An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 516 pages of information about An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1.

An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 516 pages of information about An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1.
mind comes by that knowledge; rather than into their causes or manner of Production, I shall not, contrary to the design of this Essay, see myself to inquire philosophically into the peculiar constitution of bodies, and the configuration of parts, whereby they have the power to produce in us the ideas of their sensible qualities.  I shall not enter any further into that disquisition; it sufficing to my purpose to observe, that gold or saffron has power to produce in us the idea of yellow, and snow or milk the idea of white, which we can only have by our sight without examining the texture of the parts of those bodies or the particular figures or motion of the particles which rebound from them, to cause in us that particular sensation, though, when we go beyond the bare ideas in our minds and would inquire into their causes, we cannot conceive anything else to be in any sensible object, whereby it produces different ideas in us, but the different bulk, figure, number, texture, and motion of its insensible parts.

CHAPTER XXII.

Of mixed modes.

1.  Mixed Modes, what.

Having treated of simple modes in the foregoing chapters, and given several instances of some of the most considerable of them, to show what they are, and how we come by them; we are now in the next place to consider those we call mixed modes; such are the complex ideas we mark by the names obligation, drunkenness, a lie, &c.; which consisting of several combinations of simple ideas of different kinds, I have called mixed modes, to distinguish them from the more simple modes, which consist only of simple ideas of the same kind.  These mixed modes, being also such combinations of simple ideas as are not looked upon to be characteristical marks of any real beings that have a steady existence, but scattered and independent ideas put together by the mind, are thereby distinguished from the complex ideas of substances.

2.  Made by the Mind.

That the mind, in respect of its simple ideas, is wholly passive, and receives them all from the existence and operations of things, such as sensation or reflection offers them, without being able to make any one idea, experience shows us.  But if we attentively consider these ideas I call mixed modes, we are now speaking of, we shall find their origin quite different.  The mind often exercises an active power in making these several combinations.  For, it being once furnished with simple ideas, it can put them together in several compositions, and so make variety of complex ideas, without examining whether they exist so together in nature.  And hence I think it is that these ideas are called notions:  as they had their original, and constant existence, more in the thoughts of men, than in the reality of things; and to form

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