• General Overview
  • The Undertaking
    • Central thesis: all knowledge comes from experience; the mind begins as white paper, empty of innate ideas.
    • Purpose: examine the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, plus the grounds of belief and assent.
    • Method: plain historical observation of how the understanding acquires ideas, not speculation about the soul's essence.
    • Limits: discovering the horizon of human faculties cures useless disputes and grounds sober assent.
    • Standard: probability suffices for life; certainty belongs only where experience and demonstration can reach.
  • Book I: Against Innate Principles
    • Speculative maxims: universal consent fails; children, idiots, and many peoples never think on "what is, is."
    • Practical principles: no moral rule wins universal agreement; breaches are allowed by whole societies, so conscience is custom-shaped.
    • Innate law fails: an imprinted law would require knowledge of its sanctions; defenders never list its contents.
    • Education masquerades: childhood authority, custom, and trust make acquired opinions look like innate principles.
    • Verdict: neither speculative nor practical principles are native; experience and reason suffice for all knowledge.
  • Book II: The Origin and Kinds of Ideas
    • Two fountains: sensation supplies ideas from external objects; reflection supplies ideas of the mind's own operations.
    • Simple ideas: the passive, uncompounded materials of thought; the mind can combine but cannot invent them.
    • Primary qualities: solidity, extension, figure, motion, number are truly in bodies.
    • Secondary qualities: colors, sounds, tastes, and smells are powers to produce ideas, not real resemblances.
    • Perception and retention: perception is the first faculty and inlet of knowledge; memory and attention preserve ideas.
  • Space, Duration, Number, Infinity
    • Space: simple idea from sight and touch; place is relative position; pure space is conceivable without body.
    • Duration: arises from the train of ideas in the mind, not from motion; time is measured duration.
    • Number: clearest modes, made by repeating unity; names are necessary for counting and distinctness.
    • Infinity: endless progression of additions, not a positive idea of an actual infinite.
  • Power, Will, and Liberty
    • Power: clearest idea of active power comes from reflection on volition, not from body.
    • Will: the mind's power to direct actions; the will itself is not free—the agent is free.
    • Uneasiness: present uneasiness, not the greater good, determines the will and spurs action.
    • Liberty: lies in the power to suspend desire, examine, and judge before the will determines action.
    • Happiness: all men pursue true happiness; errors about future good mislead choice, so infinite stakes make virtue rational.
  • Complex Ideas: Substances, Relations, Identity
    • Mixed modes: voluntary combinations of simple ideas (obligation, theft) whose unity is fixed by names.
    • Substances: collections of coexisting simple ideas plus an unknown supposed substratum; body and spirit are equally obscure.
    • Relations: comparisons that terminate in simple ideas; cause/effect, time, place, and moral relations arise from experience.
    • Identity: personal identity consists in same consciousness, not same substance; person is a forensic term for accountability.
    • Moral relations: actions conform to three laws—divine, civil, and opinion or reputation.
    • Idea evaluation: ideas are clear or obscure, real or fantastical, adequate or inadequate, true or false only by reference.
• Deep Dive
  • The Epistle to the Reader
    • The Epistle to the Reader · I
      • The Subject and Its Pleasures
        • Understanding: the soul’s most elevated faculty, engaged with constant delight in its searches
        • Truth-seeking: like hawking or hunting—the pursuit itself yields pleasure, new discoveries at every step
        • Self-directed thought: sets its own work on truth, not scraps of begged opinions; such a reader judges for himself
        • Candid reading: the book must stand or fall by the reader’s own judgment, not the author’s opinion of it
      • The Essay's Occasion and Composition
        • Occasion: five or six friends, discussing a remote subject, found themselves at a stand amid difficulties
        • Wrong course: before other inquiries, examine our own abilities and what objects the understanding is fitted to deal with
        • Composition: begun by chance, continued by entreaty, written in incoherent parcels, later ordered during a health retreat
        • Consequences: disjointed writing caused both too little and too much; repetitions appear in the Essay
        • Defense: too lazy or too busy to shorten it; some repetitions were deliberate to make notions plain
      • The Reader and the Author's Style
        • Audience: intended for himself and a few friends, not for masters of knowledge or quick apprehensions
        • Style: plain and familiar, turning objects on every side to make them admittable and lasting
        • Differing palates: truths must be dressed differently; the same presentation will not suit every understanding
        • Utility over reputation: publishes to be useful; prefers being tedious to being misunderstood by any reader
      • The Under-Labourer and the Abuse of Words
        • Under-labourer: ambitions to clear the ground and remove rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge
        • Enemy: learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms in the sciences
        • Vague forms of speech: hard and misapplied words pass for deep learning but are covers of ignorance
        • Third Book: dwells on language to make plain the abuse of words and the need to examine them
        • Innate ideas: critics condemned the epitome without reading; removing false foundations aids truth
        • Second Edition: adds a chapter on Identity and revises Book II chap. xxi on Liberty and the Will
    • The Epistle to the Reader · II
      • Authorial Stance and Revisions
        • Truth-seeking: he freely renounces his own opinions whenever truth appears against them.
        • Changed view: closer study altered his account of what finally determines the will.
        • Unmoved by critics: printed objections gave him no reason to change his sense.
        • Misunderstanding blamed: inattention or obscurity, not error, explains misreadings.
      • Reply to Lowde on Virtue and Vice
        • Charge rebutted: Lowde misreads Book II ch. xxvii as making vice virtue and virtue vice.
        • Actual aim: he was showing the origin and nature of moral ideas, not laying down moral rules.
        • Descriptive claim: reputations in societies denominate actions virtue or vice; this does not alter nature.
        • Law of nature preserved: reputation-based naming rarely strays from the unalterable rule of right and wrong.
        • Innate notions agreement: Lowde’s conditional innate notions reduce to later knowing, which Locke already affirmed.
      • Determinate Ideas and Terminology
        • Term shift: he replaces “clear and distinct” with “determinate” or “determined” to clarify meaning.
        • Determinate simple idea: a simple appearance the mind perceives when the idea is present.
        • Determined complex idea: a determinate number of simpler ideas in a fixed proportion and situation.
        • Names annexed: a term must be steadily tied to one precise idea during discourse.
        • Disputes dissolve: indetermined ideas and unclear words cause most controversies; precise determination ends doubts.
      • Additions Across Editions
        • Second edition additions: new chapters on association of ideas and enthusiasm, plus other additions.
        • Fourth edition notice: he announces corrections and terminology change running through the whole book.
        • Sixth edition minor: little added or altered; main changes in II.xxi can be transcribed into margin.
  • Book I Neither Principles nor Ideas Are Innate
    • Chapter I: Introduction
      • Why Study the Understanding
        • Understanding: sets man above sensible beings; source of advantage and dominion.
        • Self-inspection: like the eye, it perceives all else but needs art to observe itself.
        • Payoff: inquiry into the mind is pleasant and brings advantage in directing thought.
      • Design, Scope, and Method
        • Design: investigate original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, plus grounds of belief, opinion, assent.
        • Excluded questions: no physical study of mind's essence, bodily motions, or matter-dependence of ideas.
        • Plain historical method: trace how understanding attains notions and set measures of certainty and persuasion.
        • Threefold plan: (1) origin of ideas; (2) knowledge from them; (3) nature and grounds of faith and opinion.
      • The Bounds of Human Comprehension
        • Use of limits: know how far faculties reach and where they fail to curb meddling with the incomprehensible.
        • Cure for disputes: acknowledging our horizon prevents useless questions and perfect scepticism.
        • Capacity suited to needs: God gave enough knowledge for life, virtue, and duty; no reason to complain.
        • Probability suffices: demand certainty only where it belongs; candlelight enough for our purposes.
      • Remedies for Scepticism and Idleness
        • Measure your strength: know what to undertake; avoid both despair and overreach.
        • Sailor's line: need not fathom all depths, only enough to navigate and avoid shoals.
        • Purpose: govern opinions and actions, not know all things.
        • Occasion: unsatisfied inquiries into the “vast ocean of Being” prompted this survey of understanding.
        • Horizon: discover the boundary between enlightened and dark parts of things, then acquiesce in ignorance.
      • What “Idea” Means
        • Term: stands for whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks.
        • Equivalents: covers phantasm, notion, species, or anything the mind employs in thinking.
        • Given: everyone is conscious of ideas; the next question is how they come into the mind.
    • Against Innate Speculative Principles (Chapter II: No Innate Speculative Principles · I)
      • The Doctrine and Its Universal-Consent Proof
        • Innate principles claimed: primary notions stamped on the mind at first being, brought into the world with the soul.
        • Refutation strategy: natural faculties alone can yield all knowledge, so innate impressions need not be supposed.
        • Universal consent argument: all mankind agree on certain speculative and practical principles, hence they must be innate impressions.
        • Universal consent proves nothing: even real agreement could be explained by other causes, so it does not establish innateness.
        • No maxims are universal: even "Whatsoever is, is" and the contradiction principle are unknown to many.
      • Children and Idiots Disprove Imprinted Truths
        • Children and idiots lack them: they have no apprehension of these maxims, destroying the claim of universal assent.
        • Imprinting requires perception: to imprint without the mind's perceiving is unintelligible; impression means making truths perceived.
        • Capacity versus actual knowledge: if mere capacity made truths innate, every truth the mind can know would be innate.
        • "In the understanding" means understood: saying a truth is in the mind yet never perceived is a contradiction.
        • Unknown impressions are nothing: a notion imprinted but never noticed amounts to no impression at all.
      • The "Use of Reason" Defense Collapses
        • Standard evasion stated: all men know and assent to these maxims when they come to the use of reason.
        • If reason discovers them: then all mathematical theorems discovered by reason are equally innate—no distinction remains.
        • Reason is deduction: it draws unknown truths from known principles; innate principles needing discovery is contradictory.
        • No reasoning is used here: these maxims gain assent upon understanding, without any search or deduction.
        • The timing is false: children reason about particulars long before they know these general maxims; savages may never think of them.
        • Even if true, not proof: noticing a truth when a distinct faculty begins does not show nature imprinted it.
      • How the Mind Actually Attains These Truths
        • Actual order of knowledge: senses admit particular ideas, memory retains them, names are learned, then abstraction forms general ideas.
        • Early knowledge is acquired: infants distinguish sweet from bitter before speech or "use of reason"—not by innate inscription.
        • Assent depends on clear ideas: "three and four are equal to seven" is perceived once the needed number and equality ideas are settled.
        • Same ground for all truths: a rod and cherry differ, one and two make three, and contradictions are all known by comparing acquired ideas.
        • Delay proves nothing innate: later maxims require later general terms, not the absence of reason.
    • Assent Cannot Prove Innate Principles (Chapter II: No Innate Speculative Principles · II)
      • The Assent-at-First-Hearing Test
        • Universal assent: defenders urge maxims are innate because all assent once terms are understood.
        • Overbroad test: it would make number truths, “white is not black,” and “two bodies cannot be in the same place” innate.
        • Legions of propositions: every denial of one idea of another would become innate, requiring all ideas to be innate.
        • Self-evidence, not innateness: ready assent on understanding terms marks only self-evidence, not natural inscription.
      • Particular Truths Precede General Maxims
        • Known before maxims: children firmly assent to “one and two equal three” while ignorant of “same thing cannot be and not be.”
        • Not derived: less general truths are earlier in the mind, so cannot owe their assent to universal maxims.
        • Generality retards: abstract general ideas come later than particular ones, making maxims slower to be admitted.
        • Usefulness deferred: the vaunted utility of maxims will prove less than commonly conceived.
      • Teaching and Learning Undermine Innateness
        • Proposal implies ignorance: if innate, truths would not need proposing; first hearing shows they were not known.
        • Implicit knowledge reduces to capacity: “implicitly imprinted” means only that the mind can understand, making all demonstrations innate.
        • Fallacy of no teaching: terms, their signification, and the ideas themselves are all learned before first assent.
        • Assent from perceived agreement: once names are learnt, we assent because ideas agree or disagree, not because impressions exist.
      • No Universal Assent, Even Among the Competent
        • Innateness entails universal assent: Locke concedes this, then shows it fails; many who understand terms have never heard the maxims.
        • Children and idiots dissent: they are ignorant of maxims though they know many other truths.
        • Innate truths would be first thoughts: a truth never thought on cannot be in the mind; if innate, it must appear first.
        • Half of mankind excluded: those unacquainted with the propositions destroy the claim to universal assent.
      • Where Innateness Should Shine, It Is Absent
        • Least in uncorrupted minds: children, idiots, savages, and illiterate people show no footprints of these maxims.
        • Independence from body: if stamped on the soul, maxims should appear regardless of bodily constitution; they do not.
        • Language of schools, not huts: maxims are used in academies and disputes, seldom in Indian huts or children’s thoughts.
        • No aid to discovery: suited to artificial argumentation, not to the advancement of knowledge.
        • Conclusion: no speculative maxim is innate; if these first principles fail, none can pretend with better right.
    • Moral Principles Are Not Innate (Chapter III: No Innate Practical Principles · I)
      • Moral maxims are less evident than speculative
        • No universal assent: practical principles command even less agreement than speculative maxims; no moral rule rivals what is, is.
        • Truth unaffected: moral rules are true and demonstrable, though not self-evident; ignorance of them proves they are not innate.
        • Need for reasoning: moral principles require discourse and mental exercise, unlike engraved characters visible by their own light.
        • Demonstration suffices: certainty is attainable; failure to reach it is our own fault, not a flaw in the rules.
