e it is
capable of: wherein I must appeal to experience and observation whether
I am in the right: the best way to come to truth being to examine
things as really they are, and not to conclude they are, as we fancy of
ourselves, or have been taught by others to imagine.

16. Appeal to Experience.

To deal truly, this is the only way that I can discover, whereby the
IDEAS OF THINGS are brought into the understanding. If other men have
either innate ideas or infused principles, they have reason to enjoy
them; and if they are sure of it, it is impossible for others to deny
them the privilege that they have above their neighbours. I can speak
but of what I find in myself, and is agreeable to those notions, which,
if we will examine the whole course of men in their several ages,
countries, and educations, seem to depend on those foundations which
I have laid, and to correspond with this method in all the parts and
degrees thereof.

17. Dark Room.

I pretend not to teach, but to inquire; and therefore cannot but confess
here again,--that external and internal sensation are the only passages
I can find of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I
can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this DARK ROOM.
For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut
from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external
visible resemblances, or ideas of things without: which, would they but
stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would
very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all
objects of sight, and the ideas of them.

These are my guesses concerning the means whereby the understanding
comes to have and retain simple ideas, and the modes of them, with some
other operations about them.

I proceed now to examine some of these simple ideas an their modes a
little more particularly.

CHAPTER XII.

OF COMPLEX IDEAS.

1. Made by the Mind out of simple Ones.

We have hitherto considered those ideas, in the reception whereof
the mind is only passive, which are those simple ones received from
sensation and reflection before mentioned, whereof the mind cannot make
one to itself, nor have any idea which does not wholly consist of them.
As simple ideas are observed to exist in several combinations united
together, so the mind has a power to consider several of them united
together as one idea; and that not only as