t nothing but ONE UNIFORM APPEARANCE, OR CONCEPTION IN THE
MIND, and is not distinguishable into different ideas.

2. The Mind can neither make nor destroy them.

These simple ideas, the materials of all our knowledge, are suggested
and furnished to the mind only by those two ways above mentioned, viz.
sensation and reflection. When the understanding is once stored with
these simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare, and unite them,
even to an almost infinite variety, and so can make at pleasure new
complex ideas. But it is not in the power of the most exalted wit, or
enlarged understanding, by any quickness or variety of thought, to
INVENT or FRAME one new simple idea in the mind, not taken in by the
ways before mentioned: nor can any force of the understanding DESTROY
those that are there. The dominion of man, in this little world of his
own understanding being much what the same as it is in the great world
of visible things; wherein his power, however managed by art and skill,
reaches no farther than to compound and divide the materials that are
made to his hand; but can do nothing towards the making the least
particle of new matter, or destroying one atom of what is already in
being. The same inability will every one find in himself, who shall go
about to fashion in his understanding one simple idea, not received
in by his senses from external objects, or by reflection from the
operations of his own mind about them. I would have any one try to fancy
any taste which had never affected his palate; or frame the idea of a
scent he had never smelt: and when he can do this, I will also conclude
that a blind man hath ideas of colours, and a deaf man true distinct
notions of sounds.

3. Only the qualities that affect the senses are imaginable.

This is the reason why--though we cannot believe it impossible to God
to make a creature with other organs, and more ways to convey into the
understanding the notice of corporeal things than those five, as they
are usually counted, which he has given to man--yet I think it is not
possible for any MAN to imagine any other qualities in bodies, howsoever
constituted, whereby they can be taken notice of, besides sounds,
tastes, smells, visible and tangible qualities. And had mankind been
made but with four senses, the qualities then which are the objects
of the fifth sense had been as far from our notice, imagination, and
conception, as now any belonging to a sixth, seven