      • Practice disowns supposed innate rules
        • Justice not universal: if innate, it must be received everywhere; even thieves keep faith among themselves while plundering honest men.
        • Actions interpret thoughts: men's deeds, not professions, show what principles they actually hold.
        • Practical principles must operate: innate rules would produce conformity, but observed conduct contradicts them.
        • Desire and aversion are not innate truths: nature imprints appetites for happiness and misery, not impressions of truth on the understanding.
      • Moral rules admit of reasons, not self-evidence
        • Reasons can be demanded: one may justly ask why “do as you would be done unto,” impossible for self-evident maxims.
        • Grounds vary: keeping compacts is traced to God by Christians, to Leviathan by Hobbists, to virtue by old philosophers.
        • Variety disproves innateness: differing foundations show these rules are not imprinted by God on every mind.
        • Virtue approved as profitable: men commend rules from self-interest and social advantage, not from inward assent.
      • Conscience and custom explain apparent agreement
        • Conscience is not innate proof: it is our own judgment of moral rectitude; contrary consciences prove nothing.
        • Convention shapes remorse: what is scrupled in one place is merited in another; fashion can make duels honourable.
        • Whole nations reject moral rules: exposure of children, parricide, and cannibalism occur without remorse among civilized peoples.
        • General practice overrides profession: if a rule were naturally imprinted, no whole society could publicly renounce it.
      • Allowed transgression is decisive evidence
        • Breaking is not disproof: a lapse may occur under a known rule; a generally allowed breach proves non-innateness.
        • Parents preserve children: as a command it is not a truth; as a duty it presupposes law, lawmaker, and sanctions.
        • Innate duty needs innate ideas: God, law, obligation, punishment, afterlife — none are actually imprinted.
        • Known penalties prevent transgression: with the law and punishment before them, men could not break it gaily.
    • Moral Principles Are Not Innate (Chapter III: No Innate Practical Principles · II)
      • Innate Law Requires Certain Punishment
        • Appetites: not innate moral principles; if left uncurbed they overturn all morality.
        • Moral laws: curb desires only through rewards and punishments that outweigh transgression’s satisfaction.
        • Innate law: would demand certain and unavoidable knowledge of punishment for breach; otherwise it is useless.
        • Innate Gospel: an innate law cannot be supposed without also assuming an innate revelation of its sanctions.
        • Law of nature: knowable by natural faculties, it differs entirely from a law imprinted at our origin.
      • Innate Principles Remain Unspecified
        • General assent fails: men’s practical principles diverge too widely to mark any innate moral rule.
        • No catalogue: defenders of innate principles never list them, though an innate set would be as countable as fingers.
        • Sectarian bias: any proposed list would merely suit the hypotheses of particular schools or churches.
        • Mechanism vs morality: those who deny free agency make law impossible and remove all moral rules.
      • Lord Herbert’s Common Notions Examined
        • Herbert’s marks: priority, independence, universality, certainty, necessity, and immediate assent define the notitiae communes.
        • Five propositions: supreme deity exists, must be worshipped, piety with virtue is best worship, repentance from sins, and rewards or punishments after life.
        • Not all or more than all: rules like “do as you would be done unto” have as good a claim to being innate.
        • Marks fail: universality and certainty do not fit propositions whose key terms are disputed.
        • Uncertain terms: words like “virtue” and “sin” stand for different things in different nations, so cannot be engraved principles.
        • Useless if true: “virtue is the best worship” reduces to “God is pleased with doing what he commands,” teaching no specific duty.
      • Universal Consent and Corruption Objections Fail
        • Corruption answer: if custom can blot out innate principles, universal consent no longer proves them innate.
        • Infallibility shortcut: private persuasion cannot be passed off as universal consent via “men of right reason.”
        • Either way inconsistent: if ineradicable, principles must be clear in all; if eradicable, clearest in children and illiterate people—neither is observed.
        • Contrary principles: opposed dogmas are held sacred somewhere, so universal agreement cannot exist.
      • Principles Come from Education, Custom, and Trust
        • Nurse’s superstition: doctrines from childhood authority grow up to the dignity of principles in religion or morality.
        • White paper: children receive whatever characters teachers instill before memory begins.
        • Forgotten origin: men think innate what they cannot remember learning; parents’ respect seems natural only because its beginning is forgotten.
        • Trust from necessity: most lack leisure, skill, or will to examine, so they take principles upon trust.
        • Custom as greater power: custom makes men worship idols in their minds and defend absurdities, even die for them.
      • Principles Must Be Examined
        • Received on authority: if innate principles need no examination, anything could be believed.
        • Demand marks: distinguishing characters are needed; universal consent alone is not a sufficient mark.
        • Conclusion: no practical principles command universal agreement, therefore none are innate.
    • Innate Principles Require Innate Ideas (Chapter IV: Other Considerations Concerning Innate Principles, Both Speculative and Practical · I)
      • Propositions cannot be innate without their constituent ideas
        • Ideas precede principles: no knowledge, assent, or proposition where the composing ideas are absent
        • Origin test: if ideas are not innate, propositions built from them must be acquired
        • Infants' evidence: newborns show only faint hunger, thirst, warmth, and pains—no settled innate ideas
      • Speculative principles fail: identity and whole/part
        • Identity not innate: infants distinguish mother from stranger before forming abstract notions of identity
        • Sameness unresolved: same body? same soul? — Pythagoras, Euphorbus, and the cock make identity anything but clear
        • Whole and part: relational ideas that would force extension and number to be innate
        • No innate extension/number: patrons of innate principles would not claim these, so whole/part cannot be innate
      • Practical principle "God is to be worshipped" fails
        • Worship requires the idea: children lack any notion of worship, so cannot possess the duty innately
        • Obligation needs lawgiver: no idea of Deity means no notion of law or moral obligation
        • Historical counterevidence: nations in Brazil, Caribbee islands, and Paraguay reportedly had no notion of God
        • Names are not ideas: a universal name for God would prove no more than universal names for fire or sun
      • Universality and God's goodness do not prove innateness
        • Universality is narrow: few wise men attain true notions; the many take up vulgar opinions by chance
        • Goodness argument proves too much: it would require God to imprint all truths, even infallibility on every person
        • Faculties are enough: reason, observation, and reflection can discover God and morality without innate principles
        • Education shapes belief: had Apochancana been educated in England, he might have matched any English divine
      • Diverse and gross God-ideas contradict an innate stamp
        • Same name, contrary ideas: people agree on the sound "God" yet hold inconsistent conceptions of him
        • Heathen polytheism: worshipping hundreds of deities excludes unity, infinity, eternity—evidence of no true idea
        • Anthropomorphic gods: amours, lusts, quarrels, and corporeal images show ideas from fancy, not God's finger
        • Children learn locally: their God-idea mirrors the teacher's opinion, not an original character
    • The Case Against Innate Principles (Chapter IV: Other Considerations Concerning Innate Principles, Both Speculative and Practical · II)
      • The Idea of God Is Not Innate
        • Diverse worship: Jews, Christians, Muslims all lack a uniform or true idea of God; whole sects held a corporeal Deity
        • Ignorant notions: even in Christian nations, many fancy God in human shape; country and young people hold odd, pitiful conceptions
        • Faculties, not contents: God gave us abilities to attain the idea of himself, not the idea itself; lack comes from our want of industry
        • Universal consent proves nothing: self-evident truths like the equal-angles theorem win assent only when examined; ignorance of both is common
        • Decisive presumption: if the idea of God, our most concerning idea, is not innate, no other idea can claim to be
      • Substance and the Impossibility of Innate Ideas
        • Substance unknowable: we have no clear idea of substance by sensation or reflection; the word names an uncertain supposition of we know not what
        • No ideas, no propositions: innate propositions without innate ideas are like £100 with no coins to compose it; assent follows whenever ideas appear
        • Assent follows ideas: "God is to be worshipped" wins ready assent once a man truly has the ideas of God and worship, however late
        • Blind man analogy: one born blind will assent that saffron is yellow after sight returns; assent on hearing never proves ideas innate
      • Memory Is the Only Place for Ideas
        • Memory is the only store: an idea not in view can be in the mind only by memory; remembering requires consciousness of prior perception
        • Not remembered, never in mind: an idea appearing without that consciousness is new; what is not in memory is in the mind no way at all
        • Blind man's colors lost: one blinded in childhood loses all memory of colors, having no more notion of them than one born blind
        • Revival test: restored sight brings colors de novo without former acquaintance; let anyone revive an innate idea before outer impressions
      • Innate Principles Fail on Usefulness and Distinctness
        • Neither useful nor self-evident: speculative innate principles serve little purpose; practical ones are not self-evident; both match acquired truths
        • Untestable claim: if innate characters were clearer or distinguishable, their advocates could easily say which they are; each man could then judge
        • Demand for specifics: no one has listed the innate ideas or showed how many there are; without this the doctrine stays empty
      • Knowledge Depends on the Use of Faculties
        • Easy reception mistaken for innateness: truths that offer themselves readily are not born with us; arts and sciences are likewise discoverable, not innate
        • Diligence, not birth, divides minds: great differences in notions arise from the different use of faculties; most men lazily take things upon trust
        • Triangle and God equally ignored: the angle-sum theorem is certain and evident, yet millions never think on it; so too the existence of God
        • Knowledge is earned: knowledge depends on the right use of nature's powers, not on innate principles supposed to direct all mankind
      • Think for Yourself
        • Truth above authority: the greatest reverence is due to truth; to know by other men's understandings is to see with other men's eyes
        • Borrowed knowledge is fairy money: another's science in us is but opinionatry unless our own reason comprehends it; shreds add nothing to our stock
        • Why the doctrine arose: self-evident generalities were hastily called innate, easing the lazy from search and stopping the doubtful's inquiry
        • Power motive: calling principles innate gives teachers authority to dictate unquestionable truths and govern followers through blind credulity
        • Locke's program: the following Discourse will erect knowledge on unprejudiced experience, uniform and consistent, not on borrowed or begged foundations
  • Book II of Ideas
    • Experience as the Source of Ideas (Chapter I: Of Ideas in General, and Their Original · I)
      • Sensation and Reflection: The Two Fountains
        • Idea: the object of thinking; mental content is made up of ideas.
        • Experience: the one-word answer to how the mind is furnished with all its materials.
        • Sensation: the great source of most ideas; senses convey perceptions of sensible qualities from external objects.
        • Reflection: the mind’s internal sense; it takes notice of its own operations and yields ideas of thinking, doubting, willing.
        • Only originals: external things and the mind’s own operations are the sole beginnings of all ideas.
      • The Mind as White Paper
        • Tabula rasa: the mind begins as white paper, void of all characters and ideas.
        • No innate characters: the received doctrine of native ideas is rejected; experience must account for every idea.
        • Compounding: the understanding compounds and enlarges simple ideas into an infinite variety.
        • Whole stock: a full survey of sensible and reflective ideas and their modes contains every idea we have.
      • Acquisition and Attention
        • Perception equals having ideas: to ask when ideas first appear is to ask when perception begins.
        • Children acquire gradually: a newborn is not stored with ideas; imprinting happens by degrees.
        • Objects shape supply: more or fewer simple ideas come from the variety of objects and attention to reflection.
        • Reflection needs attention: without attentive self-observation, inner operations yield only confused ideas.
        • Late in children: outward sensations monopolize attention, so reflection rarely occurs until riper years.
        • Environment limits ideas: a child seeing only black and white would have no ideas of scarlet or green.
      • The Soul’s Thinking Is Not Constant
        • Not self-evident: “the soul always thinks” is an hypothesis, not a fact everyone assents to.
        • Thinking is an operation: perception of ideas is to the soul what motion is to the body, not its essence.
        • Experience proves only sometimes: we know we sometimes think; perpetual thinking cannot be inferred.
        • Unconscious thought is inconceivable: it is hard to conceive of thinking without being conscious of it.
        • Begging the question: one may as well prove watches think because their balance beats as assume the soul always thinks.
      • Consciousness and Personal Identity
        • Happiness requires consciousness: pleasure or pain without awareness seems utterly inconsistent and impossible.
        • Sleeping apart makes two persons: if the soul thinks while asleep and the man knows nothing of it, waking and sleeping selves divide.
        • Castor and Pollux: one soul alternating between two bodies makes two distinct persons, not one.
        • Personal identity needs consciousness: remove all consciousness of actions and sensations, and identity becomes hard to place.
    • Sensation, Reflection, and the Awakening Mind (Chapter I: Of Ideas in General, and Their Original · II)
      • Dreamless Sleep Undermines the Always-Thinking Soul
        • Dreamless sleep: many people pass nights without dreaming and cannot be convinced they secretly think for hours.
        • Unremembered thinking is useless: thoughts that leave no memory make the soul no better than a looking-glass.
        • Memory belongs to the mind itself: if separate thought leaves no trace, the thinking spirit gains no advantage by thinking.
        • Perishing thoughts degrade the soul: thoughts gone forever are as worthless as characters drawn on dust.
        • Divine waste: an infinitely wise Creator would not make thinking so admirable a faculty idle at least a fourth of our time.
      • Unconscious Thinking Implies Two Persons
        • Thinking without consciousness is unintelligible: saying a man thinks without perceiving it is like saying a body is extended without parts.
        • Two persons in one man: if the soul thinks while the man knows nothing of it, they are distinct persons.
        • Consciousness is private: another cannot perceive my thoughts when I perceive none myself; assurance would need revelation.
        • “Always thinks” is unproved: this is a confused notion adopted to serve an hypothesis, not a self-evident truth.
