For I have been hitherto apt
to think that the great and inextricable difficulties which
perpetually involve all discourses concerning infinity,- whether of
space, duration, or divisibility, have been the certain marks of a
defect in our ideas of infinity, and the disproportion the nature
thereof has to the comprehension of our narrow capacities. For, whilst
men talk and dispute of infinite space or duration, as if they had
as complete and positive ideas of them as they have of the names
they use for them, or as they have of a yard, or an hour, or any other
determinate quantity; it is no wonder if the incomprehensible nature
of the thing they discourse of, or reason about, leads them into
perplexities and contradictions, and their minds be overlaid by an
object too large and mighty to be surveyed and managed by them.
22. All these are modes of ideas got from sensation and
reflection. If I have dwelt pretty long on the consideration of
duration, space, and number, and what arises from the contemplation of
them,- Infinity, it is possibly no more than the matter requires;
there being few simple ideas whose modes give more exercise to the
thoughts of men than those do. I pretend not to treat of them in their
full latitude. It suffices to my design to show how the mind
receives them, such as they are, from sensation and reflection; and
how even the idea we have of infinity, how remote soever it may seem
to be from any object of sense, or operation of our mind, has,
nevertheless, as all our other ideas, its original there.
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