it has once got these simple ideas, it is not confined barely BOOK II. to observation, and what offers itself from without; it can, by its own power, put together those ideas it has, and make new complex ones, which it never received so united1. CHAP. XII. ideas are 3. Complex ideas, however compounded and decompounded, Complex though their number be infinite, and the variety endless, either of wherewith they fill and entertain the thoughts of men; yet Modes, I think they may be all reduced under these three heads : 1. MODES. 2. SUBSTANCES. 3. RELATIONS 2. Substances, or Relations. Modes. 4. First, Modes I call such complex ideas which, however Ideas of compounded, contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by themselves, but are considered as dependences on, or affections of substances;-such as are the ideas signified by the words triangle, gratitude, murder, &c. And if in this I use the word mode in somewhat a different sense from its ordinary signification, I beg pardon; it being unavoidable in discourses, differing from the ordinary received notions, either to make new words, or to use old words in somewhat a new signification; the later whereof, in our present case, is perhaps the more tolerable of the two 3. and mixed Modes of ideas. 5. Of these modes, there are two sorts which deserve distinct Simple consideration: First, there are some which are only variations, or different simple combinations of the same simple idea, without the mixture of any other ;-as a dozen, or score; which are nothing but the ideas of so many distinct units added together, and these I call simple modes as being contained within the bounds of one simple idea 4. 4 Secondly, there are others compounded of simple ideas of 1 In its own plastic imaginations, and arbitrary generalisations. 2 Here he makes ideas of relation' one species of 'complex idea'; whereas, in § 1, he spoke of 'complex ideas' and 'ideas of relation' as coordinate species of the genus 'ideas made by the mind,' and elsewhere he acknow ledges 'relation' in all 'complex' 3 Locke's modes '-'simple' and 4 * Treated in chapters xiii-xxi, 1 CHAP. XII. BOOK II. several kinds, put together to make one complex one;-v. g. beauty, consisting of a certain composition of colour and figure, causing delight to the beholder; theft, which being the concealed change of the possession of anything, without the consent of the proprietor, contains, as is visible, a combination of several ideas of several kinds: and these I call mixed modes1. Ideas of Substances, collective. 6. Secondly, the ideas of substances are such combinations of simple ideas as are taken to represent distinct particular single or things subsisting by themselves; in which the supposed or confused idea of substance, such as it is, is always the first and chief. Thus if to substance be joined the simple idea of a certain dull whitish colour, with certain degrees of weight, hardness, ductility, and fusibility, we have the idea of lead; and a combination of the ideas of a certain sort of figure, with the powers of motion, thought and reasoning, joined to substance, make the ordinary idea of a man. Now of substances also, there are two sorts of ideas :—one of single substances, as they exist separately, as of a man or a sheep; the other of several of those put together, as an army of men, or flock of sheep-which collective ideas of several substances thus put together are as much each of them one single idea as that of a man or an unit. Ideas of 7. Thirdly, the last sort of complex ideas is that we call Relation. relation, which consists in the consideration and comparing one idea with another 2. The abstrusest Ideas we Of these several kinds we shall treat in their order 3. 8. If we trace the progress of our minds, and with attention observe how it repeats, adds together, and unites CHAP. XII. can have from two its simple ideas received1 from sensation or reflection, it BOOK II. will lead us further than at first perhaps we should have imagined. And, I believe, we shall find, if we warily observe the originals of our notions, that even the most abstruse ideas, are all how remote soever they may seem from sense, or from any Sources. operations of our own minds, are yet only such as the understanding frames to itself, by repeating and joining together ideas that it had either from objects of sense, or from its own operations about them: so that those even large and abstract ideas are derived from sensation or reflection, being no other than what the mind, by the ordinary use of its own faculties, employed about ideas received from objects of sense, or from the operations it observes in itself about them, may, and does, attain unto. This I shall endeavour to show in the ideas we have of space, time, and infinity, and some few others that seem the most remote 2, from those originals. 