        • Experience outweighs definition: defining the soul as always thinking cannot destroy constant experience; many suspect they have no soul.
      • Children and Wombs Show No Innate Thought
        • Observation over hypothesis: a newborn shows few signs of thinking and far fewer of reasoning.
        • Fœtus nearly a vegetable: in the womb, little light or sound and no variety leaves the fœtus mostly asleep without perception.
        • Mind wakes by degrees: as senses convey ideas, the child becomes more awake and learns to distinguish familiar objects.
        • Ideas begin with sensation: the first ideas are coeval with sensation, an impression in the body noticed by the understanding.
      • Sensation and Reflection Are the Only Originals of Knowledge
        • Two sources: outward objects impress the senses; the mind reflects on its own operations about those impressions.
        • Groundwork of all ideas: these two supply the materials for every notion, from common experience to sublime speculation.
        • Intellect’s first capacity: the mind is fitted to receive impressions, and cannot stir beyond what sense or reflection offer.
        • Dreams borrow from waking life: sleeping thoughts are made of waking ideas oddly combined, never pure native ideas.
      • The Understanding Is Passive in Receiving Simple Ideas
        • Forced perception: senses obtrude ideas whether we will or not; the mind cannot avoid them.
        • Mirror-like reception: simple ideas cannot be refused, altered, or blotted out once objects produce them.
        • No total ignorance of thought: no one can be wholly ignorant of what he does when he thinks.
    • Chapters II–VI
      • Of Simple Ideas
        • Simple ideas: uncompounded uniform appearances, distinct even when blended in objects.
        • Materials of knowledge: furnished only by sensation and reflection; the mind cannot invent or destroy them.
        • Complex ideas: made by repeating, comparing, and uniting simple ideas, but never inventing new ones.
        • Five-sense limit: humans cannot imagine qualities beyond those their senses receive; other beings may have other senses.
      • Of Simple Ideas of Sense
        • Four classes: ideas enter by one sense, by more than one sense, by reflection only, or by both sensation and reflection.
        • One-sense ideas: colours by sight, sounds by hearing, tastes and smells by palate and nose, heat/cold/solidity by touch.
        • Poverty of names: most smells, tastes, colours, and sounds lack distinct names; “sweet” and “stinking” only mark pleasure or displeasure.
      • Idea of Solidity
        • Solidity: from touch; the resistance of body to another entering its place until it leaves.
        • Fills space: solid substance excludes all other solid substances from the space it possesses.
        • Distinct from space: the idea of pure space without solidity is possible; vacuum disputes show they are distinct ideas.
        • Distinct from hardness: hardness is firm cohesion of parts; solidity is repletion—the hardest body is no more solid than water.
        • Effects: mutual impulse, resistance, and protrusion of bodies depend on solidity.
        • Definition: simple ideas are learned by experience; words cannot make them clearer than the senses do.
      • Of Simple Ideas of Divers Senses
        • Shared ideas: space or extension, figure, rest, and motion reach the mind by both sight and touch.
        • Postponed treatment: enumerated here; their fuller discussion is deferred to another place.
      • Of Simple Ideas of Reflection
        • Reflection: the mind turns inward and observes its own actions about ideas received from without.
        • Perception and volition: the mind’s two principal operations; their powers are called understanding and will.
        • Modes later: remembrance, discerning, reasoning, judging, knowledge, and faith are modes treated hereafter.
    • Chapter VII: Of Simple Ideas of Both Sensation and Reflection
      • Pleasure and Pain
        • Pleasure and pain: simple ideas entering by all sensation and reflection, joined to almost every other idea.
        • One pair, many names: satisfaction, delight, and happiness are degrees of pleasure; uneasiness, trouble, and anguish are degrees of pain.
        • Motives to action: the wise Creator joined delight to thoughts and sensations; without it we would be idle, lethargic dreamers.
        • Pain as warning: pain is annexed to harmful things, preserving life and the delicate organs of sense.
        • Led to God: mixed pleasure and pain show creaturely joys are imperfect, directing us to seek happiness in Him.
      • Existence, Unity, Power, and Succession
        • Existence: every outward object and inward idea is considered as actually present, giving the idea that it exists.
        • Unity: whatever we can consider as one thing, a real being or an idea, suggests the idea of unity.
        • Power: we get the idea by observing our own thought and voluntary motion, and natural bodies acting on one another.
        • Succession: while awake, our ideas pass in a constant train, one going and another coming without intermission.
      • Simple Ideas as Materials of All Knowledge
        • Materials of knowledge: all knowledge is made from simple ideas, received only by sensation and reflection.
        • Few inlets, vast reach: the mind flies beyond stars, yet every simple idea enters through those inlets and complex ideas are composed of them.
        • Combinatorial abundance: as twenty-four letters make countless words, so number is inexhaustible and extension gives an immense field.
    • Positive Ideas, Qualities, and Primary Distinction (Chapter VIII: Some Further Considerations Concerning Our Simple Ideas of Sensation · I)
      • Positive Ideas from Privative Causes
        • Positive ideas: whatever causes perception is a real positive idea, even if cause is privation.
        • Heat, cold, light, dark, white, black, motion, rest: equally clear positive ideas in the mind.
        • Perception vs physical cause: knowing the idea differs from examining particles and arrangements behind it.
        • Painter's knowledge: artist may possess color ideas more distinctly than philosopher ignorant of their causes.
        • Negative names: words like silence or invisible signify absence of ideas, not positive ideas; shadow and darkness yield positive ideas.
      • Ideas in the Mind vs Qualities in Bodies
        • Idea: whatever mind perceives, immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding.
        • Quality: power in a subject to produce any idea in us.
        • Snowball example: whiteness/coldness/roundness as qualities in object, ideas in understanding.
        • No exact resemblance: sensations are no more likenesses of bodies than names are likenesses of ideas.
      • Primary Qualities of Bodies
        • Primary/original qualities: solidity, extension, motion or rest, number, figure.
        • Inseparable: body keeps them through all alterations and divisions, even to insensible particles.
        • Division: grinding only splits one mass into distinct masses; cannot remove solidity, extension, figure, mobility.
        • Real qualities: they exist in bodies whether or not anyone perceives them.
      • How Bodies Produce Ideas in Us
        • Impulse only: bodies operate by touching and motion; cannot act where they are not.
        • Nerve transmission: motions from external objects travel by nerves/animal spirits to brain, seat of sensation.
        • Insensible corpuscles: imperceptible particles from bodies strike senses, conveying motion to produce ideas.
        • God annexing ideas: no more impossible for motion to cause color/scent than for steel cutting flesh to cause pain.
      • Secondary Qualities and Resemblance
        • Secondary qualities: colors, smells, tastes, sounds, etc. are powers to produce sensations, not in objects.
        • Dependence: secondary qualities depend on bulk, figure, texture, motion of insensible parts.
        • Primary ideas resemble; secondary do not: patterns of primary qualities exist in bodies; no likeness of secondary in bodies.
        • Fire/warmth/pain example: same fire causes warmth at distance, pain near; if pain not in fire, why say warmth is?
        • Manna/snow: whiteness, coldness, sweetness no more in bodies than sickness or pain in manna.
    • Primary and Secondary Qualities of Bodies (Chapter VIII: Some Further Considerations Concerning Our Simple Ideas of Sensation · II)
      • Sensation as Effect, Not Resemblance
        • Simple ideas: colours, tastes, odours, sounds vanish when senses are removed; only bulk, figure, motion remain.
        • Manna's powers: pain and sickness are effects of its operation, not qualities existing in the manna.
        • Sweetness and whiteness: like pain, are effects of insensible particles on eyes and palate, not in the object.
        • Consistency: no reason to put sweetness in manna while denying pain; both depend on size, figure, motion of parts.
        • Porphyry: red and white are not in the stone; it has a texture able to produce those ideas under light.
        • Almond: pounding alters texture alone, accounting for changed colour and taste.
      • Qualities in Bodies: Three Sorts
        • Primary and real qualities: solidity, extension, figure, number, situation, motion or rest; always in bodies, perceived or not.
        • Secondary and imputed qualities: powers of insensible primary qualities to produce colour, sound, smell, taste ideas in us.
        • Third sort: powers to alter another body's primary qualities, as fire melts lead or sun whitens wax.
        • Dependence: all secondary and third qualities result from modifications of primary qualities; only primary are real, original.
      • The Two Latter Sorts Are Merely Powers
        • Resemblance: primary ideas resemble bodies; secondary are thought to but do not; third neither are nor thought so.
        • Sun's powers: light and warmth in the sun are powers only, exactly like its power to blanch wax.
        • Perceptions vs. powers: ideas of heat and light are effects in us, not qualities existing in the object.
        • One water, two hands: same water can feel hot to one hand and cold to the other; only motion of minute parts differs.
      • Why Secondary Qualities Are Mistaken for Real
        • Hidden operation: colour and sound ideas contain no bulk, figure, or motion, so we ignore their causes.
        • Senses can't compare: no discoverable unlikeness between idea and object; senses cannot trace production.
        • Reason's gap: we cannot conceive how bulk, figure, motion should produce blue or yellow; so we imagine resemblance.
        • Contrast: effects of body on body show no resemblance to cause, so are admitted to be bare powers.
      • Secondary Qualities Are Twofold
        • Immediate secondary qualities: powers operating at once on our senses to produce ideas such as colours and tastes.
        • Mediate secondary qualities: powers operating on other bodies to alter primary qualities, so they produce new ideas in us.
        • Summary: beyond primary qualities, all observed distinctions among bodies are powers depending on primary ones.
    • Chapter IX: Of Perception
      • The Nature of Perception
        • First simple idea of reflection: perception is the mind’s first faculty exercised about ideas.
        • Passive reception: in bare perception the mind cannot avoid perceiving what strikes it.
        • Known only by reflection: each person grasps perception by observing his own seeing, hearing, or thinking.
        • Words cannot teach it: without reflection, no discourse can convey what perception is.
      • Sensation Requires the Mind’s Notice
        • Noticing organic impressions: bodily changes produce perception only when they reach the mind.
        • Impulse alone insufficient: a sound-producing motion in the ear yields no sound if the mind observes nothing.
        • Attention blocks sensation: intense contemplation can make us deaf to impressions we would otherwise hear.
        • Actual perception = idea present: wherever perception occurs, some idea is actually produced in the understanding.
      • Perception, Innateness, and First Ideas
        • Ideas before birth: children may receive hunger and warmth through sensation in the womb.
        • Not innate principles: womb ideas depend on exterior affections, not original characters of the mind.
        • First order is variable: earliest ideas depend on circumstances; knowing their exact order is unimportant.
      • Judgment Alters Sensation
        • Sensation changed by judgment: in grown people, habitual judgment turns sensory appearances into perceived causes.
        • Globe example: the eye receives a flat, shaded circle; judgment frames it as a convex uniform body.
        • Molyneux’s problem: a blind man made to see could not name the cube and sphere by sight alone.
        • Sight is the main case: light and colors are mixed with space, figure, and motion, so judgment easily intrudes.
        • Judgment feels instantaneous: mental acts are quick and habitual, so we mistake judged ideas for sensed ones.
      • Perception Across the Living Order
        • Animals vs. vegetables: perception marks the boundary; sensitive-plant motion is mere mechanism.
        • Degrees in animals: all animals perceive, but avenues and acuity fit each creature’s state and needs.
        • Oyster’s condition: extra senses would be useless to a creature unable to move toward or away from objects.
        • Old age decay: when sensation fades, a man’s knowledge may sink near the level of a cockle or oyster.
        • Inlet of knowledge: perception is the first step toward knowledge and the inlet of all its materials.
    • Chapter X: Of Retention
      • Retention, Contemplation, and Memory
        • Retention: the mind's faculty for keeping simple ideas received from sensation or reflection.
        • Contemplation: keeping an idea actually in view for a time.
        • Memory: power to revive past ideas after they have disappeared from sight.
        • Storehouse metaphor: memory stores ideas, though ideas exist only while perceived.
        • Revival adds recognition: we know we have had the idea before.
      • What Fixes Ideas in Memory
        • Attention and repetition: fix ideas most firmly in the memory.
        • Pleasure and pain: make the deepest and most lasting impressions.
        • Pain acts faster than reasoning: in children and adults, it settles caution for the future.
        • Frequent refreshment: keeps ideas clearest; ideas entering by many ways persist.
        • Recurrent universals persist: solidity, extension, figure, motion, existence, duration, number, heat, cold.
      • Fading and Oblivion
        • Single or heedless impressions: fade quickly, vanishing like shadows over cornfields.
        • Childhood ideas: lost if not repeated; early blind lose all memory of colors.
        • Constant decay: even deepest memories wear out unless renewed by senses or reflection.
        • Bodily constitution: may influence memory; fever can destroy all ideas.
        • Degrees of retention: some minds hold like marble, some like freestone, some like sand.
      • Active Recall and Memory's Defects
        • Recall is active: the mind searches for hidden ideas and turns the soul's eye upon them.
        • Passions rouse memories: affections bring dormant ideas out of their dark cells.
        • Two defects: oblivion loses ideas entirely; slowness retrieves them too late.
        • Oblivion: produces perfect ignorance, since knowledge requires the idea.
        • Slowness: amounts to stupidity; the dull man is almost as ignorant as the blank.
        • Ready memory: enables invention, fancy, and quickness of parts.
      • Memory Beyond Man
        • Finite human memory: holds ideas only by succession, not all at once.
        • Superior spirits: may retain all past knowledge constantly, as in one picture.
