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“The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are principally these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which way it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence. This is called abstraction and thus all its general ideas are made.”

John Locke

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Simplified Meaning:

The mind has three main ways of working with basic thoughts: 1) It mixes several basic thoughts to create more complex ones. 2) It looks at two thoughts side by side to understand how they are related. 3) It takes a thought away from other thoughts to understand it better on its own.

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Abstraction Cognitive processes Combination Ideas John locke Mind Philosophy Relation
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