there is not really a word about the nature of the understanding in it, nor any attempt to show what it is, or whether it is or is not any thing, distinct from the faculty of simple perception. The operations of thinking, comparing, discerning, reasoning, willing, and the like, which Mr Locke ascribes to it, are the operations of nothing, or of I know not what. All the force of his mind seems to have been so bent on exploding innate ideas, and tracing our thoughts to their external source, that he either forgot or had not leisure to examine what the internal principle of all thought is. He took for his basis a bad simile-that the mind is like a blank sheet of paper, originally void of all characters whatever; for this, though true as far as relates to innate ideas, that is, to any impressions actually existing in it, is not true of the mind itself, which is not like a sheet of paper, the passive receiver and retainer of the impressions made upon it. The inference from this simile has however been that the understanding is nothing in itself, nor the cause of any thing; never acting, but always acted upon; that it is but a convenient repository for the straggling images of things, a sort of empty room into which ideas are conveyed from without through the doors of the senses, as you would carry

goods into an unfurnished lodging; and hence it has been found necessary by succeeding writers to get rid of those different faculties and operations which Mr Locke elsewhere allows to belong to the mind, but which are in truth only compatible with the active powers and independent nature of the understanding. I will first state Mr Locke's account of the origin of our ideas in his own words, and will then endeavour to show in what that account is defective; that is, what other act or faculty of the mind I conceive to be necessary to the formation of our ideas, besides sensation or simple perception. After employing eighty pages a very laborious, and for the most part sensible refutation of the doctrine of innate ideas, which was popular at the time, but which Hobbes has not deigned to notice, their impossibility being implied in the general principle that all our ideas are derived from the senses, Mr Locke proceeds in the second book to treat of Ideas, and their origin. He then says:

in a

"Every man being conscious to himself that he thinks, and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there, it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas, such as are those expressed by the words, whiteness, hardness, sweetness,

thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others: it is in the first place then to be inquired how he comes by them. I know it is a received doctrine that men have native ideas and original characters stamped upon their minds in their very first being. This opinion I have at large examined already: but I suppose what I have said will be much more easily admitted when I have shewn whence the understanding may get all the ideas it has, and by what ways and degrees they may come into the mind, for which I shall appeal to every one's own observation and experience. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it, in an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE: in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. . .

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First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways, wherein those objects do affect them; and thus we come by those ideas we have

of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities, which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call

SENSATION.

"Secondly, the other fountain from whence experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas, is the perception of the operations of our own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got: which operations when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from things without: and such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own minds; which we being conscious of, and observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings as distinct ideas as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other

sensation, so I call this REFLECTION; the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself.

These two I say, viz. external, material things, as the objects of sensation, and the operations of our own minds within as the objects of REFLECTION are to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings. The term operations here I use in a large sense, as comprehending not barely the actions of the mind about its ideas, but some sort of passions arising sometimes from them, such as is the satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought."

"The understanding," proceeds Mr Locke, "seems to me not to have the least glimmering of any ideas, which it doth not receive from one of these two. External objects furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all those different perceptions they produce in us; and the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations. These, when we have taken a full survey of them, and their several modes, combinations, and relations, we shall find to contain all our whole stock of ideas and that we have nothing in our minds, which did not come in one of these two ways." -Essay, vol. i. p. 84.