‘Every man being conscious to himself that he thinks, and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there, it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas, such are those expressed by the words, _whiteness_, _hardness_, _sweetness_, _thinking_, _motion_, _man_, _elephant_, _army_, _drunkenness_, and others: it is in the first place then to be inquired how he comes by them. I know it is a received doctrine that men have native ideas and original characters stamped upon their minds in their very first being. This opinion I have at large examined already: but I suppose what I have said will be much more easily admitted when I have shewn whence the understanding may get all the ideas it has, and by what ways and degrees they may come into the mind, for which I shall appeal to every one’s own observation and experience. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it, in an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE: in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself.... ‘First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways, wherein those objects do affect them; and thus we come by those ideas we have of _yellow_, _white_, _heat_, _cold_, _soft_, _hard_, _bitter_, _sweet_, and all those which we call sensible qualities, which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call SENSATION.