in thus doing, it is a satisfaction to know that we are treading essentially in the steps of Mr. Locke, whose general doctrine undoubtedly is, that a part of our ideas only may be traced to the senses, and that the origin of others is to be sought wholly in the intellect itself.

170. Declaration of Locke, that the soul has knowledge in itself.

After alluding to the senses as one great source of knowledge, "the other fountain," says Locke, "from which experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas, is the perception of the operations of our own minds 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 minds, which we, being conscious of, and observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings ideas as distinct as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas every man has wholly within himself. And though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with EXTERNAL objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called INTERNAL SENSE. But, as I call the other Sensation, so I call this Reflection; the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself."

It is, perhaps, necessary to remark here, that we introduce this passage from Mr. Locke merely in support of the general doctrine, without wishing to intimate a full approbation of the manner in which he has applied it in its details. It is probably true, that Mr. Locke, although he started upon a right track, failed very much in his attempts to carry out his own plan. But what we say now concerns the general question; and, in reference to that question, the passage just referred to is undoubtedly weighty in itself, as well as in consequence of the great reputation and acknowledged discernment of its author. It is undoubtedly the doctrine of Mr. Locke, that our knowledge begins with Sensation; in other words, that

impressions made on the bodily system are the first occasions, so far as we are able to judge, of bringing the mind into action. But it does not follow from this (and the passage just quoted shows that Mr. Locke did not suppose it thus to follow) that sensation is the only source of knowledge. There is undeniably something distinct from sensation; thoughts, which have an interior origin, and cannot be represented by anything external; ideas, which are based upon the succession, relation, and infinite of things, and not upon what is fixed, tangible, and measurable, or which are the representatives and exponents of what is mental rather than of what is material.

§ 171. Opinions of Cudworth on the subject of internal knowledge.

We may properly introduce here a quotation or two from another great authority, nearly contemporaneous with Mr. Locke, that of Dr. Cudworth, a name which is acknowledged to rank deservedly high among those that are most closely associated with exalted wisdom and virtue. Let us, however, be again reminded, that our whole object here is to establish the general position, that there is knowledge of a purely internal, as well as of an external origin; and that, therefore, a reference to writers for that purpose does not necessarily involve an approbation of, or a responsibility for, their opinions any further than they relate to the particular object in view.-The posthumous work from which these extracts are made, is understood to have been written in reply to Mr. Hobbes, who held the opinion that all our thoughts, of whatever kind, are only either direct, or transformed and modified sensations. And, therefore, the statements made in it, being called forth under such circumstances, must be supposed to have been carefully meditated, and on that ground, among others, are entitled to much weight.

"That oftentimes," says Cudworth,* " there is more taken notice of and perceived by the mind, both in the sensible objects themselves and by occasion of them, than was impressed from them, or passively received by sense; which, therefore, must needs proceed from some in

* Immutable Morality, book iv., chap. ii., § 14.

ward active principle in that which perceives, I shall make it further appear by some other instances.

"For, first, let a brute and a man at the same time be made spectators of one and the same artificial statue, picture, or landscape; here the brute will passively receive all that is impressed from the outward object upon sense by local motion, as well as the man all the several colours and figures of it; and yet the man will presently perceive something in this statue or picture which the brute takes no notice of at all, viz., beauty, and pulchritude, and symmetry, besides the liveliness of the effigies and portraiture. The eye of the brute being every jot as good a glass or mirror, and perhaps endued with a more perspicacious sense or power of passive perception than that of a man.

"Or, again, let both a man and a brute at the same time hear the same musical airs; the brute will only be sensible of noise and sounds, but the man will also perceive harmony in them, and be very much delighted with it, nay, even enthusiastically transported by it. Wherefore the brute perceiving all the sounds as well as the man, but nothing of the harmony, the difference must needs arise from some inward active principle or anticipation in the man, which the brute hath not."

