Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Ideas

We cannot have a single image that did not enter through the sight; but we have the power of altering and compounding those images into all the varieties of picture.

Those ideas which are in the mind of man are a transcript of the world; to this we may add, that words are the transcripts of those ideas which are in the mind of man, and that writing and printing are the transcript of words.

An idea, like a ghost (according to the common notion of ghosts), must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

In the philosophy of Locke the archetypes of our ideas are the things really existing out of us.

In the Platonic sense, ideas were the patterns according to which the Deity fashioned the phenomenal or ectypal world.

For ideas, in my sense of the word, are whatsoever is the object of the understanding, when a man thinks; or whatsoever it is the mind can be employed about in thinking.

Whatsoever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call idea.

Simple ideas, the materials of all our knowledge, are suggested to the mind only by sensation and reflection.

These simple ideas the understanding can no more refuse to have, or alter, or blot them out, than a mirror can refuse, alter, or obliterate the images which the objects set before it produce.

External material things, as the objects of sensation; and the operations of our minds within, as the objects of reflection; are the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginning.

If ideas be not innate, there was a time when the mind was without those principles; for where the ideas are not, there can be no knowledge, no assent, no mental or verbal propositions about them.

Ideas, as ranked under names, are those that, for the most part, men reason of within themselves, and always those which they commune about with others.

It suffices to the unity of any idea that it be considered as one representation or picture; though made up of ever so many particulars.

What is now “idea” for us? How infinite the fall of this word since the time when Milton sang of the Creator contemplating his newly-created world,—

to its present use, when this person “has an idea that the train has started,” and the other “had no idea that the dinner would be so bad”!

The original of sensible and spiritual ideas may be owing to sensation and reflection; the recollection and fresh excitation of them to other occasions.

Those are adequate ideas which perfectly represent their archetypes or objects. Inadequate are but a partial or incomplete representation of those archetypes to which they are referred.

The form under which these things appear to the mind, or the result of our apprehensions, is called an idea.

Those inward representations of spirit, thought, love, and hatred, are pure and mental ideas, belonging to the mind, and carry nothing of shape or sense in them.