From which prejudice everyone, perhaps, will not find it easy
to emancipate himself, by any [but] the clearest convictions of reason.
And there are some grounds to think that if there was one only invariable
and universal languages in the world, and that men were born with the
faculty of speaking it, it would be the opinion of many that the ideas of
other men's minds were properly perceived by the ear, or had at least a
necessary and inseparable tie with the sounds that were affixed to them.
All which seems to arise from want of a due application of our discerning
faculty, thereby to discriminate between the ideas that are in our
understandings, and consider them apart from each other; which would
preserve us from confounding those that are different, and make us see
what ideas do, and what do not include or imply this or that other idea.
67. There is a celebrated phenomenon, the solution whereof I shall
attempt to give by the principles that have been laid down, in reference
to the manner wherein we apprehend by sight the magnitude of objects. The
apparent magnitude of the moon when placed in the horizon is much greater
than when it is in the meridian, though the angle under which the
diameter of the moon is seen be not observed greater in the former case
than in the latter: and the horizontal moon doth not constantly appear of
the same bigness, but at some times seemeth far greater than at others.
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