4. Man’s nature is the sum of his natural faculties and powers, as the faculties of nutrition, motion, generation, sense, reason, &c. These powers we do unanimously call natural, and are contained in the definition of man, under these words, animal and rational.
5. According to the two principal parts of man, I divide his faculties into two sorts, faculties of the body, and faculties of the mind.
6. Since the minute and distinct anatomy of the powers of the body is nothing necessary to the present purpose, I will only sum them up in these three heads, power nutritive, power motive, and power generative.
7. Of the powers of the mind there be two sorts, cognitive, imaginative, or conceptive and motive; and first of cognitive.
For the understanding of what I mean by the power cognitive, we must remember and acknowledge that there be in our minds continually certain images or conceptions of the things without us, insomuch that if a man could be alive, and all the rest of the world annihilated, he should nevertheless retain the image thereof, and all those things which he had before seen or perceived in it; every one by his own experience knowing, that the absence or destruction of things once imagined doth not cause the absence or destruction of the imagination itself. This imagery and representations of the qualities of the thing without, is that we call our conception, imagination, ideas, notice or knowledge of them; and the faculty or power by which we are capable of such knowledge, is that I here call cognitive power, or conceptive, the power of knowing or conceiving.
CHAPTER II.
[2.] Definition of sense. [4.] Four propositions concerning the nature of conceptions. [5.] The first proved. [6.] The second proved. [7, 8.] The third proved. [9.] The fourth proved. [10.] The main deception of sense.
1. Having declared what I mean by the word conception, and other words equivalent thereunto, I come to the conceptions themselves, to shew their differences, their causes, and the manner of the production, so far as is necessary for this place.
Definition of sense.