An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

by John Locke, Roger Woolhouse (Editor)

Overview

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, first published in 1690, John Locke (1632-1704) provides a complete account of how we acquire everyday, mathematical, natural scientific, religious and ethical knowledge. Rejecting the theory that some knowledge is innate in us, Locke argues that it derives from sense perceptions and experience, as analysed and developed by reason. While defending these central claims with vigorous common sense, Locke offers many incidental - and highly influential - reflections on space and time, meaning, free will and personal identity. The result is a powerful, pioneering work, which, together with Descartes's works, largely set the agenda for modern philosophy.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140434828
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/01/1998
Series:	Penguin Classics Series
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	816
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.77(h) x 1.43(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

John Locke (1632-1704) was educated at Christ Church, Oxford and held various academic posts at that university, lecturing on Greek and rhetoric. However, his interests lay in medicine and the new experimental sciences and in 1667 he became personal physician to the Earl of Shaftesbury. Under the influence of Shaftesbury, Locke developed his ideas on politics, property, trade, monarchy and the mind. Shaftesbury became a bitter opponent of Charles II and was involved in the plot of 1683. This forced Locke to flee in exile to Holland, but he returned after 1688 and began to publish his most famous works. He wrote also on ethology, education, and in defense of religious tolerance, while founding the analytic philosophy of the mind.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Further Reading
Bibliographical Abbreviations
A Note on the Text
Title-page of the Fifth Edition
AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
The Epistle Dedicatory
The Epistle to the Reader
The Contents
Book I: Of Innate Notions
I Introduction
II No Innate Principles in the Mind
III No Innate Practical Principles
IV Other Considerations concerning Innate Principles, both Speculative and Practical
Book II: Of Innate Notions
I Of Ideas in General, and their Original
II Of Simple Ideas
III Of Ideas of One Sense
IV Of Solidity
V Of Simple Ideas of Divers Senses
VI Of Simple Ideas of Reflection
VII Of Simple Ideas of both Sensation and Reflection
VIII Some further Considerations concerning our Simple Ideas
IX Of Perception
X Of Retention
XI Of Discerning, and other Operations of the Mind
XII Of Complex Ideas
XIII Of Simple Modes; and first, of the Simple Modes of Space
XIV Of Duration, and its Simple Modes
XV Of Duration and Expansion, considered together
XVI Of Number
XVII Of Infinity
XVIII Of other Simple Modes
XIX Of the Modes of Thinking
XX Of Modes of Pleasure and Pain
XXI Of Power
XXII Of Mixed Modes
XXIII Of our Complex Ideas of Substances
XXIV Of Collective Ideas of Substances
XXV Of Relation
XXVI Of Cause and Effect, and other Relations
XXVII Of Identity and Diversity
XXVIII Of other Relations
XXIX Of Clear and Obscure, Distinct and Confused Ideas
XXX Of Real and Fantastical Ideas
XXXI Of Adequate and Inadequate Ideas
XXXII Of True and False Ideas
XXXIII Of the Association of Ideas
Book III: Of Words
I Of Words or Language in General
II Of the Signification of Words
III Of General Terms
IV Of the Names of Simple Ideas
V Of the Names of Mixed Modes and Relations
VI Of the Names of Substances
VII Of Particles
VIII Of Abstract and Concrete Terms
IX Of the Imperfection of Words
X Of the Abuse of Words
XI Of the Remedies of the Foregoing Imperfections and Abuses
Book IV: Of Knowledge and Opinion
I Of Knowledge in General
II Of the Degrees of Our Knowledge
III Of the Extent of Human Knowledge
IV Of the Reality of Knowledge
V Of Truth in General
VI Of Universal Propositions, their Truth and Certainty
VII Of Maxims
VIII Of Trifling Propositions
IX Of our Knowledge of Existence
X Of our Knowledge of the Existence of a God
XI Of our Knowledge of the Existence of Things
XII Of the Improvement of our Knowledge
XIII Some further Considerations concerning our Knowledge
XIV Of Judgment
Xv Of Probability
XVI Of the Degrees of Assent
XVII Of Reason
XVIII Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces
XIX Of Enthusiasm
XX Of Wrong Assent, or Error
XXI Of the Division of the Sciences

Appendix:
John Locke's Debate with Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, as it figures in footnotes in the Fifth Edition of the Essay
Index to the Fifth Edition
Notes

