it, or a necessary consequence of it; or that any mass of matter should, after its dissolution here, be again restored hereafter to an everlasting state of sense, perception, and knowledge, only because it was moulded into this or that figure, and had such a particular frame of its visible parts. Such an opinion as this, placing immortality in a certain superficial figure, turns out of doors all consideration of soul or spirit; upon whose account alone some corporeal beings have hitherto been concluded immortal, and others not. This is to attribute more to the outside than inside of things; to place the excellency of a man more in the external shape of his body than internal perfections of his soul: which is but little better than to annex the great and inestimable advantage of immortality and life everlasting, which he has above other material beings, to annex it, I say, to the cut of his beard, or the fashion of his coat. For, this or that outward make of our bodies no more carries with it the hopes of an eternal duration, than the fashion of a man's suit gives him reasonable grounds to imagine it will never wear out, or that it will make him immortal. It will perhaps be said, that nobody thinks that the shape makes any thing immortal, but it is the shape is the sign of a rational soul within, which is immortal. I wonder who made it the sign of any such thing: for barely saying it will not make it so. It would require some proofs to persuade one of it. No figure that I know speaks any such language. For it may as rationally be concluded, that the dead body of a man, wherein there is to be found no more appearance or action of life than there is in a statue, has yet nevertheless a living soul in it, because of its shape; as that there is a rational soul in a changeling, because he has the outside of a rational creature, when his actions carry far less marks of reason with them in the whole course of his life than what are to be found in many a beast.

16. Monsters.-"But it is the issue of rational parents, and must therefore be concluded to have a rational soul." I know not by what logic you must so conclude. I am sure this is a conclusion that men no where allow of. For, if they did, they would not make bold, as every where they do, to destroy ill-formed and mis-shaped productions. "Aye, but these are monsters." Let them be so; what will your drivelling, unintelligent, intractable changeling be? Shall a defect in the body make a monster; a defect in the mind (the far more noble and, in the common phrase, the far more essential part) not? Shall the want of a nose or a neck make a monster, and put such issue out of the rank of men; the want of reason and understanding not? This is to bring all back again to what was exploded just now: this is to place all in the shape, and to take the measure of a man only by his outside. To show that, according to the ordinary way of reasoning in this matter, people do lay the whole stress on the figure, and resolve the whole essence of the species of man (as they make it) into the outward shape, how unreasonable soever it be, and how much soever they disown it, we need but trace their thoughts and practice a little farther, and then

it will plainly appear. The well-shaped changeling is a man, has a rational soul, though it appear not: "This is past doubt," say you. Make the ears a little longer and more pointed, and the nose a little flatter, than ordinary, and then you begin to boggle: make the face yet narrower, flatter, and longer, and then you are at a stand: add still more and more of the likeness of a brute to it, and let the head be perfectly that of some other animal, then presently it is a monster; and it is demonstration with you that it hath no rational soul, and must be destroyed. Where now, I ask, shall be the just measure of the utmost bounds of that shape that carries with it a rational soul? For, since there have been human foetuses produced, half beast and half man; and others three parts one, and one part the other; and so it is possible they may be in all the variety of approaches to the one or the other shape, and may have several degrees of mixture of the likeness of a man or a brute; I would gladly know what are those precise lineaments which, according to this hypothesis, are or are not capable of a rational soul to be joined to them? What sort of outside is the certain sign that there is or is not such an inhabitant within? For, till that be done, we talk at random of man; and shall always, I fear, do so as long as we give ourselves up to certain sounds, and the imaginations of settled and fixed species in nature, we know not what. But, after all, I desire it may be considered that those who think they have answered the difficulty by telling us that a mis-shaped fœtus is a monster, run into the same fault they are arguing against, by constituting a species between man and beast. For what else, I pray, is their monster in the case, (if the word "monster" signifies any thing at all,) but something neither man nor beast, but partaking somewhat of either? And just so is the changeling before mentioned. So necessary is it to quit the common notion of species and essences, if we will truly look into the nature of things, and examine them by what our faculties can discover in them as they exist, and not by groundless fancies that have been taken up about them.

