AS Epitomes
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Abstract
©The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute.
Contents Updated: Saturday, 5 July 2008
John Locke
John Locke was born at Wrington, Somersetshire, August 29, 1632. He went to Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, but he rebelled against the system of education in vogue and the public disputations of the schools, which he thought invented for wrangling and ostentation rather than to discover truth. He found in Descartes his relish of philosophkal things. From 1683 to 1689 he was forced, for political reasons, to stay in Holland, where the Essay was completed. First published in 1690, twenty editions of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding had appeared before 1700, for few works of philosophy so speedily won the approval of the thinking world.
It is a lengthy treatise, extending to some three hundred thousand words. Seventeen years were spent on its preparation, and it originated in an effort to set down clearly, “on a sheet of notepaper”, for a group of friends, the questions with which human understanding can deal. The design of the work, Locke explains, is to inquire “into the origin, certainty and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion and assent”. Locke’s resolute devotion to truth, his instant surrender to the proven fact, his distrust of the emotional, his splendid tolerance, are conspicuous in the famous essay.
Ideas and Understanding
Idea being that term which serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding, I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is the mind can be employed about in thinking. Let us, then, suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters—without any ideas. Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? To this, I answer in one word—experience, in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself.
Let anyone examine his own thoughts and thoroughly search his understanding, and then let him tell me whether of all the original ideas he has there are any other than of the objects of his senses, or of the observations of his mind considered as objects of his reflection. Though the qualities that affect our senses are, in the things themselves, so united and blended that there is no separation, no distance between them, yet it is plain the ideas they produce in the mind enter by the senses simple and unmixed. For though the sight and touch often take in from the same object at the same time different ideas, yet the simple ideas thus united in the same subject are as perfectly distinct as those that come in by different senses. The coldness and hardness which a man feels in a piece of ice being as distinct ideas in the mind as the smell and whiteness of a lily, and each of them being in itself uncompounded contains nothing but one uniform appearance, or conception, in the mind, and is not distinguishable into different ideas.
When the understanding is once stored with these simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare and unite them even to an almost infinite variety, and so can make at will new complex ideas. But it is not in the power of any most exalted wit or enlarged understanding, by any quickness or variety of thought, to invent or frame one new simple idea in the mind, nor to destroy those that are there. I would have anyone try to fancy any taste which had npver affected his palate, or frame the idea of a scent he had never smelt, and when he can do this, I will also conclude that a blind man hath ideas of colours and a deaf man true, distinct notions of sound.
There are some ideas which have admittance only through one sense which is peculiarly adapted to receive them. Thus, light and colours come in only by the eye, all kinds of noises by the ear, the tastes and smells by the nose and palate. The most considerable of those belonging to the touch are heat, cold and solidity—which is the idea that belongs to the body, whereby we conceive it to fill space. Simple ideas of divers senses are the ideas of space or extension, figure, rest and motion, for these make perceivable impressions on the eyes and touch, and we can receive and convey into our minds the ideas of the extension, figure, motion and rest of bodies by seeing and feeling.
Mind
The mind, receiving the ideas mentioned in the foregoing from without, when it turns its view inward upon itself and observes its own actions about those ideas it has, takes from thence other ideas which are as capable to be the objects of its contemplation as any of those it received from foreign things.
The two great and principal actions of the mind which are most frequently considered, and which are so frequent that everyone that pleases may take notice of them in himself, are these two—perception or thinking, and volition or will. The power of thinking is called the understanding, and the power of volition is called the will. And these two powers or abilities in the mind are denominated faculties. Modes of these simple ideas of reflection are remembrance, discerning, reasoning, judging, knowledge.
Attached to several objects and to the ideas which we receive from them, as also to several of our thoughts, is a concomitant pleasure, and that in several objects to several degrees, that those faculties might not remain wholly unemployed by us. Pain has the same efficacy and use to set us on work that pleasure has, we being as ready to employ our faculties to avoid that as to pursue this.
Existence and unity are two other ideas that are suggested to the understanding by every object without and every idea within. Power is another of those simple ideas which we receive from sensation and reflection, and, besides these, there is succession.
Nor let anyone think these too narrow bounds for the capacious mind of man to expatiate in, which takes its flight farther than the stars and cannot be confined by the limits of the world, that extends its thoughts often even beyond the utmost expansion of matter and makes excursions into that incomprehensible inane. Nor will it be so strange to think these few simple ideas sufficient to employ the quickest thought or largest capacity if we consider how many words may be made out of the various composition of twenty four letters. Or if, going one step farther, we will but reflect on the variety of combinations that may be made with barely one of the above mentioned ideas, number, whose stock is inexhaustible. And what a large and immense field doth extension alone afford the mathematicians!
Qualities
The power to produce any idea in our mind I call quality of the subject wherein the power is. Qualities are, first, such as are utterly inseparable from the body in what state soever it be. These I call original or primary qualities, which I think we may observe to produce simpleideas in us, solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number.
Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, ie by the bulk, figure, texture and motion of their insensible parts. These secondary qualities are colours, sounds, tastes, etc. From whence it is easy to draw this observation, that the ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances of them, but the ideas produced in us by the secondary qualities have no resemblance in them at all.