Introduction

Sometime in the 1660s, John Locke and a handful of friends found themselves discussing morality and religion, but they soon reached an impasse, running up against "difficulties that rose on every side." From this common enough situation sprang the insight that gave rise to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, a formidable achievement that would become the basis of modern empiricism. Why is it that such arguments so often end in stalemate? Locke saw that instead of giving our imagination free rein, we need to step back and determine the limits of human knowledge. He gave philosophy a critical turn by shifting attention from the subject matter of many debates - the nature of God, the ultimate truths of morality, the nature of the world itself - to the tools and materials of knowledge. If we are simply not in a position to discover these ultimate truths, we can free ourselves from useless wrangling and focus on what is within our grasp. What is more, we can see dogmatic pronouncements about matters that lie beyond human understanding for what they are: at best, nonsense; at worst, fig leaves to hide political or religious agendas. Since Locke hoped to have an effect on the public debate of his age, he wrote with considerable clarity on a wide range of difficult issues. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding is thus one of those rare books that is of as much interest to the intelligent reader as to the specialist.

The son of a Protestant landowner and part-time attorney, John Locke was born in 1632 in Somerset, England. Through his father's influence, he was able to secure a place at the prestigious Westminster School at the age of fifteen,ultimately going on to study at Christ Church, Oxford. Locke seems not to have formed any definite plans for his future after graduation. He took the first steps on the path to becoming a lawyer by enrolling in Gray's Inn. In 1658, he earned an M.A. at Oxford, the usual preparation for taking up a position in the Church, which seems to have been his father's wish. During this time he also studied medicine; this was to prove providential when in 1666 he met Lord Ashley (who would become the first Earl of Shaftesbury). After overseeing a successful operation on Ashley's liver (no mean feat in those days), Locke became his medical advisor and enjoyed his patronage. Shaftesbury vigorously opposed the succession of the heirless Charles II's Roman Catholic brother James. As part of Shaftesbury's circle, Locke was himself under royal suspicion. When in 1683 some of Shaftesbury's intimates were arrested in connection with the Rye House plot to kidnap Charles and James, Locke fled to the Netherlands, remaining there for six years, until the Glorious Revolution removed James II. From 1692 until his death twelve years later, Locke resided with Sir Francis and Lady Masham. He never married nor had children.

Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding was published in 1689 after his return to England, some twenty years after the conversation that was its impetus. If the epistemic modesty Locke enjoins seems a small reward for the effort of reading such an imposing volume, we should remember that dogmatism too often stands in the way of what little we can know about the world. Locke sees himself as an "under-laborer" in the service of science, sweeping aside the rubbish of other philosophers. Along with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and a host of others, Locke did so thorough a job of cleaning house that we may find it hard to believe there was any debris there in the first place. But to complain that many of Locke's guiding ideas are truisms is like criticizing Hamlet for being full of clichés.

At the same time, much in the Essay remains controversial. The restriction of thought to ideas given in experience cuts the ground from under innumerable views in metaphysics and philosophy of religion. And the dictum that all meaningful speech is tied to ideas in the mind of the speaker, the chief theme of Book III, is indeed a demanding one. How many of us can claim to know what we're talking about when we hold forth on the religious and moral questions that gave rise to the Essay?

Although the Essay was almost immediately recognized as a major work, running to four editions before Locke's death, it was immediately controversial as well. In 1701, Oxford banned the Essay, expressly forbidding its professors to use it as a text.

What made the Essay so troubling to Locke's contemporaries? Western culture for centuries had been founded on what most took to be a single, unified tradition. In the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, we find a clear expression of the intuition that the ideas of such disparate thinkers as Aristotle, Plato, and Augustine can be fit into a comprehensive worldview, with Christianity at its core. By the seventeenth century, however, it was no longer possible to pretend that this tradition formed a coherent whole. As the events of Locke's own life demonstrate, religious strife was pervasive and questions of theology were not recondite matters to be settled by learned theologians, but pressing questions of practical and political import.

Religious controversy bled into debate about the nature of the physical world. We must keep in mind that in this period there was no sharp distinction between science and philosophy. Descartes had quite as much to say on geometry, optics, and physiology as on metaphysics and epistemology. That such a distinction ever arose is partly due to Locke, since he is arguably the first to clearly articulate philosophy's critical role as an adjunct to science.

