Work · Locke
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
1689 · Four books
There are no innate ideas; the mind starts blank and is written on by experience.
4
Books
1689
Published
White paper
The famous image
Two kinds of quality
Locke splits what the senses report. Some ideas (shape, size, motion) copy features genuinely in the body; others (colour, sound, taste) are real experiences in us but match nothing in the thing itself, which holds only the power to cause them. The line is the hinge Berkeley would later pull on to argue that nothing at all is left outside the mind.
The shape of the argument
Book I
Against innate ideas: there are none. If any were stamped in at birth, children and "idiots" would have them, and they do not.
Book II
Where ideas really come from: the two fountains of sensation and reflection, simple ideas combined into complex ones, and the white paper written on by experience.
Book III
Words: how general terms get their meaning, and how the abuse of words breeds most of the disputes that pass for philosophy.
Book IV
Knowledge: what it is (perceiving how ideas agree or clash), its three degrees, its narrow limits, and the clean border between reason and faith.
The cast
Locke — sets out to map the limits of the understanding so that what lies inside them can be trusted
The two fountains — sensation and reflection: the only two sources from which every idea is drawn
White paper — Locke’s own image for the mind at birth, void of all characters until experience writes on it
Innate ideas — the doctrine he spends Book I demolishing, that some truths are stamped in from birth
The famous bits
No innate ideasBook I
If truths were printed on the mind at birth, everyone would already have them, and plainly not everyone does.
White paperBook II
Suppose the mind to be white paper, void of all characters: how does it come to be furnished?
The two fountainsBook II
Every idea flows from one of two sources, the outward senses and the inward observation of the mind’s own workings.
Primary and secondary qualitiesBook II
Shape is in the thing; colour is only a power in the thing to produce a sensation in you.
Personal identityBook II
What makes you the same person over time is not the same soul or body but the reach of your own consciousness.
Reason and faithBook IV
Faith has its own province beyond reason’s reach, but it can never license believing against what reason plainly knows.