172. Further remarks of the same writer on this subject.

"But I shall yet further illustrate this business," says this learned writer near the conclusion of the same chapter," that the mind may actively comprehend more in the outward objects of sense, and by occasion of them, than is passively received and impressed from them, by another instance. Suppose a learned written or printed volume held before the eye of a brute-creature or illiterate person; either of them will passively receive all that is impressed upon sense from those delineations, to whom there will be nothing but several scrawls of ink drawn upon white paper. But if a man that hath inward anticipations of learning in him look upon them, he will immediately have another comprehension of them than that of sense, and a strange scene of thoughts presently represented to his mind from them; he will see heaven,

earth, sun, moon, and stars, comets, meteors, elements, in those inky delineations; he will read profound theorems of philosophy, geometry, astronomy in them, learn a great deal of new knowledge from them that he never understood before, and thereby justly admire the wisdom of the composer of them. Not that all this was passively stamped upon his soul by sense from those characters (for sense, as I said before, can perceive nothing here but inky scrawls, and the intelligent reader will many times correct his copy, finding erratas in it), but because his mind was before furnished with certain inward anticipations, that such characters signify the elements of certain sounds; those sounds, certain notions or cogitations of the mind; and because he hath an active power of exciting any such cogitations within himself, he reads in those sensible delineations the passive stamps or prints of another man's wisdom or knowledge upon them, and also learns knowledge and instruction from them, not as infused into his mind from those sensible characters, but, by reason of those hints and significations thereby proposed to it, accidentally kindled, awakened, and excited in it; for all but the phantasms of black, inky strokes and figures arises from the inward activity of his own mind. Wherefore this instance in itself shows how the activity of the mind may comprehend more in and from sensible objects than is passively imprinted by them upon sense.

66 But now, in the room of this artificial book in vol-, umes, let us substitute the book of nature, the whole visible and material universe, printed all over with the passive characters and impressions of divine wisdom and goodness, but legible only to an intellectual eye; for, to the sense both of man and brute, there appears nothing else in it but as in the other, so many inky scrawls, i. e., nothing but figures and colours; but the mind and intellect, which hath an inward and active participation of the same divine wisdom that made it, and being printed all over with the same archetypal seal, upon occasion of those sensible delineations represented to it, and taking notice of whatsoever is cognate to it, exerting its own inward activity from thence, will not only have a wonderful scene and large prospect of other thoughts laid open

before it, and variety of knowledge, logical, mathematical, metaphysical, moral, displayed, but also clearly read the divine wisdom and goodness in every page of this great volume, as it were written in large and legible characters."*

173. Writers who have objected to the doctrine of an internal source of knowledge.

But it ought not to pass unnoticed, that there have been writers who have objected to the doctrine of an internal source of knowledge in distinction from that knowledge which is outward, and is dependant, not only for its occasion, but for its very nature, on the senses. It was the opinion, among others, of Mr. Hobbes, who preceded Locke, and was not without merit as a metaphysician, that all our knowledge might be traced to the senses, and that, of course, no other origin of it need be sought. "The original of all thoughts," says that writer, Leviathan, ch. i.," is that which we call SENSE. There is no conception in a man's mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. This was the opinion also of his contemporary, Gassendi, who was his particular friend and correspondent, and, at a still later period, of Condillac. The latter supported his views at length and with much ingenuity, particularly in his Treatise on Sensations.

These writers appear to have maintained, as a general statement, that we have no simple ideas but such as exist

Many other writers, as Stewart, Degerando, Brown, Coleridge, Price, Jouffroy, and Cousin, advocate this general doctrine. Kant himself, whatever obscurity may rest on other articles of his metaphysics, is clear upon this. He evidently gives us to understand, that the mental operations themselves, although the senses are the first occasions of those operations, furnish a new set of notions, which cannot directly be traced to anything external.-Der Zeit nach geht also keine Erkenntniss in uns vor der Erfahrung vorher, und mit dieser fangt alle an. Wenn aber gleich alle unsere Erkenntniss mit der Erfahrung anhebt, so entspringt sie darum doch nicht eben alle aus der Erfahrung. Denn es könne wohl seyn, dass selbst unsere Erfahrungserkenntniss ein Zusammengesetztes aus dem sey, was wir durch Eindrücke empfangen, und dem, was unser eigenes Erkenntnissvermögen (durch sinnliche Eindrücke bloss veranlasst), aus sich selbst hergiebt, welchen Zusatz wir von jenem Grundstoffe nicht eher unterscheiden, als bis lange Uebung uns darauf aufmerksam, und zur Absonderung desselben geschikt gemacht hat.-Kant's Critik der reinen Vernunft, Einleitung, I.