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An essay concerning human understanding

  
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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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Book III Of Words
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Chapter I Of Words or Language in General
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Chapter II Of the Signification of Words
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Chapter III Of General Terms
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Chapter IV Of the Names of Simple Ideas
  
1. Names of simple ideas, modes, and substances, have each something peculiar.
  
2. Names of simple ideas, and of substances intimate real existence.
  
3. Names of simple ideas and modes signify always both real and nominal essences.
  
4. Names of simple ideas are undefinable.
  
5. If all names were definable, it would be a process in infinitum.
  
6. What a definition is.
  
7. Simple ideas, why undefinable.
  
8. Instances: scholastic definitions of motion.
  
9. Modern definitions of motion.
  
10. Definitions of light.
  
11. Simple ideas, why undefinable, further explained.
  
12. The contrary shown in complex ideas, by instances of a statue and rainbow.
  
13. Colours indefinable to the born-blind.
  
14. Complex ideas definable only when the simple ideas of which they consist have been got from experience.
  
15. Names of simple ideas of less doubtful meaning than those of mixed modes and substances.
  
16. Simple ideas have few ascents in linea praedicamentali.
  
17. Names of simple ideas not arbitrary, but perfectly taken from the existence of things.
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Chapter V Of the Names of Mixed Modes and Relations
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Chapter VI Of the Names of Substances
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Chapter VII Of Particles
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Chapter VIII Of Abstract and Concrete Terms
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Chapter IX Of the Imperfection of Words
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Chapter X Of the Abuse of Words
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Chapter XI Of the Remedies of the Foregoing Imperfections and Abuses of Words
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Book IV Of Knowledge and Probability

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7. Simple ideas, why undefinable.

This being premised, I say that the names of simple ideas, and those only, are incapable of being defined. The reason whereof is this, That the several terms of a definition, signifying several ideas, they can all together by no means represent an idea which has no composition at all: and therefore a definition, which is properly nothing but the showing the meaning of one word by several others not signifying each the same thing, can in the names of simple ideas have no place.

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