An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2: MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books 3 and 4
John Locke · en
[It has been generally taken for granted, that mathematics alone are
capable of demonstrative certainty: but to have such an agreement or
disagreement as may intuitively be perceived, being, as I imagine, not
the privilege of the ideas of number, extension, and figure alone, it
may possibly be the want of due method and application in us, and not of
sufficient evidence in things, that demonstration has been thought to
have so little to do in other parts of knowledge, and been scarce so
much as aimed at by any but mathematicians.] For whatever ideas we have
wherein the mind can perceive the immediate agreement or disagreement
that is between them, there the mind is capable of intuitive knowledge;
and where it can perceive the agreement or disagreement of any two
ideas, by an intuitive perception of the agreement or disagreement
they have with any intermediate ideas, there the mind is capable of
demonstration: which is not limited to ideas of extension, figure,
number, and their modes.
10. Why it has been thought to be so limited.
The reason why it has been generally sought for, and supposed to be only
in those, I imagine has been, not only the general usefulness of those
sciences; but because, in comparing their equality or excess, the modes
of numbers have every the least difference very clear and perceivable:
and though in extension every the least excess is not so perceptible,
yet the mind has found out ways to examine, and discover
demonstratively, the just equality of two angles, or extensions, or
figures: and both these, i. e. numbers and figures, can be set down by
visible and lasting marks, wherein the ideas under consideration are
perfectly determined; which for the most part they are not, where they
are marked only by names and words.
11. Modes of Qualities not demonstrable like modes of Quantity.