perception of something in general. Unless
the mind had a distinct perception of different objects and their
qualities, it would be capable of very little knowledge, though the
bodies that affect us were as busy about us as they are now, and the
mind were continually employed in thinking. On this faculty of
distinguishing one thing from another depends the evidence and certainty
of several even very general propositions which have passed for innate
truths, because men, overlooking the true cause why those propositions
find universal assent, impute it wholly to native uniform impressions;
whereas it, in truth, depends upon this clear discerning faculty of the
mind, whereby it perceives two ideas to be the same or different.

The comparing of ideas one with another is the operation of the mind
upon which depends all that large tribe of ideas comprehended under
relations. The next operation is composition, whereby the mind puts
together several simple ideas and combines them into complex ones.

The use of words being to stand as outward marks of our internal ideas,
and those ideas being taken from particular things, if every particular
idea that we take in should have a distinct name, names must be endless.
To prevent this, the mind makes the particular ideas received from
particular objects to become general, which is done by considering them
as they are in the mind, and such appearances separate from all other
existences, and from the circumstances of real existence, as time,
place, or any other concomitant ideas. This is called Abstraction,
whereby ideas taken from particular being become general representatives
of all of the same kind. Thus, the same colour being observed to-day in
chalk or snow which the mind yesterday received from milk, it considers
that that appearance alone makes it a representative of all of that
kind; and having given it the name "whiteness," it by that sound
signifies the same quality wheresoever imagined or met with; and thus
universals, whether ideas or terms, are made.

As the mind is wholly passive in the reception of all its simple ideas,
so it exerts several acts of its own, whereby, out of its simple ideas,
as the materials and foundations of the rest the others are framed. And
I believe we shall find, if we observe the originals of our notions,
that even the most abstruse ideas, how remote soever they may seem from
sense, or from any operation of our minds, are yet only such as the
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