Locke's Conduct of the Understanding |
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able accustomed apply arguments Aristotle assent authority Book Century Dictionary Christ College concerning conclusions conduct demonstration determined ideas discourse distinct ideas doctrine edge employed endeavor enlarge error Essay evidence examine exercise faculties false falsehood fancy farther furnished give habit hinder humeri Iliad improvement indifferency inquiry instances Instauratio Magna intermediate principles John Locke judgment knowl knowledge labor lazy learned Letter concerning Toleration Locke Locke's logic mathematics matter meaning men's minds ment Merchant of Venice method Midsummer Night's Dream nature never notions Novum Organum object observations opinions ourselves particular passion perceive perhaps philosophical prejudice proof proposition question reason religion rules sciences sense sentence serve settled side Silas Marner Sir Launfal sort stand student taken tenets things thought Thoughts Concerning Education tion true truth UTICA FREE ACADEMY wherein wholly words write
Popular passages
Page 130 - Whatsoever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call idea; and the power to produce any idea in our mind, I call quality of the subject wherein that power is.
Page 23 - Just so it is in the mind; would you have a man reason well, you must use him to it betimes, exercise his mind in observing the connection of ideas and following them in train. Nothing does this better than mathematics, which therefore I think should be taught all those who have the time and opportunity, not so much to make them mathematicians as to make them reasonable creatures...
Page 16 - But yet it is true, that at first some lucky hit which took with somebody, and gained him commendation, encouraged him to try again, inclined his thoughts and...
Page 27 - I have mentioned mathematics as a way to settle in the mind a habit of reasoning closely and in train ; not that I think it necessary that all men should be deep mathematicians, but that, having got the way of reasoning, which that study necessarily brings the mind to, they might be able to transfer it to other parts of knowledge, as they shall have occasion.
Page 52 - The business of education, as I have already observed, is not, as I think, to make them perfect in any one of the sciences, but so to open and dispose their minds as may best make them capable of any, when they shall apply themselves to it.
Page 16 - ... is attributed wholly to nature, which was much more the effect of use and practice. I do not deny that natural disposition may often give the first rise to it; but that never carries a man far without use and exercise, and it is practice alone that brings the powers of the mind, as well as those of the body, to their perfection. Many a good poetic vein is buried under a trade, and never produces anything, for want of improvement.
Page 17 - And he will not have much better success who shall endeavor at that age to make a man reason well, or speak handsomely, who has never been used to it, though you should lay before him a collection of all the best precepts of logic or oratory. Nobody is made...
Page 16 - As it is in the body, so it is in the mind; practice makes it what it is, and most even of those excellencies, which are looked on as natural endowments, will be found, when examined into more narrowly, to be the product of exercise, and to be raised to that pitch only by repeated actions.
Page 69 - It still presses into farther discoveries and new objects, and catches at the variety of knowledge ; and therefore often stays not long enough on what is before it to look into it as it should, for haste to pursue what is yet out of sight. He that rides post through a country may be able from the transient view to tell how in general the parts lie, and may be able to give some loose description of here a mountain and there a plain, here a morass and there a river, woodland in one part and savannahs...
Page 8 - ... capacity, quickness, and penetration ; for since no one sees all, and we generally have different prospects of the same thing according to our different, as I may say, positions to it, it is not incongruous to think, nor beneath any man to try, whether another may not have notions of things which have escaped him, and which his reason would make use of if they came into his mind.