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1 8 8 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 2external reality (77). Epistemological sensualism comes to its own rescue, onemight say. “To one who argues all is a dream, Locke asks derisively whetherhe would rather dream of being in a fire, or actually be in it.” This does not ofcourse commit Locke to claiming that every sensory report accurately reflectsexternal reality. Locke explains sensory error by first distinguishing between“primary” and “secondary” qualities. Primary qualities—solidity, extension,shape—come to us infallibly through our senses; “our senses reveal to usattributes that really do inhere in objects” (78). Secondary qualities—color,smell, taste—are not intrinsic to the object perceived but vary with our ownsenses; one person might perceive colors differently than another, for example.Hence the wise monition not to dispute matters of taste. Thus far, Lockefollows Boyle.A further complexity arises in Locke’s distinction between “simple” and“complex” ideas or sense impressions. Simple ideas, such as yellow, white,heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, “merely signify that some external qualityis having the effect in question on our senses” (79). Complex ideas, however,are “compounded of simple ideas” and therefore involve the mind in theactive arrangement of the impressions it has received. From the simple ideasof brown, hard, rough, and cylindrical, our mind forms the complex idea,tree trunk. Such “bundles of qualities do appear together regularly in ourexperience; there really are tree trunks,” but “we must not imagine that wewill ever have fully adequate ideas of them”—only ideas more or less adequate“to our purposes” (79–80). Our minds “create” them, assembling them out ofpreexisting materials, calling certain sorts of order out of our perceptionswithout ever fully knowing if we’ve got it right. As we now say, the mind“abstracts from” sensory experience to construct its concepts. To “know” isnot to perceive a formal template but “to say that we have grasped somethingof the different modes in which matter may exist, and the regularitiesobserved by matter in those modes” (82). This is not (yet) “postmodernism”or a form of conventionalism; we are indeed perceiving something, or somethings that are out there. We are not creating ex nihilo. And of course reasonremains unchallenged; the sense impression white is not the sense impressionblack. There is no whiteblack in Locke’s world any more than there isin Plato’s or Aristotle’s or Aquinas’s. We may, without contradiction, defineman as a rational animal, a political animal, or a featherless biped, but wecannot run it together with donkey—at least, in any nonmetaphorical way(85). On the other hand, these species concepts remain only concepts; “thosebrought under a single species name often differ more among themselves