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An essay concerning human understanding. With the notes and illustr. of the author, and analysis of his doctrine of ideas
An essay concerning human understanding With the notes and illustr of the author and analysis of his doctrine of ideas Author:John Locke This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1853 Excerpt: ...to be conformable to some real existence. Thus the two ideas of a man and a centaur, supposed to be the ideas of real substances, are the ... more »one true and the other false; the one having a conformity to what has really existed, the other not. Thirdly. When the mind refers any of its ideas to that real constitution and essence of any thing, whereon all its properties depend: and thus the greatest part, if not all our ideas of substances, are false. 6. The cause of such references.--These suppositions the mind is very apt tacitly to make concerning its own ideas. But yet, if we will examine it, we shall find it is chiefly, if not only, concerning its abstract complex ideas. For the natural tendency of the mind being towards knowledge, and finding that, if it should proceed by and dwell upon only particular things, its progress would be very slow, and its work endless: therefore, to shorten its way to knowledge, and make each perception the more comprehensive, the first thing it does, as the foundation of the easier enlarging its knowledge, either by contemplation of the things themselves that it would know, or conference with others about them, is to bind them into bundles, and rank them so into sorts, that what knowledge it gets of any of them, it may thereby with assurance extend to all of that sort; and so advance by larger steps in that which is its great business, knowledge. This, as I have elsewhere showed, is the reason why we collect things under comprehensive ideas, with names annexed to them, into genera and species, i. e., into "kinds" and " sorts." 7. If therefore we will warily attend to the motions of the mind, and observe that course it usually takes in its way to knowledge, we shall, I think, find that the mind, having got any ...« less