28, 1704.

_I.--The Nature of Simple Ideas_

"Idea" being that term which, I think, serves best to stand for
whatsoever is the object of the understanding. I have used it to express
whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is the
mind can be employed about in thinking. Let us, then, suppose the mind
to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters--without any ideas.
Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of
man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? To this, I answer
in one word--Experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from
that it ultimately derives itself.

Let anyone examine his own thoughts and thoroughly search his
understanding, and then let him tell me whether of all the original
ideas he has there are any other than of the objects of his senses, or
of the observations of his mind considered as objects of his
reflection. Though the qualities that affect our senses are, in the
things themselves, so united and blended that there is no separation, no
distance between them, yet it is plain the ideas they produce in the
mind enter by the senses simple and unmixed. For, though the sight and
touch often take in from the same object at the same time different
ideas, yet the simple ideas thus united in the same subject are as
perfectly distinct as those that come in by different senses; the
coldness and hardness which a man feels in a piece of ice being as
distinct ideas in the mind as the smell and whiteness of a lily, and
each of them being in itself uncompounded, contains nothing but one
uniform appearance, or conception, in the mind, and is not
distinguishable into different ideas.

When the understanding is once stored with these simple ideas, it has
the power to repeat, compare, and unite them even to an almost infinite
variety, and so can make at will new complex ideas. But it is not in the
power of any most exalted wit or enlarged understanding, by any
quickness or variety of thought, to invent or frame one new simple idea
in the mind, nor to destroy those that are there. I would have anyone
try to fancy any taste which had never affected his palate, or frame the
idea of a scent he had never smelt; and when he can do this, I will also
conclude that a blind man hath ideas of colours and a deaf man true,
distinct notions of sound.

There are some ideas which have admittance only through one sense which
is peculiarly adapted t