        • Pascal's memory: forgot nothing until illness impaired it, yet still only successively.
        • Brutes have memory: birds learning tunes retain ideas and use them as patterns.
        • Mechanical imitation impossible: matching yesterday's tune requires memory of the sound.
    • Chapters XI–XII
      • Discerning and Judgment
        • Discernment: the mind must distinguish ideas clearly; without it, little knowledge is possible, even for “innate” truths.
        • Wit vs judgment: wit assembles resembling ideas into pleasing fancies; judgment separates differing ideas to avoid being misled.
        • Clear, determinate ideas: prevent confusion even when senses report differently, as fever makes sugar taste bitter.
        • Exactness of reason: depends on unconfused ideas and the ability to discriminate the least differences.
      • Comparing and Compounding
        • Comparing: measuring ideas by extent, degrees, time, place, or other circumstances; the basis of all relation ideas.
        • Brutes compare imperfectly: they compare only sensible circumstances, not general ideas for abstract reasoning.
        • Compounding: the mind puts simple ideas together into complex ones; enlarging adds same-kind units, as units make a dozen.
        • Brutes compound little: a dog’s idea of his master is only distinct marks, and animals sense no loss of number in their young.
      • Abstraction and Language
        • Naming: children fix ideas in memory, then learn signs and use words to signify their ideas to others.
        • Abstraction: considering an idea apart from time, place, and circumstances makes it general; thus whiteness arises from milk, chalk, and snow.
        • General names: apply to whatever conforms to abstract patterns; universals are made by the mind, not innate.
      • The Human–Brute Divide and Failures of Mind
        • Brutes abstract not: they lack general signs and universal ideas; abstraction is the perfect distinction between man and brutes.
        • Brutes not machines: they reason on particular sensible ideas, but cannot enlarge them by abstraction, despite some articulate sounds.
        • Idiots: lack quickness and activity in the faculties; they make few propositions and scarce reason at all.
        • Madmen: join ideas wrongly, then reason rightly from wrong principles—as one who thinks himself glass uses glass-like caution.
      • Complex Ideas: Kinds
        • Complex ideas: the mind unites several simple ideas into one idea, as in beauty, gratitude, man, army, universe.
        • Voluntary power: the mind can multiply and vary ideas infinitely, yet only from simple materials of sensation and reflection.
        • Three kinds: modes, substances, and relations—all complex ideas fall under these heads.
        • Modes: affections dependent on substances; simple modes vary one idea (dozen), mixed modes combine kinds (beauty, theft).
        • Substances: combinations representing particulars subsisting by themselves; single (man) or collective (army).
        • Relations: arise from considering and comparing one idea with another.
      • Source and Limits of Knowledge
        • Abstruse ideas: even space, time, and infinity derive from repeating and joining ideas of sensation or reflection.
        • Beginnings of knowledge: a true history of the mind’s steps from first objects to stored ideas; appeal lies to experience.
        • Dark room: understanding is a closet shut to light, with sensation and reflection as the only windows letting in ideas.
        • Method: faculties are first examined in simple ideas, being clearer, before tackling complex ones and their operations.
    • Simple Modes of Space (Chapter XIII: Complex Ideas of Simple Modes:—and First, of the Simple Modes of Idea of Space · I)
      • Simple Modes: Repetitions of One Idea
        • Simple modes: modifications of any one simple idea, as distinct as ideas of greatest contrariety
        • Unity repeated: repetitions of the simple unit idea make distinct modes — dozen, gross, million
        • Mind-made: formed within the mind without extrinsic objects or foreign suggestions
      • Space, Distance, Extension, Immensity
        • Space: simple idea received by sight and touch — evident, needing no proof
        • Distance: bare length between two beings; capacity: length, breadth, and thickness
        • Extension: space possessed by solid, tangible, movable matter; belongs to body only
        • Immensity: unlimited repetition of familiar lengths — foot, yard, league — without stint
      • Figure: Infinite Variety
        • Figure: relation of parts in a circumscribed space's termination
        • Senses: touch reads bodies' extremities; eye reads straight or crooked lines and angles
        • Infinite variety: mind repeats and joins lines to multiply figures beyond any existing stock
      • Place: Relative Position
        • Place: relative distance from two or more points considered at rest
        • Same place: unchanged distance from reference points; changed distance means changed place
        • Nested references: chess-men vs board, board vs cabin, ship vs land — each "same place" relative to its standard
        • Purpose-driven: place is fixed by adjacent bodies serving the present use, not absolute coordinates
        • Universe has no place: nothing beyond it to relate to; "somewhere" only asserts existence
      • Space Distinct from Body
        • Distinct ideas: space and solidity differ as thinking from extension; solidity requires extension but is not it
        • No resistance: pure space lacks solidity, contact, impulse, and resistance to motion
        • Inseparable parts: pure space cannot be divided actually or mentally — only partially considered
        • Immovable parts: motion is change of distance; inseparable parts must rest perpetually
        • Definition criticized: "partes extra partes" merely says extension is extension, no real insight
    • Space, Vacuum, and Substance (Chapter XIII: Complex Ideas of Simple Modes:—and First, of the Simple Modes of Idea of Space · II)
      • Substance Is an Unknown Ground
        • Body and spirit: only names for solid unthinking beings and thinking unextended beings — not explanations.
        • Substance unknown: asked if void is substance or accident, Locke answers “I know not.”
        • Ambiguous term: “substance” applied to God, finite spirits, and body has no single clear idea.
        • If same meaning: God, spirits, and body would differ only as modifications of one substance.
        • If different meanings: distinct names are needed; otherwise the term breeds confusion.
        • Substance and accidents: words “under-propping” and “sticking on” reveal their emptiness.
      • Space Without Body Is Conceivable
        • Beyond all bodies: a man at body's extremity could stretch his hand into space without body, absent external hindrance.
        • Pure space: sufficient to remove necessity of mutual contact; bare space in the way cannot stop motion.
        • No bounds: thought cannot limit space any more than duration; immensity and eternity are finite or infinite alike.
        • Annihilation: if God can annihilate a body during universal rest, the vacated space remains without body.
        • Conceivability: clear ideas show no necessary connexion between space and solidity, since each can be conceived without the other.
        • Disputes presuppose: debating vacuum or plenum confesses distinct ideas of space with and without body.
      • Motion Requires Void Space
        • Local motion: freely moving parts within a solid body require void space equal to the smallest divided particle.
        • Infinite regress: if true for a mustard-seed particle, it holds for particles 100,000,000 times smaller.
        • Void size: even a fraction of the smallest particle suffices; the consequence is always space without matter.
        • Plenitude refuted: even a tiny void makes space distinct from body and destroys the hypothesis of plenitude.
      • Extension Is Not the Essence of Body
        • Constant conjunction: extension is so tied to sight and touch that some mistake it for body's whole essence.
        • Counterexamples: tastes, smells, hunger, and thirst include no idea of extension.
        • Essence fallacy: if constant joining made essence, unity would be the essence of everything.
        • Distinct ideas: space and solidity are as distinct as solidity and motion; space without solidity is easily conceived.
        • Uniform idea: whether called extension, dimensions, or distance, space is the same simple idea.
      • Words and Clear Ideas Settle Disputes
        • Precise words: knowing precisely what our words stand for would quickly end the dispute.
        • Agreement in ideas: thinking men who examine their simple ideas generally agree, though names differ.
        • Wrangling: unthinking, sectarian, bookish men confound words with ideas and produce endless jargon.
        • Necessary examination: resolve complex ideas into simple ones and see which have necessary connexion.
        • Floating principles: without this, one builds on uncertain foundations and is often at a loss.
    • Duration, Succession, and Time (Chapter XIV: Idea of Duration and Its Simple Modes · I)
      • Origin of Duration in the Train of Ideas
        • Duration: fleeting extension from the perpetually perishing succession of ideas, not the permanent parts of space.
        • Simple modes: different lengths of duration with distinct ideas — hours, days, years, time, and eternity.
        • Succession: reflection on ideas appearing one after another in the mind is the sole source of our idea of duration.
        • Sleep test: when the train of ideas stops, perception of duration stops; sound sleep loses all sense of elapsed time.
        • Dreaming: if ideas succeed each other in sleep, we sense duration; otherwise the interval vanishes.
        • Extension analogy: having learned duration from thought, we can apply it to things existing while we do not think.
      • Motion Is Not the Source
        • Motion's role: motion yields succession only by producing a train of distinguishable ideas in the mind.
        • Becalmed sailor: a man may watch sun and sea for an hour without perceiving motion, yet think and find succession.
        • Slow motions: changes too gradual produce no new ideas, so constant motion goes unperceived, as in clock hands.
        • Swift motions: motions faster than our ideas succeed one another are not perceived, appearing as a whole circle.
        • Independence: we would have duration even with no sense of motion, from the mind's own train.
      • Perception Limits and the Instant
        • Instant: a duration too swift to perceive succession is an instant, taking up only one idea without another.
        • Cannonball example: a shot strikes two walls in real succession, yet neither pain nor sound is perceived as successive.
        • Sensory pace: senses can only register succession up to a certain degree of quickness; beyond that, succession is lost.
        • Slow motion also loses succession: other ideas fill the gaps between sensory changes, so motion seems to stand still.
        • Train as standard: the regular succession of ideas in a waking man is the measure of all other successions.
      • The Mind Cannot Fix on a Single Idea
        • Invariable idea: no one can keep one unvaried single idea in mind for any considerable time.
        • Constant succession: ideas inevitably shift; even considering aspects of the same idea yields new ideas.
        • Limited power: we can observe and direct which ideas enter, but cannot stop the constant succession of fresh ones.
        • No motion in ideas: however ideas are made, their appearance includes no idea of motion; reflection alone gives succession.
      • Time as Measured Duration
        • Time: duration set out by periods and marked by measures or epochs; without it history and knowledge become confused.
        • Measuring difficulty: unlike extension, no two parts of succession can be laid together; no standing unvarying measure exists.
        • Equal periods: a convenient measure must divide the whole length of duration into apparently equal, constantly repeated periods.
        • Sun and moon: diurnal and annual revolutions are regular, constant, and universally observable, hence proper measures of time.
        • Time vs. motion: men confound time and motion, though any constant periodical appearance would serve equally well.
    • Measuring Duration and Imagining Eternity (Chapter XIV: Idea of Duration and Its Simple Modes · II)
      • Periodic Appearances, Not Motion, Measure Time
        • Regular appearances suffice: birds, seasons, hunger, or an ague can mark years as well as the sun.
        • Blind men count years by heat, cold, smells, or tastes, without perceiving any motion.
        • Motion's role is indirect: it helps measure time only by producing sensible ideas at seemingly equal intervals.
        • Solar motion is not essential: an uneven or non-circular sun would measure time no better than a comet.
      • No Certain Equality of Successive Durations
        • Duration flows uniformly, but no measure of it can be known to match that uniform course.
        • Two successive lengths of duration can never be brought together to prove their equality.
        • The sun's motion is unequal in its parts, undermining its long-held status as an exact standard.
        • A pendulum's swings also cannot be certified equal: its causes are unknown and its medium varies.
      • Time Is Not Motion's Measure
        • Motion requires space and bulk, not only time; defining time as "measure of motion" is one-sided.
        • Clock units are arbitrary: minutes, hours, days, and years are as conventional as inches, feet, and miles.
        • Other worlds need analogous periods, but not our particular measures; Japan no more uses our miles than our years.
        • Different measures never alter the underlying notion of duration, any more than foot and cubit alter extension.
      • Applying Time to Duration Before Time
        • A known measure can extend backward: the Julian period reckons years before the sun's motion existed.
        • A year applied to pre-creation duration parallels applying miles to space beyond all body.
        • Co-existence is not required: measuring yesterday's candle by today's dial works without shared motion.
        • World-age computations vary from 5,639 to millions of years, yet all remain intelligible as imagined durations.
      • From Succession to Eternity
        • Succession arises from observing the train of ideas constantly passing in the mind.
        • Duration arises from noticing distance between successive ideas.
        • Lengths of time come from regular sensible appearances at seemingly equal periods.
        • Eternity is endless addition of such lengths, just as number can always be increased.
        • Time in general is infinite duration marked out by periodical measures; future eternity extends the same idea.
