greater proximity between some ideas than others: a common point to which they tend, that is a common quality: a general nature, in which they are identified: or there could not be in the mind more ideas of same or like, or different, or judgment, or reasoning, or truth, or falsehood, than in the stones in the fields, or the sands of the sea-shore. The idea of classing things implies only the same sort of general comparison, or abstract idea of likeness, that is necessary to the idea of any simple sensible quality of an object. In both cases, we only contemplate a number of things as alike or under the same general notion, without attending to their actual differences. Take the idea, for instance, of a slab of white marble. As long as only one such piece of marble is considered, it is supposed to be a particular object, and its whiteness is supposed to be perceived by the mind as a simple sensible quality. If, on the contrary, several such slabs of marble are presented to the mind, this is commonly considered as producing a general idea of marble and of whiteness. But this idea of whiteness, not as a quality of a particular thing, but as a common quality of different things, is rejected by the moderns as implying the supposition, that several different ideas can coalesce in the same general notion, which amounts, they say, to the contradiction that a thing may be the same, and different at the same time. Now I would affirm whatever there is absurd or inconceivable in this latter case applies equally to the former. For what possible idea can any man form of a slab of white marble, in any other way than that of abstraction? Is the idea of its whiteness as a sensible quality the idea of a point. Is it one single impression? This Berkeley and others deny, for they say there can be no idea of colour without extension, or of quality without quantity. If there are in this object several impressions of colour, I would ask are they all distinctly perceived? Are they all the same? Or if not, are all their differences perceived by the mind, before it possibly can be impressed with the general idea of a certain sensible quality, or that the object before it is white? Is the mind aware of even the slightest stain in this object, of every thing that may happen to vary it? Yet, if the idea falls anything short of this minute and perfect knowledge, it can only be an imperfect and general notion. That is, a number of differences must be massed together in a common feeling of likeness, and a number of separate parts make up the idea of a given object. Yet this is all that is implied in forming the ideas of whiteness in general, as belonging to several objects, or of colour, or extension, or any other idea whatever, drawn from numberless objects, impressed at numberless times. If particular objects or qualities were single things, there would then be some precise limit between them and abstract or general