is not always so easily taken notice of.
CONCUBINE is, no doubt, a relative name, as well as wife: but in
languages where this and the like words have not a correlative term,
there people are not so apt to take them to be so, as wanting that
evident mark of relation which is between correlatives, which seem to
explain one another, and not to be able to exist, but together. Hence
it is, that many of those names, which, duly considered, do include
evident relations, have been called EXTERNAL DENOMINATIONS. But all
names that are more than empty sounds must signify some idea, which is
either in the thing to which the name is applied, and then it is
positive, and is looked on as united to and existing in the thing to
which the denomination is given; or else it arises from the respect the
mind finds in it to something distinct from it, with which it considers
it, and then it includes a relation.
3. Some seemingly absolute Terms contain Relations.
Another sort of relative terms there is, which are not looked on to be
either relative, or so much as external denominations: which yet, under
the form and appearance of signifying something absolute in the
subject, do conceal a tacit, though less observable, relation. Such are
the seemingly positive terms of OLD, GREAT, IMPERFECT, &c., whereof I
shall have occasion to speak more at large in the following chapters.
4. Relation different from the Things related.
This further may be observed, That the ideas of relations may be the
same in men who have far different ideas of the things that are
related, or that are thus compared: v. g. those who have far different
ideas of a man, may yet agree in the notion of a father; which is a
notion superinduced to the substance, or man, and refers only to an act
of that thing called man whereby he contributed to the generation of
one of his own kind, let man be what it will.
5. Change of Relation may be without any Change in the things related.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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