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
Those who so confidently tell us that the soul always actually thinks,
I would they would also tell us, what those ideas are that are in the
soul of a child, before or just at the union with the body, before it
hath received any by sensation. The dreams of sleeping men are, as I
take it, all made up of the waking man’s ideas; though for the most
part oddly put together. It is strange, if the soul has ideas of its
own that it derived not from sensation or reflection, (as it must have,
if it thought before it received any impressions from the body,) that
it should never, in its private thinking, (so private, that the man
himself perceives it not,) retain any of them the very moment it wakes
out of them, and then make the man glad with new discoveries. Who can
find it reason that the soul should, in its retirement during sleep,
have so many hours’ thoughts, and yet never light on any of those ideas
it borrowed not from sensation or reflection; or at least preserve the
memory of none but such, which, being occasioned from the body, must
needs be less natural to a spirit? It is strange the soul should never
once in a man’s whole life recall over any of its pure native thoughts,
and those ideas it had before it borrowed anything from the body; never
bring into the waking man’s view any other ideas but what have a tang
of the cask, and manifestly derive their original from that union. If
it always thinks, and so had ideas before it was united, or before it
received any from the body, it is not to be supposed but that during
sleep it recollects its native ideas; and during that retirement from
communicating with the body, whilst it thinks by itself, the ideas it
is busied about should be, sometimes at least, those more natural and
congenial ones which it had in itself, underived from the body, or its
own operations about them: which, since the waking man never remembers,
we must from this hypothesis conclude either that the soul remembers
something that the man does not; or else that memory belongs only to
such ideas as are derived from the body, or the mind’s operations about
them.
18. How knows any one that the Soul always thinks? For if it be not a
self-evident Proposition, it needs Proof.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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