work_id,theme,provenance,created_at,text,reviewed_on,id,comments,metaphor,dictionary,updated_at,context
7856,"",Reading,2014-03-14 20:30:20 UTC,"Just so any operation or affection of the mind, which has been long unperceived, will appear the same it used to appear to our inward sense, when it is perceived a-new by reflection. But when we are forced to recall our complex ideas, the case is not the same, at least when they are such as are not in common use. Those of mixed modes and relations, for instance, that philosophers sometimes employ, and to which the mind scarce ever adverts on other occasions, may well receive some alteration even when they are recalled readily, though this alteration is the less perceptible, perhaps, on account of that very readiness with which they are recalled. But when they are recalled with difficulty, and dragged back slowly, as it were, and by pieces and parcels into the mind, it is no wonder if they receive much greater alteration. They are then in some sort recompounded, and though this may be for the better as well as for the worse, yet still they vary, and every variation of them begets some uncertainty and confusion in our reasoning. Thus it must be, when besides our simple ideas, such numberless collections of simple and complex ideas, and such numberless combinations of all these into notions, are to be held together and to be preserved in their order by so weak a mental faculty as that of retention.
(Essay I, §4; vol. iii, p. 419)",,23726,"","""But when they are recalled with difficulty, and dragged back slowly, as it were, and by pieces and parcels into the mind, it is no wonder if they receive much greater alteration.""","",2014-03-14 20:30:20 UTC,""
7856,"",Reading,2014-03-14 20:31:23 UTC,"Names indeed are given to signify all our ideas and all our notions to ourselves and to others, and to help the memory in meditation as well as in discourse. When they are assigned to complex ideas, they are meant as knots according to the very proper image Mr. Locke gives of them, to tie each specific bundle of ideas together: and in these respects they are not only useful, but necessary. It happens, however, that names, far from having these effects, have such very often as are quite contrary to these. Whilst we retain the names of complex ideas and notions, we imagine that we retain the ideas and notions; but the ideas and notions shift and vary, whilst the names remain the same. The scene of the mind, like a moving picture, must be governed with attention, that it may bring into our view the images we want, and as we want them. Otherwise ideas that are foreign to our actual train of thinking will frequently rush into our thoughts, and become objects of them whether we will or no. But there is another and a greater mischief which will flow from this constitution of the mind, unless the utmost attention be employed, and often when it is. The former is a sort of violence, which cannot be offered unperceived, and may be therefore resisted. This that I am going to mention steals so silently upon us, that we do not perceive it very often even when it has worked its effect. When we recall our ideas and notions, whether this be done with ease or difficulty, we review them in some sort: and if they are more liable to have been altered, we have a better chance for perceiving any alteration that may have been made in the determination of them. But when the ideas and notions we want present themselves, as it were of themselves, to the mind, under their usual names and appearances, we are apt to employ them without examination, and perhaps we advert very often to nothing more than the word by which we are used to signify them. In this manner our ideas and notions become unsteady imperceptibly, and I would not answer that something may not happen to me of this kind, even in writing this essay, though I am on my guard against it. How much more must it happen to those who are not thus on their guard?
(Essay I, §4; vol. iii, pp. 419-20)",,23727,"","""When they are assigned to complex ideas, they are meant as knots according to the very proper image Mr. Locke gives of them, to tie each specific bundle of ideas together: and in these respects they are not only useful, but necessary.""","",2014-03-14 20:31:23 UTC,""
7856,"",Reading,2014-03-14 20:34:06 UTC,"[...] But however small and almost imperceptible, even to a cool mind that is on its guard against its own weakness, such alterations may be, each in itself; yet besides that, each of them may produce others, each of them, though small in the idea or notion, may become of great consequence in the course of that reasoning, wherein this idea or notion is frequently employed, or which turns perhaps upon it. A few ideas, or parts of ideas, that slip out of the bundle of covetousness, make it the bundle of frugality: and a few added to that of frugality, make it the bundle of covetousness.
(Essay I, §4; vol. iii, p. 422)",,23730,"","""A few ideas, or parts of ideas, that slip out of the bundle of covetousness, make it the bundle of frugality: and a few added to that of frugality, make it the bundle of covetousness.""","",2014-03-14 20:34:06 UTC,""
7856,"",Reading,2014-03-14 20:34:51 UTC,"But that the precise meaning of moral words can be so fixed and maintained, that the congruity or incongruity of the ideas and notions they stand for shall be always discerned, clearly and uniformly, I do not believe. Definitions, therefore, consisting of words, they cannot answer Mr. Locke's purpose, as it would not be hard to shew in the very instances he brings. Intellect, the artificer, works lamely without his proper instrument, sense; which is the case when he works on moral ideas. Whenever he can employ this instrument, and as far as it can serve him, which is the case when he works on mathematical ideas, he works securely. I apprehend, therefore, that to expect a new method would be ever found, of preserving as steadily and invariably our moral ideas and notions, as we preserve those that are mathematical, is not very different from expecting that a method should be found, sometime or other, of rendering things, that are not objects of sight by nature, visible by art. Ideas and notions of virtue and vice, very clearly defined, have been often confounded by schoolmen and casuists, in the most flagrant cases. They are so still by them and others in most discourses, and in all disputes about political or moral affairs. But no mathematician ever confounded the idea of any triangle with that of a square, nor that of a square with that of a circle.
