rations of
our own minds, are yet only such as the understanding frames to itself,
by repeating and joining together ideas that it had either from objects
of sense, or from its own operations about them: so that those even
large and abstract ideas are derived from sensation or reflection, being
no other than what the mind, by the ordinary use of its own faculties,
employed about ideas received from objects of sense, or from the
operations it observes in itself about them, may, and does, attain unto.

This I shall endeavour to show in the ideas we have of space, time, and
infinity, and some few others that seem the most remote, from those
originals.

CHAPTER XIII.

COMPLEX IDEAS OF SIMPLE MODES:--AND FIRST, OF THE SIMPLE MODES OF IDEA
OF SPACE.

1. Simple modes of simple ideas.

Though in the foregoing part I have often mentioned simple ideas, which
are truly the materials of all our knowledge; yet having treated of
them there, rather in the way that they come into the mind, than as
distinguished from others more compounded, it will not be perhaps amiss
to take a view of some of them again under this consideration, and
examine those different modifications of the SAME idea; which the mind
either finds in things existing, or is able to make within itself
without the help of any extrinsical object, or any foreign suggestion.

Those modifications of any ONE simple idea (which, as has been said, I
call SIMPLE MODES) are as perfectly different and distinct ideas in the
mind as those of the greatest distance or contrariety. For the idea of
two is as distinct from that of one, as blueness from heat, or either of
them from any number: and yet it is made up only of that simple idea
of an unit repeated; and repetitions of this kind joined together make
those distinct simple modes, of a dozen, a gross, a million. Simple
Modes of Idea of Space.

2. Idea of Space.

I shall begin with the simple idea of SPACE. I have showed above, chap.
4, that we get the idea of space, both by our sight and touch; which, I
think, is so evident, that it would be as needless to go to prove that
men perceive, by their sight, a distance between bodies of different
colours, or between the parts of the same body, as that they see colours
themselves: nor is it less obvious, that they can do so in the dark by
feeling and touch.

3. Space and Extension.

This space, considered barely in length between any two beings,
without consider