-- this proposition: a circle is a circle be not as selfevident a proposition as that consisting of more general terms, whatsoever is, is. What shall we then say? Are these general maxims of no use? By no means though perhaps their use is not that which it is commonly taken to be. Chapt. VII. §. 2. 4. 11. There are universal propositions which though they be certainly true, yet they add no light to our understandings, bring no increase to our knowledge. Such are first all purely identical propositions.... Secondly another sort of trifling propositions is, when a part of the complex idea is predicated of the name of the whole. Therefore he trifles with words who makes such a proposition, which when is made contains no more than one of the terms does.... v. g. a triangle hath three sides. We can know then the truth of two sorts of propositions with perfect certainty, the one is of those trifling propositions which have a certainty in them but is only a verbal certainty, but no instructive. And secondly we can know the truth.... which is a necessary consequence of its (a things) precise complex idea, but not contained in it: as that the external angle of all triangels is bigger than either of the opposite internal angles. - Chapt. VIII. §. 1. 2. 4. 7. 8. (True knowledge) being very short and scanty as we have seen, he would be often utterly in the dark.... Therefore as God has set some things in broad day-light...., so in the greatest part of our concernments he has afforded us only the twilight, as I may so say, of probability. The faculty which God has given man to supply the want of clear and certain knowledge in cases where that cannot be had, is judgment. Chapt. XIV. §. 1. 2. 3. Where the proofs are such, as make it highly probable.... there I think, a man who has weighed them, can scarce refuse his assent to the side, on which the greater probability appears. Chapt. XX. §. 15. Intuitive knowledge is certain son. beyond all doubt and needs no probation nor can have any; this being the highest of all human certainty. Chapt. XVII. §. 14. The assurance of its (viz. the book's, which Moses wrote) being a revelation is less still than the assurance of his senses. Therefore no proposition can be received for divine revelation or obtain the assent due to all such if it be contradictory to our clear intuitive knowledge. Chapt. XVIII. §. 4. 5. According to reason are such propositions whose truth we can discover by examining and tracing those ideas we have from sensation and reflection.... Thus the existence of God is according to reason. Above reason are such propositions whose truth or probability we cannot by reason derive from those principles.... the resurrection of the dead is above reaContrary to reason are such propositions, as are inconsistent with or irreconcileable to our clear and distinct ideas.... The existence of more than one God is contrary to reason. Chapt. XVII. §. 23. I think science may be divided properly into these three sorts: First the knowledge of things as they are in their own proper beings their constitution, properties and operations, whereby I mean not only matter and body, but spirits also, which have their proper natures, constitutions and operations as well as bodies. This in a little more enlarged sense of the word I call Dvoix or natural philosophy. Secondly Ioaxtix, the skill of right applying our own powers and actions for the attainment of things good and useful. Thirdly the third branch may be called Enutiotix or the doctrine of signs the most usual whereof being words it is aptly enough termed also Aoyix, logic. Chapt. XXI. §. 1. 2. 3. 4. II. Belegstellen aus Brown. *) Zu §. 7. 1. We have no other faculties of perceiving or knowing any thing divine or human but our five senses and our reason. Proced. p. 53. We must lay down that maxim of the Schools as universaly true without any restriction or limitation: Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuit in sensu. So that the most abstracted spiritual knowledge we have, as will hereafter abundantly appear, takes its first rive from those sensations, and hath all along a necessary dependence upon them. Ibid. p. 55. 56. The material externe objects by their presence have left any footstep or character of themselves upon our senses, and this representation or likeness of the object being transmitted from thence to the imagination and lodged there for the view and observation of the pure intellect, is aptly and properly called its idea. Thus the laying down the ideas of sensation and reflection to be alike the original sources and foundation of all our knowledge is one great and fundamental error which runs thro' most of the discourses and essays of our modern writers of Logic and Metaphysics. Ibid. p. 58. 64. the word idea.... ought to be confined entirely to our simple and compound ideas of sensation, in distinction from all the operations and affections of the mind, of which we have an immediate consciousness without the intervention of any idea, and from all Ich citire: The procedure extent and limits of human understanding nach der 2ten Ausgabe. London print. for William Innys 1729. 8vo. und: Things divine and supernatural conceived by analogy with things natural and human by the author of the proc. ext. and lim. of hum. und. London print. for Will. Innys and Richard Manby 1733. 8vo. those complex notions or conceptions form'd by the mind out of its own operations and the ideas of sensation. Thus we have an idea of an house, a consciousness of thinking or grief, and a complex notion of justice, mercy and charity. Ibid. p. 133. Nothing is properly an idea but what stands in the mind for an image or representation of something, which is not in it. Ibid. p. 65. Thinking and Willing with all the various modes of them are not ideas, but the actions and workings of the intellect upon ideas first lodged in the imagination for that purpose, and necessarly to be considered as antecedent to any such operations. Ibid. So that all the operations of the mind necessarly presuppose ideas of sensation as prior materials for them to work upon, and without which the mind could not have operated at all, no nor have had even a consciousness of itself or of its being. Ibid. p. 67. At our birth the imagination is intirely a tabula rasa or perfect blanc without any materials either for a simple view or any other operation of the intellect. Much less has the human soul a power of raising up to itself ideas out of nothing, which is a kind of creation. Ibid. 382. 383. All the real true knowledge we have of nature is intirely experimental in so much that we may lay this down as the first fundamental unerring rule in Physics, that it is not within the compass of human understanding to assign a purely speculative reason for any one phaenomenon in nature. By a speculative reason I mean assigning the true and immediate efficient cause a priori, together with the manner of its operation. Ibid. 206. 2. The first (kind of knowledge) is that we have from our senses, and consists in an intellectual view of all those ideas which are thro' them conveyed inwardly to the imagination. This carries in it the highest kind of evidence. When the sensation is regular and perfect, the assent of the intellect naturally and necessarily follows all at once. — All ness. con self-evident propositions and axioms and postulata are clear and evident in proportion to their near affinity to sensation, and owe their apparent truth and certainty to a more immediate correspondence with it. Ibid. 214. 215. 217. Another kind of knowledge is that which we have from self-consciousWe have no degree of it, antecedent to the actual exercise of those faculties upon the ideas of sensation. Thus we could have had no sciousness of thinking antecedently to and abstractedly from any object or idea actualy thought upon. Ibid. p. 222. 223. Were it not for our actual sensible perception of bodily substance, we should not know what it was to have a being, nor could we be conscious of even our own being. Ibid. 387. Tho' this kind of knowledge necessarily presupposes that which we have from external sensation,.... yet it is nothing inferior to it in point of certainty and evidence. Ibid. 224. These two sorts of knowledge are immediate, and consequently a sort of intuition. This leads us to another kind of knowledge or evidence very different from either of them, which is mediate and altogether acquired by deduction and consequence; that is reason. -This we are to distinguish into four different heads of knowledge. The first head of this knowledge or evidence is that of science or demonstration. next head of knowledge which we have from reason is that of moral certainty, the utmost degree of which approaches next to what is demonstrative. The assent of the mind here is free and voluntary and follows by a moral necessity only. The third kind of knowledge which we have from deduction of reason is that of opinion. This is a kind of knowledge inferior to any of the afore mentioned and approaches nearest to that which is founded an moral evidence. - The fourth and last head of knowledge obtained by deduction of reason is that which is derived from the experience and informa -- The |