Page:Of the conduct of the understanding (IA ofconductofunder00lock).pdf/55

Rh with moral and more abstract ideas, for these not offering themselves to the senses, but being to be framed to the understanding, people are generally so neglectful of a faculty they are apt to think wants nothing, that I fear most men’s minds are more unfurnished with such ideas than is imagined. They often use the words, and how can they be suspected to want the ideas? What I have said in the third book of my essay will excuse me from any other answer to this question. But to convince people of what moment it is to their understandings to be furnished with such abstract ideas, steady and settled in them, give me leave to ask how anyone shall be able to know whether he be obliged to be just, if he has not established ideas in his mind of obligation and of justice, since knowledge consists in nothing but the perceived agreement or disagreement of those ideas; and so of all others the like which concern our lives and manners. And if men do find a difficulty to see the agreement or disagreement of two angles which lie before their eyes unalterable in a diagram, how utterly impossible will it be to perceive it in ideas that have no other sensible objects to represent them to the mind but sounds, with which they have no manner of conformity, and therefore had need to be clearly settled in the mind themselves, if we would make any clear judgment about