CHAP. VII. be made out of the various composition of twenty-four letters; BOOK II. or if, going one step further, we will but reflect on the variety of combinations that may be made with barely one of the above-mentioned ideas, viz. number, whose stock is inexhaustible and truly infinite: and what a large and immense field doth extension alone afford the mathematicians? CHAPTER VIII. SOME FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING OUR SIMPLE IDEAS OF SENSATION. BOOK II. CHAP. VIII. 1. CONCERNING the simple ideas of Sensation, it is to be considered, that whatsoever is so constituted in nature as to be able, by affecting our senses, to cause any perception in the Ideas from mind, doth thereby produce in the understanding a simple privative idea1; which, whatever be the external cause of it, when it causes. Ideas in the mind distinguished from that in things which gives rise to them. comes to be taken notice of by our discerning faculty, it is by the mind looked on and considered there to be a real positive idea in the understanding, as much as any other whatsoever; though, perhaps, the cause of it be but a privation of the subject. 2. Thus the ideas of heat and cold, light and darkness, white and black, motion and rest, are equally clear and positive ideas in the mind; though, perhaps, some of the causes which produce them are barely privations, in those subjects from whence our senses derive those ideas. These the understanding, in its view of them, considers all as distinct positive ideas, without taking notice of the causes that produce them: which is an inquiry not belonging to the idea, as it is in the understanding, but to the nature of the things existing without us. These are two very different things, and carefully to be distinguished; it being one thing to perceive and know the idea of white or black, and quite 1 In other words, whatever makes the proper impression upon the appropriate sense organ is in consequence perceived, or gives rise to the corresponding sense idea, e. g. colour when the eye, or sound when the ear is the organ thus impressed. Now this perception, as a mental state, he argues, cannot in any case be a negation whatever its correlate may be in external nature. It is a positive idea. another to examine what kind of particles they must be, and BOOK II how ranged in the superficies, to make any object appear white or black. CHAP. VIII. have the ignorant of 3. A painter or dyer who never inquired into their causes We may hath the ideas of white and black, and other colours, as ideas when clearly, perfectly, and distinctly in his understanding, and we are perhaps more distinctly, than the philosopher1 who hath their busied himself in considering their natures, and thinks he physical knows how far either of them is, in its cause, positive or privative; and the idea of black is no less positive in his mind than that of white, however the cause of that colour in the external object may be only a privation. causes. cause in occasion 4. If it were the design of my present undertaking to Why a inquire into the natural causes and manner of perception 2, privative I should offer this as a reason why a privative cause might, nature in some cases at least, produce a positive idea; viz. that all my sensation being produced in us only by different degrees and a positive modes of motion in our animal spirits, variously agitated by external objects, the abatement of any former motion must as necessarily produce a new sensation as the variation or increase of it; and so introduce a new idea, which depends only on a different motion of the animal spirits in that organ3. idea. names 5. But whether this be so or not I will not here determine, Negative but appeal to every one's own experience, whether the shadow need not of a man, though it consists of nothing but the absence of be meanlight (and the more the absence of light is, the more discernible is the shadow) does not, when a man looks on it, cause as clear and positive idea in his mind, as a man himself, 1 'Philosopher,' i. e. the natural philosopher or physicist, whose province is invaded in this chapter, which is supplementary to the preceding account of the simple ideas presented in the senses. 2. Natural causes and manner,' i. e. the organic conditions which accompany or precede reception of ideas in sense. Locke has already (Introd. § a) declined to meddle with details of organic psychology, as foreign to what he proposed to inquire into and to his introspective method. English But in this example the physical ingless. CHAP. VIII. BOOK II. though covered over with clear sunshine? And the picture of a shadow is a positive thing. Indeed, we have negative names, [1which stand not directly for positive ideas, but for their absence, such as insipid, silence, nihil, &c.; which words denote positive ideas, v.g. taste, sound, being, with a signification of their absence.] Whether any ideas causes 6. And thus one may truly be said to see darkness 2. For, are due to supposing a hole perfectly dark, from whence no light is reflected, it is certain one may see the figure of it, or it may really privative. be painted; or whether the ink I write with makes any other idea, is a question. The privative causes I have here assigned of positive ideas are according to the common opinion; but, in truth, it will be hard to determine whether there be really any ideas from a privative cause, till it be determined, whether rest be any more a privation than motion. Ideas in the Mind, 7. To discover the nature of our ideas the better, and to Qualities discourse of them intelligibly, it will be convenient to distinin Bodies. guish them as they are ideas or perceptions in our minds; and as they are modifications of matter in the bodies that cause such perceptions in us: that so we may not think (as perhaps usually is done) that they are exactly the images and resemblances of something inherent in the subject most of those of sensation being in the mind no more the likeness of something existing without us, than the names that stand for them are the likeness of our ideas, which yet upon hearing they are apt to excite in us 4. fested in most of the ideas or phenomena which we refer to it. Without a previous enquiry as to the nature of our ideas of 'self' and of 'external things'; and without explaining how our ideas come to be regarded as 'qualities' of things, or how the idea of a quality of a thing originates, Locke, in this chapter, supplements the preceding description of the simple ideas of sense, by dis tinguishing some of them as direct manifestations of bodies in their solid extension, while others are only effects, in our sensuous organism, or in extraorganic things, of 'powers' inherent CHAP. VIII. Our Ideas of Bodies. 8. Whatsoever the mind perceives in itself, or is the im- BOOK II. mediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call idea; and the power to produce any idea in our mind, I call quality of the subject wherein that power is. Thus a and the snowball having the power to produce in us the ideas of Qualities white, cold, and round,—the power to produce those ideas in us, as they are in the snowball, I call qualities; and as they are sensations or perceptions in our understandings, I call them ideas; which ideas, if I speak of sometimes as in the things themselves, I would be understood to mean those qualities in the objects which produce them in us. Primary 9. [1 Qualities thus considered in bodies are, First, such as are utterly inseparable from the body, in what of Bodies. state soever it be ;] and such as in all the alterations and changes it suffers, all the force can be used upon it, it constantly keeps; and such as sense constantly finds in every particle of matter which has bulk enough to be perceived; and the mind finds inseparable from every particle of matter, though less than to make itself singly be perceived by our senses: v.g. Take a grain of wheat, divide it into two parts; each part has still solidity, extension, figure, and mobility: divide it again, and it retains still the same qualities; and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible 2; they must retain in bodies. For he finds body discovering itself in sense in both these ways-in the phases of its own solid extension, and in the sensuous states which it occasions in sentient persons. The former he calls its primary or real, and the latter its secondary or imputed qualities. In the former, matter seems to be manifested to him as directly as his own mind is manifested to him, in his ideas of his own mental operations when he is conscious. In the latter, matter is indirectly manifested, in and through his ideas of the sensuous states to which it gives rise in himself. 1 In the first three editions section 9 stands thus :-' Concerning these qualities we may, I think, observe these primary ones in bodies that produce simple ideas in us, viz. solidity, 2 Does the divisibility continue after |