It should be observed that in this faculty, according to its application, there is knowledge either without or with ideas—in other words, either an immediate or a mediate knowledge. It is by the pure intellect alone that we take cognisance of our own mind in its phenomena, and these we can immediately, or without idea, apprehend. But of everything distinct from ourselves which we know by the intellect, we can have but a mediate knowledge, or a knowledge by idea. The distinction of the ideas of the imagination and the intellect is nearly similar to the distinction of thoughts into those of the individual and general, or of intuitions (in the older sense of the term), and notions or concepts.—Con. Note II, Idea. Med; IV, p. 112. Med. VI, pp. 127–129. Prin. of, Phil., § 73. Lett. LXXV, Garnier, tom. IV, p. 318 (or LXII of vol. VI Ed. 12mo.), Ep. P. I, XXX. Reg. ad Direct. Ing., R. XII. De la Forge, De l’Esprit, chap. XVIII, pp. 298–302. Hamilton’s Reid, p. 291, note. ↩
“What appears manifestly to him who considers it as he ought.” —French ↩
“First.” —French ↩
Things and the affections of things are (in the French) equivalent to “what has some (i.e., a real) existence,” as opposed to the class of “eternal truths,” which have merely an ideal existence. ↩
“And generally all the attributes that lead us to entertain different thoughts of the same thing, such as, for example, the extension of body and its property of divisibility, do not differ from the body which is to us the object of them, or from each other, unless as we sometimes confusedly think the one without thinking the other.” —French ↩
“By the colour we perceive on occasion of it.” —French ↩
“Which vary according to the diversities of the movements that pass from all parts of our body to the part of the brain to which it (the mind) is closely joined and united.” —French ↩
“Which it perceived on occasion of them” (i.e., of external objects). —French ↩
“Reasonings.” —French ↩
The following section of the Principles is added to those given in the text, from its bearing logically and historically on the doctrine of Occasional Causes as arising out of Cartesianism:—
“That God is the primary cause of motion: and that he always preserves the same quantity of motion in the universe.
“After having thus adverted to the nature of motion, it is necessary to consider its cause, and that the twofold: firstly, the universal and primary, which is the general cause of all the motions in the world; and secondly, the particular, by which it happens that each of the parts of matter acquires the motion which it had not before. And with respect to the general cause, it seems manifest to me that it is none other than God himself, who, in the beginning, created matter along with motion and rest, and now by his ordinary concourse alone preserves in the whole the same amount of motion and rest that he then placed in it. For although motion is nothing in the matter moved but its mode, it has yet a certain and determinate quantity, which we easily understand may remain always the same in the whole universe, although it changes in each of the parts of it. So that, in truth, we may hold, when a part of matter is moved with double the quickness of another, and that other is twice the size of the former, that there is just precisely as much motion, but no more, in the less body as in the greater; and that in proportion as the motion of any one part is reduced, so is that of some other and equal portion accelerated. We also know that there is perfection in God, not only because he is in himself immutable, but because he operates in the most constant and immutable manner possible: so that with the exception of those mutations which manifest experience, or divine revelation renders certain, and which we perceive or believe are brought about without any change in the Creator, we ought to suppose no other in his works, lest there should thence arise ground for concluding inconstancy in God himself. Whence it follows as most consonant to reason, that merely because God diversely moved the parts of matter when he first created them, and now preserves all that matter, manifestly in the same mode and on the same principle on which he first created it, he also always preserves the same quantity of motion in the matter itself.” —Part II § 36 ↩
“Common sense.” —French ↩
In the French this section begins, “Taste, after touch the grossest of the senses,” etc. ↩
“Thus we may reckon upon having already discovered two diverse forms in matter, which may be taken for the forms of the first two elements of the visible world. The first is that of the scraping (raclure) which must have been separated from the other parts of matter,
