Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man |
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abstract absurd apparent magnitude appears apprehend argument Aristotle attributes axioms beauty belief Bishop Berkeley body brain called cause ceive centaur Chap Cicero cognition color common sense conceive conception consciousness consider David Hume degree demonstration Descartes distinct distinctly distinguish doctrine Edinburgh Review Essay evidence existence experience expressed external objects faculties feel figure give human mind Hume hypothesis ideas imagination immediate impression ject judge judgment kind knowledge language Lect Leibnitz Locke Malebranche mankind matter meaning memory ment monads moral nature necessary necessary truths nerves never Nominalists notion objects of sense observed operations opinion pain perceive perception Peripatetics person personal identity phenomena philosophers Plato primary qualities principle produced proper proposition qualities reason Reid relation remember Sect sensation sensible signify skeptic space species suppose taste testimony theory thing remembered things thought tion true truth understanding vulgar words
Popular passages
Page 299 - ... in the heavens above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.
Page 327 - Now, if we will annex a meaning to our words, and speak only of what we can conceive, I believe we shall acknowledge that an idea which, considered in itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the SAME SORT.
Page 223 - A case of this kind occurred in a Catholic town in Germany, a year or two before my arrival at Gottingen, and had not then ceased to be a frequent subject of conversation. A young woman of four or five and twenty, who could neither read nor write, was seized •with a nervous fever ; during which, according to the asseverations of all the priests and monks of the neighborhood, she became possessed, and, as it appeared, by a very learned devil.
Page 66 - I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this dark room; for methinks the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without...
Page 454 - ... all our reasonings concerning causes and effects, are derived from nothing but custom ; and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures.
Page 129 - It seems evident that men are carried by a natural instinct or prepossession to repose faith in their senses, and that without any reasoning, or even almost before the use of reason, we always suppose an external universe which depends not on our perception but would exist though we and every sensible creature were absent or annihilated.
Page 469 - This is no where more remarkable than in birds of the same shape and proportion, where we often see the male determined in his courtship by the single grain or tincture of a feather, and never discovering any charms but in the colour of its species.
Page 237 - ... as long as he is awake. Reflection on these appearances of several ideas one after another in our minds, is that which furnishes us with the idea of succession ; and the distance between any parts of that succession, or between the appearance of any two ideas in our minds, is that we call duration.
Page 265 - The dominion of man in this little world of his own understanding, being much-what the same as it is in the great world of visible things, wherein his power, however managed by art and skill, reaches no farther than to compound and divide the materials that are made to his hand, but can do nothing towards the making the least particle of new matter, or destroying one atom of what is already in being.
Page 95 - It is evident the mind knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them.