1.
Introduction to Empiricism
Understanding brought to the fore
1. So what did Locke do? Let’s go back to the question of principal concern to the
greatest Rationalist thinkers: substance. Establishing the correct definition and
determining the fundamental kinds of substance seems a natural point with which
to begin philosophizing: substances are what the world consists of; they are
fundamental, prior to everything else, the foundation of all objective thought and
knowledge. So how can we take a step in metaphysics – the science of the first
principles of reality – unless we begin with substances?
2. To this, Locke would ask what need have creatures like human beings, who have
all they can do just to keep body and soul together, of god-like understandings of
the sort Leibniz ascribed to us?
Look around and see how humans actually employ their understandings, and
then consider whether it does not seem incautious, at the very least, to attribute to
ourselves capacities to penetrate beyond the world of our experience to know the
ultimate essences of things. Maybe metaphysical speculations requires us to punch
too far above our intellectual weight?
3. Certainly, from Locke’s point of view, our speculations have outrun the
evidence when philosophers blithely endow us with special faculties that have no
conceivable use except to carry out arcane metaphysical speculations. Before we
ascribe to ourselves faculties of pure intellect, stocked with a wealth of innate
ideas, we should first inquire whether such knowledge as we incontestably have,
above all mathematics, can be explained on humbler, more mundane principles,
as simply more refined applications of the very same operations our
understandings perform in a state of nature.
4. This may not sound very revolutionary, but in fact the idea of making the
understanding the first concern of philosophy – the thing we must investigate
before anything else, including the nature of substances – completely changed the
face of philosophy up to and including Kant. Whereas before Locke the main
works of philosophers focused on the metaphysics of substances, after him they
took human understanding, or more broadly human nature, as their primary
concern, and only then took up the questions of substances and their nature,
answering them in the light of their theory of the understanding.
2.
5. I just want to read to you the passage in the Essay where Locke states this call
for a reorientation of philosophy to human understanding. It is on p. 271 of your
text, ECHU I.i.§7:
Occasion of this essay. This was that which gave the first rise to this Essay
concerning the understanding. For I thought that the first step towards
satisfying several inquiries the mind of man was very apt to run into, was, to
take a survey of our own understandings, examine our own powers, and see to
what things they were adapted. Till that was done I suspected we began at the
wrong end, and in vain sought for satisfaction in a quiet and sure possession
of truths that most concerned us, whilst we let loose our thoughts into the vast
ocean of Being; as if all that boundless extent were the natural and undoubted
possession of our understandings, wherein there was nothing exempt from its
decisions, or that escaped its comprehension. Thus men, extending their
inquiries beyond their capacities, and letting their thoughts wander into those
depths where they can find no sure footing, it is no wonder that they raise
questions and multiply disputes, which, never coming to any clear resolution,
are proper only to continue and increase their doubts, and to confirm them at
last in perfect scepticism. Whereas, were the capacities of our understandings
well considered, the extent of our knowledge once discovered, and the horizon
found which sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things;
between what is and what is not comprehensible by us, men would perhaps
with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ
their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction in the other.
6. Here Locke calls for a transformation of philosophy. Instead of determining
what kind of understanding we have by the first establishing which definition of
substance is correct, we decide on the correct definition of substance by first
determining which powers our understandings have and determining from this how
far their reach is, and in particular, how far they are able to conceive and to
know substances.
7. The point is to begin by understanding understanding, and from this to
determine not only its powers but the limits of its powers, before attempting to
employ this faculty to understand anything else, be it substance, God, freedom
of the will, the immortality of the soul, or any other metaphysical topic.
8. Locke’s Essay focuses on three principal powers of the understanding: the
powers to form ideas, to signify by means of them (esp. in language), and to gain
knowledge by means of ideas, esp. of the reality beyond them (i.e. outside our
minds). He argued that when we become clear about the nature of these powers
3.
especially their limits, it emerges that a clear and distinct idea of substance is not
within its capacity to form and that any talk of the real and ultimate essence of
substances is just that: mere talk devoid of meaning.
9. For we can argue till we are blue in the face that substance must be this or must
be that, and that its ultimate essence must consist in this or in that; but if it turns
out that our understandings lack the power to form any idea adequate to support
our words, then the only conclusion is that we quite literally do not know what we
are talking about.
