The works of John Locke Volume 3 Author:John Locke This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1812 Excerpt: ...is an eminent one) are alone productive of certain, uniform, and universal knowledge: Tims qualities of a certain kind, when abstracted, o... more »r taken apart from nature, and set up for common standards, are so far independent as to become absolute, unmixed, or perfect in themselves, however different they may be found in their respective concretes. Thus goodness, justice, guilt, merit, &e. in general, are ever the same goodness, &c. all the world over, however imperfectly they may appear in any particular subjects, times, and places. In the same manner as a line, or the abstract consideration of length without thickness or breadth; the consideration of surface, i. e. length and breadth without thickness, must be the same, in aH intelligent beings of like faculties with us, though the natural substances which suggest them may differ Note 10. to King's Origin of Evil. Rem. k. with an endless variety. Let personality answer to st line or surface; let the substances it is predicated of, like the infinite variety of solids in nature, (with their appendages, heat, cold, colour, &c.) in which length and breadth are found, vary as you please, still the abstract ideas of line and surface, and therefore of person, will remain invariable. And thus propositions formed out of these general ideas contain certain truths, that are in one sense external and immutable, as depending on no precarious existences whatever. Being merely what we ourselves make them, they must continue the same while the same number of such ideas continue joined together, and appear the same to every intelligent being that contemplates them. They do not stand in need (I say) of an objective reality, or the existence of any external things in full conformity to them, since we here consider th...« less