m in his mind, that the ideas he calls white and round are
the very ideas they are, and that they are not other ideas which he
calls red or square.... This ... the mind ... always perceives at
first sight; and if ever there happen any doubt about it, it will
always be found to be about the names and not the ideas
themselves."

This sounds like high Platonic doctrine for a philosopher of the Left; but
Locke's utilitarian temper very soon reasserted itself in this subject.
Mathematical ideas were not only lucid but true: and he demanded this
truth, which he called "reality", of all ideas worthy of consideration:
mere ideas would be worthless. Very likely he forgot, in his philosophic
puritanism, that fiction and music might have an intrinsic charm. Where
the frontier of human wisdom should be drawn in this direction was clearly
indicated, in Locke's day, by Spinoza, who says:

"If, in keeping non-existent things present to the imagination, the
mind were at the same time aware that those things did not exist,
surely it would regard this gift of imagination as a virtue in its
own constitution, not as a vice: especially if such an imaginative
faculty depended on nothing except the mind's own nature: that is
to say, if this mental faculty of imagination were free".

But Locke had not so firm a hold on truth that he could afford to play
with fancy; and as he pushed forward the claims of human jurisdiction
rather too far in physics, by assuming the current science to be literally
true, so, in the realm of imagination, he retrenched somewhat illiberally
our legitimate possessions. Strange that as modern philosophy transfers
the visible wealth of nature more and more to the mind, the mind should
seem to lose courage and to become ashamed of its own fertility. The
hard-pressed natural man will not indulge his imagination unless it poses
for truth; and being half aware of this imposition, he is more troubled at
the thought of being deceived than at the fact of being mechanised or
being bored: and he would wish to escape imagination altogether. A good
God, he murmurs, could not have made us poets against our will.

Against his will, however, Locke was drawn to enlarge the subjective
sphere. The actual existence of mind was evident: you had only to notice
the fact that you were thinking. Conscious mind, being thus known to
exist directly and independently of the body, was a pri