HKB
2 passages · search this phrase →
Often appears with: language, naming, and meaning · sorts and species · reason and the intellect · paul's rapture · original vs traditional revelation · nominal essence · no new simple ideas by revelation · miracles and divine intervention · conversion and faith · abstract ideas
Usually: argument (2) · skepticism (2) · crisis of belief (1) · detachment (1)
Locke argues that common names for substances function as labels for “sorts,” formed from collections of complex ideas shared by particular things, and that these sorts depend on human abstraction rather than real natures.
OF THE NAMES OF SUBSTANCES. 1. The common Names of Substances stand for Sorts. The common names of substances, as well as other general terms, stand for SORTS: which is nothing else but the being made signs of such complex ideas wherein several particular substances do or might agree, by virtue of which they are capable of being comprehended in one common conception, and signified by one name. I say do or might agr…
Locke argues that even God-inspired revelation cannot convey new simple ideas through traditional signs and words, using examples like Paul’s rapture and hypothetical creatures with a sixth sense on Jupiter or Saturn.
new, and formerly unknown simple ideas. The same holds in all other signs; which cannot signify to us things of which we have before never had any idea at all. Thus whatever things were discovered to St. Paul, when he was rapt up into the third heaven; whatever new ideas his mind there received, all the description he can make to others of that place, is only this, That there are such things, 'as eye hath not seen, …