10. Thus, Locke calls for us to first determine what our understandings conceive
and do not conceive when forming ideas of substances. If the result shows the idea
of substance we actually have to be incapable of underwriting the kind of
metaphysical speculation that was the stock and trade of Rationalists, then,
however persuasive their claims may be in words, they will have to be considered
empty of objective content. Their definitions will be nothing but grammatical
mirages and the consequences deduced from them, far from disclosing new truths,
will simply ensnare us ever more deeply in webs of words.
Intellectualist method
1. That is Locke’s basic approach and the kind of result it is capable of producing.
More particularly, his complaint was not with the Rationalists’ search for clear and
distinct perceptions of the ideas most fundamental to our thought about objective
reality as such. For Locke, a precise accounting of the contents of our ideas of
substance, cause and effect, identity, space, time, existence, relation, necessity, and
so on, is, just as Descartes maintained, the essential prerequisite for metaphysics.
2. It was not the goal but the method of attaining it favored by the Rationalist that
Locke challenged. Rationalists sought to clarify ideas by analytical means not all
that different from Plato’s Socratic approach of whittling away the extraneous to
leave all and only what is essential to the idea, that is, its correct definition.
Locke, however, was not interested in what ideas we should have but in those
we actually do, and to discover this he favored a psychological approach
designed to determine the contents of ideas by tracing them to their origin, i.e. how
they first come into the possession of our understandings.
3. There is, however, a more fundamental point of difference that explains why
Rationalists were not only not interested in the psychology of the origin of the
4.
ideas but thought it a major hindrance to a correct understanding of their true
contents.
4. Like Plato, the Rationalists took ideas to preexist their presence to
consciousness in perception. There isn’t really an agreed upon name for this
view, but in my own work on modern philosophy I call it intellectualism.
5. This is why Rationalists tended to distinguish ideas properly so called from
other modifications of the mind like sensations or emotions. Sensations and
emotions exist only in being perceived, in being present to consciousness. A
headache is a headache only insofar as it is felt, consciously perceived; prior to and
independently of consciousness, there can be no headaches at all. It would, for
example, be absurd to say of someone that he is suffering a horrible migraine but
doesn’t know it; more absurd to say this of someone in the deepest levels of sleep,
or someone in coma, much less of a corpse or statue. So too for pains generally,
pleasures, emotions like fear or rage.
6. For reasons we haven’t focused on in great detail, Rationalists and Empiricists
alike said the same thing of what have come to be known as ideas of secondary
qualities: colors, sounds, smells, flavors, i.e. sensations generally: these too exist
only in being perceived. And for Rationalists this was enough to say that, on a
strict accounting, they are not ideas at all (i.e. intellectualist criteria must be
satisfied before a thought can be accounted an idea, i.e. accorded objective reality).
7. Ideas properly so called, as the Rationalists conceived them, are images of true
and immutable natures: essences, beings, things that could exist if God or some
other cause produces them. We have already seen abundant examples of
Rationalists insisting that the way we get to a clearer and more distinct perception
of these ideas is by eliminating the sensory elements with which they become
confused, and this includes not only sensations, imaginings, and passions but also
the ideas that result from the psychological operations performed on sensory data,
e.g. the way an object seen at 20 yards and the same object seen at 5 yards seems
to have the same size even though it takes up four times as much of our visual field
(the sense would say it has grown, psychology corrects for this and makes it seem
unchanged).
8. But what this boils down to is what I’m calling intellectualism: ideas, properly
so called, preexist sensations and sensory psychology, so that however useful and
important they may be for our getting along in the world, they are to be treated as
contaminants when it comes to attaining a clear and distinct perception of the ideas
5.
themselves, that is, the contents proper to them, what they are in themselves, as
opposed to the contents superimposed on them by our human-mammalian
psychological means of gaining conscious access to them. All this is just
incrustation that must be stripped away like barncales from the hull of a boat
if we are to get at the ideas themselves concealed beneath.
9. Because of their intellectualist commitments, the only philosophical virtue
Rationalists could find in sensory psychology is to identify those contents that only
seem to belong to the ideas but in fact have their origins in our ways of perceiving
ideas so that they may forthwith be stripped off, eliminated, disregarded. Thus, for
them, the utility of psychology is wholly negative, and the main work of getting
at the actual contents of ideas must be performed by strictly analytical
methods aimed at producing a correct definition.
