An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 516 pages of information about An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1.

An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 516 pages of information about An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1.

9.  Their powers usually make up our complex ideas of substances.

Whosoever first lighted on a parcel of that sort of substance we denote by the word gold, could not rationally take the bulk and figure he observed in that lump to depend on its real essence, or internal constitution.  Therefore those never went into his idea of that species of body; but its peculiar colour, perhaps, and weight, were the first he abstracted from it, to make the complex idea of that species.  Which both are but powers; the one to affect our eyes after such a manner, and to produce in us that idea we call yellow; and the other to force upwards any other body of equal bulk, they being put into a pair of equal scales, one against another.  Another perhaps added to these the ideas of fusibility and fixedness, two other passive powers, in relation to the operation of fire upon it; another, its ductility and solubility in aqua regia, two other powers, relating to the operation of other bodies, in changing its outward figure, or separation of it into insensible parts.  These, or parts of these, put together, usually make the complex idea in men’s minds of that sort of body we call gold.

10.  Substances have innumerable powers not contained in our complex ideas of them.

But no one who hath considered the properties of bodies in general, or this sort in particular, can doubt that this, called gold, has infinite other properties not contained in that complex idea.  Some who have examined this species more accurately could, I believe, enumerate ten times as many properties in gold, all of them as inseparable from its internal constitution, as its colour or weight:  and it is probable, if any one knew all the properties that are by divers men known of this metal, there would be an hundred times as many ideas go to the complex idea of gold as any one man yet has in his; and yet perhaps that not be the thousandth part of what is to be discovered in it.  The changes that that one body is apt to receive, and make in other bodies, upon a due application, exceeding far not only what we know, but what we are apt to imagine.  Which will not appear so much a paradox to any one who will but consider how far men are yet from knowing all the properties of that one, no very compound figure, a triangle; though it be no small number that are already by mathematicians discovered of it.

11.  Ideas of Substances, being got only by collecting their qualities, are all inadequate.

So that all our complex ideas of substances are imperfect and inadequate.  Which would be so also in mathematical figures, if we were to have our complex ideas of them, only by collecting their properties in reference to other figures.  How uncertain and imperfect would our ideas be of an ellipsis, if we had no other idea of it, but some few of its properties?  Whereas, having in our plain idea the whole essence of that figure, we from thence discover those properties, and demonstratively see how they flow, and are inseparable from it.

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An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.