17. Words and species.-I have mentioned this here, because I think we cannot be too cautious that words and species, in the ordinary notions which we have been used to of them, impose not on us. For, I am apt to think, therein lies one great obstacle to our clear and distinct knowledge, especially in reference to substances; and from thence has rose a great part of the difficulties about truth and certainty. Would we accustom ourselves to separate our contemplations and reasonings from words, we might, in a great measure, remedy this inconvenience within our own thoughts: but yet it would still disturb us in our discourse with others, as long as we retained the opinion, that species and their essences were any thing else but our abstract ideas, (such as they are,) with names annexed to them to be the signs of them.

18. Recapitulation.-Wherever we perceive the agreement or disagreement of any of our ideas, there is certain knowledge: and wherever we are sure those ideas agree with the reality of things, there is certain real knowledge. Of which agreement of our ideas

with the reality of things having here given the marks, I think I have shown wherein it is that certainty, real certainty, consists. Which, whatever it was to others, was, I confess, to me heretofore one of those desiderata which I found great want of.

CHAPTER V.

OF TRUTH IN GENERAL.

1. What truth is." What is truth?" was an inquiry many ages since; and it being that which all mankind either do or pretend to search after, it cannot but be worth our while carefully to examine wherein it consists; and so acquaint ourselves with the nature of it, as to observe how the mind distinguishes it from falsehood.

2. A right joining or separating of signs; i. e. ideas or words.— Truth then seems to me, in the proper import of the word, to signify nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the things signified by them do agree or disagree one with another. The joining or separating of signs here meant, is what by another name we call "proposition." So that truth properly belongs only to propositions: whereof there are two sorts, viz., mental and verbal; as there are two sorts of signs commonly made use of, viz. ideas and words.

3. Which make mental or verbal propositions. To form a clear notion of truth, it is very necessary to consider truth of thought, and truth of words, distinctly one from another: but yet it is very difficult to treat of them asunder; because it is unavoidable, in treating of mental propositions, to make use of words; and then the instances given of mental propositions cease immediately to be barely mental, and become verbal. For, a mental proposition being nothing but a bare consideration of the ideas as they are in our minds stripped of names, they lose the nature of purely mental propositions as soon as they are put into words.

4. Mental propositions are very hard to be treated of.-And that which makes it yet harder to treat of mental and verbal propositions separately, is, that most men, if not all, in their thinking and reasonings within themselves, make use of words instead of ideas, at least when the subject of their meditation contains in it complex ideas. Which is a great evidence of the imperfection and uncertainty of our ideas of that kind, and may, if attentively made use of, serve for a mark to show us what are those things we have clear and perfect established ideas of, and what not. For, if we will curiously observe the way our mind takes in thinking and reasoning, we shall find, I suppose, that when we make any propositions within our own thoughts about white or black, sweet or bitter, a triangle or a circle, we can and often do frame in our minds the ideas themselves without reflecting on the names. But when we would consider or make propositions about the more complex ideas, as of a man, vitriol, fortitude, glory, we usually put the name for the idea: because, the ideas these names stand for being

:

for the most part imperfect, confused, and undetermined, we reflect on the names themselves, because they are more clear, certain, and distinct, and readier occur to our thoughts, than the pure ideas and so we make use of these words instead of the ideas themselves, even when we would meditate and reason within ourselves, and make tacit mental propositions. In substances, as has been already noted, this is occasioned by the imperfection of our ideas: we making the name stand for the real essence, of which we have no idea at all. In modes, it is occasioned by the great number of simple ideas that go to the making them up. For, many of them being compounded, the name occurs much easier than the complex idea itself, which requires time and attention to be recollected and exactly represented to the mind, even in those men who have formerly been at the pains to do it; and is utterly impossible to be done by those who, though they have ready in their memory the greatest part of the common words of their language, yet perhaps never troubled themselves in all their lives to consider what precise ideas the most of them stood for. Some confused or obscure notions have served their turns; and many who talk very much of religion and conscience, of church and faith, of power and right, of obstructions and humours, melancholy and choler, would perhaps have little left in their thoughts and meditations if one should desire them to think only of the things themselves, and lay by those words with which they so often confound others, and not seldom themselves also.

