Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 6, 2025
In some, this complex idea contains a greater, and in others a smaller number of qualities; and so is apparently such as the mind makes it. The yellow shining colour makes gold to children; others add weight, malleableness, and fusibility; and others yet other qualities, which they find joined with that yellow colour, as constantly as its weight and fusibility.
Alike trifling it is to predicate any other part of the definition of the term defined, or to affirm anyone of the simple ideas of a complex one of the name of the whole complex idea; as, 'All gold is fusible. For fusibility being one of the simple ideas that goes to the making up the complex one the sound gold stands for, what can it be but playing with sounds, to affirm that of the name gold, which is comprehended in its received signification?
Steel rods, loadstones, glass pipes, and bottles of various acids were oftener before us than our meals. My uncle Hardwigg was once known to classify six hundred different geological specimens by their weight, hardness, fusibility, sound, taste, and smell. He corresponded with all the great, learned, and scientific men of the age.
Thus if to substance be joined the simple idea of a certain dull whitish colour, with certain degrees of weight, hardness, ductility, and fusibility, we have the idea of lead; and a combination of the ideas of a certain sort of figure, with the powers of motion, thought and reasoning, joined to substance, make the ordinary idea of a man.
Secondly, When judged to agree to real Existence, when they do not. When it having a complex idea made up of such a collection of simple ones as nature never puts together, it JUDGES it to agree to a species of creatures really existing; as when it joins the weight of tin to the colour, fusibility, and fixedness of gold. Thirdly, When judged adequate, without being so.
Thus, if we shall found our distinction upon the fusibility and different degree of having been charred, we shall confound fossil coals of very different degrees of value in burning, or of very different compositions as strata; if, again, we found it upon the purity of composition, in judging from the ashes, we shall confound fossil bodies of very different qualities, the one burning with much smoke and flame, the other without any; the one fusible almost like wax, the other fixed and infusible as charcoal.
Thus when we pronounce concerning gold, that it is fixed, our knowledge of this truth amounts to no more but this, that fixedness, or a power to remain in the fire unconsumed, is an idea that always accompanies and is joined with that particular sort of yellowness, weight, fusibility, malleableness, and solubility in AQUA REGIA, which make our complex idea signified by the word gold.
But essence, even in this sense, RELATES TO A SORT, AND SUPPOSES A SPECIES. For, being that real constitution on which the properties depend, it necessarily supposes a sort of things, properties belonging only to species, and not to individuals: v. g. supposing the nominal essence of gold to be a body of such a peculiar colour and weight, with malleability and fusibility, the real essence is that constitution of the parts of matter on which these qualities and their union depend; and is also the foundation of its solubility in aqua regia and other properties, accompanying that complex idea.
Another characteristic of the poetic temperament, allied with the preceding, likewise seems to belong in the region where words are not as yet emerging above the threshold of consciousness. I mean the strange feeling, witnessed to by many poets, of the fluidity, fusibility, transparency the infinitely changing and interchangeable aspects of the world as it appears to the senses.
For, though in the substance of gold one satisfies himself with colour and weight, yet another thinks solubility in aqua regia as necessary to be joined with that colour in his idea of gold, as any one does its fusibility; solubility in aqua regia being a quality as constantly joined with its colour and weight as fusibility or any other; others put into it ductility or fixedness, &c., as they have been taught by tradition or experience.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking