Do we create our Ideas?

We do not see objects through ideas created with us.

God does not produce them in us at every moment we need them.

The third opinion is that of those who claim that all ideas are created with us.

To recognize how little plausibility there is in this opinion, one must represent to oneself that there are in the world many different things of which we have ideas: but to speak only of simple figures, it is certain that their number is infinite; and even if one stops at a single one, such as the ellipse, one cannot doubt that the mind conceives an infinite number of different species of it, when it conceives that one of the diameters can be lengthened infinitely while the other remains always the same.

Likewise, the height of a triangle being able to be increased or decreased infinitely, while the side serving as base remains always the same, one conceives that there can be an infinite number of different species; and even—what I beg to be considered here—the mind perceives in some manner this infinite number, although it can imagine only very few of them, and cannot at the same time have particular and distinct ideas of many triangles of different species. But what must principally be noted is that this general idea that the mind has of this infinite number of triangles of different species proves enough that if one does not conceive through particular ideas all these different triangles—in a word, if one does not comprehend the infinite—it is not for lack of ideas, or that the infinite is not present to us; but it is only for lack of capacity and extent of mind. If a man applied himself to considering the properties of all the diverse species of triangles, even if he continued eternally this sort of study, he would never lack new and particular ideas, but his mind would tire itself uselessly.

What I have just said of triangles can be applied to figures of five, six, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand sides, and so on to infinity. And if the sides of a triangle, being able to have infinite relations to each other, make triangles of an infinity of species, it is easy to see that figures of four, five, or a million sides are capable of still greater differences, since they are capable of a greater number of relations and combinations of their sides than simple triangles.

The mind therefore sees all these things; it has ideas of them: it is certain that these ideas will never fail it, even if it employed infinite centuries in the consideration of a single figure; and if it does not perceive these infinite figures all at once, or if it does not comprehend the infinite, it is only because its capacity is very limited. It therefore has an infinite number of ideas—what am I saying, an infinite number!—it has as many infinite numbers of ideas as there are different figures; so that since there is an infinite number of different figures, in order to know only figures, the mind must have an infinity of infinite numbers of ideas.

Now, I ask whether it is plausible that God created so many things with the human mind. For me, this does not appear so; principally because this can be done in another very simple and very easy manner, as we shall see shortly. For, since God always acts by the simplest ways, it does not appear reasonable to explain how we know objects by admitting the creation of an infinity of beings, since one can resolve this difficulty in a more easy and more natural manner.

But even if the mind had a storehouse of all the ideas that are necessary for it to see objects, it would nevertheless be impossible to explain how the soul could choose them to represent them to itself; how, for example, it could happen that it perceives, at the very moment it opens its eyes in the middle of a countryside, all these diverse objects whose size, figure, distance, and motion it discovers. It could not even, by this means, perceive a single object, such as the sun, when it is present to the body’s eyes; for, since the image that the sun imprints in the brain does not resemble the idea we have of it, as has been proved elsewhere, and even that the soul does not perceive the motion that the sun produces at the bottom of the eyes and in the brain, it is not conceivable that it could rightly guess, among this infinite number of ideas it would have, which one it would need to represent to itself in order to imagine or see the sun, and to see it of such or such a determined size. One cannot therefore say that the ideas of things are created with us, and that this suffices for us to see the objects that surround us.

One cannot say either that God produces as many new ones at every moment as we perceive different things. This is sufficiently refuted by what has just been said in this chapter. Moreover, it is necessary that at all times we actually have within ourselves the ideas of all things; since at all times we can wish to think of all things; which we could not do if we did not already perceive them confusedly—that is to say, if an infinite number of ideas were not present to our mind; for finally one cannot wish to think of objects of which one has no idea. Moreover, it is evident that the idea or the immediate object of our mind, when we think of immense spaces, of a circle in general, of indeterminate being, is nothing created; for no created reality can be either infinite or even general, such as what we then perceive. But all this will be seen more clearly in what follows.