5. Being nothing but the joining or separating ideas without words. But to return to the consideration of truth. We must,

I say, observe two sorts of propositions that we are capable of making.

First. Mental, wherein the ideas in our understandings are without the use of words put together or separated by the mind, perceiving or judging of their agreement or disagreement.

Secondly. Verbal propositions, which are words, the signs of our ideas, put together or separated in affirmative or negative sentences. By which way of affirming or denying, these signs, made by sounds, are as it were put together or separated one from another. So that proposition consists in joining or separating signs, and truth consists in the putting together or separating these signs, according as the things which they stand for agree or disagree.

6. When mental propositions contain real truth, and when verbal. -Every one's experience will satisfy him that the mind, either by perceiving or supposing the agreement or disagreement of any of its ideas, does tacitly within itself put them into a kind of proposition affirmative or negative, which I have endeavoured to express by the terms "putting together" and "separating." But this action of the mind, which is so familiar to every thinking and reasoning man, is easier to be conceived by reflecting on what passes in us when we affirm or deny, than to be explained by words. When a man has in his mind the idea of two lines, viz. the side and diagonal of a square, whereof the diagonal is an inch long, he may have the idea also of the division of that line into a

certain number of equal parts; v. g. into five, ten, an hundred, a thousand, or any other number; and may have the idea of that inch-line being divisible or not divisible into such equal parts as a certain number of them will be equal to the side-line. Now, whenever he perceives, believes, or supposes such a kind of divisibility to agree or disagree to his idea of that line, he as it were joins or separates those two ideas, viz. the idea of that line, and the idea of that kind of divisibility, and so makes a mental proposition which is true or false, according as such a kind of divisibility, a divisibility into such aliquot parts, does really agree to that line or no. When ideas are so put together or separated in the mind, as they or the things they stand for do agree or not, that is, as I may call it, "mental truth." But truth of words is something more, and that is the affirming or denying of words one of another, as the ideas they stand for agree or disagree: and this again is twofold; either purely verbal and trifling, which I shall speak of, (chap. x.) or real and instructive, which is the object of that real knowledge which we have spoken of already.

7. Objection against verbal truth, that thus it may all be chimerical. But here again will be apt to occur the same doubt about truth, that did about knowledge: and it will be objected, that "if truth be nothing but the joining or separating of words in propositions, as the ideas they stand for agree or disagree in men's minds, the knowledge of truth is not so valuable a thing as it is taken to be, nor worth the pains and time men employ to the search of it; since, by this account, it amounts to no more than the conformity of words to the chimeras of men's brains. Who knows not what odd notions many men's heads are filled with, and what strange ideas all men's brains are capable of? But if we rest here, we know the truth of nothing by this rule, but of the visionary world in our own imaginations; nor have other truth, but what as much concerns harpies and centaurs as men and horses. For those and the like may be ideas in our heads, and have their agreement and disagreement there, as well as the ideas of real beings, and so have as true propositions made about them. And it will be altogether as true a proposition to say, 'All centaurs are animals,' as that all men are animals;' and the certainty of one as great as the other. For in both the propositions the words are put together according to the agreement of the ideas in our minds: and the agreement of the idea of animal' with that of 'centaur,' is as clear and visible to the mind as the agreement of the idea of 'animal' with that of man;' and so these two propositions are equally true, equally certain. But of what use is all such truth

to us ?"

8. Answered. Real truth is about ideas agreeing to things.Though what has been said in the foregoing chapter to distinguish real from imaginary knowledge might suffice here, in answer to this doubt, to distinguish real truth from chimerical, or (if you please) barely nominal, they depending both on the same foundation; yet it may not be amiss here again to consider, that though our words signify nothing but our ideas, yet being designed by