10. For example, it is the human senses that make a triangle apprehended visually
seem to have the property of color, and the same triangle apprehended by touch
seem to have such properties as being, say, room temperature, dry, and smooth.
These properties do not belong to the triangle itself but are rather added to it by our
minds’ subjective sensory constitution. If we had different senses than those we
do, the triangle would appear differently in perception; and if we had no senses at
all but like God apprehend things purely intellectually, we would find no sensory
qualities at all in our idea of the triangle.
11. Obviously, if we strip out everything distinctively visual in our perceptions of
triangles as well as everything distinctively tactual there will be nothing left: our
senses cannot perceive invisible, intangible triangles. Nevertheless, the
Rationalists held that this is no impediment, we can apprehend them purely
intellectually by means of words in a definition.
Geometry shows us how and also shows how, from definitions, together with
self-evident axioms, we can discover properties that belong to all triangles as such,
properties that belong to them of necessity and about which we can be absolutely
certain, such as the equality of the sum of their angles to two right angles.
Isn’t the discovery of such universally and necessarily valid properties
ample proof that the definitions geometers start from are correct, that is, that
they give us access to the content of the idea purely intellectually, with no help
from the senses? And doesn’t this in turn prove that this and other ideas we
can know by means of geometry and other equally rigorous a priori sciences
preexist their presence to consciousness in sense perception?
12. This is Rationalism’s persuasive force in a nutshell: no other explanation of the
6.
most indubitable kinds of knowledge seems as adequate. But it does premise the
intellectualist thesis that ideas preexist their presence to consciousness in
perception, which inevitably raises the question: how, by what means and in what
capacity, do ideas preexist perception?
13. Thus usual response was to claim that ideas are present in our understandings
innately, that is, they belong to our essence, part of the divine endowment that
makes us each the intellectual beings we are, whether we exist or not.
The only major exception was Malebranche, who held that these ideas are not
innate to our minds but to God’s and that God confers on us a special kind of pure
intellectual vision that enables us to behold them (a view known as
illuminationism).
14. Both innatism and illuminationism are forms of intellectualism, as is Plato’s
view that ideas are forms existing in their own purely intelligible realm distinct
from the sensible world: on all these views, ideas preexist their presence to
consciousness in perception, with the consequence that psychology can tell us
nothing positive about the contents of these ideas and so has at most a
secondary role to play in philosophy. Philosophy, then, is just like mathematics:
an abstract, analytical, non-empirical science.
Sensibilism
1. It was intellectualism, particularly in its innatist form, that Locke’s Essay is
dedicated to combatting and replacing with the opposing view that ideas do not
preexist their presence to consciousness in sense perception, and its principal
consequence: that sensory psychology, far from being irrelevant except to mask the
true content of ideas, is actually the best method by which to discover (clarify,
make distinct) what their contents really are. This view I call sensibilism.
2. On a sensibilist view, human understanding has no contents proper to itself
(whether innately or by illumination) other than the ideas we get empirically from
inwardly sensing its various operations (what Locke terms ideas of reflexion by
contrast with ideas of sensation). All our ideas, including those most essential to
our grasp of reality (the substance package), are either identical with sensations
or are nothing more than various ways of regarding sensations – separately, in
combination, related, in abstraction from time and place, etc.
2. For nearly all intents and purposes sensibilism and empiricism are
7.
interchangeable notions. Sensibilism says that all our ideas derives from the
senses, be it sensation or reflexion. Since perceptions of sensation and reflexion
are the very definition of a posteriori, or empirical, there may seem to be no point
in complicating matters by introducing another term. The reason I do so is because
of Kant: while a sensibilist like Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, he was not an
empiricist; he introduced the notion that the senses represent objects entirely a
priori, a notion very complex and confusing that few would even pretend to
understand but is still important to note because it is premised in everything in
Kant’s philosophy and Kant is the most important philosopher of the last two
thousand years if not of all time.
3. So empiricism should be understood as a variety of sensibilism, an answer to the
question how the ideas of the senses are given analogous to the answer Rationalists
philosophers give to the question how ideas preexist their presence to the senses
(innatism, illuminationism, and Platonism being the principal answers).
