2. Made by the mind.
That the mind, in respect of its simple ideas, is wholly passive, and receives them all from
the existence and operations of things, such as sensation or reflection offers them, without being able to make any
one idea, experience shows us. But if we attentively consider these ideas I call mixed modes, we are now speaking
of, we shall find their original quite different. The mind often exercises an active power in making these several
combinations. For, it being once furnished with simple ideas, it can put them together in several compositions,
and so make variety of complex ideas, without examining whether they exist so together in nature. And hence I
think it is that these ideas are called notions: as if they had their original, and constant existence, more in the
thoughts of men, than in the reality of things; and to form such ideas, it sufficed that the mind put the parts of
them together, and that they were consistent in the understanding, without considering whether they had any real
being: though I do not deny but several of them might be taken from observation, and the existence of several
simple ideas so combined, as they are put together in the understanding. For the man who first framed the idea of
hypocrisy, might have either taken it at first from the observation of one who made show of good qualities which
he had not; or else have framed that idea in his mind without having any such pattern to fashion it by. For it is
evident that, in the beginning of languages and societies of men, several of those complex ideas, which were
consequent to the constitutions established amongst them, must needs have been in the minds of men, before they
existed anywhere else; and that many names that stood for such complex ideas were in use, and so those ideas
framed, before the combinations they stood for ever existed.
