This I shall endeavour to show in the ideas we have of space,
time, and infinity, and some few others that seem the most remote,
from those originals.
Chapter XIII
Complex Ideas of Simple Modes:-
and First, of the Simple Modes of the Idea of Space
1. Simple modes of simple ideas. Though in the foregoing part I have
often mentioned simple ideas, which are truly the materials of all our
knowledge; yet having treated of them there, rather in the way that
they come into the mind, than as distinguished from others more
compounded, it will not be perhaps amiss to take a view of some of
them again under this consideration, and examine those different
modifications of the same idea; which the mind either finds in
things existing, or is able to make within itself without the help
of any extrinsical object, or any foreign suggestion.
Those modifications of any one simple idea (which, as has been said,
I call simple modes) are as perfectly different and distinct ideas
in the mind as those of the greatest distance or contrariety. For
the idea of two is as distinct from that of one, as blueness from
heat, or either of them from any number: and yet it is made up only of
that simple idea of an unit repeated; and repetitions of this kind
joined together make those distinct simple modes, of a dozen, a gross,
a million.
Pages:
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228