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
Secondly, the other fountain from which experience furnisheth the
understanding with ideas is,—the perception of the operations of our
own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got;—which
operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish
the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had
from things without. And such are perception, thinking, doubting,
believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings
of our own minds;—which we being conscious of, and observing in
ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings as distinct
ideas as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas
every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having
nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might
properly enough be called INTERNAL SENSE. But as I call the other
Sensation, so I call this REFLECTION, the ideas it affords being such
only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within
itself. By reflection then, in the following part of this discourse, I
would be understood to mean, that notice which the mind takes of its
own operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof there come to
be ideas of these operations in the understanding. These two, I say,
viz. external material things, as the objects of SENSATION, and the
operations of our own minds within, as the objects of REFLECTION, are
to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take their
beginnings. The term OPERATIONS here I use in a large sense, as
comprehending not barely the actions of the mind about its ideas, but
some sort of passions arising sometimes from them, such as is the
satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought.
5. All our Ideas are of the one or of the other of these.
The understanding seems to me not to have the least glimmering of any
ideas which it doth not receive from one of these two. EXTERNAL OBJECTS
furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all
those different perceptions they produce in us; and THE MIND furnishes
the understanding with ideas of its own operations.
These, when we have taken a full survey of them, and their several
modes, and the compositions made out of them we shall find to contain
all our whole stock of ideas; and that we have nothing in our minds
which did not come in one of these two ways. Let any one examine his
own thoughts, and thoroughly search into his understanding; and then
let him tell me, whether all the original ideas he has there, are any
other than of the objects of his senses, or of the operations of his
mind, considered as objects of his reflection. And how great a mass of
knowledge soever he imagines to be lodged there, he will, upon taking a
strict view, see that he has not any idea in his mind but what one of
these two have imprinted;—though perhaps, with infinite variety
compounded and enlarged by the understanding, as we shall see
hereafter.
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