SYNOPSIS OF THE SECOND BOOK. IN the Second Book Locke offers what seems to him the true history of the ideas or phenomena in which the human understanding finds knowledge and probability, intending it to take the place of the 'established opinion,' controverted in the First Book,-that we are conscious at birth of certain regulating ideas and principles, which are thus independent of criticism and verification by experience. That all the simple ideas or phenomena of existence, with which the understanding of man can be concerned, are either, those presented in the five senses, which we refer to external things, or those presented in a reflex experience of our own mental operations,-is the counter thesis that is stated and illustrated in the first eleven chapters of the Second Book. That our most abstract ideas, how remote soever they may seem from data of sense or from operations of our own minds, are yet only such as our understanding frames to itself, by repeating, uniting, substantiating, and connecting ideas, received either from objects of sense or from its own operations about them, and thus by the active exercise of its faculties, is the theory of which chapters xii-xxviii contain the verification. It consists of a series of crucial instances,' intended to show that even in such complex ideas as those of space, time, infinity, substance, power, identity, and morality, which seem most remote from the original phenomena of experience, the understanding 'stirs not one jot beyond' those phenomena, by which, accordingly, our original ignorance of what exists is removed. The qualities of our simple and complex ideas, -as clear, distinct, adequate, and true, with their opposites, are illustrated in chapters xxix-xxxii. The Book concludes in chapter xxxiii with examples of mental 'association,' as an influence that is apt to mar the quality of our ideas, making them unfit to determine either knowledge or probability. CHAPTER I. OF IDEAS IN GENERAL, AND THEIR ORIGINAL. CHAP. I. Idea is the 1. EVERY man being conscious to himself that he thinks; BOOK II. and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there1, it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas, such as are those expressed by the words whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others: it is in the first place then to be inquired, How he comes by them? I know it is a received doctrine, that men have native ideas, and original characters, stamped upon their minds in their very first being. This opinion I have at large examined already; and, I suppose what I have said in the foregoing Book will be much more easily admitted, when I have shown whence the understanding may get all the ideas it has; and by what ways and degrees they may come into the mind;— for which I shall appeal to every one's own observation and experience. Object of come from 2. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white All Ideas paper 2, void of all characters, without any ideas :-How comes Sensation it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store or Reflecwhich the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the 1 Cf. Introd. § 8. It must be remembered that 'ideas,' as treated of in the Second Book, are not regarded as cognitions (the subject reserved for the Fourth Book), but as phenomena considered in abstraction from affirmation and denial, truth and falsehood, as simple apprehensions in short. And he here asks, in the 'historical plain method,' under what conditions the phenomena of real existence begin to appear, and gradually multiply, in new 2 White paper' might suggest that tion. CHAP. I. BOOK II. materials of reason and knowledge1? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE 2. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring. The 4 3. First, our Senses, conversant about particular sensible Sensation objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions 5 1 Assuming, then, that the human mind is at first ignorant of everything,-what, he asks, is the explanation of the state in which adult human understanding may now be found, with its often rich stores of varied and elaborated ideas? 2 'Experience.' The ambiguity of this term is a main source of the controversies which the Essay has occasioned. Locke did not see that innateness (in a different meaning) and experience are not contradictories, but are really two different ways of regarding the possessions of the understanding. Our attitude towards the philosophy of Experience must entirely depend upon the meaning we put into the term experience. . . . The point on which issue should be joined is,the identification of Experience with mere sense. If we prove that this is not so, and that, on the contrary, mere sense is an abstraction, impossible in rerum natura, Experientialism is at once shorn of all its supposed terrors.' (Seth, Scottish Philosophy, pp. 142, 3.) What Locke argues for is, that, in respect of the time of its manifestation in the conscious life of each man, no knowledge that he possesses can precede awakening of intellectual life into (at first dim and imperfect) exercise through impressions on the senses. He thus makes our adult understand ing of things the issue of the exercise of the faculties in 'experience'; but he does not get in sight of Kant's ques tion, or try to disengage the elements of reason through which a scientific or intelligible experience is itself possible, -the problem of the next great critique of a human understanding of the uni verse. 3 But the materials of thinking' presuppose, for their conversion into scientific experience, intellectual conditions, which conditions Locke either leaves in the background, or mixes up with the materials,' i. e. with those gradually accumulated data without which our notions would be empty, and our common terms meaningless. The exordium of knowledge, back to which the contents of all our concepts may be traced, and apart from which they would be empty; not its origo, or the elements in the intellectual products that are found, after critical analysis of its logical constitution. Locke means by 'origin,' 'exordium,' which alone has relation to his 'historical' method. The acquired contents of our real knowledge, he goes on to show, must be either ideas of the qualities of matter, or ideas of the operations of mind. 5 Here perception is virtually equivalent to idea-but regarded from the point of view of the apprehensive act, not of the phenomena apprehended. of things, according to those various ways wherein those BOOK II. objects do affect them. And thus we come by those ideas CHAP. I. we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, one Source and all those which we call sensible qualities; which when of Ideas. I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external1 objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call SENSATION2 the other them. 4. Secondly, the other fountain from which experience The Operafurnisheth the understanding with ideas is,―the perception of tions of the operations of our own mind within us, as it is employed our Minds, about the ideas it has got ;-which operations, when the soul Source of comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from things without. And such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own minds;-which we being conscious of, and observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings as distinct ideas as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other Sensation, so or origo? The former alone is pro- That Locke applies the term sense CHAP. I. BOOK II. I call this REFLECTION, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself. By reflection then, in the following part of this discourse, I would be understood to mean, that notice which the mind takes of its own operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof there come to be ideas of these operations in the understanding1. These two, I say, viz. external material things, as the objects of SENSATION, and the operations of our own minds within, as the objects of REFLECTION 2, are to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings. The term operations here I use in a large sense, as comprehending not barely the actions of the mind about its ideas, but some sort of passions arising sometimes from them, such as is the satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought. 'All our Ideas are or the other of 5. The understanding seems to me not to have the least of the one glimmering of any ideas which it doth not receive from one of these two. External objects 2 furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all those different perceptions they produce in us; and the mind 2 furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations 3. these. These, when we have taken a full survey of them, and their several modes, [* combinations, and relations,] we shall find to contain all our whole stock of ideas; and that we have Common Reason a sense-the 'Com- 1 Whether reflection should be inter- 2 He, here and throughout, presupposes external material things' and 'our own minds,' as the causes of the phenomena (simple ideas) given in external and internal 'sense,' but without metaphysical discussion of the reason of the assumption. This is (so far) inquired into in Bk. IV. ch. ix. and xi. 3 So Bacon-'Homo, naturae minister et interpres, tantum facit et intelligit quantum de naturae ordine re vel mente observaverit.' (Nov. Org. Lib. I. Aph. 1.) The distinction intended by re vel mente,' says Dr. Fowler, 'may be either between the observation of facts and the subsequent process of reflection on such observation, or between external and internal perception. According to either interpreta. tion the passage will remind the reader of the main position in Locke's Essay, to which it might well serve as a motto.' (Fowler's Nov. Org. p. 188.) 4 and the compositions made out of them '-in the first three editions. |