Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

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Phillips, Sampson,, 1855 - Intellect - 492 pages
 

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Page 136 - But this universal and primary opinion of all men is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy, which teaches us that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception...
Page 135 - ... can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception, and that the senses are only the inlets through which these images are conveyed, without being able to produce any immediate intercourse between the mind and the object. The table, which we see, seems to diminish, as we remove farther from it : But the real table, which exists independent of us, suffers no alteration : It was therefore nothing but its image which was present to the mind. These are the obvious dictates of reason...
Page 327 - Now, if we will annex a meaning to our words, and speak only of what we can conceive, I believe we shall acknowledge that an idea which, considered in itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the SAME SORT.
Page 66 - 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...
Page 237 - ... as long as he is awake. Reflection on these appearances of several ideas one after another in our minds, is that which furnishes us with the idea of succession ; and the distance between any parts of that succession, or between the appearance of any two ideas in our minds, is that we call duration.
Page 265 - The dominion of man in this little world of his own understanding, being much-what the same as it is in the great world of visible things, wherein his power, however managed by art and skill, reaches no farther than to compound and divide the materials that are made to his hand, but can do nothing towards the making the least particle of new matter, or destroying one atom of what is already in being.
Page 469 - Thus we see that every different species of sensible creatures has its different notions of beauty, and that each of them is most affected with the beauties of its own kind. This is no where more remarkable than in birds of the same shape and proportion, where we often see the male determined in his courtship by the single grain or tincture of a feather, and never discovering any charms but in the colour of its species.
Page 95 - It is evident the mind knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them.
Page 223 - ... became possessed, and, as it appeared, by a very learned devil. She continued incessantly talking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, in very pompous tones and with most distinct enunciation. This possession was rendered more probable by the known fact that she was or had been a heretic.
Page 346 - Euclid's, and show by construction that its truth was known to us ; to demonstrate, for example, that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal...

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