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Full Idea
He who in his sleep dreams of a winged man does not dream so without having seen some winged thing and a man. And in general it is impossible to find in conception anything which one does not possess as known by experience.
Gist of Idea
We can only dream of a winged man if we have experienced men and some winged thing
Source
Sextus Empiricus (Against the Logicians (two books) [c.180], II.058)
Book Ref
Sextus Empiricus: 'Against the Logicians', ed/tr. Bury,R.G. [Harvard Loeb 1997], p.267
A Reaction
This precisely David Hume's empiricist account of the formation of concepts. Hume's example is a golden mountain, which he got from Aquinas. How do we dream of faces we have never encountered, or shapes we have never seen?
Related Idea
Idea 2183 We can only invent a golden mountain by combining experiences [Hume]
| 22759 | Fools, infants and madmen may speak truly, but do not know [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22760 | Madmen are reliable reporters of what appears to them [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22762 | Some properties are inseparable from a thing, such as the length, breadth and depth of a body [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22763 | We can only dream of a winged man if we have experienced men and some winged thing [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22764 | Ordinary speech is not exact about what is true; we say we are digging a well before the well exists [Sext.Empiricus] |