(2) Certain ideas in the
mind of the speaker. (3) Those words the signs of those ideas. (4)
Those signs put together, by affirmation or negation, otherwise than
the ideas they stand for are in the mind of the speaker. I think I
need not go any further in the analysis of that complex idea we call a
lie: what I have said is enough to show that it is made up of simple
ideas. And it could not be but an offensive tediousness to my
reader, to trouble him with a more minute enumeration of every
particular simple idea that goes to this complex one; which, from what
has been said, he cannot but be able to make out to himself. The
same may be done in all our complex ideas whatsoever; which, however
compounded and decompounded, may at last be resolved into simple
ideas, which are all the materials of knowledge or thought we have, or
can have. Nor shall we have reason to fear that the mind is hereby
stinted to too scanty a number of ideas, if we consider what an
inexhaustible stock of simple modes number and figure alone afford us.
How far then mixed modes, which admit of the various combinations of
different simple ideas, and their infinite modes, are from being few
and scanty, we may easily imagine. So that, before we have done, we
shall see that nobody need be afraid he shall not have scope and
compass enough for his thoughts to range in, though they be, as I
pretend, confined only to simple ideas, received from sensation or
reflection, and their several combinations.
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