Ideas

John Locke
26 pages (2008/1915); 197KB download
WOWIO Books; ISBN: WOWIO-00379

DESCRIPTION

Ideas, things and substance are examined in this excerpt from Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.”

“In 1690 John Locke published his ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding.’ The book marks the beginning of descriptive psychology, for, while its avowed purpose is ‘to inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge,’ yet it is actually a descriptive analysis of knowledge more than an examination of the ground of all knowledge. Besides this analysis, however, there are two features of Locke’s system that have had great influence. The first is that he declares all knowledge to come from experience, that is, from sensation and subsequent reflection. The second is that he points out that our sensations are not the things themselves, nor necessarily copies of the things, but that they represent powers or qualities, and that we presuppose the things as a support for a number of such qualities, the sensations from which are continually recurring together in our mind. Hence Locke is the spirit of sensualistic materialism on the one side, and on the other from his doctrine that substance is merely something presupposed as the ground of sensations grew Berkeley’s idealism.”—Oliver Joseph Thatcher