Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/177

Ch. 2. concerning ideas of sensation and reflection, as the foundation and materials of all our ideas, and consequently of all our knowledge: I have set down these particulars out of my book, that the reader, having a full view of my opinion herein, may the better see what in it is liable to your lordship's reprehension. For that your lordship is not very well satisfied with it, appears not only by the words under consideration, but by these also: "But we are still told, that our understanding can have no other ideas, but either from sensation or reflection."

Your lordship's argument, in the passage we are upon, stands thus: If the general idea of substance be grounded upon plain and evident reason, then we must allow an idea of substance, which comes not in by sensation or reflection. This is a consequence which, with submission, I think will not hold, viz. That reason and ideas are inconsistent; for if that supposition be not true, then the general idea of substance maybe grounded on plain and evident reason; and yet it will not follow from thence, that it is not ultimately grounded on and derived from ideas which come in by sensation or reflection, and so cannot he said to come in by sensation or reflection.

To explain myself, and clear my meaning in this matter. All the ideas of all the sensible qualities of a cherry come into my mind by sensation; the ideas of perceiving, thinking, reasoning, knowing, &c. come into my mind by reflection. The ideas of these qualities and actions, or powers, are perceived by the mind to be by themselves inconsistent with existence; or, as your lordship well expresses it, we find that we can have no true conception of any modes or accidents, but we must conceive a substratum, or subject, wherein they are, i. e. That they cannot exist or subsist of themselves. Hence the mind perceives their necessary connexion with inherence or being supported; which being a relative idea, superadded to the red colour in a cherry, or to thinking in a man, the mind frames the correlative idea of a support. For I never denied that the mind could frame to itself ideas of relation, but have showed the quite contrary in my chapters about relation. But because a relation cannot be founded in nothing, or lie the relation of nothing, and the thing here related as a supporter, or a support, is not represented to the mind by any clear and distinct idea; therefore the obscure and indistinct vague idea of thing, or something, is all that is left to be the positive idea, which has the relation of a support, or substratum, to modes or ways aforementioned: nor can any force of the understanding destroy those that are there. The dominion of man, in this little world of his own understanding, being much-what the same as it is in the great world of visible things; wherein his power, however managed by art and skill, reaches no farther than to compound and divide the materials that are made