minds;--which we being conscious of, and observing in ourselves, do from
these receive into our understandings as distinct ideas as we do from
bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas every man has wholly
in 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. By reflection then, in
the following part of this discourse, I would be understood to mean,
that notice which the mind takes of its own operations, and the manner
of them, by reason whereof there come to be ideas of these operations in
the understanding. These two, I say, viz. external material things, as
the objects of SENSATION, and the operations of our own minds within, as
the objects of REFLECTION, are to me the only originals from whence all
our ideas take their beginnings. The term OPERATIONS here I use in a
large sense, as comprehending not barely the actions of the mind about
its ideas, but some sort of passions arising sometimes from them, such
as is the satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought.

5. All our Ideas are of the one or of the other of these.

The understanding seems to me not to have the least glimmering of any
ideas which it doth not receive from one of these two. EXTERNAL OBJECTS
furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all
those different perceptions they produce in us; and THE MIND furnishes
the understanding with ideas of its own operations.

These, when we have taken a full survey of them, and their several
modes, and the compositions made out of them we shall find to contain
all our whole stock of ideas; and that we have nothing in our minds
which did not come in one of these two ways. Let any one examine his own
thoughts, and thoroughly search into his understanding; and then let him
tell me, whether all the original ideas he has there, are any other
than of the objects of his senses, or of the operations of his mind,
considered as objects of his reflection. And how great a mass of
knowledge soever he imagines to be lodged there, he will, upon taking a
strict view, see that he has not any idea in his mind but what one
of these two have imprinted;--though perhaps, with infinite variety
compounded and enlarged by the un