12. Simple ideas, ektupa, and adequate. Thus the mind has three
sorts of abstract ideas or nominal essences:
First, simple ideas, which are ektupa or copies; but yet certainly
adequate. Because, being intended to express nothing but the power
in things to produce in the mind such a sensation, that sensation when
it is produced, cannot but be the effect of that power. So the paper I
write on, having the power in the light (I speak according to the
common notion of light) to produce in men the sensation which I call
white, it cannot but be the effect of such a power in something
without the mind; since the mind has not the power to produce any such
idea in itself: and being meant for nothing else but the effect of
such a power, that simple idea is real and adequate; the sensation
of white, in my mind, being the effect of that power which is in the
paper to produce it, is perfectly adequate to that power; or else that
power would produce a different idea.
13. Ideas of substances are ektupa, and inadequate. Secondly, the
complex ideas of substances are ectypes, copies too; but not perfect
ones, not adequate: which is very evident to the mind, in that it
plainly perceives, that whatever collection of simple ideas it makes
of any substance that exists, it cannot be sure that it exactly
answers all that are in that substance.
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