An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Volume 1

Front Cover
T. Tegg, 1823
 

Selected pages

Contents

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 276 - Who will render to every man according to his deeds: To them who by patient continuance in well-doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life: But unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil...
Page xxxiv - Let him study the Holy Scriptures, especially the New Testament. Therein are contained the words of eternal life. It has God for its Author ; salvation for its end ; and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter.
Page 81 - ... 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.
Page 2 - I shall not at present meddle with the physical consideration of the mind; or trouble myself to examine wherein its essence consists; or by what motions of our spirits or alterations of our bodies we come to have any sensation by our organs, or any ideas in our understandings; and whether those ideas do in their formation, any or all of them, depend on matter or not.
Page 237 - I think evident, that we find in ourselves a power to begin or forbear, continue or end several actions of our minds, and motions of our bodies, barely by a thought or preference of the mind . ordering, or, as it were, commanding the doing or not doing such or such a particular action.
Page 96 - These simple ideas, when offered to the mind, the understanding can no more refuse to have, nor alter, when they are imprinted, nor blot them out, and make new ones itself, than a mirror can refuse, alter, or obliterate the images or ideas which the objects set before it do therein produce.
Page 3 - If by this inquiry into the nature of the understanding, I can discover the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things they are in any degree proportionate; and where they fail us, I suppose it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those tilings which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities.
Page 15 - For, first, it is evident, that all children and idiots have not the least apprehension or thought of them ; and the want of that is enough to destroy that universal assent, which must needs be the necessary concomitant of all innate truths : it seeming to me near a contradiction to say, that there are truths imprinted on the soul which it perceives or understands not ; imprinting, if it signify any thing, being nothing else but the making certain truths to be perceived.
Page 128 - This is certain, that whatever alterations are made in the body, if they reach not the mind, whatever impressions are made on the outward parts, if they are not taken notice of within, there is no perception.
Page 154 - The ideas of substances are such combinations of simple ideas as are taken to represent distinct particular things subsisting by themselves, in which the supposed or confused idea of substance, such as it is, is always the first and chief.

Bibliographic information