Our specific ideas of substances. But to return to the matter in
hand,- the ideas we have of substances, and the ways we come by
them. I say, our specific ideas of substances are nothing else but a
collection of a certain number of simple ideas, considered as united
in one thing. These ideas of substances, though they are commonly
simple apprehensions, and the names of them simple terms, yet in
effect are complex and compounded. Thus the idea which an Englishman
signifies by the name swan, is white colour, long neck, red beak,
black legs, and whole feet, and all these of a certain size, with a
power of swimming in the water, and making a certain kind of noise,
and perhaps, to a man who has long observed this kind of birds, some
other properties: which all terminate in sensible simple ideas, all
united in one common subject.
15. Our ideas of spiritual substances, as clear as of bodily
substances. Besides the complex ideas we have of material sensible
substances, of which I have last spoken,- by the simple ideas we
have taken from those operations of our own minds, which we experiment
daily in ourselves, as thinking, understanding, willing, knowing,
and power of beginning motion, &c., co-existing in some substance,
we are able to frame the complex idea of an immaterial spirit. And
thus, by putting together the ideas of thinking, perceiving,
liberty, and power of moving themselves and other things, we have as
clear a perception and notion of immaterial substances as we have of
material.
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