    • Chapter XV: Ideas of Duration and Expansion, Considered Together
      • Common Nature of Expansion and Duration
        • Expansion: pure distance in abstract conception, distinguished from extension which intimates body
        • Duration: continued length of fleeting parts that never exist together
        • Both are continuous lengths: mind conceives greater and less, as clearly in hours as in inches
      • Both Boundless to the Mind
        • Expansion not bounded by matter: mind reaches end of solid extension, then finds no stop in endless expansion
        • Duration not bounded by motion: can double and enlarge beyond all corporeal beings and measures of time
        • God fills immensity as eternity: to say where no body there is nothing confines God within matter
      • Why Infinite Duration Is More Readily Admitted
        • Attribution to God: infinite duration easily ascribed to God; extension attributed only to finite matter
        • Imaginary space: beyond the universe called imaginary because void of body; duration before body never termed imaginary
        • Linguistic trace: durare and durum esse link duration to hardness and resistance, shaping the idea
      • Time and Place as Measured Portions
        • Time to duration as place to expansion: finite portions marked by landmarks in boundless oceans of eternity and immensity
        • First acceptation: time as co-existent with the motions and existence of the great bodies; place as the material world's portion
        • Second acceptation: portions supposed equal to measured lengths, even beyond the actual world — e.g., 7,640 years before creation
      • Parts, Measures, and Essential Differences
        • All parts homogeneous: every part of extension is extension, every part of duration is duration; still simple ideas
        • Least clear portions: moment (time of one idea in succession); sensible point (least discernible particle, ~30 seconds of a circle)
        • Parts inseparable: expansion and duration parts not separable even in thought, though measures may be interrupted by rest or sleep
        • Duration as line, expansion as solid: duration one straight line common to all existents; expansion has figure, breadth, thickness
        • Perishing vs lasting distance: no two parts of duration exist together; all parts of expansion exist together
        • God's eternity: past and future lie under one view with infinite knowledge and power; finite beings hold only the present
    • Chapter XVI: Idea of Number
      • Unity: The Simplest and Most Universal Idea
        • Unity's simplicity: the idea of one has no variety or composition; every object, thought, and idea brings it along
        • Universal reach: number applies to men, angels, actions, thoughts — to all that exists or can be imagined
      • Number's Modes and Their Distinctness
        • Modes by addition: repeating unity and adding repetitions together yields couple, dozen, score, million
        • Perfect distinctness: each unit of variation makes a mode clearly different; two is as distinct from one as from two hundred
        • Contrast with extension: adjacent degrees of white, or the least excess in space, cannot be distinctly separated
        • Precise demonstrations: numbers yield more evident, exact, and determinate proofs than extension; 91 stands out from 90 as from 9000
      • Names Are Necessary for Numbering
        • Names mark collections: numeration adds one unit and gives the whole a distinct name or sign
        • Confusion without names: large collections of units, unmarked, are hardly kept from being a heap in confusion
        • Language limits counting: some Americans could not count to 1000 for want of words; Tououpinambos stopped at five
        • Our own limits: without orderly denominations, naming beyond eighteen or twenty-four decimal progressions is hard
        • Children number late: they need names, the faculty to collect ideas, and memory to retain the ordered series
        • Two requirements: distinguish ideas differing by one unit; retain names in exact order, for a gap breaks the chain
      • Number Measures All Measurables
        • Number as measure: the mind uses number to measure expansion and duration — all things measurable
        • Eternity and immensity: these ideas are repeated additions of imagined parts of duration and expansion, with infinite number
        • Endless addibility: no collected sum lessens the power to add; this gives the clearest idea of infinity
    • Infinity as Endless Progression (Chapter XVII: Of Infinity · I)
      • Origin and Primary Objects
        • Infinity's primary objects: space, duration, and number — modes of quantity that can increase or diminish.
        • God's infinity: conceived through duration and ubiquity; power, wisdom, goodness only figuratively endless.
        • Finite idea: easy, from sensible portions of extension and bounded periods like hours, days, years.
        • Boundless ideas: the real difficulty is how eternity and immensity arise from finite sensory objects.
      • How the Mind Frames Infinity
        • Repetition power: repeat any length idea without end, and the mind frames infinite space.
        • Duration same way: repeat any length of duration, adding endless number, to get eternity.
        • Only partitive ideas qualify: ideas with parts can be endlessly enlarged; whiteness or sweetness cannot, since additions merge or diminish.
        • Number clarifies: clearest infinity; numbers keep repeated ideas distinct and reveal an endless addible remainder.
      • Boundless Space and Duration
        • Space admits no end: mind is apt to think it actually boundless, though ideas are not proofs of existence.
        • Void supports boundlessness: empty space within or beyond bodies is the same in nature; nothing hinders motion into it.
        • Duration likewise boundless: repeating durations yields eternity, but the idea does not prove an actually eternal being.
        • Eternity both ways: number-line extended backwards and forwards from present — a parte ante and a parte post.
        • Immenity from all sides: mind at centre follows indeterminable lines of number in any direction, yielding immensity.
      • Infinity vs Infinite Quantity
        • Key distinction: infinity of space is endless progression; a "space infinite" would be completed totality — contradictory.
        • Infinite number impossible: every positive number idea is finite; an actual infinite number would terminate progression.
        • Obscure compound: "infinite space" joins a terminated idea with endless enlargement, confusing all reasoning about it.
        • Number's one-endedness: number is infinite only forward from unit, so duration and space seem infinite in both directions.
    • Infinity as Negative Idea (Chapter XVII: Of Infinity · II)
      • No Positive Idea of Infinite Number
        • Infinite number: only a power of adding units to any former sum, never an actual positive idea.
        • Finite additions: adding finite units suggests infinity only through endless progression, not by producing a positive infinite.
        • Growing idea: infinity is a fugitive, boundless progression that can stop nowhere.
      • Positive, Comparative, and Negative in Quantity
        • Positive idea: only finite measured quantities, like so many miles or years, are clear and positive.
        • Comparative idea: “greater” is clear, but only comparative, not comprehensive.
        • Negative idea: “so much greater as cannot be comprehended” is plainly negative, leaving the remainder obscure.
        • Sounding-line analogy: the mind knows depth so many fathoms and more; the “more” has no distinct notion.
      • No Positive Idea of Infinite Duration
        • Duration involves succession: eternity is only infinite succession of moments, not a positive actual infinite.
        • Punctum stans: duration without succession is inconceivable; being no quantity, finite or infinite cannot belong to it.
        • Eternal Being: we necessarily conceive a Being without beginning, but that negation gives no positive idea of infinite duration.
      • No Positive Idea of Infinite Space
        • No greatest or least: positive ideas of quantity always have bounds; infinite littleness from division is never positively grasped.
        • No infinite matter required: idea of empty space is as easy as the hollow of a nut-shell without a kernel.
        • Future duration analogy: we have an idea of infinite future duration though nothing exists in it, so space need not be filled.
        • Absurd consequences: a positive infinite could be added to itself, making one infinite infinitely bigger than another.
      • Mistakes and Origin
        • Mistake source: treating infinity as a complete positive idea entangles discourses in perplexities and contradictions.
        • Eternity confusion: because an eternal Being seems necessary, some think they have a positive idea of eternity.
        • Origin from sensation and reflection: even infinity, however remote, derives from these sources like all ideas.
        • Mathematicians: may use advanced speculations, but their first ideas of infinity still come from sensation and reflection.
    • Chapters XVIII–XX
      • Chapter XVIII: Other Simple Modes
        • Simple modes of motion: slide, roll, tumble, walk, run, dance — all modifications of one simple idea.
        • Modes of sound: articulate words and tunes are modifications; a musician can frame a tune silently in fancy.
        • Modes of colour: rarely pure; usually mixed modes joining figure, as in beauty and rainbow.
        • Unnamed modes: compounded tastes and smells, and small degrees of the same idea, commonly lack distinct names.
        • Why actions get names: men's chief concern is with men and actions, so modified actions received names for quick discourse.
        • Trade terms: coltshire, drilling, filtration, cohobation name complex ideas known only to practitioners.
      • Chapter XIX: Of the Modes of Thinking
        • Modes of thinking: sensation, remembrance, recollection, contemplation, reverie, attention, study, dreaming, ecstasy.
        • Reverie: ideas float without reflection or regard of the understanding; English scarce has a name for it.
        • Degrees of attention: from earnest study that shuts out the senses to faint shadows that make no impression.
        • Sleep and dreaming: mind retired from senses; dreaming is loose incoherent thinking; sound sleep ends all appearances.
        • Thinking as action, not essence: since thinking admits intention and remission, it is probably the soul's action.
      • Chapter XX: Of Modes of Pleasure and Pain
        • Pleasure and pain: simple ideas from sensation and reflection, known only by experience, not definable by words.
        • Good and evil: defined solely by reference to pleasure and pain — good increases pleasure or diminishes pain.
        • Passions as modes: love, hatred, desire, joy, sorrow, hope, fear, despair, anger, envy — hinge on pleasure and pain.
        • Desire and uneasiness: uneasiness is the chief spur to human industry; velleity is its lowest, faintest degree.
        • Universal passions: envy and anger mix self-other comparisons, so not all men have them; the rest are universal.
        • Passion dynamics: removal of pain operates as pleasure, loss of pleasure as pain; shame need not bring blushing.
    • Power, Freedom, and the Will (Chapter XXI: Of Power · I)
      • Origin of the Idea of Power
        • Power is derived from observing constant changes in senses and reflection, and expecting like changes from like agents.
        • Active power is ability to make a change; passive power is ability to receive it.
        • Power includes relation: all our ideas, even qualities and extension, secretly involve relation to action or change.
        • Bodies yield only obscure active power: impulse merely transfers motion already received; it never produces it.
      • Active Power Is Known Best from Reflection
        • Reflection on the mind gives the clearest idea of active power: by willing, we begin motion in our own bodies.
        • Body cannot start motion: a moved ball is in passion, not action; it only passes on motion.
        • God and spirits are the truest subjects of active power; matter may be wholly passive.
      • Will, Understanding, and Faculties
        • Will is the mind's power to begin or forbear actions by preferring or commanding them.
        • Volition is the actual exercise of that power; actions are voluntary when they follow it, involuntary when they do not.
        • Understanding is the power of perception: of ideas, of signs, and of agreement or disagreement among ideas.
        • Faculties are not real beings: will and understanding are powers, not distinct agents inhabiting the soul.
      • Liberty and Necessity
        • Liberty is an agent's power to do or forbear an action according to the mind's preference.
        • Necessity occurs when doing or not doing does not follow the agent's volition.
        • Liberty requires thought and will; but thought and will can exist where liberty is absent.
        • Voluntary is opposed to involuntary, not to necessary: a locked-in stay can be voluntary though unfree.
        • Compulsion and restraint are necessity in agents capable of volition; unthinking agents are necessary agents throughout.
        • Thoughts can be necessitated too: a man on the rack cannot lay aside pain, and passion may carry thoughts away.
      • The Will's Freedom Is a Category Mistake
        • Freedom belongs only to agents and substances, not to powers themselves.
        • Asking whether the will is free is as absurd as asking whether riches are rich or virtue square.
        • Willing is a power; liberty is another power in the same agent, so one power cannot possess another.
        • Faculty talk disguises the error: saying the will orders or chooses treats an ability as a separate actor.
    • Freedom, the Will, and Uneasiness (Chapter XXI: Of Power · II)
      • Faculties Are Not Agents
        • Powers are relations: faculties do not operate on each other; only the mind or man acts.
        • Faculty-talk breeds confusion: attributing action to abilities (“digestive faculty digested”) obscures the real agent.
        • Question reframed: ask not “is the will free?” but “is the man free?”
      • Freedom Belongs to the Man, Not the Will
        • Liberty defined: power to act or forbear acting according to one’s will or choice.
        • Will not free: when an action is proposed, a man cannot avoid willing one way or the other.
        • Absurd question: asking if a man is free to will what he pleases asks whether he can will what he wills, to infinity.
      • Defining Volition and Action
        • Volition is simple: an act of mind directing thought to produce an action, exerting power.
        • Action includes forbearance: sitting still or silence count as actions requiring the will’s determination.
        • Fixed ideas cure confusion: clear ideas of liberty and volition resolve most perplexity.
      • Uneasiness Determines the Will
        • The mind determines: the motive for change is always present uneasiness, not bare contemplation of good.
        • Desire is uneasiness: desire for absent good, negative as ease from pain or positive as enjoyment of pleasure.
        • Spring of action: natural uneasinesses like hunger and thirst move the will to preserve us.
        • Good alone moves not: the greater good determines the will only when desire makes us uneasy in its want.
      • Will Distinguished from Desire
        • Will terminates in action: volition concerns only our own actions, reaching no further.
        • Desire can run contrary: one may will persuasions he wishes not to prevail.
        • Gout example: pain breeds desire for ease, but the will may not act when removal threatens worse.
    • Uneasiness, Not the Greater Good, Moves the Will (Chapter XXI: Of Power · III)
      • Uneasiness Alone Determines the Will
        • Uneasiness overrides acknowledged good: conviction of plenty or virtue moves nobody until want is felt.
        • Absent good cannot operate: it stays a bare idea in the mind, unactive speculation, until it raises desire.
        • Drunkard’s case: he sees health and estate wasted, yet habitual thirst drives him to the tavern.
        • Video meliora...: “I see and approve the better, I follow the worse” is made intelligible only by present uneasiness.
        • Any great uneasiness holds the will: bodily pain, love, or revenge keeps it steady; confessed infinite good does not.
      • Why Uneasiness Has This Power
        • First step to happiness: removing pain is necessary before enjoyment, since pain spoils the relish of present goods.
        • Uneasiness alone is present: absent good may be contemplated, but cannot counterbalance present pain till desire is raised.
        • Desire accompanies every uneasiness: wherever uneasiness is, desire is; even joy includes desire to continue and fear to lose.
        • Most pressing attainable uneasiness wins: the will is moved only by what is judged removable; incurable pains are set aside.
      • Good Is Desired Only as Part of One’s Happiness
        • Happiness alone moves desire: good and evil are comparative degrees of pleasure and pain.
        • Not all confessed good is desired: only what a man takes as necessary to his own happiness excites his desire.
        • Studious man and epicure: each admits the other’s pleasure, but wants it not; uneasiness directs their pursuits.
        • Pain always moves: no one feels uneasiness without being moved, while absent good can leave men unconcerned.
      • Why Infinite Good Is Often Neglected
        • Present misery outweighs absent good: all present pain is part of misery; absent good is not, so moderate enjoyments content us.
        • Natural and habitual uneasinesses fill life: hunger, thirst, ambition, and custom-made desires crowd out remoter good.
        • Great good needs repeated contemplation: only when consideration raises desire does it compete for the will.
