Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/302

 226 have no names for, are less taken notice of, and cannot be set clown in writing; and therefore must be left without enumeration to the thoughts and experience of my reader.

§ 6. In general it may be observed, that those simple modes which are considered but as different degrees of the same simple idea, though they are in themselves many of them very distinct ideas, yet have ordinarily no distinct names, nor are much taken notice of as distinct ideas, where the difference is but very small between them. Whether men have neglected these modes, and given no names to them, as wanting measures nicely to distinguish them—or because, when they were so distinguished, that knowledge would not be of general or necessary use—I leave it to the thoughts of others: it is sufficient to my purpose to show that all our simple ideas come to our minds only by sensation and reflection; and that when the mind has them, it can variously repeat and compound them, and so make new complex ideas. But though white, red, or sweet, &c. have not been modified or made into complex ideas, by several combinations, so as to be named, and thereby ranked into species; yet some others of the simple ideas, viz. those of unity, duration, motion, &c. above instanced in, as also power and thinking, have been thus modified to a great variety of complex ideas, with names belonging to them.

§ 7. The reason whereof, I suppose, has been this; that, the great concernment of and others men being with men one amongst another, the knowledge of men and their actions, and the signifying of them to one another, was most necessary; and therefore they made ideas of actions very nicely modified, and gave those complex ideas names, that they might the more easily record and discourse of those things they were daily conversant in, without long ambages and circumlocutions; and that the things they were continually to