only, therefore, to get back to the natural primitives. Under the influence of such deistic ideas, Locke writes a mythology of the history of knowledge, starting from clear and distinct meanings, each simple, well defined, sharply and unambiguously just what it is on its face, without concealments and complications, and proceeds by "natural" compoundings up to the store of complex ideas, and to the perception of simple relations of agreement among ideas: a perception always certain if the ideas are simple, and always controllable in the case of complex ideas if we consider the simple ideas and their compoundings. Thus he established the habit of taking logical discriminations as historical or psychological primitives--as "sources" of beliefs and knowledge instead of as checks upon inference and as means of knowing. I hope reference to Locke will not make a scapegoat. I should not have mentioned him if it were not that this way of looking at things found its way over into orthodox psychology and then back again into the foundations of logical theory. It may be said to be the stock in trade of the school of empiricist logicians, and (what is even more important) of the other schools of logic whenever they are dealing with propositions of perception and observation: _vide_ Russell's trusting confidence in "atomic" propositions as psychological primitives. It led to the supposition that there is a kind of _knowledge_ or simple apprehension (or sense acquaintance) implying no inference and yet basic to inference. Note, if you please, the multitude of problems generated by thinking of whatever is present in experience (as sensory qualities are present) as if it were intrinsically and apart from the use made of its subject-matter of knowledge.