        • Heaven’s joys would seize the will: if bare greater good determined it, infinite eternal good could never be let go; experience shows otherwise.
      • Liberty Lies in Suspending Desire
        • Power to suspend desire: the mind can hold back satisfaction and examine its objects on all sides.
        • Source of liberty: suspension, not free-will, is where liberty truly consists.
        • Hasty determination causes errors: precipitate willing before due examination produces mistakes and faults.
        • Due consideration raises desire: we can proportion desire to a good’s value and let it work on the will in its turn.
    • Liberty Grounded in Judgment and Suspension (Chapter XXI: Of Power · IV)
      • Determination by Judgment is Liberty
        • Determination by judgment: not restraint but the very improvement and benefit of freedom
        • Perfect indifference to good or evil would be an imperfection, not an excellence
        • Even God cannot choose what is not good; being determined by what is best is divine freedom
        • Constant pursuit of happiness: no abridgment of liberty; madmen and fools alone would be "free" without it
      • Suspension of Desire: The Hinge of Liberty
        • Power to suspend: opportunity to examine, view, and judge before the will determines action
        • The hinge of liberty: intellectual beings can suspend particular desires till they have fairly examined good and evil
        • Necessity of pursuing true happiness: the foundation of liberty, obliging us to suspend satisfaction in particular cases
        • Our duty complete: after due examination, acting on the last judgment is all we can or ought to do
      • Governing Passions as the Right Use of Liberty
        • Chief care: moderate and restrain passions so reason may judge unbiassed
        • Form appetites suited to true good by consideration of its real worth
        • No one may plead inability: what a man can do before a prince he can do alone or before God
        • God pities frailty: violent passions that overpower thought are judged by a kind and merciful Father
      • All Men Seek Happiness, but Not the Same Sort
        • Variety of choices: does not argue men do not pursue good; happiness is placed in different things
        • Relish of the mind: like the palate, differs; summum bonum disputes were as vain as debating apples, plums, or nuts
        • No prospect beyond the grave: then "let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die" is the right inference
      • Wrong Judgments About Future Good Cause Misery
        • Present good never chosen amiss: things in present enjoyment are what they seem; real and apparent good coincide
        • Errors regard future good: absent good moves us only by our opinion of its necessity to happiness
        • Bodily pain and wrong desires: uneasinesses determining the will arise from pains not in our power, or desires misled by false judgment
        • Necessity of future bliss: seeing heaven and hell changes the measures of good and evil that govern choice
      • No One Chooses Misery but by Wrong Judgment
        • Double sense of good and bad: bare pleasure or pain, and things that draw pleasure or pain after them
        • Willing misery impossible: no one puts bitter into his own draught except by wrong judgment
        • Comparing present and future: misreporting these comparisons makes the will fasten on the worse side
    • Present against Future Happiness (Chapter XXI: Of Power · V)
      • Comparing Present with Future Pleasure and Pain
        • Nearness distorts judgment: present pleasure or pain appears greater than future good or evil at a distance.
        • Spendthrift error: men prefer a little in hand to a greater reversion, judged by unequal measures.
        • Time corrects the illusion: the future becomes present, then shows its full dimensions and convicts the mistake.
        • Cause is our narrow constitution: the mind cannot enjoy two pleasures at once, and present pain extinguishes all relish.
      • Why Absent Good Cannot Outweigh Present Uneasiness
        • Present uneasiness monopolizes desire: any present pain or inflamed desire lessens future good in our thoughts.
        • Unknown future goods are discounted: men suspect they may not answer report, having found past pleasures sometimes nauseous.
        • Future happiness is an exception: a state God designs for happiness must suit every palate; heavenly manna fits all.
        • Wrong judgment of consequences: men underrate the evil dependent on actions or doubt its certainty and avoidability.
      • Causes of Wrong Judgment: Ignorance and Inadvertency
        • Ignorance: he who judges without informing himself to the utmost cannot acquit himself of judging amiss.
        • Inadvertency: overlooking what one knows is an affected ignorance that misleads as much as the other.
        • Judgment is balancing an account: haste and passion leave sums out of the reckoning and cause wrong verdicts.
        • Reason was given to check this: we should search and see before determining the will.
      • Mistaking What Is Necessary to Happiness
        • Resting in present ease: once pain is removed, men take up with any pleasure at hand and look no further.
        • Desire follows necessity: an apparent greater good moves us only if judged necessary to our happiness.
        • The great mistake: not taking as necessary to happiness what really is so misleads choice of both end and means.
        • Unpleasant means seem preposterous: men cannot easily make themselves unhappy in order to become happy.
      • Men Can Change What Pleases Them
        • Palates of the mind can be corrected: reason recommends at first, and custom makes actions pleasant.
        • Pleasure arises from action or end: contemplating the end adds gusto; use and practice make the action itself pleasant.
        • Habits have powerful charms: repetition wears us into liking what at first displeased us.
        • Neglect of this power causes wandering: fashion and custom corrupt palates; contrary habits can rectify them.
      • Liberty, Happiness, and Infinite Stakes
        • Liberty redefined: power to act or not act as the mind directs; will directs operative faculties to motion or rest.
        • Uneasiness determines the will: present uneasiness, accompanied by desire, moves us; not every greater good does.
        • Suspension and judgment: we can suspend satisfying a desire until we examine whether the apparent good belongs to real happiness.
        • Infinite happiness outweighs all: even the bare possibility of a future state makes virtue the only rational choice against infinite misery.
        • Original ideas: extension, solidity, mobility come from body; perceptivity and motility from mind; existence, duration, number belong to both.
    • Chapter XXII: Of Mixed Modes
      • What Mixed Modes Are
        • Mixed modes: complex ideas combining simple ideas of different kinds, as obligation, drunkenness, a lie
        • Opposed to simple modes: simple modes mix only ideas of the same kind; mixed modes join ideas of different kinds
        • Mind's active power: the mind is passive in receiving simple ideas, yet actively combines them into new compositions
        • Notions, not substances: mixed modes are not marks of real beings, but exist chiefly in thought, not in things
      • Names Give Mixed Modes Their Unity
        • Unity is mental: scattered simple ideas are united by an act of the mind, not by coexistence in nature
        • One name completes the union: a name marks the collection; parricide is a distinct idea, killing an old man is not
        • Getting ideas by names: explication of terms conveys mixed modes like sacrilege or murder without witnessing the acts
        • Names stand in for fleeting ideas: triumph or apotheosis have no steady existence anywhere but in their names
      • Mixed Modes and the Life of Language
        • End of language: men name the combinations they frequently use; rare collections stay loose and nameless
        • Untranslatable terms: ostrakismos and proscriptio lack equivalents elsewhere because the customs they name were absent
        • Languages change: new customs and opinions generate new combinations, so new names are annexed and old ones laid by
      • Three Ways of Acquiring Mixed Modes
        • Observation: seeing two men wrestle or fence yields the ideas of wrestling or fencing
        • Invention: the first designer of printing or etching had the idea in mind before it existed
        • Explication of names: the most usual way; enumerate the simple ideas a term stands for to one who knows them
        • Analysis of a lie: articulate sounds, the speaker's ideas, signs affirming contrary to them—all resolvable into simple ideas
      • The Most Modified Simple Ideas
        • Thinking, motion, power: the most modified simple ideas, since action is the great business of mankind and of laws
        • Modes of power: boldness, habit, disposition, and testiness name powers or aptitudes fitted for action
        • Words of seeming action: creation, annihilation, and freezing signify the effect, not the manner of operating
        • Other simple ideas also enter mixed modes; a full list would make a dictionary of divinity, ethics, law, politics
    • The Unknown Support of Qualities (Chapter XXIII: Of Our Complex Ideas of Substances · I)
      • Substance in General as Unknown Support
        • Substance: a supposed unknown support for qualities observed to go constantly together.
        • Pure substance: only a supposition of “he knows not what” supporting accidents.
        • Indian analogy: world rests on elephant, elephant on tortoise, tortoise on “something, he knew not what.”
        • Vague language: calling it “something” marks ignorance, not a distinct idea.
        • Etymology: substantia literally means standing under or upholding.
      • Sorting Substances by Collected Simple Ideas
        • Particular substances: combinations of simple ideas observed to coexist, e.g. man, horse, gold, water.
        • Craft knowledge: smith or jeweller knows iron or diamond better than a philosopher’s substantial forms.
        • Substratum ingredient: every complex substance idea includes a confused sense of something in which qualities subsist.
        • Thing-talk: body is a thing extended; spirit a thing thinking; substance is always something beside observable ideas.
      • Corporeal and Spiritual Substance Equally Obscure
        • Spirit: a supposed substratum for thinking, reasoning, fearing, just as matter is for sensible qualities.
        • Symmetry: no clearer notion of corporeal substance than of spiritual substance.
        • Non-inference: ignorance of spirit’s substance no more disproves spirit than ignorance of matter’s substance disproves body.
      • Powers as Components of Complex Ideas
        • Powers: active and passive capacities are included among the simple ideas making up substances.
        • Examples: loadstone’s power to draw iron and iron’s power to be drawn are treated as inherent qualities.
        • Mediate discovery: fire appears by heat and colour directly, and by turning wood to charcoal indirectly.
        • Necessity: powers must be considered for true distinct notions of particular substances.
      • Three Kinds of Ideas in Corporeal Substances
        • Primary qualities: bulk, figure, number, situation, motion; really in bodies whether perceived or not.
        • Secondary qualities: powers to produce ideas in us; not really in things except as causes.
        • Active/passive powers: aptness to give or receive primary-quality changes, known only through sensible effects.
        • Gold: melting, aqua regia, and yellowness are powers, not inherent visible qualities.
        • Sun: heat is a power like whiteness produced in wax; not actually in the sun.
      • Senses Suited to Our State
        • Microscope lesson: acute sight would replace colours with textures of minute parts.
        • Observed shifts: sand and glass turn pellucid; hair changes colour; blood shows red globules in clear liquor.
        • Divine design: faculties fit life’s conveniences, not perfect adequate knowledge.
        • Sufficiency: enough insight to know the Creator and our duty.
        • Hyperacuity: finer senses would alter appearances and be inconsistent with our wellbeing.
    • Senses, Substance, and Obscurity (Chapter XXIII: Of Our Complex Ideas of Substances · II)
      • Senses Fitted to Our Condition
        • Providential sensory fit: God suited our organs to surrounding bodies, not to absolute acuity.
        • Hyperacute hearing: A thousandfold quicker ear would make quiet rest impossible; perpetual noise would distract.
        • Microscopical eyes: Seeing minute textures would change appearances and hinder commerce and communication.
        • Utility over penetration: Acute sight into a clock's springs loses the clock's use; practical discernment matters more.
        • Spirits' adaptable organs: Conjecture that spirits shape their bodily organs to suit their designs, beyond our guesses.
        • Bounds of conjecture: We cannot enlarge guesses about angels beyond ideas from sensation and reflection.
      • Specific and Spiritual Substance Ideas
        • Specific substance ideas: Collections of simple ideas considered as united in one subject, like a swan's properties.
        • Immaterial spirit idea: Thinking, perceiving, liberty, and self-motion co-existing make spirit as conceivable as matter.
        • Obscure substratum: Substance is a supposed I know not what supporting accidents, equally unknown in both.
        • Sensation reveals both parts: Perceiving a corporeal object implies a spiritual being within that perceives.
      • Primary Ideas of Body and Spirit
        • Body’s primary ideas: Cohesion of solid, separable parts, and power of communicating motion by impulse.
        • Spirit’s primary ideas: Thinking, will, power to move body by thought, and consequent liberty.
        • Common ideas: Existence, duration, and mobility belong to body and spirit alike.
        • Spirits mobile: The soul changes place with the body, and its separation at death confirms motion.
        • God immovable: Not because immaterial, but because he is an infinite spirit.
      • Cohesion as Incomprehensible as Thought
        • Body and soul compared: Extended solid substance and thinking substance are equally clear and equally obscure.
        • Ambient fluid cannot explain cohesion: External pressure cannot bind the fluid's own parts, nor resist lateral sliding.
        • Extension depends on cohesion: We cannot understand body's extension without understanding the union of its parts.
        • Cohesion as obscure as thinking: The manner of bodies sticking together is as unknowable as the manner of thought.
        • Common observation is not comprehension: Daily experience of cohesion and thought gives no insight into their causes.
    • Body, Spirit, and Simple Ideas (Chapter XXIII: Of Our Complex Ideas of Substances · III)
      • Coherence and Cohesion of Body
        • Cohesion of parts: how fused gold or brass coheres is as unintelligible as how we perceive or move.
        • Water's atoms: perfectly loose and perpetually moving, yet sharp cold consolidates them into firm bodies.
        • Cement of matter: any discovered bond would itself need a cement, so solid extension remains incomprehensible.
        • Extension's clarity: examined closely, solid extended substance is as hard to conceive as thinking immaterial substance.
      • Motion by Impulse or Thought
        • Communication of motion: impulse and thought both exhibit daily experience, but the manner of each is equally dark.
        • Impulse: motion passing from one body into another is as obscure as mind moving body by thought.
        • Active power: motivity is clearer in spirit than in body; resting bodies only move by borrowed motion.
        • Power attributes: active power suits spirits, passive power suits matter; beings that are both partake of both.
      • Body and Spirit Compared
        • Equal ignorance: substance of spirit and substance of body are equally unknown to us.
        • Clear properties: body has solid coherent parts and impulse; spirit has thinking and power of action.
        • Modes: body qualities are modifications of extension and motion; thinking modes include doubting, intending, fearing.
