25. Why the secondary are ordinarily taken for real qualities, and
not for bare powers. The reason why the one are ordinarily taken for
real qualities, and the other only for bare powers, seems to be,
because the ideas we have of distinct colours, sounds, &c., containing
nothing at all in them of bulk, figure, or motion, we are not apt to
think them the effects of these primary qualities; which appear not,
to our senses, to operate in their production, and with which they
have not any apparent congruity or conceivable connexion. Hence it
is that we are so forward to imagine, that those ideas are the
resemblances of something really existing in the objects themselves:
since sensation discovers nothing of bulk, figure, or motion of
parts in their production; nor can reason show how bodies, by their
bulk, figure, and motion, should produce in the mind the ideas of blue
or yellow, &c. But, in the other case, in the operations of bodies
changing the qualities one of another, we plainly discover that the
quality produced hath commonly no resemblance with anything in the
thing producing it; wherefore we look on it as a bare effect of power.
For, through receiving the idea of heat or light from the sun, we
are apt to think it is a perception and resemblance of such a
quality in the sun; yet when we see wax, or a fair face, receive
change of colour from the sun, we cannot imagine that to be the
reception or resemblance of anything in the sun, because we find not
those different colours in the sun itself.
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