"Secondly, the other Fountain, from which Experience furnisheth
the Understanding with Ideas, is the Perception of the operations
of our own minds 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 our selves, 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, namely, 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 beginning. 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."
"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." (Bk.
II., ch. i., §§ 2-5.)
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