Tuesday, May 12, 2009

LOCKE: John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book II


John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II]

From: Biographical note on John Locke, pg. ix
…lost a great deal of time at the commencement of his studies because the only philosophy then known at Oxford was the Peripatetic.

From: Biographical note on John Locke, pg. ix
The reading of Descartes which gave him a “relish of philosophical things” and the founding at Oxford of the Royal Society led him to being experiments in chemistry, and meteorology. Soon after he began the study of medicine and by 1666 he was engaged in the occasional practice, although he never took a doctor’s degree.


Locke wrote:
He that attentively considers the state of a child, as his first coming into the world, will have little reason to think him stored with plenty of ideas that are to be the matter of his future knowledge. It is by degrees he comes to be furnished with them. And though the ideas of obvious and familiar qualities imprint themselves before the memory begins to keep a register of time or order, yet it is often so late before some unusual qualities come in the way, that there are few men that cannot recollect them. And if it were worthwhile, no doubt a child might be so ordered as to have but a very few even of the ordinary ideas, till he were grown up to a man.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 1, Of Ideas in general and their Original, #6, pg. 122


Locke wrote:
Men then come to be furnished with fewer or more simple ideas from without, according as the objects they converse with afford greater or less varieties; and from the operations of their minds within, according as they more or less reflect on them. … and considers them attentively. …The pictures or clock may be so placed, that they may come in his way every day; but yet he will have but a confused idea of all the parts they are made up of, till he applies himself with attention, to consider them each in particular.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 1, Of Ideas in general and their Original, #7, pg. 122


Locke wrote:
I know that it is an opinion that the soul always thinks and that it has the actual perception of ideas in itself constantly, as long as it exists; …which if true, to inquire after the beginning of a man’s ideas is the same as to inquire after the beginning of his soul.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 1, Of Ideas in general and their Original, #9, pg. 123


Locke wrote:
But whether the soul be supposed to exist antecedent to, or coeval with, or some time after the first rudiments of organization, or the beginning of life in the body, I leave to be disputed by those who have better thought of that matter.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 1, Of Ideas in general and their Original, #10, pg. 123


Locke wrote:
But men in love with their opinions may not only supposed what is in question, but allege wrong matter of fact.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 1, Of Ideas in general and their Original, #10, pg. 123


Locke wrote:
…how the same water, at the same time, may produce the idea of cold by one hand and of heat by the other; whereas it is impossible that the same water, if those ideas were really in it, should at the same time be both hot and cold, For if we imagine warmth, as it is in our hands, to be nothing but certain sort and degree of motion in the minute particles of our nerves or animal spirits, we may understand how it is possible that the same water may, at the same time, produce the sensation of heat in one had and cold in the other; if a body be applied to the two hand, which has in it’s minute particles a greater motion than in those of one of the hands, and a less than in those of the other, it will increase the motion of the one hand and lessen it in the other; and as cause the different sensations of heat and cold that depend thereon.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 8, Some further considerations concerning our Simple Ideas of Sensation, #21, pg. 136


Locke wrote:
And if he does not reflect, all the words in the world cannot make him have any notion of it.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 9, Of Perception, #2, pg. 138

Locke wrote:
Attention and repetition help much to the fixing any ideas into the memory. But those which naturally at first make the deepest and most lasting impressions are those which are accompanied with pleasure or pain. …makes both the old and young avoid painful objects with that haste which is necessary for their preservation…
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 10, Of Retention, #3, pg. 141



Locke wrote:
The memory of some men, it is true, is very tenacious, even to a miracle. But yet there seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas… so that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated exercise of the senses, or reflection… the print wears out.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 10, Of Retention, #5, pg. 142


Locke wrote:
Constantly repeated ideas can scarce be lost… those that are oftenest refreshed… by a frequent return to the objects or actions that produce them, fix themselves best in the memory, and remain clearest and longest there.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 10, Of Retention, #6, pg. 142


Locke wrote:
…the memory of man in general, compared with some superior created intellectual beings… may have constantly in view the whole scene of all their former actions where in no one of their thoughts they have every had may slip out of their sight. The omniscience of God who knows all things past, present, and to come…may satisfy us of the possibility of this.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 10, Of Retention, #9, pg. 143


Locke wrote:
Monsieur Pascal, it the decay of his health had impaired his memory, he forgot nothing of what he had done, read or thought in any part of his rational age.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 10, Of Retention, #9, pg. 143


Locke wrote:
For wit, lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable vision in the fancy; judgment on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one things for another.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 11, Of Discerning, and other operations of the mind, #2, pg. 144


Locke wrote:
The abstrusest ideas we can have come from two sources. If we trace the progress of our minds, and with attention observe how it repeats, adds together, and unites its simple ideas received from sensation and reflection, it will lead us further than at first perhaps we should have imagined. …even large and abstract ideas are derived from sensation or reflection, being no other than what the mind, by the ordinary use of its own faculties, employed about ideas received from objects of sense, or from the operations it observes in itself about them, may, and does, attain unto.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 12, Of Complex Ideas, #8, pg. 148


Locke wrote:
It helps not our ignorance to feign a knowledge where we have none, but making a noise with sounds, without clear and distinct significations.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 13, Complex Ideas of Simple Modes; - and First, of the Simple Modes and of the Idea of Space, #18, pg. 152


Locke wrote:
No one, I supposed, will deny that God can put an end to all motion that is in matter, and fix al the bodies of the universe in a perfect quiet and rest, and continue them so long as he pleases.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 13, Complex Ideas of Simple Modes; - and First, of the Simple Modes and of the Idea of Space, #18, pg. 152


Locke wrote:

John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II] Chapter 13, Complex Ideas of Simple Modes; - and First, of the Simple Modes and of the Idea of Space, #18, pg. 152

VOCABULARY – John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ Book II]

Peripaetic, pg. ix, biographical note, Locke
A follower of Aristotle.


Antecedent, pg. 123 before the other
the referent of an anaphor; a phrase or clause that is referred to by an anaphoric pronoun

anaphor
a word (such as a pronoun) used to avoid repetition; the referent of an anaphor is determined by its antecedent

Coeval, pg. 123
of the same period

Postern, pg. 129
a small gate in the rear of a fort or castle

Porphery, pg. 136
No entry

tenacious, pg. 142
sticking together; "two coherent sheets"; "tenacious burrs"


precipitancy, pg. 144
the quality of happening with headlong haste or without warning


abstrusest, pg. 148
no entry

abstruse
difficult to penetrate; incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge; "the professor's lectures were so abstruse that students tended to avoid them"; "a deep metaphysical theory"; "some recondite problem in historiography"

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