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An essay concerning human understanding

  
[frontispiece]
  
[title page]
  
To The Right Honourable Lord Thomas,
  
Epistle to the Reader

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Introduction An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
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Book I Neither Principles Nor Ideas Are Innate
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Book II Of Ideas
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Chapter I Of Ideas in general, and their Original
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Chapter II Of Simple Ideas
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Chapter III Of Simple Ideas of Sense
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Chapter IV Idea of Solidity
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Chapter V Of Simple Ideas of Divers Senses
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Chapter VI Of Simple Ideas of Reflection
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Chapter VII Of Simple Ideas of both Sensation and Reflection
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Chapter VIII Some further considerations concerning our Simple Ideas of Sensation
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Chapter IX Of Perception
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Chapter X Of Retention
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Chapter XI Of Discerning, and other operations of the Mind
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Chapter XII Of Complex Ideas
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Chapter XIII Complex Ideas of Simple Modes:--and First, of the Simple Modes of the Idea of Space
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Chapter XIV Idea of Duration and its Simple Modes
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Chapter XV Ideas of Duration and Expansion, considered together
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Chapter XVI Idea of Number
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Chapter XVII Of Infinity
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Chapter XVIII Other Simple Modes
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Chapter XIX Of the Modes of Thinking
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Chapter XX Of Modes of Pleasure and Pain
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Chapter XXI Of Power
  
1. This idea how got.
  
2. Power, active and passive.
  
3. Power includes relation.
  
4. The clearest idea of active power had from spirit.
  
5. Will and understanding two powers in mind or spirit.
  
6. Faculties, not real beings.
  
7. Whence the ideas of liberty and necessity.
  
8. Liberty, what.
  
9. Supposes understanding and will.
  
10. Belongs not to volition.
  
11. Voluntary opposed to involuntary, not to necessary.
  
12. Liberty, what.
  
13. Necessity, what.
  
14. Liberty belongs not to the will.
  
15. Volition.
  
16. Powers, belonging to agents.
  
17. How the will, instead of the man, is called free.
  
18. This way of talking causes confusion of thought.
  
19. Powers are relations, not agents.
  
20. Liberty belongs not to the will.
  
21. But to the agent, or man.
  
22. In respect of willing, a man is not free.
  
23. How a man cannot be free to will.
  
24. Liberty is freedom to execute what is willed.
  
25. The will determined by something without it.
  
26. The ideas of liberty and volition must be defined.
  
27. Freedom.
  
28. What volition and action mean.
  
29. What determines the will.
  
30. Will and desire must not be confounded.
  
31. Uneasiness determines the will.
  
32. Desire is uneasiness.
  
33. The uneasiness of desire determines the will.
  
34. This is the spring of action.
  
35. The greatest positive good determines not the will, but present uneasiness alone.
  
36. Because the removal of uneasiness is the first step to happiness.
  
37. Because uneasiness alone is present.
  
38. Because all who allow the joys of heaven possible, pursue them not.
  
39. But any great uneasiness is never neglected.
  
40. Desire accompanies all uneasiness.
  
41. The most pressing uneasiness naturally determines the will.
  
42. All desire happiness.
  
43. Happiness and misery, good and evil, what they are.
  
44. What good is desired, what not.
  
45. Why the greatest good is not always desired.
  
46. Why not being desired, it moves not the will.
  
47. Due consideration raises desire.
  
48. The power to suspend the prosecution of any desire makes way for consideration.
  
49. To be determined by our own judgment, is no restraint to liberty.
  
50. The freest agents are so determined.
  
51. A constant determination to a pursuit of happiness no abridgment of liberty.
  
52. The necessity of pursuing true happiness the foundation of liberty.
  
53. Power to suspend.
  
54. Government of our passions the right improvement of liberty.
  
55. How men come to pursue different, and often evil, courses.
  
56. All men seek happiness, but not of the same sort.
  
57. Power to suspend volition explains responsibility for ill choice.
  
58. Why men choose what makes them miserable.
  
59. The causes of this.
  
60. Our judgment of present good or evil always right.
  
61. Our wrong judgments have regard to future good and evil only.
  
62. From a wrong judgment of what makes a necessary part of their happiness.
  
63. A more particular account of wrong judgments.
  
64. No one chooses misery willingly, but only by wrong judgment.
  
65. Men may err in comparing present and future.
  
66. Causes of our judging amiss when we compare present pleasure and pain with future.
  
67. Absent good unable to counterbalance present uneasiness.
  
68. Wrong judgment in considering consequences of actions.
  
69. Causes of this.
  
70. Wrong judgment of what is necessary to our happiness.
  
71. We can change the agreeableness or disagreeableness in things.
  
72. Preference of vice to virtue a manifest wrong judgment.
  
73. Recapitulation--liberty of indifferency.
  
74. Active and passive power, in motions and in thinking.
  
75. Summary of our original ideas.
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Chapter XXII Of Mixed Modes
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Chapter XXIII Of our Complex Ideas of Substances
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Chapter XXIV Of Collective Ideas of Substances
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Chapter XXV Of Relation
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Chapter XXVI Of Cause and Effect, and other Relations
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Chapter XXVII Of Identity and Diversity
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Chapter XXVIII Of Other Relations
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Chapter XXIX Of Clear and Obscure, Distinct and Confused Ideas
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Chapter XXX Of Real and Fantastical Ideas
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Chapter XXXI Of Adequate and Inadequate Ideas
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Chapter XXXII Of True and False Ideas
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Chapter XXXIII Of the Association of Ideas
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Book III Of Words
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Book IV Of Knowledge and Probability

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68. Wrong judgment in considering consequences of actions.

(II) As to things good or bad in their consequences, and by the aptness that is in them to procure us good or evil in the future, we judge amiss several ways.

1. When we judge that so much evil does not really depend on them as in truth there does.

2. When we judge that, though the consequence be of that moment, yet it is not of that certainty, but that it may otherwise fall out, or else by some means be avoided; as by industry, address, change, repentance, etc.

That these are wrong ways of judging, were easy to show in every particular, if I would examine them at large singly: but I shall only mention this in general, viz., that it is a very wrong and irrational way of proceeding, to venture a greater good for a less, upon uncertain guesses; and before a due examination be made, proportionable to the weightiness of the matter, and the concernment it is to us not to mistake. This I think every one must confess, especially if he considers the usual cause of this wrong judgment, whereof these following are some:--

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