Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/182

 i6o LOCKE. 1 J and the brightness of the blaze, the redness, the pleasant taste, and the aromatic odor of the strawberry, exist in these bodies merely as the power to produce such sensations in us by stimulation of the skin, the eye, the palate, and the nose. If we remove the perceptions of them, they disappear as such, and their causes alone remain — the bulk, figure, num- ber, texture, and motion of the insensible particles. The ground of the illusion lies in the fact that such qualities as color, etc., bear no resemblance to their causes, in no wise point to these, and in themselves contain naught of bulk, density, figure, and motion, and that our senses are too | weak to discover the material particles and their primary qualities. — The distinction between qualities of the first and second order — first advanced by the ancient atomists, revived by Galileo and Descartes on the threshold of the modern period, retained by Locke, and still customary in the natural science of the day — forms an important link in the transition from the popular view of all sense- qualities as properties of things in themselves to Kant's position, that spatial and temporal qualities also belong to phenomena alone, and are based merely on man's subjective mode of apprehension, while the real properties of things in themselves are unknowable. Thus far the procedure of the understanding has been purely passive. But besides the capacity for passively receiving simple ideas, it possesses the further power of vari- ously combining and extending these original ideas which have come into it from without, of working over the material given in sensation by the combination, relation, and separa- tion of its various elements. In this it is active, but not crea- tive. It is not able to form new simple ideas (and just as little to destroy such as already exist), but only freely to combine the elements furnished without its assistance by perception (or, following the figure mentioned above, to combine into syllables and words the separate letters of sensation). Complex ideas arise from simple ideas through voluntary combination of the latter. Perception is the first stej^ toward knowledge. After perception the most mdispensable faculty is retention, the prolonged consciousness of present ideas and the revival of /-"