9. How we get the ideas of mixed modes.
There are therefore three ways whereby we get these complex ideas of
mixed modes:--(1) By experience and observation of things themselves: thus, by seeing two men wrestle or
fence, we get the idea of wrestling or fencing. (2) By invention, or voluntary putting together of several simple
ideas in our own minds: so he that first invented printing or etching, had an idea of it in his mind before it ever
existed. (3) Which is the most usual way, by explaining the names of actions we never saw, or motions we cannot
see; and by enumerating, and thereby, as it were, setting before our imaginations all those ideas which go to the
making them up, and are the constituent parts of them. For, having by sensation and reflection stored our minds
with simple ideas, and by use got the names that stand for them, we can by those means represent to another any
complex idea we would have him conceive; so that it has in it no simple ideas but what he knows, and has with us
the same name for. For all our complex ideas are ultimately resolvable into simple ideas, of which they are
compounded and originally made up, though perhaps their immediate ingredients, as I may so say, are also
complex ideas. Thus, the mixed mode which the word lie stands for is made of these simple ideas:--(1) Articulate
sounds. (2) Certain ideas in the mind of the speaker. (3) Those words the signs of those ideas. (4) Those signs put
together, by affirmation or negation, otherwise than the ideas they stand for are in the mind of the speaker. I think
I need not go any further in the analysis of that complex idea we call a lie: what I have said is enough to show that
it is made up of simple ideas. And it could not be but an offensive tediousness to my reader, to trouble him with a
more minute enumeration of every particular simple idea that goes to this complex one; which, from what has
been said, he cannot but be able to make out to himself. The same may be done in all our complex ideas
whatsoever; which, however compounded and decompounded, may at last be resolved into simple ideas, which
are all the materials of knowledge or thought we have, or can have. Nor shall we have reason to fear that the mind
is hereby stinted to too scanty a number of ideas, if we consider what an inexhaustible stock of simple modes
number and figure alone afford us. How far then mixed modes, which admit of the various combinations of
different simple ideas, and their infinite modes, are from being few and scanty, we may easily imagine. So that,
before we have done, we shall see that nobody need be afraid he shall not have scope and compass enough for his
thoughts to range in, though they be, as I pretend, confined only to simple ideas, received from sensation or
reflection, and their several combinations.