[outside]. And such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different acting 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 … 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 understanding seems to me not to have the least glimmering of any ideas which it does 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.
Specimen Questions
1 What are Locke’s main arguments against the doctrine of innate knowledge? Do you find them compelling?
2 ‘There is nothing more commonly taken for granted than that there are certain principles … universally agreed upon by all mankind’ (Locke). Examine Locke’s criticisms of the argument for innate ideas based on universal consent.
3 Locke suggests that it is ‘near a contradiction to say that there are truths imprinted on the soul which it perceives or understands not’. Is the notion of ideas which the soul does not perceive really senseless?
Suggestions for Further Reading (Including Internet Resources)
1 J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1689], ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).
2 An excellent introduction to Locke’s philosophy is E. J. Lowe, Locke (London: Routledge, 2005); also recommended is R. S. Woolhouse, Locke (Brighton: Harvester, 1983).
3 See also R.I. Aaron, John Locke (3rd edn, Oxford: Clarendon, 1971); J. D. Mabbott, John Locke (London: Macmillan, 1973).
4 See also the valuable collection of essays in I. Tipton (ed.), Locke and Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
5 An influential critical study of Locke and other ‘empiricist’ philosophers is J. Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
6 A good place for beginners to start is A. J. Pyle’s excellent and brief introduction, Locke (London: Polity, 2013).
7 Oxford University hosts a series of excellent podcasts, amongst them introductory lectures in the history of philosophy (2.4 John Locke) by P. Millican http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/general-philosophy.
8 Two excellent internet resources with entries on Locke’s philosophy are the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/ (by W. Uzgalis), and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://www.iep.utm.edu/locke/ (by P. J. Connolly).
Notes
* John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1690], extracts (with omissions) from Bk I, ch. 2, §§ 1–5 and 12–16; Bk II, ch. 1, §§ 1–5; spelling and punctuation revised. There are many available editions of the Essay, of which the most definitive is the critical edition of P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975); cf. pp. 48–58.
1 1 In later sections of the Essay, Locke proceeds to argue equally vigorously that there are no innate moral or practical principles, any more than there are innate logical and mathematical principles, and that observed divergences in religious belief and practice rule out the idea of a universal innate idea of God.
6 Innate Knowledge Defended: Gottfried Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding*
Locke’s attack on the theory of innate knowledge provoked a comprehensive response from the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, in his New Essays on Human Understanding (Nouveaux Essais sur l’entendement humain), written in French and completed in 1704 (but not published until 1765, some fifty years after the author’s death). Leibniz agrees with Locke that sensory stimulation is necessary for the acquisition of knowledge. But he argues that it is not, by itself, sufficient. The senses merely elicit or activate what is already in a certain sense present within us – ‘living fires or flashes of light hidden inside us but made visible by the stimulation of the senses, as sparks can be struck from a steel’. Leibniz goes on to cite the necessary truths of mathematics as support for his version of the theory of innateness: the truth of such propositions ‘does not depend on instances, nor consequently on the testimony of the senses’. Readers may well see a parallel here with the earlier arguments of Plato in the Meno (extract 1, above). Although sensory stimulation (the drawing of a visible diagram in the sand) helped the slave boy to see the result concerning the square on the diagonal, the truth of the proposition in question does not in any way depend on such experiments or observations or ‘instances’; it can be demonstrated quite independently of experience. Reflection on the universal and necessary nature of truths of this kind leads Leibniz to the conclusion that proof of necessary truths such as those of mathematics ‘can only come from inner principles’.
Locke, as is clear from our previous passage (extract 5), had objected that if such truths were indeed imprinted in the mind from birth, one would surely expect young children to be aware of them – which in many cases they patently are not. To this Leibniz replies that although present in the mind, such principles are not like notices conspicuously posted on a ‘notice board’: it often needs diligent attention for us to achieve the kind of explicit awareness that makes us recognize their truth. Against Locke’s image of the mind as a tabula rasa or blank sheet, Leibniz compares the mind to a block of marble – one that is not homogenous but already veined in a certain pattern: the sculptor’s blows (corresponding to the stimulation of the senses) are certainly necessary, but they serve to uncover a shape that is already present in the structure of the stone. There follows an interesting discussion of the way in which the cognitive activities of the human mind seem to transcend entirely the straightforward ‘stimulus-response’ capacities of animals. The beasts, as Leibniz puts it, are like ‘simple empirics’: their awareness of things is limited to particular sensory images and impressions. Humans, by contrast, ‘are capable of demonstrative knowledge’ – that is, they can use their reason to establish universal and logically necessary truths (like those of mathematics). Leibniz’s innatism thus proclaims the power of human reason to achieve knowledge that goes wholly beyond what can be derived from sensory data: ‘What shows the existence of inner sources of necessary truths is also what distinguishes man from beast.’
The Essay on the Understanding, produced by an illustrious Englishman, is one of the finest and most admired works of the age. Since I have thought at length about the same subject and about most of the