        • No contradiction: thinking without solidity is no more contradictory than solidity without thinking.
        • Divisibility: finite extension's divisibility in infinitum entraps us in consequences as absurd as any in an immaterial spirit.
        • Boundaries: simple ideas from sensation and reflection mark the limits of thought; beyond lies obscurity.
      • The Complex Idea of God
        • Origin: complex idea of God is made by enlarging simple ideas from reflection—existence, knowledge, power, happiness.
        • Infinity: adding infinity to those simple ideas produces our best idea of the Supreme Being.
        • Essence unknown: God's real essence is incognizable, just as are the essences of a pebble, a fly, or ourselves.
        • Spirits limited: all ideas of spirits come from reflection, differing only in degrees of knowledge, power, duration, happiness.
        • Spirit communication: we have no idea how bodiless spirits communicate, having no experience of immediate thought-sharing.
      • Recapitulation of Substance Ideas
        • Collections: all complex ideas of substances are collections of simple ideas with an unknown substratum supposed.
        • Source: every simple idea, even in angels and God, originates from sensation or reflection.
        • Powers as qualities: most simple ideas in gold—yellowness, weight, fusibility—are really powers or relations, not inherent qualities.
    • Collective Ideas and Mental Composition (XXIV–XXVI · I)
      • One Idea from Many Substances
        • Collective idea: many particular substances considered together as one united representation.
        • Army and world: collections are as much one idea as a man or an atom.
        • Unity criterion: whatever the mind views as one picture is one idea.
      • Made by Composition
        • Power of composition: the mind unites simple or complex ideas into collective ideas.
        • Parallel with numbers: repeated unities yield modes like score or gross; grouped substances yield troop, army, swarm, city, fleet.
        • Equal ease: conceiving an army of ten thousand as one idea is no harder than conceiving one man.
      • Artificial Draughts of the Mind
        • Artificial things: most objects made of distinct substances are collective ideas.
        • Remote materials: the mind can unite remote or contrary things into one conception, e.g., the universe.
        • Purpose: such unity lets the mind contemplate and discourse under a single name.
    • Relation, Comparison, and Relative Names (XXIV–XXVI · II)
      • Defining Relation
        • Relation: the mind sets one thing beside another and views it in respect to that other.
        • Relative terms: names that lead thought beyond the thing itself to something distinct, as husband or whiter does.
        • Correlatives: paired terms like father/son announce relation at once; lacking a correlative, relation is easily overlooked.
        • External denominations: names that hide a relation are still relative whenever language supplies no reciprocal term.
      • Relation and the Things Related
        • Superinduced: relation is extraneous to things, yet the same relation-idea can be shared by people with different ideas of the substances related.
        • Change without alteration: a father ceases to be one by his son’s death, his own being unchanged.
        • Contrary comparisons: the same man is older and younger, stronger and weaker, merely as the mind compares him with different people.
        • Two terms required: no relation exists except between two things considered as distinct; whole aggregates, like triangle or family, count as one positive idea.
      • Universality and Clarity of Relations
        • Everything relatable: no idea, substance, mode, or relation is incapable of an almost infinite number of references.
        • One man, many relations: father, brother, husband, friend, subject, captain, islander—relations multiply with occasions of comparison.
        • Clearer than substances: paternity is easier to conceive clearly than humanity, because relation needs only one action or simple idea.
        • Knowledge gap: to know a substance requires collecting many ideas; to know a relation requires grasping only its foundation, as dam and chick without knowing the birds.
      • Relations Rest on Simple Ideas
        • Termination in simple ideas: all relations, however refined or remote from sense, reduce to simple ideas of sensation or reflection.
        • Relativity test: words that necessarily lead the mind beyond what really exists in the subject are relative—father and blacker, not man and black.
        • Toward cause and effect: the most comprehensive relation, cause and effect, will be shown to arise from the same two fountains of knowledge.
    • Cause, Effect, and Relative Terms (XXIV–XXVI · III)
      • The Sensory Origin of Cause and Effect
        • Cause and effect: arise from observing constant vicissitude of things, not from knowing their manner of operation.
        • Cause: whatever produces any simple idea, substance, or mode; effect is what is produced.
        • Heat and wax: heat causes a simple idea, fluidity, not present before; relation is observed, not explained.
        • Fire and ashes: fire causes wood to become another complex idea, ashes; change yields causal relation.
        • Termination: all causal ideas trace to sensation or reflection, however comprehensive.
      • Kinds of Production
        • Creation: wholly new being, no part existed before, as a new particle of matter begins to exist.
        • Generation: substance made by internal principle, set working by external agent through insensible ways.
        • Making: artificial things produced by sensible separation or juxtaposition of discernible parts.
        • Alteration: new simple idea produced in a subject that lacked it before.
        • Common core: cause is beginning to exist by operation of another; effect is what begins.
      • Relations of Time
        • Time denominations: words answering "how long?" compare durations to another duration, e.g. years of reign.
        • Dates answer "when?": by showing distance from a fixed longer duration, as 1066 from Christ.
        • Young and old: relative terms comparing age to a standard duration settled in the mind for that sort.
        • Standards vary by kind: a man is old later than a horse, a dog sooner; each species has its own period.
        • Unknown limits: sun, stars, rubies, diamonds are not called old because their usual periods are unknown.
      • Relations of Place, Size, and Power
        • Place and distance: obvious relations, as above, below, or a mile from Charing-cross.
        • Great and little: relative to a mental standard of bigness for each species.
        • Conventional scale: a "great" horse to a Welshman may be "little" to a Fleming.
        • Weak and strong: relative to ordinary human power or, for creatures, to God's power.
        • Hidden relations: ordinary words like "necessary stores" express relations to use or purpose.
    • Identity, Consciousness, and the Self (Chapter XXVII: Of Identity and Diversity · I)
      • Identity and Diversity
        • Identity: a thing compared with itself as existing at another time and place; its ideas do not vary from the earlier moment.
        • Diversity: two things of the same kind cannot exist in the same place at the same time.
        • One beginning: whatever had one beginning is the same; different beginning in time or place makes it diverse.
        • Principium individuationis: existence itself fixes a being to one time and place, incommunicable to two beings of the same kind.
      • Substances, Modes, and Masses
        • God: eternal, unalterable, and everywhere; his identity admits no doubt.
        • Finite spirits and particles: determinate beginnings in time and place give each its identity while it exists.
        • Successive modes: motion and thought perish at every moment, so no motion or thought at different times is the same.
        • Same mass: same atoms united make the same mass; add or remove one atom and it is a different mass.
      • Living Things vs. Mere Matter
        • Vegetable life: same plant is same while it partakes of one common life through continued organization, despite changed particles.
        • Animal identity: same continued life communicated to fleeting particles in a vitally organized body.
        • Machine analogy: a watch is organization of parts for an end; unlike animals, its moving force comes from outside.
        • Mass vs. body: identity applies to different things—cohesion of particles vs. an organized living body.
      • Identity of Man
        • Same man: participation in the same continued life by particles successively united to one organized body.
        • Soul alone insufficient: soul-only identity would let Seth, Socrates, and Caesar Borgia be the same man.
        • Form determines man: a creature of human shape without reason is still called man; a philosophizing parrot is still parrot.
        • Common idea of man: a body of a certain shape joined to a thinking being, not thinking substance alone.
      • Personal Identity and Consciousness
        • Person: a thinking intelligent being that can consider itself as itself in different times and places.
        • Consciousness inseparable: every perception includes perceiving that one perceives; this makes each one what he calls self.
        • Personal identity: sameness of a rational being, reaching back exactly as far as consciousness can extend to past actions.
        • Not substance: personal identity depends on consciousness alone, whether it is annexed to one or several substances.
        • Limbs are self: body parts belong to self while vitally united to consciousness; cut off, they are no more self than remote matter.
      • Substance Change and Hard Cases
        • Interrupted consciousness: forgetfulness and sleep obscure past selves, but doubts about substance do not touch personal identity.
        • Transferred consciousness: if the same consciousness could be transferred between thinking substances, two substances would make one person.
        • Same substance, two persons: if consciousness of a past state is wholly lost and unrecoverable, a pre-existent soul would be a different person.
        • Divine safeguard: God will not let reward or punishment attach to a fatal error of transferred consciousness.
    • Consciousness Makes Personal Identity (Chapter XXVII: Of Identity and Diversity · II)
      • Consciousness Alone Constitutes the Same Person
        • Personal identity: consists in identity of consciousness, not identity of substance
        • Same soul, no consciousness: a soul that was Socrates' without consciousness of his life is not the same person
        • Remote actions: consciousness reaching back unites past existences — Noah's flood and last winter — into one self
        • Self: the conscious thinking thing, concerned for its own happiness, whatever substance underlies it
        • Little finger test: if consciousness follows a severed finger, the finger is the person, not the remaining body
      • Distinguishing Man, Person, and Self
        • Man needs body too: body and soul together make the same man; soul alone does not
        • Prince in cobbler's body: same person accountable for princely actions, yet the same cobbler to everyone else
        • Absolute oblivion: unrecoverable memories separate actions from the person, though not from the man
        • "Not himself": everyday speech treats the madman as a different person from the sober man
        • Three suppositions of man: soul, animal, or both — none make identity rest in anything but consciousness
      • Forensic Self and Accountability
        • Person is a forensic term: it appropriates actions and their merit, so belongs only to intelligent agents
        • Reward and punishment: founded on personal identity; happiness and misery matter only to the conscious self
        • Drunkard and sleeper: human laws punish both, unable to distinguish real from counterfeit ignorance
        • The Great Day: no one shall answer for what he knows nothing of; conscience accusing or excusing
        • Punishment without consciousness: no better than being created miserable, with no demerit at all
      • Puzzle Cases of Divided Consciousness
        • Day-man and night-man: two incommunicable consciousnesses in one body are two distinct persons
        • One consciousness, two bodies: same person in two bodies, like one man in two clothings
        • Memory intervals: regular day/night forgetfulness makes two persons with the same immaterial spirit
        • Vital union: substance vitally united to present thinking being is part of the same self; separated, it is not
      • Names and Ignorance Resolve the Difficulties
        • Pardonable suppositions: our ignorance of the thinking thing excuses seemingly strange hypotheses
        • Same soul, different bodies: no absurdity in one soul informing different bodies, as sheep's matter becomes man's
        • Ill-used names: most obscurity about identity arises from names ill-used, not from the things themselves
        • Same complex idea continued: continued existence under a fixed complex idea preserves the same individual man
    • Relations, Laws, and Moral Measures (Chapter XXVIII: Of Other Relations · I)
      • Proportional and Natural Relations
        • Proportional relations: compare subjects by degrees of one simple idea—whiter, sweeter, equal, more.
        • Natural relations: grounded in origin or blood, e.g. father, son, brothers, countrymen.
        • Language follows convenience: relations get names only when common life needs to mark them.
        • Kinship terms absent for brutes: same real relations exist, but no practical need breeds no names.
      • Instituted or Voluntary Relations
        • Voluntary relations: founded on acts conferring moral right, power, or obligation.
        • Examples: general over army, citizen with privileges in a place.
        • Unnamed relations overlooked: constable or dictator lack relational names for those under them, so the relation goes unnoticed.
      • Moral Relations and Good and Evil
        • Moral relation: conformity or disagreement of voluntary actions to a rule by which they are judged.
        • Actions as mixed modes: gratitude, polygamy, etc. are complex ideas with annexed names.
        • Moral good and evil: conformity to some law, with reward or punishment attached by the law-maker’s will and power.
        • No law without enforcement: a rule without annexed good or evil cannot determine the will.
      • Three Laws That Judge Actions
        • Divine law: God’s rule by nature or revelation; the touchstone of sin and duty, enforced by infinite rewards and punishments.
        • Civil law: the commonwealth’s rule; marks actions criminal or innocent, enforced by political power over life, liberty, and goods.
        • Law of opinion or reputation: social praise and blame; the common measure of what are called virtues and vices.
        • Virtue is public esteem: everywhere virtue and praise, vice and blame, go together.
        • Reputation tracks divine law: general interest keeps common commendation and blame mostly aligned with God’s unchangeable rule.
    • Three Laws Governing Moral Relations (Chapter XXVIII: Of Other Relations · II)
      • The Law of Fashion
        • Law of fashion: private censure guides most men more strongly than divine or civil law.
        • Social punishment: constant dislike and condemnation by one’s company is a burden too heavy for human sufferance.
        • Motives of reputation: commendation and disgrace powerfully accommodate men to the opinions of those with whom they converse.
        • Rarity of resistance: few can live in constant disgrace with their familiar society; solitude is easier than social contempt.
      • Three Rules of Moral Good and Evil
        • Three laws men compare actions to: divine law, civil law, and the law of fashion or private censure.
        • Moral rectitude is the conformity or nonconformity of an action to whichever rule is used as touchstone.
        • Moral good and evil are denominations derived from agreement or disagreement with these patterns.
        • Mixed modes: rules are collections of simple ideas; conformity means ordering action so its simple ideas correspond.
      • Moral Actions: Absolute and Relative
        • Twofold consideration: moral actions may be regarded absolutely as mixed modes, or relatively as good or bad against a rule.
        • Absolute sense: drunkenness or lying is a positive collection of simple ideas, like drinking of a horse or speaking of a parrot.
        • Relative sense: duelling is sin by God’s law, valour by fashion, and a capital crime by civil law.
        • Misleading names: one word often fuses the positive action with its moral relation, so people take names for things.
