faculties that were fitted by nature to receive and judge of them when duly employed about them. 25. Conclusion.-To show how the understanding proceeds herein is the design of the following discourse, which I shall proceed to when I have first premised, that hitherto, to clear my way to those foundations which I conceive are the only true ones whereon to establish those notions we can have of our own knowledge, it hath been necessary for me to give an account of the reasons I had to doubt of innate principles. And since the arguments which are against them do some of them rise from common received opinions, I have been forced to take several things for granted, which is hardly avoidable to any one, whose task is to show the falsehood or improbability of any tenet; it happening in controversial discourses as it does in assaulting of towns, where, if the ground be but firm whereon the batteries are erected, there is no further inquiry of whom it is borrowed, nor whom it belongs to, so it affords but a fit rise for the present purpose. But in the future part of this Discourse, designing to raise an edifice uniform and consistent with itself, as far as my own experience and observation will assist me, I hope to erect it on such a basis that I shall not need to shore it up with props and buttresses, leaning on borrowed or begged foundations; or at least, if mine prove a castle in the air, I will endeavour it shall be all of a piece and hang together. Wherein I warn the reader not to expect undeniable cogent demonstrations, unless I inay be allowed the privilege, not seldom assumed by others, to take my principles for granted, and then, I doubt not, but I can demonstrate too. All that I shall say for the principles I proceed on is, that I can only appeal to men's own unprejudiced experience and observation whether they be true or not; and this is enough for a man who professes no more than to lay down candidly and freely his own conjectures, concerning a subject lying somewhat in the dark, without any other design than an unbiassed inquiry after truth. BOOK II. CHAPTER I. OF IDEAS IN GENERAL, AND THEIR ORIGINAL. 1. Idea is the Object of Thinking.-EVERY man being con scious to himself that he thinks, and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking, being the ideas that are there, 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. 2. All Ideas come from Sensation or Reflection.-Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper,* void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. + Our observation employed either * Upon this comparison I have already remarked in a former note.-ED. + It would at first sight, and to an unprejudiced person, appear that Locke in this passage had expressed himself with sufficient clearness, but Mr. Dugald Stewart found it to be either obscure in itself, or directly at variance with the comments which the philosopher has elsewhere made on the doctrine it contains. His remarks are too long to be introduced into a note, but the result to which he supposes them to lead is stated in the following sentences: "If the foregoing remarks be wellfounded, they are fatal to a fundamental principle of Locke's philosophy, which has been assumed by most of his successors as a demonstrated about external sensible objects, or about the internal opera tions 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, 3. The Objects of Sensation one Source of Ideas.—First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them: and thus we come by those ideas we have, of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities; which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external 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 SENSATION.* truth, and which, under a form somewhat disguised, has served to Hume as the basis of all his sceptical theories. It appears to me, that the doctrines of both these eminent authors, with respect to the origin of our ideas, resolve into the supposition, that consciousness is exclusively the source of all our knowledge. Their language, indeed, particularly that of Locke, seems to imply the contrary; but that this was really their opinion, may, with certainty, be inferred from their own comments.' (Phil. Essay, p. 82, et seq.)-ED. On this subject see Wolf's Logic, p. 11. Logique de Du Marsais, p. 20 et seq. This latter writer takes of the whole question the views of a mere materialist. "Elle (l'âme) sent immédiatement par les sens extérieurs, et elle sent médiatement par les organes du sens intérieur du cerveau. Descartes undertakes to explain the very manner in which ideas are obtained by sensation: "Les choses extérieures, says he, "mettant les esprits vitaux en mouvement par les impressions qu'elles produisent, ces esprits remontent au cerveau, et y forment un canal ou type, qui correspond aux impressions et a leur matière determinée. Ce type n'est pas l'idée de l'objet lui-même, mais l'âme en prend connaissance, et alors voit en elle-même l'idée, qui diffère donc totalement du type et de l'objet qui cause l'impression." (Buhle, Hist. de la Phil. Mod. vol. iii. p. 20.) Aristotle on this question appears to have entertained the same opinions as Locke. (See De Anima, ii. 5, 6, 12.) Though, as Dr. Gillies has already observed, the celebrated axiom, "Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuit prius in sensu,' appears not to be at present found in the works of the Stagirite. (Ethics and Politics, Anal. I. 46.) This doctrine, before the time of Locke, had already been adopted by Hobbes. "Il n'y a dans l'âme aucune idée qui n'ait été précédemment produite, en toute ou en partie, par un des sens. (Buhle, Hist. Phil Mod. vol. iii. 203.)-ED. 4. The Operations of our Minds, the other Source of them.Secondly, the other fountain, from which experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas, is the perception of the operations of our own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got; which operations, when the soul 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 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 understanding. 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; 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. 5. All our Ideas are of the one or the other of these. The l understanding seems to me not to have the least glimmering || of any ideas which it doth not receive from one of these two. External objects furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all those different perceptions they produce in us; and the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations. 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 * See on this subject the writings of Stewart, Hutcheson, &c.--Kn nothing in our minds, which did not come in one of these two ways. Let any one examine his own thoughts, and thoroughly search into his understanding; and then let him tell me, whether all the original ideas he has there, are any other than of the objects of his senses, or of the operations of his mind, considered as objects of his reflection: and how great a mass of knowledge soever he imagines to be lodged there, he will, upon taking a strict view, see that he has not any idea in his mind, but what one of these two have imprinted; though, perhaps, with infinite variety compounded and enlarged by the understanding, as we shall see hereafter. * 6. Observable in Children.-He that attentively considers the state of a child, at his first coming into the world, will have little reason to think him stored with plenty of ideas, that are to be the matter of his future knowledge: it is by degrees he comes to be furnished with them. And though the ideas of obvious and familiar qualities imprint themselves before the memory begins to keep a register of time or order, Mr. Dugald Stewart supposes himself to be controverting this doctrine in the following passage; but if such be really the case, I confess he does not carry my understanding along with him: "It is surely an intuitive truth, that the sensations of which I am now conscious, and all those of which I retain any remembrance, belong to one and the same being, which I call myself. Here is an intuitive judgment, involving the simple idea of personal identity. In like manner, the changes of which I am conscious in the state of my own mind, and those which I perceive in the external universe, impress me with a conviction that some cause must have operated to produce them. Here is an intuitive judgment, involving the simple idea of causation. To these, and other instances of the same kind, may be added our ideas of time; of number; of truth; of certainty; of probability;—all of which, while they are manifestly peculiar to a rational mind, necessarily arise in the human understanding, when employed in the exercise of its different faculties. To say, therefore, with Cudworth, and some of the Greek philosophers, that Reason, or the Understanding, is a source of new ideas, is not so exceptionable a mode of speaking as it may appear to be at first sight, to those whose reading has not extended beyond Locke's Essay. According to the systein there taught, Sense furnishes our ideas, and Reason perceives their agreements or disagreements. But the fact is, that what Locke calls agreements and disagreements are, in many instances, simple ideas, of which no analysis can be given, and of which the origin must therefore be referred to reason, according to Locke's own doctrine." (Phil. Ess. p. 98 et seq.) Now in my judgment, these observations, designed to subvert Locke's doctrine, only tend more completely to esta blish it, for his term 'reflection' includes all those operations of the mird alluded to rather than described by Mr. Stewart.-ED. |