1 'received' — yet originally received in complexity-a complexity however that can always, by abstraction and analysis, be refunded into simple ideas of external or internal sense. * In the following chapters,-to the end of the twenty-eighth,-the examples of ideas in their modes, of ideas of substances, and of ideas of their relations, are what Bacon would call' crucial instances,'-in verification of the hypothesis that even our 'most CHAPTER XIII. COMPLEX IDEAS OF SIMPLE MODES:-AND FIRST, OF THE SIMPLE MODES OF IDEA OF SPACE. 1. THOUGH in the foregoing part I have often mentioned simple ideas, which are truly the materials of all our knowledge; yet having treated of them there, rather in the way that they come into the mind, than as distinguished from others more compounded1, it will not be perhaps amiss to take a view of some of them again under this consideration, and examine those different modifications of the same idea; which the mind either finds in things existing 2, or is able to make within itself without the help of any extrinsical object, or any foreign suggestion 3. Those modifications of any one simple idea (which, as has been said, I call simple modes) are as perfectly different and distinct ideas in the mind as those of the greatest distance or contrariety. For the idea of two is as distinct from that of one, as blueness from heat, or either of them from any number: and yet it is made up only of that simple idea of an unit repeated; and repetitions of this kind joined together make those distinct simple modes, of a dozen, a gross, a million. 1 More compounded' suggests that, from the first, experience implies some degree of complexity in the ideas of which it consists. 2 The mind accordingly 'finds' complex ideas made for it in things existing, which are perceived as quali ties united in substances, accompanied always by ideas of existence' and 'power'-all obscurely present even in our early sense perceptions. That is, they are either made by or for the individual mind. 2. I shall begin with the simple idea of space1. I have BOOK II. showed above, chap. 4, that we get the idea of space, both 2 CHAP. XIII. by our sight and touch 3; which, I think, is so evident, that it Idea of would be as needless to go to prove that men perceive, by Space. their sight, a distance between bodies of different colours, or between the parts of the same body, as that they see colours themselves: nor is it less obvious, that they can do so in the dark by feeling and touch. 1 The idea of the immensity of space, and also our mathematical ideas of space relations, might seem too remote from the simple phenomena of sense to be explained by them. In what follows, Locke tries to meet this objection, and treats our ideas of the modes of space as crucial instances, in verification of his theory of the dependence of all our ideas on experience. If the simple phenomena of extension, presented in the senses, can give rise to the idea of boundless space, a fortiori the sublimest ideas of which man is conscious may depend in like manner upon data of sense. In this and the four following chapters, Locke tries to reconcile our idea of the Infinite in Quantity—as in space, duration, and number-with his theory of the necessary dependence of all our ideas upon the exercise of our faculties in experience. * 'get,' i. e. dependently on perceptions of sight or touch, in the order of time, and thus of history; but not therefore in the order of reason, according to which space is necessarily suggested' by, and thus innate' in, those sense perceptions. 'Getting an idea' is, with Locke, becoming percipient of an attribute for the first time; and demands a history of the circumstances in which the consciousness has arisen, and had its natural origin'—the history of the rise of an idea superseding in the Essay that critical analysis of its ultimate constitution which may reveal other elements than the merely sensuous phenomena in which it arose. 3 To regard space moreover as a datum of touch, Cousin argues, is to identify space and body. This he alleges that Locke accordingly does, or at least is logically bound to do, and so to make the idea of immensity that of body indefinitely enlarged. Locke does not ask whether the perce ptionof space is exclusively tactual and visual, or whether it is not more or less occasioned by, and so implied in, every organic sensation; also whether the idea of extension given in seeing is identical with, or different in kind from that given in touch; and whether in 'touch' it is given chiefly in the sense of simple contact (touch proper), or in the muscular sense. This means that some perception of extension is necessarily given in perception of colour—at least a vague superficial extension; for the question about distance outwards in the line of sight, afterwards discussed by Berkeley, is hardly raised by Locke. Body, according to him, immediately reveals itself, in its chief primary quality of extension, through both sight and touch. Berkeley, on the other hand, concludes that space proper is not, as Locke held, both seen and felt, but is only felt; and the idea is thus ultimately resolved into the succession of tactual sensations. Touch is made the only original occasion of the idea of room, which is supposed to be gradually attached to |