Empiricists
One claim, pressed harder by each thinker who took it up, until it nearly took everything down with it. The empiricists held that all knowledge starts in experience: the mind arrives empty, a blank sheet, and everything written on it comes in through the senses. There are no innate ideas, no truths the mind was born already holding. Bacon turned that conviction into a method and pointed it at nature. Hobbes made the mind itself nothing but matter in motion. Locke built the full system: the blank slate, ideas from sensation and reflection, and a sober map of how little can really be known. Berkeley pushed the principle until matter itself vanished. And Hume pushed it to the end of the line, where cause and effect, the self, and the proofs of God all dissolved into habit. It is the story of a single idea followed all the way down, and of the wreckage it left for the next philosopher to rebuild from.
