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SECT.  XV.

OF THE CLASSES OF IDEAS.

I. 1. Ideas received in tribes. 2. We combine them further, or abstract from these tribes. 3. Complex ideas. 4. Compounded ideas. 5. Simple ideas, modes, substances, relations, general ideas. 6. Ideas of reflexion. 7. Memory and imagination imperfectly defined.  Ideal presence.  Memorandum-rings. II. 1. Irritative ideas.  Perception. 2. Sensitive ideas, imagination. 3. Voluntary ideas, recollection. 4. Associated ideas, suggestion. III. 1. Definitions of perception, memory. 2. Reasoning, judgment, doubting, distinguishing, comparing. 3. Invention. 4. Consciousness. 5. Identity. 6. Lapse of time. 7. Free-will.

I. 1.  As the constituent elements of the material world are only perceptible to our organs of sense in a state of combination; it follows, that the ideas or sensual motions excited by them, are never received singly, but ever with a greater or less degree of combination.  So the colours of bodies or their hardnesses occur with their figures:  every smell and taste has its degree of pungency as well as its peculiar flavour:  and each note in music is combined with the tone of some instrument.  It appears from hence, that we can be sensible of a number of ideas at the same time, such as the whiteness, hardness, and coldness, of a snow-ball, and can experience at the same time many irritative ideas of surrounding bodies, which we do not attend to, as mentioned in Section VII. 3. 2.  But those ideas which belong to the same sense, seem to be more easily combined into synchronous tribes, than those which were not received by the same sense, as we can more easily think of the whiteness and figure of a lump of sugar at the same time, than the whiteness and sweetness of it.

2.  As these ideas, or sensual motions, are thus excited with greater or less degrees of combination; so we have a power, when we repeat them either by our volition or sensation, to increase or diminish this degree of combination, that is, to form compounded ideas from those, which were more simple; and abstract ones from those, which were more complex, when they were first excited; that is, we can repeat a part or the whole of those sensual motions, which did constitute our ideas of perception; and the repetition of which now constitutes our ideas of recollection, or of imagination.

3.  Those ideas, which we repeat without change of the quantity of that combination, with which we first received them, are called complex ideas, as when you recollect Westminster Abbey, or the planet Saturn:  but it must be observed, that these complex ideas, thus re-excited by volition, sensation, or association, are seldom perfect copies of their correspondent perceptions, except in our dreams, where other external objects do not detract our attention.