k perception and power) produce ideas in it?
Ideas signify nothing but themselves, _i. e_., affections of the subject.

[Footnote 1: The fire that I see is not the cause of the pain which I
experience in approaching it, but the visual image of the flame is only a
sign which warns me not to go too near. If I look through a microscope
I see a different object from the one perceived with the naked eye. Two
persons never see the same object, they merely have like sensations.]

The further question arises, What is the origin of ideas? Men have been led
into this erroneous belief in the reality of the material world by the
fact that certain ideas are not subject to our will, while others are.
Sensations are distinguished from the ideas of imagination, which we can
excite and alter at pleasure, by their greater strength, liveliness, and
distinctness, by their steadiness, regular order, and coherence, and by
the fact that they arise without our aid and whether we will or no. Unless
these ideas are self-originated they must have an external cause. This,
however, can be nothing else than a willing, thinking Being; for without
will it could not be active and act upon me, and without ideas of its own
it could not communicate ideas to me. Because of the manifoldness and
regularity of our sensations the Being which produces them must, further,
possess infinite power and intelligence. The ideas of imagination are
produced by ourselves, real perceptions are produced by God. The connected
whole of divinely produced ideas we call nature, and the constant
regularity in their succession, the laws of nature. The invariableness of
the divine working and the purposive harmony of creation reveal the wisdom
and goodness of the Almighty more clearly than "astonishing and exceptional
events." When we hear a man speak we reason from this activity to his
existence. How much less are we entitled to doubt the existence of God, who
speaks to us in the thousandfold works of nature.

The natural or created ideas which God impresses on us are copies of
the eternal ideas which he himself perceives, not, indeed, by passive
sensation, but through his creative reason. Accordingly when it was
maintained that things do not exist independently of perception, the
reference was not to the individual spirit, but to all spirits. When I
turn my eyes away from an object it continues to exist, indeed, after
my perception has ended--in the minds of other men and in tha