14. Simple ideas in this sense not false, and why.
First, our simple ideas, being barely such perceptions as God has
fitted us to receive, and given power to external objects to produce in us by established laws and ways, suitable to
his wisdom and goodness, though incomprehensible to us, their truth consists in nothing else but in such
appearances as are produced in us, and must be suitable to those powers he has placed in external objects or else
they could not be produced in us: and thus answering those powers, they are what they should be, true ideas. Nor
do they become liable to any imputation of falsehood, if the mind (as in most men I believe it does) judges these
ideas to be in the things themselves. For God in his wisdom having set them as marks of distinction in things,
whereby we may be able to discern one thing from another, and so choose any of them for our uses as we have
occasion; it alters not the nature of our simple idea, whether we think that the idea of blue be in the violet itself, or
in our mind only; and only the power of producing it by the texture of its parts, reflecting the particles of light
after a certain manner, to be in the violet itself. For that texture in the object, by a regular and constant operation
producing the same idea of blue in us, it serves us to distinguish, by our eyes, that from any other thing; whether
that distinguishing mark, as it is really in the violet, be only a peculiar texture of parts, or else that very colour, the
idea whereof (which is in us) is the exact resemblance. And it is equally from that appearance to be denominated
blue, whether it be that real colour, or only a peculiar texture in it, that causes in us that idea: since the name, blue,
notes properly nothing but that mark of distinction that is in a violet, discernible only by our eyes, whatever it
consists in; that being beyond our capacities distinctly to know, and perhaps would be of less use to us, if we had
faculties to discern.
