es, lay them how you please. But the ideas that are most familiar at
first, being various according to the divers circumstances of children's
first entertainment in the world, the order wherein the several ideas
come at first into the mind is very various, and uncertain also; neither
is it much material to know it.

8. Sensations often changed by the Judgment.

We are further to consider concerning perception, that the ideas
we receive by sensation are often, in grown people, altered by the
judgment, without our taking notice of it. When we set before our eyes a
round globe of any uniform colour, v.g. gold, alabaster, or jet, it is
certain that the idea thereby imprinted on our mind is of a flat circle,
variously shadowed, with several degrees of light and brightness coming
to our eyes. But we having, by use, been accustomed to perceive
what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us; what
alterations are made in the reflections of light by the difference of
the sensible figures of bodies;--the judgment presently, by an habitual
custom, alters the appearances into their causes. So that from that
which is truly variety of shadow or colour, collecting the figure, it
makes it pass for a mark of figure, and frames to itself the perception
of a convex figure and an uniform colour; when the idea we receive from
thence is only a plane variously coloured, as is evident in painting. To
which purpose I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious
and studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy Mr.
Molineux, which he was pleased to send me in a letter some months since;
and it is this:--"Suppose a man BORN blind, and now adult, and taught by
his TOUCH to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal,
and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the
other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and
sphere placed on a table, and the blind man be made to see: quaere,
whether BY HIS SIGHT, BEFORE HE TOUCHED THEM, he could now distinguish
and tell which is the globe, which the cube?" To which the acute and
judicious proposer answers, "Not. For, though he has obtained the
experience of how a globe, how a cube affects his touch, yet he has not
yet obtained the experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must
affect his sight so or so; or that a protuberant angle in the cube, that
pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does