(Essay I, §4; vol. iii, pp. 429-30)",,23731,"","""Intellect, the artificer, works lamely without his proper instrument, sense; which is the case when he works on moral ideas.""","",2014-03-14 20:34:51 UTC,""
7856,"",Reading,2014-03-14 20:40:12 UTC,"Another example of the same kind it may be proper to consider. Hobbes says somewhere, that words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools. The observation is just, and the expression happy. Ideas and notions are the money of wise men, and they pay with these; whilst they mark and compute, with words, the money of fools. But yet so difficult is the intellectual commerce, so narrow the intellectual fund, that the wisest men are frequently obliged to employ their money like counters, and their counters like money, in one case, however, without loss, in the other without fraud. We may be said to do the first, that is, to employ our money like counters, when we employ ideas of one kind to mark and suggest ideas of another. We employ, as it were, in this case, good and current money of one species, to compute and fix the sum payable in another: and thus guineas may stand in the place of shillings, or shillings serve to represent guineas. This happens whenever we make use of figures, and figures are so interwoven into language, that they make up a great part of our discourse, and a greater than is commonly apprehended.
(Essay I, §5; vol. iii, p. 444)",,23735,USE IN ENTRY,"""But yet so difficult is the intellectual commerce, so narrow the intellectual fund, that the wisest men are frequently obliged to employ their money like counters, and their counters like money, in one case, however, without loss, in the other without fraud. We may be said to do the first, that is, to employ our money like counters, when we employ ideas of one kind to mark and suggest ideas of another. We employ, as it were, in this case, good and current money of one species, to compute and fix the sum payable in another: and thus guineas may stand in the place of shillings, or shillings serve to represent guineas.""",Coinage,2014-03-14 20:40:12 UTC,""
7856,Wit and Judgment,Reading,2014-03-14 20:42:34 UTC,"The figurative style is peculiarly that of poets, or of the tribe nearest allied to theirs, I mean orators. In this style the frightened wave returns: or Cicero, in his Philippics, thunders against Anthony. To employ this stile with true propriety is hard no doubt. It must needs be hard to keep up an exact precision propriety of ideas and words, when two sets of each are concerned, since it is extremely so to keep them up, when one set of each is alone the business of the mind. It is hard for another reason; because imagination, whose talents are neither precision nor propriety, not the former at least, is employed in the application of one of these sets of ideas and words to the other, and because it rarely happens that great heat of imagination, and great coolness of judgment, that happy association which forms a genius, and appears eminently in all your writings, go together, and keeps pace with one another. When they do so, the figurative style, that some of our neighbours have almost rejected even out of poetry, and that we have abused most licentiously in it, serves to enforce, as well as to explain and adorn, but never to deceive. Somebody has said of the boldest figure in rhetoric, the hyperbole, that it lies without deceiving: and if I may venture to make a little alteration, in a definition given by my Lord Bacon, I will say of rhetoric in general, the practice of which I esteem much, the theory little, that it applies images, framed or borrowed by imagination, to ideas and notions which are framed by judgment, so as to warm the affections, to move the passions, and to determine the will; so as to assist nature, not to oppress her.
(Essay I, §5; vol. iii, p. 444)",,23736,META-METAPHORICAL!,"""It is hard for another reason; because imagination, whose talents are neither precision nor propriety, not the former at least, is employed in the application of one of these sets of ideas and words to the other, and because it rarely happens that great heat of imagination, and great coolness of judgment, that happy association which forms a genius, and appears eminently in all your writings, go together, and keeps pace with one another.""","",2014-03-14 20:42:51 UTC,""
7856,"",Reading,2014-03-14 20:45:06 UTC,"But besides the use which poets make with some profusion, as they have a right to do, and orators make, or should make more sparingly, of this art of the mind, which, transferring ideas from one subject to another, makes that becomes graceful and reasonable, and thereby useful when the application is judicious, which would be monstrous and absurd, and thereby hurtful without it; there is another use, which the severest philosophical writers may and do make of it in their meditations, as well as in their discourses; an use that if it does not serve to increase, serves most certainly to facilitate and propagate knowledge. They who meditate (for every man, and probably every animal thinks) must have observed that the mind employs all its forces, and memory and imagination among the rest, not only to form opinions, or to arrive at knowledge, but to set the objects of opinion, or knowledge, in the fullest and clearest light for its own satisfaction, and for the ease of communicating these thoughts to other minds in the same order, and with the same energy as they are contemplated by it. Not only judgment compares in a steady train, ideas and notions that are present to it and those that are intermediate, those that sagacity discovers to help the process of comparing; but memory and the faculty of imagining are employed to bring in adventitious helps. Such they may be called, for though foreign ideas divert the attention of the mind, when they break in unsought and by violence, they help it often when they have been sought and are admitted by choice. They lead the mind, indirectly and round about, as it were, in many cases, to such truths, or such evidence of truth, as could not have been attained so easily, nor so fully, without them.
(Essay I, §5; vol. iii, pp. 445-6)",,23737,"","""Such they may be called, for though foreign ideas divert the attention of the mind, when they break in unsought and by violence, they help it often when they have been sought and are admitted by choice.""","",2014-03-14 20:45:06 UTC,""