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Full Idea
'Matter' is a partial and more confused conception, it seeming to me to be used for the substance and solidity of body, without taking in its extension and figure.
Gist of Idea
I take 'matter' to be a body, excluding its extension in space and its shape
Source
John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 3.10.15)
Book Ref
Locke,John: 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding', ed/tr. Nidditch,P.H. [OUP 1979], p.498
A Reaction
The 'without taking in' I take to mean that matter is an abstraction (of the psychological kind) from the character of physical bodies. Matter does not exist without having an extension and figure.
| 13470 | Mass is central to matter [Newton, by Hart,WD] |
| 15978 | I take 'matter' to be a body, excluding its extension in space and its shape [Locke] |
| 12718 | Secondary matter is active and complete; primary matter is passive and incomplete [Leibniz] |
| 19416 | Not all of matter is animated, any more than a pond full of living fish is animated [Leibniz] |
| 19422 | Every particle of matter contains organic bodies [Leibniz] |
| 19436 | Bare or primary matter is passive; it is clothed or secondary matter which contains action [Leibniz] |
| 7560 | Leibniz struggled to reconcile bodies with a reality of purely soul-like entities [Jolley on Leibniz] |
| 6731 | No one can explain how matter affects mind, so matter is redundant in philosophy [Berkeley] |
| 14301 | We have no good concept of solidity or matter, because accounts of them are all circular [Hume] |
| 16603 | In the 17th C matter became body, and was then studied by science [Pasnau] |