22. An excursion into natural philosophy. I have in what just goes
before been engaged in physical inquiries a little further than
perhaps I intended. But, it being necessary to make the nature of
sensation a little understood; and to make the difference between
the qualities in bodies, and the ideas produced by them in the mind,
to be distinctly conceived, without which it were impossible to
discourse intelligibly of them;- I hope I shall be pardoned this
little excursion into natural philosophy; it being necessary in our
present inquiry to distinguish the primary and real qualities of
bodies, which are always in them (viz. solidity, extension, figure,
number, and motion, or rest, and are sometimes perceived by us, viz.
when the bodies they are in are big enough singly to be discerned),
from those secondary and imputed qualities, which are but the powers
of several combinations of those primary ones, when they operate
without being distinctly discerned;- whereby we may also come to
know what ideas are, and what are not, resemblances of something
really existing in the bodies we denominate from them.
23. Three sorts of qualities in bodies. The qualities, then, that
are in bodies, rightly considered, are of three sorts:-
First, The bulk, figure, number, situation, and motion or rest of
their solid parts.
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