Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/300

224 their minds be overlaid by an object too large and mighty to be surveyed and managed by them.

§ 22. If I have dwelt pretty long on the consideration of duration, space, and number, and what arises from the contemplation of them, infinity; it is possibly no more than the matter requires, there being few simple ideas whose modes give more exercise to the thoughts of men than these do. I pretend not to treat of them in their full latitude; it suffices to my design to show how the mind receives them, such as they are, from sensation and reflection; and how even the idea we have of infinity, how remote soever it may seem to be from any object of sense or operation of our mind, has nevertheless, as all our other ideas, its original there. Some mathematicians perhaps of advanced speculations, may have other ways to introduce into their minds ideas of infinity; but this hinders not, but that they themselves, as well as all other men, got the first ideas which they had of infinity from sensation and reflection, in the method we have here set down.

§ 1. Though I have in the foregoing chapters shown how from simple ideas, taken in by sensation, the mind comes to extend itself even to infinity; which however it may, of all others, seem most remote from any sensible perception, yet at last hath nothing in it but what is made out of simple ideas, received into the mind by the senses, and afterwards there put together by the faculty the mind has to repeat its own ideas: though, I say, these might be instances enough of simple modes of the simple ideas of sensation, and suffice to show how the mind