eir minds in their very first being.
This opinion I have at large examined already; and, I suppose what I
have said in the foregoing Book will be much more easily admitted, when
I have shown whence the understanding may get all the ideas it has; and
by what ways and degrees they may come into the mind;--for which I
shall appeal to every one's own observation and experience.

2. All Ideas come from Sensation or Reflection.

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all
characters, without any ideas:--How comes it to be furnished? Whence
comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man
has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the
MATERIALS of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from
EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it
ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about
external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds
perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our
understandings with all the MATERIALS of thinking. These two are the
fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can
naturally have, do spring.

3. The Objects of Sensation one Source of Ideas

First, our Senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do
convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according
to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them. And thus we
come by those IDEAS we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard,
bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities; which
when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external
objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. This
great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our
senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call SENSATION.

4. The Operations of our Minds, the other Source of them.

Secondly, the other fountain from which experience furnisheth the
understanding with ideas is,--the perception of the operations of our
own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got;--which
operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish
the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from
things without. And such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing,
reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own