Development of English literature and language - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 Excerpt: ... our own minds within us; as it is employed about the ideas it has got; which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from things without; and such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own minds, which we, being conscious of, and observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings ideas as distinct as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself, and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But 1 Then, as now, attached to the past. To this day, its students are drilled in the philosophy of Aristotle. as I call the other sensation so I call this reflection, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself.' No ideas are allowed to be in the mind except those which can be shown to spring from one or other of these inlets: 'When the understanding is once stored with these simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare, and unite them, even to an almost infinite variety, and so can make at pleasure new complex ideas. But it is not in the power of the most exalted wit, or enlarged understanding, by uny quickness or variety of thought, to invent or frame one new simple idea in the mind not taken in by the ways aforementioned.' The thing perceived is the idea: 'It is evident that the mind knows not things immediately, but by the intervention of the ideas it has of them. Our knowledge, therefore, is real only so far as there is a conformity between our ideas and the r...