An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I: Book II, Chapter XVI.

Too Long; Didn't Read

1. Number the simplest and most universal Idea. Amongst all the ideas we have, as there is none suggested to the mind by more ways, so there is none more simple, than that of UNITY, or one: it has no shadow of variety or composition in it: every object our senses are employed about; every idea in our understandings; every thought of our minds, brings this idea along with it. And therefore it is the most intimate to our thoughts, as well as it is, in its agreement to all other things, the most universal idea we have. For number applies itself to men, angels, actions, thoughts; everything that either doth exist or can be imagined. 2. Its Modes made by Addition. By repeating this idea in our minds, and adding the repetitions together, we come by the COMPLEX ideas of the MODES of it. Thus, by adding one to one, we have the complex idea of a couple; by putting twelve units together we have the complex idea of a dozen; and so of a score or a million, or any other number. 3. Each Mode distinct. The SIMPLE MODES of NUMBER are of all other the most distinct; every the least variation, which is an unit, making each combination as clearly different from that which approacheth nearest to it, as the most remote; two being as distinct from one, as two hundred; and the idea of two as distinct from the idea of three, as the magnitude of the whole earth is from that of a mite. This is not so in other simple modes, in which it is not so easy, nor perhaps possible for us to distinguish betwixt two approaching ideas, which yet are really different. For who will undertake to find a difference between the white of this paper and that of the next degree to it: or can form distinct ideas of every the least excess in extension?