2. That I believe he will allow a very manifest
difference between dreaming of being in the fire, and being actually
in it. But yet if he be resolved to appear so sceptical as to
maintain, that what I call being actually in the fire is nothing but a
dream; and that we cannot thereby certainly know, that any such
thing as fire actually exists without us: I answer, That we
certainly finding that pleasure or pain follows upon the application
of certain objects to us, whose existence we perceive, or dream that
we perceive, by our senses; this certainty is as great as our
happiness or misery, beyond which we have no concernment to know or to
be. So that, I think, we may add to the two former sorts of
knowledge this also, of the existence of particular external
objects, by that perception and consciousness we have of the actual
entrance of ideas from them, and allow these three degrees of
knowledge, viz. intuitive, demonstrative, and sensitive: in each of
which there are different degrees and ways of evidence and certainty.
15. Knowledge not always clear, where the ideas that enter into it
are clear. But since our knowledge is founded on and employed about
our ideas only, will it not follow from thence that it is
conformable to our ideas; and that where our ideas are clear and
distinct, or obscure and confused, our knowledge will be so too? To
which I answer, No: for our knowledge consisting in the perception
of the agreement or disagreement of any two ideas, its clearness or
obscurity consists in the clearness or obscurity of that perception,
and not in the clearness or obscurity of the ideas themselves: v.
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