For, whatsoever impressions he himself
may have from the immediate hand of God, this revelation, if it be
of new simple ideas, cannot be conveyed to another, either by words or
any other signs. Because words, by their immediate operation on us,
cause no other ideas but of their natural sounds: and it is by the
custom of using them for signs, that they excite and revive in our
minds latent ideas; but yet only such ideas as were there before.
For words, seen or heard, recall to our thoughts those ideas only
which to us they have been wont to be signs of, but cannot introduce
any perfectly new and formerly unknown simple ideas. The same holds in
all other signs; which cannot signify to us things of which we have
before never had any idea at all.
Thus whatever things were discovered to St. Paul, when he was rapt
up into the third heaven; whatever new ideas his mind there
received, all the description he can make to others of that place,
is only this, That there are such things, "as eye hath not seen, nor
ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive." And
supposing God should discover to any one, supernaturally, a species of
creatures inhabiting, for example, Jupiter or Saturn, (for that it
is possible there may be such, nobody can deny,) which had six senses;
and imprint on his mind the ideas conveyed to theirs by that sixth
sense: he could no more, by words, produce in the minds of other men
those ideas imprinted by that sixth sense, than one of us could convey
the idea of any colour, by the sound of words, into a man who,
having the other four senses perfect, had always totally wanted the
fifth, of seeing.
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