id,comments,provenance,dictionary,created_at,reviewed_on,work_id,theme,context,updated_at,metaphor,text
9928,"•The mind is furnished with ""Materials"" and can exercise and employ itself. Reminiscent of the servant in the previous entry? Is the mind the cabinet or the person in the cabinet. A typical Lockean ambiguity. I have not included the weak personification in this passage in the database.","Reading. -- An important metaphor for Sean Silver in The Mind is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2015), 23-5, 56, 58.",Rooms,2003-09-04 00:00:00 UTC,,3866,"",I.ii.15.,2016-03-11 18:21:18 UTC,"""The senses at first let in particular Ideas, and furnish the yet empty Cabinet: And the Mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the Memory, and Names got to them.""","The senses at first let in particular Ideas, and furnish the yet empty Cabinet: And the Mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the Memory, and Names got to them. Afterwards the Mind proceeding farther, abstracts them, and by Degrees learns the use of general Names. In this manner the Mind comes to be furnish'd with Ideas and Language, that Materials about which to exercise its discursive Faculty: And the use of Reason becomes daily more visible, as these Materials, that give it Employment, increase. But though the having of general Ideas, and the use of general Words and Reason usually grow together: yet, I see not, how this any way proves them innate. The Knowledge of some Truths, I confess, is very early in the Mind; but in a way that shews them not to be innate, but acquired: It being about those first, which are imprinted by external Things, with which Infants have earliest to do, and which make the most frequent Impressions on their Senses. In Ideas thus got, the Mind discovers, that some agree, and others differ, probably as soon as it has any use of Memory; as soon as it is able, to retain and receive distinct Ideas.
(I.ii.15)"
9958,"•Locke's qualification:""as it were."" Notice how he takes the metaphor back.
•Westbury and Dennett point to this as ""the standard representative theory of memory"" (Memory, Brain, and Belief, 16). Theories of memory which treat a memory as an accurate picture of a perception reduce the problem of memory to the problem of perception: ""In remembering x, we know that it is x for the same reason (whatever that might be!) that we were able to recognize x when we first sensed it"" (16). Memory is only another viewing.
•In a footnote Westbury and Dennett admit Locke is ""more subtle"" than the quotation would suggest. The full passage ""suggests that Locke did not think of the memory simply as a static storehouse of images, but rather as a dynamic ability to evoke or reconstruct an image, a metaphor more closely in keeping with modern scientific views of memory"" (31n.1)",Reading,"",2003-09-15 00:00:00 UTC,,3866,"",II.x.2. The retention of ideas,2011-06-14 04:18:04 UTC,"""This is Memory, which is as it were the Store-house of our Ideas.""","The other way of Retention is the Power to revive again in our Minds those Ideas, which after imprinting have disappeared, or have been as it were laid aside out of Sight: And thus we do, when we conceive Heat or Light, Yellow or Sweet, the Object being removed. This is Memory, which is as it were the Store-house of our Ideas. For the narrow Mind of Man, not being capable of having many Ideas under View and Consideration at once, it was necessary to have a Repository, to lay up those Ideas, which at another time it might have use of. But our Ideas being nothing, but actual Perceptions in the Mind, which cease to be any thing, when there is no perception of them, this laying up of our Ideas in the Repository of the Memory, signifies no more but this, that the Mind has a Power, in many cases to revive Perceptions, which it has once had, with this additional Perception annexed to them, that is has had them before. And in this Sense it is, that our Ideas are said to be in our Memories, when indeed, they are actually no where, but only there is an ability in the Mind, when it will, to revive them again; and as it were paint them anew on it self, though some with more, some with less difficulty, some more obscurely. And thus it is, by the Assistance of this Faculty, that we are said to have all those Ideas in our Understandings, which though we do not actually contemplate, yet we can bring in sight, and make appear again, and be the Objects of our Thoughts, without the help of those sensible Qualities, which first imprinted them there.
(II.x.2)"
9959,"The retention of ideas
•Locke explains his own ""metaphorical"" meaning
•See also previous entry",Reading,"",2003-09-15 00:00:00 UTC,,3866,"",II.x.2. ,2011-06-14 04:19:50 UTC,"""For the narrow Mind of Man, not being capable of having many Ideas under View and Consideration at once, it was necessary to have a Repository, to lay up those Ideas, which at another time it might have use of.""","The other way of Retention is the Power to revive again in our Minds those Ideas, which after imprinting have disappeared, or have been as it were laid aside out of Sight: And thus we do, when we conceive Heat or Light, Yellow or Sweet, the Object being removed. This is Memory, which is as it were the Store-house of our Ideas. For the narrow Mind of Man, not being capable of having many Ideas under View and Consideration at once, it was necessary to have a Repository, to lay up those Ideas, which at another time it might have use of. But our Ideas being nothing, but actual Perceptions in the Mind, which cease to be any thing, when there is no perception of them, this laying up of our Ideas in the Repository of the Memory, signifies no more but this, that the Mind has a Power, in many cases to revive Perceptions, which it has once had, with this additional Perception annexed to them, that is has had them before. And in this Sense it is, that our Ideas are said to be in our Memories, when indeed, they are actually no where, but only there is an ability in the Mind, when it will, to revive them again; and as it were paint them anew on it self, though some with more, some with less difficulty, some more lively and others more obscurely. And thus it is, by the Assistance of this Faculty, that we are said to have all those Ideas in our Understandings, which though we do not actually contemplate, yet we can bring in sight, and make appear again, and be the Objects of our Thoughts, without the help of those sensible Qualities, which first imprinted them there.
(II.x.2)"
10012,"","Reading.Found again searching in Past Masters. See also Marjorie Nicholson's Newton Demands the Muse (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1946), 144-145; found again reading M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford UP, 1953), 57. Also, Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010), 261; Sean Silver, The Mind is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2015), 31, 56, 58, 63.",Rooms,2006-04-16 00:00:00 UTC,2004-11-08,3866,Interiority,II.xi.17,2020-02-01 22:05:39 UTC,"""Would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them""","I pretend not to teach, but to enquire, and therefore cannot but confess here again, that external and internal sensation are the only passages I can find of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this dark room: For methinks the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without: Would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them.
(II.xi.17)"
22773,"",Reading; text from ECCO-TCP,Rooms,2013-09-17 16:52:20 UTC,,3866,"","Book II, chapter xxxii",2014-06-22 18:18:24 UTC,"""If therefore we will warily attend to the Motions of the Mind, and observe what Course it usually takes in its way to Knowledge, we shall, I think, find that the Mind having got any Idea, which it thinks it may have use of, either in Contemplation or Discourse; the first Thing it does, is to abstract it, and then get a Name to it; and so lay it up in its Store-house, the Memory, as containing the Essence of a sort of Things, of which that Name is always to be the Mark.""","ยง. 7. If therefore we will warily attend to the Motions of the Mind, and observe what Course it usually takes in its way to Knowledge, we shall, I think, find that the Mind having got any Idea, which it thinks it may have use of, either in Contemplation or Discourse; the first Thing it does, is to abstract it, and then get a Name to it; and so lay it up in its Store-house, the Memory, as containing the Essence of a sort of Things, of which that Name is always to be the Mark. Hence it is, that we may often observe, that when any one sees a new Thing of a kind that he knows not, he presently asks what it is, meaning by that Enquiry nothing but the Name. As if the Name carried with it the Knowledge of the Species, or the Essence of it; whereof it is indeed used as the Mark, and is generally supposed annexed to it.
(II.xxxii.7, p. 178 in 1690 ed.)"