5. This is just to warn you that there is a That-question and a How-question to be
distinguished here just as there is in the case of Rationalism. But since we won’t
be getting to Kant in this course, I will try to restrict myself to the usual term
‘empiricism’ but ask that you keep in mind that I generally have sensibilism
uppermost in mind, i.e. the view that contrasts not with innatism but with
intellectualism.
Origins: the psychological method
1. Now all this is just meant to help you to appreciate the significance of the
sudden prominence of psychological considerations in philosophy after Locke
when before him they were more or less disdained. The role of psychology, in
particular, is to clarify the content thought in philosophically controversial
concepts by tracing them back to their origin as ideas in the mind: which
operations of the understanding are responsible for them and whether they are
purely mental or mixed up in some way or other with the verbal (i.e. what can only
be thought by linguistic means or, more generally, by means of signs).
2. Of course, you may well ask why Locke and his successors were so concerned
with clarifying ideas by tracing ideas back to their first origins in the mind. Why
bother to do that when a far more direct method is ready to hand and seems not
only easier but surer as well? To wit: why not go straight to the idea itself, lay it
out for inspection, and read off its contents directly, without worrying when and
8.
how we first got it into our minds?
3. There are four main reasons why Locke and his successors rejected the direct
approach. They are a bit complicated but important to understand. Don’t worry if
they do not sink in completely all at once because we’ll be returning to these and
related considerations repeatedly through the remainder of the semester, to
understand why empiricism took the course it did from Locke to Berkeley, from
Berkeley to Hume, and from Hume to the threshold of Kant.
4. Difficult to scrutinize directly. The ideas we actually operate with in thought
and reasoning are not the original sensations and reflexions but the copies we make
of them after they are gone. These copies we can manipulate in various ways in
the course of reasoning – rearrange their order, take them apart, put them together
with other things in new ways, compare them, and operate them in all kinds of
other ways that simply aren’t possible with their sensation originals alone.
Yet, this ease of manipulation comes at a price. Their copies are in every way
less easy to scrutinize than the sensations themselves. Where sensations and
reflexions are quite literally tangible, visible, noisemaking, smelly, tasty things – as
palpably real as anything can be, vividly present – their copies in thought are faint,
evanescent, and wavering, almost dreamlike. They are consequently much more
difficult to seize mental hold of and lay open for inspection than their sensation
originals.
Sensibilist therefore looked to the vivid clarity of sensations and reflexions as
the best way to clarify the contents of their images in thought.
5. Limits of our capacity for attentive discernment. A second reason why
sensibilist philosophers rejected the direct approach to clarifying ideas concerns
the limits of our capacity to inspect what’s going on in our minds (introspection:
the ability to attend to what’s going on in one’s mind and directly inspect its
contents).
Things our minds are habituated to doing, they tend to do with such extreme
rapidity as to seem, to our introspective gaze, to take no time at all. This makes it
easy for us to mistake ideas that in fact involve complex mental activity, and
cannot exist apart from it, for simple passive givens of sense.
6. A good example is our ability to see a happy face, a sad face, an angry face and
so forth. We cannot of course literally see emotions. What we see is a sheath of
skin colored by underlying blood, muscle, and other biomatter, so that it is not
emotions we see playing across it but motions caused by the rippling of various
facial muscles, blood vessels filling up and expanding or emptying out and
9.
contracting etc. Nevertheless, once we have built up a sufficient body of
experience of faces, and have learned to associate their postures, motions, and
coloration with inner emotional states, it is just as if we did see them as directly as
we do light and color, with the consequence that this complex mental process is
mistaken for immediate perception.
7. There are other phenomena Locke and others adduced to make this point.
On is hearing speech spoken in our native tongue. If we direct our attention at
it, it is impossible not to understand what is being said. It is impossible for us to
direct our attention at it and, by a sheer act of will, hear it as a dog might or as
recording devices register it: a seamless ribbon of sound rather than an articulated
sequence of discrete phonemes each of which contribute to conveying the
meaning. Certainly, there must have been a point very early in life where we heard
speech just as the seamless ribbon of sound that appears to our consciousness in
auditory sensation; but our mastery of speech transforms this so that not only is our
attention fixed on the meaning, we cannot, not matter how hard we try, attend to it
any other way. It is only because we know that children have to learn to talk that
we know that this is not a case of genuine perception but of complex operations
that people take a long time to master.
