BOOK II: Locke's ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
"No innate ideas"
1. Idea is the object of thinking. Every man
being conscious to himself that he thinks; and that which his mind is applied
about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there, it is past doubt that men
have in their minds several ideas,- such as are those expressed by the words
whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army,
drunkenness, and others: it is in the first place then to be inquired, How he
comes by them?
I know it is a received doctrine, that men have native
ideas, and original characters, stamped upon their minds in their very first
being. This opinion I have at large examined already; and, I suppose what I have
said in the foregoing Book will be much more easily admitted, when I have shown
whence the understanding may get all the ideas it has; and by what ways and
degrees they may come into the mind;- for which I shall appeal to every one's
own observation and experience.
2.All ideas come from sensation or reflection.
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all
characters, without any ideas:- How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by
that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with
an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and
knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our
knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our
observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the
internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is
that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These
two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can
naturally have, do spring.
3. The objects of sensation one source of ideas.
First, our Senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into
the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways
wherein those objects do affect them. And thus we come by those ideas we have of
yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we
call sensible qualities; which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I
mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those
perceptions. This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly
upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call SENSATION.
4. The operations of our minds, the other source of
them. Secondly, the other fountain from which experience furnisheth the
understanding with ideas is,- the perception of the operations of our own mind
within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got;- which operations, when
the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with
another set of ideas, which could not be had from things without. And such are
perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all
the different actings of our own minds;- which we being conscious of, and
observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings as
distinct ideas as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas
every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing
to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough
be called internal sense. But as I call the other SENSATION, so I Call this
REFLECTION, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting
on its own operations within itself. By reflection then, in the following part
of this discourse, I would be understood to mean, that notice which the mind
takes of its own operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof there
come to be ideas of these operations in the understanding. These two, I say,
viz. external material things, as the objects of SENSATION, and the operations
of our own minds within, as the objects of REFLECTION, are to me the only
originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings. The term operations
here I use in a large sense, as comprehending not barely the actions of the mind
about its ideas, but some sort of passions arising sometimes from them, such as
is the satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought.
5.All our ideas are of the one or the other of
these. The understanding seems to me not to have the least glimmering of
any ideas which it doth not receive from one of these two. External objects
furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all those
different perceptions they produce in us; and the mind furnishes the
understanding with ideas of its own operations.
These, when we have taken a full survey of them, and
their several modes, combinations, and relations, we shall find to contain all
our whole stock of ideas; and that we have nothing in our minds which did not
come in one of these two ways. Let any one examine his own thoughts, and
thoroughly search into his understanding; and then let him tell me, whether all
the original ideas he has there, are any other than of the objects of his
senses, or of the operations of his mind, considered as objects of his
reflection. And how great a mass of knowledge soever he imagines to be lodged
there, he will, upon taking a strict view, see that he has not any idea in his
mind but what one of these two have imprinted;- though perhaps, with infinite
variety compounded and enlarged by the understanding, as we shall see hereafter.
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