474 REMARKS ON MR. LOCKE'S ESSAY. collections of simple ideas; and indeed it is sometimes very dif- ficult to distinguish ideas simple from complex, whether they be ideas of substances or ideas of modes, partly because the acts of the mind perceiving several ideas and uniting them .in one complex one, are so swift and undistinguishable, that they seem to be one act, forming one simple idea ; and partly because lan- guage bath appointed sometimes a single word to signify a very complex idea, and sometimes an idea much more simple needs many words to express it. Thus through the mixture and con- fusion of ideas by words, it is hard to distinguish always which are the simple ones and which the complex, or which are the pure and which the mixed. Here b might enquire, what difference doth Mr. Locke make between complex modes and mixed modes? Would it not be better to distinguish them thus? If we apply the term sim- ple mode to the simple ideas of modes gotten by sensation only, as white, black, motion, figure, or to those gotten only by re- flection, as a thought, a desire, &c. and if several simple ideas combined, whether sensibleor intellectual, or both, were called in general complex modes; and the particular term mixed mode, were confined only to those ideas, which include both sensible and intellectual ideas, such as speech, conversation, witness, theft, &c. we might perhaps discourse more distinctly of these subjects: But as this author himself says in another place, " We ought to put things together as well as we can :" but after all, some things will not be bundled up together under our terms and ways of speaking. SECT. VIL-=Of Identity and Diversity. THE most familiar and common objects of knowledge are often found the most difficult to`explain by principles of philo- sophy in clear and distinct ideas : Time, place, and motion, the fluidity, and the hardness of bodies, the coherence of the parts of matter, and the principle of gravitation are convincing iñ- stances hereof. The doctrine of identity and diversity is as hard to be explained ; and while every child pretends to know what it is for one thing to be the same with itself and not another thing, philosophers are deeply entangled in the search thereof, and frequently confounded in their thoughts. This author, Mr. Locke, has given us, in his27th chapter, an ingenious attempt to unfold the mystery of sameness, or wherein the principium in- viduationis consists : and he describes it, " existenpe itself which determines a beingof any sort to a particular time and place in- communicable to two beings of the same kind." Which defi- nition, though it is hard to understand in these words, yet he makes much clearer by large instances in the following sections: His meaning is, that identity may have various ideas according as it is applied to various Sorts of beings; so the sameness of an
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=