real in man, and upon which all qualities are ‘superinductions of the mind.’ [2] [1] Book III. chap. vi. sec. 4: ‘Take but away the abstract ideas by which we sort individuals, and then the thought of anything essential to any of them instantly vanishes.’ [2] See a few lines below the passage quoted: ‘So that if it be asked, whether it be essential to me, or any other particular corporeal being, to have reason? I say, no; no more than it is essential to this white thing I write on to have words in it.’ Only about qualities of matter, as distinct from matter itself, that Locke feels any difficulty. 107. We may now discern the precise point where the qualm as to clothing reality with such superinductions commonly returns upon Locke. The conversion of feeling into body felt and of the particular time of the feeling into an individuality of the body, and, further, the fusion of the individual bodies, manifold as the times of sensation, into one continued body, he passes without scruple. So long as these are all the traces of mental fiction which ‘matter,’ or ‘body,’ or ‘nature’ bears upon it, he regards it undoubtingly as the pure ‘privation’ of whatever belongs to the mind. But so soon as cognisable qualities, forming an essence, come to be ascribed to body, the reflection arises that these qualities are on our side ideas, and that so far as they are permanent or continuous they are not ideas of the sort which can alone represent body as the ‘real’ opposite of mind; they are not the result of momentary impact; they are not ‘actually present sensations.’ Suppose them, however, to have no permanence--suppose their reality to be confined to the fleeting ‘now’--and they are no qualities, no essence, at all. There is then for us no _real_ essence of body or nature; what we call so is a creation of the mind. These, as knowable, must be our ideas, and therefore not a ‘real essence’.