position of twenty-four letters; or if, going one step
further, we will but reflect on the variety of combinations that may be
made with barely one of the above-mentioned ideas, viz. number, whose
stock is inexhaustible and truly infinite: and what a large and immense
field doth extension alone afford the mathematicians?

CHAPTER VIII.

SOME FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING OUR SIMPLE IDEAS OF SENSATION.

1. Positive Ideas from privative causes.

Concerning the simple ideas of Sensation; it is to be considered,--that
whatsoever is so constituted in nature as to be able, by affecting our
senses, to cause any perception in the mind, doth thereby produce in the
understanding a simple idea; which, whatever be the external cause of
it, when it comes to be taken notice of by our discerning faculty, it is
by the mind looked on and considered there to be a real positive idea in
the understanding, as much as any other whatsoever; though, perhaps, the
cause of it be but a privation of the subject.

2. Ideas in the mind distinguished from that in things which gives rise
to them.

Thus the ideas of heat and cold, light and darkness, white and black,
motion and rest, are equally clear and positive ideas in the mind;
though, perhaps, some of the causes which produce them are barely
privations, in those subjects from whence our senses derive those ideas.
These the understanding, in its view of them, considers all as distinct
positive ideas, without taking notice of the causes that produce
them: which is an inquiry not belonging to the idea, as it is in the
understanding, but to the nature of the things existing without us.
These are two very different things, and carefully to be distinguished;
it being one thing to perceive and know the idea of white or black, and
quite another to examine what kind of particles they must be, and how
ranged in the superficies, to make any object appear white or black.

3. We may have the ideas when we are ignorant of their physical causes.

A painter or dyer who never inquired into their causes hath the ideas
of white and black, and other colours, as clearly, perfectly, and
distinctly in his understanding, and perhaps more distinctly, than the
philosopher who hath busied himself in considering their natures, and
thinks he knows how far either of them is, in its cause, positive or
privative; and the idea of black is no less positive in his mind than
that of white, however the cause