with these simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare, and unite them, even to an almost infinite variety; and so can make at pleasure new complex ideas. But it is not in the power of the most exalted wit or enlarged understanding, by any quickness or variety of thought, to invent or frame one new simple idea in the mind, not taken in by the
- ↑ In his first letter to the Bishop of Worcester.
- ↑ B. 3. c. 3. B. 2. c. 25. & c. 28. § 18.
- ↑ B. 2. c. 1. § 5.
- ↑ B. 2. c. 7. § 10.
- ↑ B. 2. c. 21. § 73.
words: "If the idea of substance be grounded upon plain and evident reason, then we must allow an idea of substance, which comes not in by sensation or reflection; and so we may be certain of something which we have not by these ideas."
To which our author[1] answers: These words of your lordship's contain nothing as I see in them against me: for I never said that the general idea of substance comes in by sensation and reflection, or that it is a simple idea of sensation or reflection, though it be ultimately founded in them; for it is a complex idea, made up of the general idea of something, or being, with the relation of a support to accidents. For general ideas come not into the mind by sensation or reflection, but are the creatures or inventions of the understanding, as I think I have shown[2]; and also how the mind makes them from ideas which it has got by sensation and reflection; and as to the ideas of relation, how the mind forms them, and how they are derived from, and ultimately terminate in, ideas of sensation and reflection, I have likewise shown.
But that I may not be mistaken, what I mean, when I speak of ideas of sensation and reflection, as the materials of all our knowledge; give me leave, my lord, to set down here a place or two, out of my book, to explain myself; as I thus speak of ideas of sensation and reflection:
"That these, when we have taken a full survey of them, and their several modes, and the compositions made out of them, we shall find to contain all our whole stock of ideas, and we have nothing in our minds, which did not come in one of these two ways[3]." This thought, in another place, I express thus.
"These are the most considerable of those simple ideas which the mind has, and out of which is made all its other knowledge; all which it receives by the two forementioned ways of sensation and reflection[4]." And,
"Thus I have, in a short draught, given a view of our original ideas, from whence all the rest are derived, and of which they are made up[5]."
This, and the like, said in other places, is what I have thought
