Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/86

  been given of the way how they performed these actions, or wherein they consisted, I do not know. Were I as well read as your lordship, I should have been safe from that gentle reprimand of your lordship's, for thinking my way of ideas for want of looking into other men's thoughts, which appear in their books.

Your lordship's words, as an acknowledgment of your instructions in the case, and as a warning to others, who will be so bold adventurers as to spin any thing barely out of their own thoughts, I shall set down at large. And they run thus: Whether you took this way of ideas from the modern philosopher mentioned by you, is not at all material; but I intended no reflection upon you in it (for that you mean, by my commending you as a scholar of so great a master)''; I never meant to take from you, the honour of your own inventions: and I do believe you when you say. That you wrote from your own thoughts, and the ideas you had there. But many things may seem new to one, who converses only with his own thoughts, which really are not so; as he may find, when he looks into the thoughts of other men, which appear in their books. And therefore, although I have a just esteem for the invention of such who can spin volumes barely out of their own thoughts; yet I am apt to think, they would oblige the world more, if, after they have thought so much themselves, they would examine what thoughts others have had before them concerning the same things; that so those may not be thought their own inventions which are common to themselves and others. If a man should try all the magnetical experiments himself, and publish them as his own thoughts, he might take himself to be the inventor of them; but he that examines and compares with them, what Gilbert and others have done before him, will not diminish the praise of his diligence, but may wish he had compared his thoughts with other men's; by which the world would receive greater advantage, although he had lost the honour of being an original.''

To alleviate my fault herein, I agree with your lordship, that many things may seem to one that converses only with his own thoughts, which really are not so: but I must crave leave to suggest to your lordship, that if in the spinning them out of his own thoughts, they seem new to him, he is certainly the inventor of them; and they may as justly be thought his own invention, as any one's; and he is as certainly the inventor of them, as any one who thought on them before him : the distinction of invention, or not invention, lying not in thinking first, or not first, but in borrowing, or not borrowing, our thoughts from another: and he to whom, spinning them out of his own thoughts, they seem new, could not certainly borrow them from another. So he truly invented printing in Europe, who, without any communication with the Chinese, spun it out of his own thoughts; though it were ever so true, that the Chinese had the use of printing, nay, of printing in the very same way, among them, many ages before him. So that he that spins any thing out of his own thoughts, that seems new to him, cannot cease to think it his own invention, should he examine ever so far, what thoughts others have had before him concerning the same thing, and should find, by examining, that they had the same thoughts too.

But what great obligation this would be to the world, or weighty cause of turning over and looking into books, I confess I do not see. The great end to me, in conversing with my own or other men's thoughts, in matters of speculation, is to find truth, without being much concerned whether my own spinning of it out of mine, or their spinning of it out of their own thoughts, helps me to it. And how little I affect the honour of an original, may be seen at that place of my book, where, if any where, that itch of vain-glory was likeliest to have shown itself, had I been so