If anyone will consider that the same fire that at one distance produces in us the sensation of warmth does, at a nearer approach, produce in us the far different sensation of pain, let him bethink himself what reason he has to say that his idea of warmth, which was produced in him by the fire, is actually in the fire, and his idea of pain, which the same fire produced in him in the same way, is not in the fire. The particular bulk, number, figure and motion of the parts of fire or snow are really in them, whether anyone’s senses perceive them or not, and, therefore, they may be called real qualities, because they really exist in those bodies. But light, heat, whiteness, or coldness are no more really in them than sickness or pain is in manna. Take away the sensation of them, let not the eyes see light or colours, nor the ears hear sounds, let the palate not taste, nor the nose sinell, and all colours, tastes, odours and sounds vanish and are reduced to their causes, ie bulk, figure and motion of parts.
Perception
What perception is everyone will know better by reflecting on what he does himself when he sees, hears, feels, tastes, smells or thinks, than by any discourse of mine.
We ought further to consider concerning perception, that the ideas we receive by sensation are often in grown people altered by the judgement without our taking any notice of it. When we set before our eyes a round globe of any uniform colour, eg gold, alabaster or jet, the idea thereby imprinted in our mind is of a flat circle variously shadowed with several degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But we, having by use been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearances convex bodies are wont to make in us, what alterations are made in the reflections of light by the difference of the sensible figures of bodies, the judgement presently, by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes, so that from that which is truly a variety of shadow or colour collecting the figure, it makes it pass for a mark of figure, and frames to itself the perception of a convex figure and a uniform colour, when the idea we receive from thence is only a plane variously coloured, as is evident in painting.
Perception, then, is the first operation of our intellectual faculties, and the inlet of all knowledge into our minds. The next faculty of the mind whereby it makes a further progress towards knowledge is that which I call retention, or the keeping of those simple ideas which from sensation or reflection it hath received.
This is done, first, by keeping the idea which is brought into it for some time actuallv in view, which is called contemplation. The other way of retention is the power to revive again in our minds those ideas which after imprinting have disappeared, or have been, as it were, laid aside out of sight, and thus we do when we conceive heat or light, yellow or sweet, the object being removed. This is memory, the store house of our ideas.
Discrimination
Another faculty we may take notice of in our minds is that of discerning and distinguishing between the several ideas it has. It is not enough to have a confused perception of something in general. Unless the mind had a distinct perception of different objects and their qualities, it would be capable of very little knowledge, even though the bodies that affect us were as busy about us as they are now, and though the mind were continually employed in thinking.
On this faculty of distinguishing one thing from another depend the evidence and certainty of several even very general propositions which have passed for innate truths, because men, overlooking the true cause why those propositions find universal assent, impute it wholly to native uniform impressions, whereas it, in truth, depends upon this clear discerning faculty of the mind, whereby it perceives two ideas to be the same or to be different.
The comparing of ideas one with another is the operation of the mind upon which depends all that large tribe of ideas comprehended under relations. The next operation is composition, whereby the mind puts together several simple ideas and combines them into complex ones.
The use of words being to stand as outward marks of our internal ideas, and those ideas being taken from particular things, if every particular idea that we take in should have a distinct name, names must be endless. To prevent this, the mind makes the particular ideas received from particular objects to become general, which is done by considering them as they are in the mind, and such appearances separate from all other existences and from the circumstances of real existence, as time, place, or any other concomitant ideas. This is called abstraction, whereby ideas taken from particular being become gcneral representatives of all of the same kind. Thus, the same colour being observcd today in chalk or snow which the mind yesterday received from milk, it considers that that appearance alone makes it a representative of all of that kind, and having given it the name “whiteness”, it by that sound signifies the same quality wheresoever imagined or met with, and thus universals, whether ideas or terms, are made.
As the mind is wholly passive in the reception of all its simple ideas, so it exerts several acts of its own, whereby, out of its simple ideas, as the materials and foundations of the rest the others are framed. And I believe we shall find, if we observe the originals of our notions, that even the most abstruse ideas, how remote soever they may seem from sense, or from any operation of our minds, are yet only such as the understanding frames to itself, by repeating and joining together ideas that it had either from objects of sense or from its own operations about them. So that even those large and abstract ideas are derived from sensation or reflection, being no other than what the mind, by the ordinary use of its own faculties employed about ideas received from objects of sense, or from the operations it observes in itself about them, may and does attain. This may be shown in our ideas of space, time and infinity, and some others that seem the most remote from these originals.
It is the actual receiving of ideas from without that gives us notice of the existence of other things, and makes us know that something does exist at that time without us wbich causes that idea in us, though perhaps we neither know nor consider how it does it. And this, though not so certain as our own intuitive knowledge, or as the deductions of our reason employed about the clear abstract ideas of our own minds, yet deserves the name of knowledge. It is plain that those perceptions are produced by exterior causes affecting our senses for the following reasons:
- Because those that lack the physical organs of any sense never can have the ideas belonging to that sense produced in their minds.
- Because sometimes I find I cannot avoid having those ideas produced in my mind for, as when my eyes are shut, or the windows fast, I can at pleasure recall to my mind the ideas of light or the sun which former sensations have lodged in my memory, so I can at pleasure lay by that idea and take into my view that of a rose or taste of sugar. But if I turn my eyes at noon towards the sun, I cannot avoid the ideas which the light or sun produces in me. There is nobody who does not perceive the difference in himself contemplating the sun as he has an idea of it in his memory and actually looking upon it, of which two his perception is so distinct that few of his ideas are more distinguishable one from another, and, therefore, he has certain knowledge that they are not both memory or the action of his mind and fancies only within him, but that actual seeing has a cause without. Add to this that many of those ideas are produced with pain, which afterwards we remember without the least offence.
Lastly, our senses bear witness to the truth of each other’s report concerning the existence of sensible things without us and around us.