8. Another example Locke and others considered is distance vision. An object we
see at twenty paces seems to grow as it approaches us, so that at two paces it fills
up ten times as much of the visual field as it did originally. Yet, we do not treat
this as a change in the object, i.e. we do not conclude that it grew, we conclude
only that our point of view on the object changed.
The curious thing is that, very early in life, this ceases being a matter of
reasoning about things and becomes part of the way the object looks to us to be, so
that even while its appearance to our sense of sight grows markedly, it seems not to
grow but to maintain the same size throughout. Because we do not explicitly
reason it out, however, we mistake this complex psychological process of
correcting for appearances with what appears to our senses directly, before any
mental activity is performed on the sensory input.
In other words, the operation, though complex, is performed so quickly and
unobstrusively that it completely escapes our introspective gaze. We have to rely
on indirect considerations, on extrapolation and reasoning, to determine that here
introspection cannot be relied upon. And if it cannot be relied on for selfknowledge here, don’t we need to be very careful about relying on it in other
cases, including ones where the evidence of complex psychological processing
is not so ready to hand?
10.
9. For these kinds of reasons attentive discernment – introspection – was not
considered a reliable guide to the contents of thoughts, and other, less direct but
more reliable methods were favored, methods focused on our first acquisition of
the mental skills in question. Thus Locke (this text is posted on the course
website, the editors made a bad decision and omitted it):
By habit, ideas of sensation are unconsciously changed into ideas of
judgment. Nor need we wonder that this is done with so little notice, if we
consider how quick the actions of the mind are performed. For, as itself is
thought to take up no space, to have no extension; so its actions seem to
require no time, but many of them seem to be crowded into an instant. I speak
this in comparison to the actions of the body. Any one may easily observe this
in his own thoughts, who will take the pains to reflect on them. How, as it
were in an instant, do our minds, with one glance, see all the parts of a
demonstration, which may very well be called a long one, if we consider the
time it will require to put it into words, and step by step show it another?
Secondly, we shall not be so much surprised that this is done in us with so
little notice, if we consider how the facility which we get of doing things, by a
custom of doing, makes them often pass in us without our notice. Habits,
especially such as are begun very early, come at last to produce actions in us,
which often escape our observation. How frequently do we, in a day, cover
our eyes with our eyelids, without perceiving that we are at all in the dark!
Men that, by custom, have got the use of a by-word, do almost in every
sentence pronounce sounds which, though taken notice of by others, they
themselves neither hear nor observe. And therefore it is not so strange, that
our mind should often change the idea of its sensation into that of its
judgment, and make one serve only to excite the other, without our taking
notice of it.
10. The confusion of language with thought. A third reason sensibilists like
Locke did not rely primarily introspection to get at the content of ideas is that it
carries a great risk of confusing the content of ideas with linguistic meaning. In
their view, linguistic and ideational understanding march to the beat of very
different drummers and one must always be on guard against the temptation to
attribute to ideas what is true only of words.
11. Language depends on conventions – implicit rules which everyone must agree
to abide by in order for a certain practice to work, e.g. the convention of driving on
the right – whereas ideas are a natural phenomenon, as natural to the human mind
as to creatures like dogs and horses that lack the capacity for language, as real as
the sensations they copy, as real as other mental states such as headaches, and,
11.
more particularly, they exist prior to and independently of everything that has to do
with human social interaction.
12. Another feature of ideas is that they are essentially private: no one but me is
privy to what is appearing to my consciousness (if I am color blind, you cannot
know that the colors you see are invisible to me). I cannot share my ideas with
you, you cannot share yours with me; they are by their very nature accessible only
to the mind that has them.
Language, by contrast, is by its very nature public. To be sure, I can talk to
myself; but the same sentences I say in the privacy of my own mind I can repeat
out loud. Indeed, even in the privacy of my own head, sentences have meaning
only in and through publicly instituted meanings in much the same way, e.g., the
money I have buried deep underground that no one else knows about has value,
and counts as money, only insofar as it would be accepted as legal tender by others
(otherwise it is only so much paper and metal – as language is only so many throat
warblings and ink scratches in the absence of conventions and the instituted
meanings [“rules of propriety” as Locke termed them] they make possible).
