4. The operations of our minds, the other source of them.
Secondly, the other fountain from which experience
furnisheth the understanding with ideas is,--the perception of the operations of our own mind within us, as it is
employed about the ideas it has got;--which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do
furnish the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from things without. And such are
perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own
minds;--which we being conscious of, and observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings
as distinct ideas as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself;
and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly
enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other Sensation, so I Call this Reflection, the ideas it affords
being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself. By reflection then, in the
following part of this discourse, I would be understood to mean, that notice which the mind takes of its own
operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof there come to be ideas of these operations in the
understanding. These two, I say, viz., external material things, as the objects of Sensation, and the operations of
our own minds within, as the objects of Reflection, are to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take
their beginnings. The term operations here I use in a large sense, as comprehending not barely the actions of the
mind about its ideas, but some sort of passions arising sometimes from them, such as is the satisfaction or
uneasiness arising from any thought.
