Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/279

Ch. 16. more ways, so there is none more simple than that of unity, or one. It has no shadow of variety or composition in it; every object our senses are employed about, every idea in our understandings, every thought of our minds, brings this idea along with it; and therefore it is the most intimate to our thoughts, as well as it is, in its agreement to all other things, the most universal idea we have. For number applies itself to men, angels, actions, thoughts, every thing that either doth exist or can be imagined.

§ 2. By repeating this idea in our minds. Its modes and adding the repetitions together, we come by the complex ideas of the modes of it. Thus by adding one to one, we have the complex idea of a couple; by putting twelve units together, we have the complex idea of a dozen; and so of a score, or a million, or any other number.

§ 3. The simple modes of numbers are of all other the most distinct; every the least variation, which is an unit, making each combination as clearly different from that which approacheth nearest to it, as the most remote: two being as distinct from one as two hundred; and the idea of two as distinct from the idea of three as the magnitude of the whole earth is from that of a mite. This is not so in other simple modes, in which it is not so easy, nor perhaps possible for us to distinguish betwixt two approaching ideas, which yet are really different. For who will undertake to find a difference between the white of this paper, and that of the next degree to it; or can form distinct ideas of every the least excess in extension?

§ 4. The clearness and distinctness of each mode of number from all others, even those that approach nearest, makes me apt to think that demonstrations in numbers, if they are not more evident and exact than in extension, yet they are more general in their