An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2: MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books 3 and 4 — John Locke — John Shaqi
An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2: MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books 3 and 4
John Locke · en
Conformable also to what has been said concerning the essences of the
species of mixed modes, that they are the creatures of the understanding
rather than the works of nature; conformable, I say, to this, we find
that their names lead our thoughts to the mind, and no further. When we
speak of JUSTICE, or GRATITUDE, we frame to ourselves no imagination of
anything existing, which we would conceive; but our thoughts terminate
in the abstract ideas of those virtues, and look not further; as they do
when we speak of a HORSE, or IRON, whose specific ideas we consider not
as barely in the mind, but as in things themselves, which afford the
original patterns of those ideas. But in mixed modes, at least the most
considerable parts of them, which are moral beings, we consider the
original patterns as being in the mind, and to those we refer for the
distinguishing of particular beings under names. And hence I think it
is that these essences of the species of mixed modes are by a more
particular name called NOTIONS; as, by a peculiar right, appertaining to
the understanding.
13. Their being made by the Understanding without Patterns, shows the
Reason why they are so compounded.
Hence, likewise, we may learn why the complex ideas of mixed modes
are commonly more compounded and decompounded than those of natural
substances. Because they being the workmanship of the understanding,
pursuing only its own ends, and the conveniency of expressing in short
those ideas it would make known to another, it does with great liberty
unite often into one abstract idea things that, in their nature, have
no coherence; and so under one term bundle together a great variety of
compounded and decompounded ideas. Thus the name of PROCESSION: what a
great mixture of independent ideas of persons, habits, tapers, orders,
motions, sounds, does it contain in that complex one, which the mind of
man has arbitrarily put together, to express by that one name? Whereas
the complex ideas of the sorts of substances are usually made up of only
a small number of simple ones; and in the species of animals, these two,
viz. shape and voice, commonly make the whole nominal essence.
14. Names of mixed Modes stand alway for their real Essences, which are
the workmanship of our minds.
Another thing we may observe from what has been said is, That the
names of mixed modes always signify (when they have any determined
signification) the REAL essences of their species. For, these abstract
ideas being the workmanship of the mind, and not referred to the real
existence of things, there is no supposition of anything more signified
by that name, but barely that complex idea the mind itself has formed;
which is all it would have expressed by it; and is that on which all the
properties of the species depend, and from which alone they all flow:
and so in these the real and nominal essence is the same; which, of what
concernment it is to the certain knowledge of general truth, we shall
see hereafter.