22. The mind thinks in proportion to the matter it gets from experience to think about.
Follow a child from its
birth, and observe the alterations that time makes, and you shall find, as the mind by the senses comes more and
more to be furnished with ideas, it comes to be more and more awake; thinks more, the more it has matter to think
on. After some time it begins to know the objects which, being most familiar with it, have made lasting
impressions. Thus it comes by degrees to know the persons it daily converses with, and distinguishes them from
strangers; which are instances and effects of its coming to retain and distinguish the ideas the senses convey to it.
And so we may observe how the mind, by degrees, improves in these; and advances to the exercise of those other
faculties of enlarging, compounding, and abstracting its ideas, and of reasoning about them, and reflecting upon
all these; of which I shall have occasion to speak more hereafter.