        • Stealing example: taking a madman’s sword is properly stealing as a mode, yet no sin against God’s rule.
      • Relations Terminate in Simple Ideas
        • Foundation: all relations ultimately terminate in simple ideas from sensation or reflection.
        • Murder analyzed: reflection gives willing, considering, malice, life, perception; sensation gives the sensible ideas of a man and destructive action.
        • Relative words decompose: “father” includes man, generation, and child; “friend” includes man, love, readiness, action, and good.
        • Tracing: moral words end, often remotely, in collections of simple ideas; otherwise they signify nothing.
      • Relation vs. Truth of the Rule
        • Clarity of relation: we often have as clear a notion of the relation as of the simple ideas it is founded on.
        • Example of brothers: clear relation of brotherhood requires only same parentage, not knowledge of the manner of birth.
        • Independence from rule’s truth: comparing an action to any rule yields a true perception of agreement or disagreement.
        • Erroneous rule: a wrong yardstick can misjudge moral rectitude, but not the relation itself.
    • Chapter XXIX: Of Clear and Obscure, Distinct and Confused Ideas
      • Clear vs. Obscure Ideas
        • Clear ideas: such as objects present in well-ordered sensation; memory retains them fresh and exact.
        • Obscurity in simple ideas: from dull organs, slight or transient impressions, or weak memory.
        • Wax-and-seal analogy: perception like wax — too hard, too soft, or a too-light seal leaves an obscure print.
        • Complex ideas clear when their simple components are clear and their number and order determinate.
      • Distinct vs. Confused Ideas
        • Distinct idea: one the mind perceives as different from all others; confused: not sufficiently distinguishable from another it should differ from.
        • Objection noted: every idea is visibly what it is and differs from all others — so how can any be confused?
        • Answer via names: confusion arises when an idea may as well be called by another name; the differentiating mark is left out.
      • Three Sources of Confusion
        • Too few simple ideas: "beast with spots" fails to distinguish a leopard from a lynx or panther.
        • Jumbled ingredients: enough parts but disorderly — an anamorphic picture called "Caesar" suits "baboon" or "Pompey" as well.
        • Mutable, undetermined ideas: shifting the components of church or idolatry each time one thinks of them.
      • Names, Confusion, and the Cure
        • Confusion concerns two ideas, especially nearest neighbors; examine what a suspect idea may be confounded with.
        • Prevention: unite all distinguishing ingredients in a determinate number and order, and apply the name steadily.
        • Why exactness fails: loose naming covers ignorance and perplexes others, passing for learning and superiority.
        • Memory limits: complex ideas have too many parts to retain the same precise combination under one name.
        • Twofold confusion: within one's own reasonings from unstable ideas, and in discourse from not divining another's precise idea.
      • Partly Clear, Partly Confused
        • Chiliaedron: the number 1,000 is distinct while the figure of 1,000 sides is confused — not distinguishable from 999 sides by shape.
        • Self-deception: men argue from the clear part while the familiar name covers the obscure part and draws deductions from it.
        • Eternity: clear idea of duration and vast lengths, but no positive comprehensive idea of endless extent; disputes breed absurdities.
      • Infinite Divisibility and Obscurity
        • Minute corpuscles: beyond the smallest sensible parts we have no clear idea of bulk — the 100,000th and 1,000,000th parts of an atom are indistinguishable.
        • Infinite division: clear ideas only of number and division; the distinct idea of extension is lost after a little progression.
        • Endless addibility yields no idea of an actual infinite number, any more than endless divisibility yields actual infinite parts.
        • Finite cannot represent infinite: all our ideas are finite and bear no proportion to infinite; reasoning about it ends in confusion.
    • Chapter XXX: Of Real and Fantastical Ideas
      • The Real–Fantastical Distinction
        • Real ideas: have a foundation in nature, conforming to real being or archetypes
        • Fantastical or chimerical: no foundation in nature, no conformity to the referenced archetype
        • Threefold distinction: ideas are real or fantastical, adequate or inadequate, true or false
      • Simple Ideas Are Always Real
        • All simple ideas real: constant effects of powers in external things, never fictions at pleasure
        • Resemblance not required: exact images or mere effects both serve as real distinguishing characters
        • Reality is steady correspondence: sensations tied to constitutions of real beings, whether as cause or pattern
        • Mind wholly passive: cannot produce any simple idea beyond what things operate on it
      • Mixed Modes and Relations Are Their Own Archetypes
        • Mind's liberty in complex ideas: voluntary combinations explain why ideas of gold or justice differ between persons
        • Mixed modes and relations: their own archetypes; consistent, possibly existing collections are real
        • Names impose conformity: a named idea must match ordinary signification, else fantasticalness is mere impropriety of speech
        • Courage example: steadfast action in danger is real; the same without reason is no less real an idea
      • Substance Ideas Must Agree with Existence
        • Substance ideas represent things: real only as simple ideas truly united and co-existing in substances
        • Chimerical collections: centaurs, or a yellow malleable body lighter than water, were never found together
        • Contradictory parts: collections with inconsistency or contradiction are most clearly imaginary
        • Pattern beyond possibility: substances need conformity to a known existing pattern, not bare possible existence
    • Chapter XXXI: Of Adequate and Inadequate Ideas
      • The Distinction: Adequate vs. Inadequate
        • Adequate ideas: perfectly represent the archetypes the mind supposes them taken from
        • Inadequate ideas: partial or incomplete representations of those archetypes
        • Archetypes: the patterns ideas are intended to stand for and to which they are referred
      • Simple Ideas Are Always Adequate
        • Simple ideas: effects of powers in things, ordained by God to produce sensations in us
        • Each sensation answers the power operating on a sense; the mind cannot produce simple ideas itself
        • Secondary qualities: only powers to excite ideas, not real beings in things
        • With no sense organs there would be no light or heat, though the sun and Aetna remain
        • Real modifications: solidity, extension, figure, motion, rest exist whether perceived or not
      • Modes and Relations: Archetypes Without Patterns
        • Complex ideas of modes: voluntary collections of simple ideas, made without reference to real archetypes
        • Being archetypes made by the mind, they cannot want anything; the mind acquiesces in them
        • Triangle: three sides and three angles contain all that is essential to it
        • Mixed modes and relations: archetypes without patterns, hence adequate; e.g., courage
        • Learned names: a mode idea turns inadequate when intended to match another mind's idea
        • Speaking vs. knowing: reference to others' ideas makes modes faulty in discourse, not knowledge
      • Substance Ideas: Referred to Real Essences
        • Double reference: substance ideas aim at supposed real essences, or at copies of existing things
        • Unknown essences: men apply species names to supposed real essences they do not know, so ideas cannot represent them
        • Complex idea ≠ essence: a substance's properties do not depend on our collection of simple ideas
        • Iron example: malleableness has no necessary connection with its color, weight, or hardness
        • Substantial form: we have no idea at all, only the sound of the word
      • Substance Ideas: Referred to Observable Qualities
        • Copying sensible qualities comes nearer but never reaches adequacy
        • Men rarely include all known qualities; specific ideas are made of a few for clarity
        • Most are powers: we cannot know all powers of a body until tried against all other bodies
        • Gold: different men's ideas include color, weight, fusibility, fixedness, ductility, solubility
        • Innumerable powers: gold has far more properties than any idea contains — even a triangle yields endless discoveries
        • Ellipsis example: collected properties alone give imperfect ideas; the whole essence makes them demonstrable
      • The Threefold Summary
        • Simple ideas: copies, yet adequate — the sensation must be the effect of the power
        • Substance ideas: ectypes, but inadequate — we cannot be sure they answer all in the substance
        • Secondary qualities: even an exact collection of them would not yield the real essence
        • Substance in general: we have no idea of it, nor know what it is in itself
        • Mode and relation ideas: originals and archetypes, containing precisely what the mind intended
    • Ideas, Truth, and Reference (Chapter XXXII: Of True and False Ideas · I)
      • Truth Belongs to Propositions, Not Ideas
        • Truth and falsehood: strictly belong only to propositions that affirm or deny.
        • Ideas as appearances: bare perceptions cannot be true or false in themselves.
        • Tacit judgment: an idea earns the name only when the mind makes a hidden mental proposition.
        • Metaphysical truth: things may be called true merely by existing, but that sense is not under inquiry.
      • How Ideas Acquire Truth-Value
        • Extraneous reference: the mind tacitly supposes an idea conforms to something outside it.
        • Three standards: other men's ideas, real existence, and supposed real essences of substances.
        • Abstract complex ideas: these are chiefly what the mind refers, not particular perceptions.
        • Bundling into sorts: generalizing speeds knowledge, making conformity to sorts a standing need.
      • Reference to Other Men's Names
        • Simple ideas: least liable to mismatch; senses and common use keep their names stable.
        • Mixed modes: most liable; voluntary collections have no sensible standard but names and definitions.
        • Human-made essences: the essence of each mixed mode is made by men, not found in things.
        • False justice: an idea of justice may fit another name, like cruelty, in another man's usage.
      • Reference to Real Existence
        • Substance ideas only: these can be false when judged against real existence.
        • Simple ideas safe: they are perceptions fitted to us by God and produced by object powers.
        • Real essences: most substance ideas fail if referred to the unknown constitution on which properties depend.
      • The Example of Blue
        • Different perceptions: one man's blue may differ from another's, yet neither idea is false.
        • Name as distinction: "blue" marks a discernible difference, not an exact inner resemblance.
        • Texture suffices: a violet's texture producing blue in us gives the same practical mark for use.
    • Truth and Falsehood in Ideas (Chapter XXXII: Of True and False Ideas · II)
      • Simple Ideas Are Never False
        • Same object, different minds: no falsehood, for names still work consistently
        • Simple perceptions answer objective powers: blue and yellow are just what they are, so they cannot be false
        • Name misapplication: calling purple “scarlet” is an error in names, not in the idea itself
        • Common likeness: Locke thinks different men’s sensible ideas are usually near alike, though the contrary would be useless to prove
      • Modes and Substance Ideas
        • Modes have no natural pattern: complex mode ideas refer to no existing archetype, so they are neither true nor false
        • Frugality example: naming an action “frugality” or “virtue” is false only if it misses the standard those names signify
        • Substance ideas can be false copies: they misrepresent when they unite what nature never combines
        • Gold not fixed: adding a negation of an inseparable quality, like denying gold’s fixedness, makes a false complex idea
        • Omission is inadequacy: leaving out fixedness without negating it makes the idea imperfect, not false
      • Truth and Falsehood Require Judgment
        • Truth needs affirmation or negation: no proposition, no truth-value; signs must be joined or separated
        • Mental or verbal propositions: ideas and words are signs; truth is joining or separating them as things agree or disagree
        • Ideas themselves are not true or false: exact representations cannot be false; even fanciful ones only mislead when judged
      • Four Sources of False Judgment
        • Against another’s idea: thinking my idea matches a name’s common meaning when it does not — usual in mixed modes
        • Against real existence: judging a collection nature never united belongs to an actual species, e.g., gold with tin’s weight
        • Against adequacy: judging an incomplete collection complete — gold without fixedness or aqua regia solubility
        • Against real essence: judging the complex idea contains a body’s real essence when it holds only a few flowing properties
      • Right and Wrong Rather Than True and False
        • Fanciful ideas are not false: a horse-headed man is no false idea until named “man” and referred to reality
        • Right or wrong fit: referred to name signification or reality, ideas are fitly right or wrong by agreement with those archetypes
        • Only jumbled complex ideas are wrong in themselves: all other ideas are right; truthfulness belongs to knowledge and propositions
• Core Conclusion and Practical Takeaways
  • Core Conclusions on Knowledge
    • Tabula rasa: the mind begins as white paper; all ideas derive from sensation and reflection.
    • No innate principles: universal consent proves nothing; reason and experience can yield all knowledge.
    • Simple ideas are materials: complex ideas, modes, substances, and relations are made by the mind from simple inputs.
    • Knowledge has bounds: understand the horizon of faculties; use probability where certainty is beyond reach.
    • Substance is unknown: we know collections of qualities and powers, not the real essence underneath.
  • Daily Practices for Clear Thinking
    • Examine words: resolve complex ideas into simple ones and fix each term to a determinate idea.
    • Suspend desire: before willing, hold back satisfaction and examine apparent goods on all sides.
    • Judge by your own understanding: don't take principles upon trust; test them by experience and reason.
    • Trace relations to their foundations: reduce every moral or causal relation to simple ideas of sensation or reflection.
    • Use memory actively: fix ideas by attention and repetition, and refresh them before they fade.
  • Mindset Shifts
    • Truth above authority: the greatest reverence is due to truth; borrowed knowledge is fairy money.
    • Be an under-labourer: clear away abuse of words and false foundations rather than build grand systems.
    • Accept your horizon: like a sailor's line, measure only what is needed to navigate; acquiesce in ignorance beyond it.
    • Stay candid: let the book or argument stand by your own judgment, not by reputation or fashion.
    • Seek the pursuit's pleasure: truth-seeking itself delights, like hawking, even before full discovery.
  • Applying Liberty and Morality
    • Uneasiness moves the will: present uneasiness, not bare greater good, determines action; examine which uneasiness drives you.
    • True liberty is suspension: power to suspend desire and judge before acting is the hinge of freedom.
    • Happiness is the end: all men seek happiness, but relish differs; correct the palate by custom and reflection.
    • Moral rules are threefold: compare actions to divine, civil, and opinion laws; reputation is not the deepest standard.
    • Personal identity is consciousness: accountability reaches only as far as your own consciousness of past actions.