comprehensive vices, barbarism and solecism, the one being an offence
against accidence, the other against syntax.

The famous comparison of the infant mind to a blank sheet of paper,
which we connect so closely with the name of Locke, really comes from
the Stoics. The earliest characters inscribed upon it were the
impressions of sense, which the Greeks called "phantasies." A
phantasy was defined by Zeno as "an impression in the soul."
Cleanthes was content to take this definition in its literal sense,
and believe that the soul was impressed by external objects as wax by
a signet ring. Chrysippus, however, found a difficulty here, and
preferred to interpret the Master's saying to mean an alteration or
change in the soul. He figured to himself the soul as receiving a
modification from every external object which acts upon it just as
the air receives countless strokes when many people are speaking at
once. Further, he declared that in receiving an impression the soul
was purely passive and that the phantasy revealed not only its own
existence, but that also of its cause, just as light displays itself
and the things that are in it. Thus, when through sight we receive an
impression of white, an affection takes place in the soul, in virtue
whereof we are able to say that there exists a white object affecting
us. The power to name the object resides in the understanding. First
must come the phantasy, and the understanding, having the power of
utterance, expresses in speech the affection it receives from the
object. The cause of the phantasy was called the "phantast," _e.
g._ the white or cold object. If there is no external cause, then
the supposed object of the impression was a "phantasm," such as a
figure in a dream, or the Furies whom Orestes sees in his frenzy.

How then was the impression which had reality behind it to be