13. Language and ideas are thus utterly different things: one artificial and public,
the other natural and private. Yet – and here is the problem that concerned
Empiricists like Locke – in practice, words and ideas are always found mixed up
together and extremely difficult to keep separate, so much so that properties of the
one that are completely incompatible with the other get attributed to the other
anyway and even the most vigilant introspection is unable to prevent this. Only
extensive philosophical reflection combined with great care and effort in
application can succeed in freeing us from this type of confusion and enable us to
penetrate the mists of language to discover what actually is and is not present to
our minds beneath our talk.
14. And even then, when we penetrate the veil of language, there is still a risk.
For, according to the Empiricists, ideas have a twofold use in the understanding:
they are not only the only objects with which our minds are ever acquainted but
also are put to use to as signs to designate other objects (ideas), and differences of
signification do not always coincide with differences of ideas.
15. Take, for example, a tone, say a middle C sounded on a piano. Does the tone –
the sensation-idea – consist of two distinguishable parts, the piano timbre and the
middle-C pitch? To answer yes, it would have to be possible to hear pitchless
timbres and timbreless pitches. But it is not. In the sensation, they are one and
inseparable, and therefore are one and inseparable in their idea copies. But it is
12.
nevertheless true that the idea of that tone can be put to use in two quite distinct
significative roles: to designate all piano timbres irrespective of their pitch or to
designate all pitches of middle C whether played on piano, violin, kazoo, or what
not.
16. It is all too easy to mistake significative uses of ideas for real distinctions
within the ideas themselves. Introspection is totally unreliable here. Once I learn
to distinguish visible shape from color, I can suppose that I can see the shape in the
sense of forming separate idea of it and prove it to myself by fancying that I can
attend exclusively to the shape, direct my mind at it, and can do so with no help
from language.
But Empiricists (less so Locke than Berkeley and Hume) believed that if we
trace these distinctions to their origin, we will find that we are dealing not with
separate ideas but merely with different significative uses of one and the same
idea. So that we do not literally see the shape without the color or the color
without the shape, anymore than we hear pitchless timbres or timbreless pitches,
and that if all trace of the different ways this visual idea can be used to signify, we
would not dream that any distinction is possible in such cases.
17. Extraneous meaning from being embedded in a wider context. Fourth and
finally, the ideas copied from sensations that we employ in thought and reasoning
become embedded in a network of acquired meanings. The occasion for this is the
taking of ever more general points of view. Take for example the idea of scarlet.
Locke believed that, at the level of the senses, we can directly discern a quality
common to scarlet and burgundy, the quality we denote by the term ‘red’. But
there simply is nothing we can strictly speaking see that is common to scarlet and a
shade of yellow, a shade of blue, or any shade of any other color than red. So how
do we form the general idea of color?
18. According to Locke this happens not at the level of ideas but by means of a
linguistic generalization. Instead of any quality of the ideas, the concept of color is
fixed linguistically by keying it to all and only sensations entering by way of the
eyes. When we think of scarlet as a color thereafter, we are then apt to integrate it
into the field of optical concepts. Without the sensation itself having anything
added to its intrinsic content (nothing about the eye is present in the sensation of
scarlet), extrinsic meaning trickles down into it by virtue of its place in language,
so that it becomes related in our minds to the context of the anatomy and workings
of the eye, the physics of its stimulation, the nature of light, the chemistry of dyes,
etc. And this is only a few of the meaning nexuses into which the idea is drawn
that in turn seem to trickle down into it.
13.
19. Since these extrinsic meanings are so confounded together with its intrinsic
ideational content, introspection is useless to distinguish them and so can be of no
help to us if our endeavor is to discover what the contents are of the ideas present
to our minds, and to them alone. Consequently, Empiricists held that if we are
ever to distinguish what belongs to the idea itself, as its proper content, from what
accrues to it by virtue of its place in the infinitely ramifying nexus of concepts in
language, we must return to the originating sensation.
20. For since the sensation is not itself employed in thought and reasoning, it stays
detached and can be considered in complete isolation. Unlike the ideas copied
from them, the sensation originals of our ideas have no (linguistically derived)
conceptual strings attached but instead stand apart, in isolation, easy to take hold of
and lay open for inspection. We can therefore be quite confident what contents do
and do not belong to the ideas we copy from them.