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
order and proportion, then the confusion ceases, and the eye presently
sees that it is a man, or Caesar; i.e. that it belongs to those names;
and that it is sufficiently distinguishable from a baboon, or Pompey;
i.e. from the ideas signified by those names. Just thus it is with our
ideas, which are as it were the pictures of things. No one of these
mental draughts, however the parts are put together, can be called
confused (for they are plainly discernible as they are) till it be
ranked under some ordinary name to which it cannot be discerned to
belong, any more than it does to some other name of an allowed
different signification.
9. Thirdly, or their simple ones mutable and undetermined.
Thirdly, A third defect that frequently gives the name of confused to
our ideas, is, when any one of them is uncertain and undetermined. Thus
we may observe men who, not forbearing to use the ordinary words of
their language till they have learned their precise signification,
change the idea they make this or that term stand for, almost as often
as they use it. He that does this out of uncertainty of what he should
leave out, or put into his idea of CHURCH, or IDOLATRY, every time he
thinks of either, and holds not steady to any one precise combination
of ideas that makes it up, is said to have a confused idea of idolatry
or the church: though this be still for the same reason as the former,
viz. because a mutable idea (if we will allow it to be one idea) cannot
belong to one name rather than another, and so loses the distinction
that distinct names are designed for.
10. Confusion without Reference to Names, hardly conceivable.
By what has been said, we may observe how much NAMES, as supposed
steady signs of things, and by their difference to stand for, and keep
things distinct that in themselves are different, are the occasion of
denominating ideas distinct or confused, by a secret and unobserved
reference the mind makes of its ideas to such names. This perhaps will
be fuller understood, after what I say of Words in the third Book has
been read and considered. But without taking notice of such a reference
of ideas to distinct names, as the signs of distinct things, it will be
hard to say what a confused idea is. And therefore when a man designs,
by any name, a sort of things, or any one particular thing, distinct
from all others, the complex idea he annexes to that name is the more
distinct, the more particular the ideas are, and the greater and more
determinate the number and order of them is, whereof it is made up.
For, the more it has of these, the more it has still of the perceivable
differences, whereby it is kept separate and distinct from all ideas
belonging to other names, even those that approach nearest to it, and
thereby all confusion with them is avoided.
11. Confusion concerns always two Ideas.
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