An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2: MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books 3 and 4
John Locke · en
Thus whatever things were discovered to St. Paul, when he was rapt up
into the third heaven; whatever new ideas his mind there received, all
the description he can make to others of that place, is only this, That
there are such things, 'as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath
it entered into the heart of man to conceive.' And supposing God should
discover to any one, supernaturally, a species of creatures inhabiting,
for example, Jupiter or Saturn, (for that it is possible there may be
such, nobody can deny,) which had six senses; and imprint on his mind
the ideas conveyed to theirs by that sixth sense: he could no more, by
words, produce in the minds of other men those ideas imprinted by that
sixth sense, than one of us could convey the idea of any colour, by the
sound of words, into a man who, having the other four senses perfect,
had always totally wanted the fifth, of seeing. For our simple ideas,
then, which are the foundation, and sole matter of all our notions and
knowledge, we must depend wholly on our reason, I mean our natural
faculties; and can by no means receive them, or any of them, from
traditional revelation. I say, TRADITIONAL REVELATION, in distinction to
ORIGINAL REVELATION. By the one, I mean that first impression which is
made immediately by God on the mind of any man, to which we cannot set
any bounds; and by the other, those impressions delivered over to others
in words, and the ordinary ways of conveying our conceptions one to
another.
4. Secondly, Traditional Revelation may make us know Propositions
knowable also by Reason, but not with the same Certainty that Reason
doth.