The Aristotelian natural philosophy that had dominated the Schools was slowly being supplanted by the new 'mechanical' philosophy, which took its cue from the atomism of Epicurus. For the Scholastics, the world is composed of substances, ordinary physical objects like horses, trees, and humans. Each naturally occurring substance is composed of a form or essence, which both makes the thing what it is and explains its causal powers, and of matter, the raw material that makes it up. A human being, in this view, is a form-matter compound like anything else in the sublunary world. The soul is the form of the person, but in Aristotle's own view, the soul, like any other form, cannot exist without matter. The Scholastics ran into difficulties trying to graft this view on to Christianity, and Aquinas spends a good deal of time trying to explain how the soul can outlive the body. The soul is part of a substance, the whole human being, and is not itself a substance or a 'this.'

By contrast, the mechanical philosophy sees the physical world as composed of atoms or 'corpuscles' that interact only by means of the mechanical forces of push and pull. There is no need for a form or essence of each thing. 'Horseness' and 'treeness' are nothing more than particular arrangements of microphysical particles. The most powerful proponent of the new philosophy was Descartes, who saw his job as providing the intellectual foundation of science. In his view, the tools for understanding the world in all of its richness are given to us by God in the form of innate ideas. The physical world can be fully understood in quantitative terms; anything irreducibly qualitative, such as thought and sensation, belongs to the mind or soul. And unlike the Scholastics, Descartes holds that the mind is indeed a substance, capable of existing independently of the body.

Thus the Essay entered the field at a time when an entire worldview was in crisis. It is hardly surprising that Locke's doubts about our ability to know the ultimate nature of reality should have occasioned so much resistance, for such humility flies in the face of the religious and scientific dogmatism that at once was responsible for the crisis in the first place and provided a haven for partisans.

This is especially clear in the denial of innate ideas, the thesis of Book I. For Locke, the mind at birth is an 'empty cabinet' that only experience can furnish; its materials are given by sensation and reflection. It is crucial to see that Locke's attack extends not only to innate ideas as Descartes understood them but also to intrinsic practical principles. The so-called 'Cambridge Platonists' had argued that certain moral principles are innate on the grounds that all human beings assent to them. Locke neatly disposes of this kind of argument by pointing out that universal assent does not entail innateness. (After all, a moral principle such as 'do not kill innocent people for pleasure' might be universally accepted simply because it is a valuable rule for any society to have.) In any case, the anthropological evidence, even as known to Locke, does not support the claim that all humans assent to such moral principles in the first place.

When we turn to Locke's arguments against Descartes, the issue becomes more complicated and more interesting. Descartes had posited a faculty, the intellect, which God stocked with ideas that allow us to understand the physical world, our own minds, and to a lesser degree, God himself. In the sixth of his Meditations, Descartes argues that our ability to demonstrate propositions about complex geometrical figures such as a chiliagon, or thousand-sided figure, shows that our mental powers are not limited to the information we receive from experience. Try to form a mental image of a chiliagon. Can you tell the difference between it and an image of a figure with 999 sides? What you come up with is at best a confused picture of a many-sided figure. Therefore there must be a purely intellectual idea, not derived from experience, that funds our demonstrations about such figures. Locke tackles this argument head on in II.xxix.13. The demonstrations Descartes made so much of are not in the first place about the chiliagon itself but rather about the numbers we assign to its sides and angles. Nothing more is required than an ability to perform simple mathematical operations. In Book I, Locke challenges the very coherence of innate ideas, the alleged objects of the intellect. Not even Descartes had claimed that we are always conscious of our innate ideas; these come to light only with effort. An innate idea, then, must somehow be 'in' the mind, even though we are not aware of it. Locke finds this absurd, for what is it to have an idea, other than to be conscious or aware of that idea?

It is all very well to deny innate ideas and principles. It is another thing altogether to invent a replacement for them. Can the empiricist reconstruct our knowledge of the world solely on the basis of experience? Locke turns to this task in the remaining books of the Essay, offering recipes for producing ideas of things, like God, that are remote from our experience. This brings into view the precise form of Locke's empiricism. He is not arguing that the simple passive reception of sensations constitutes knowledge; his claim is instead that the materials for knowledge must come from experience. We need not experience a unicorn to have an idea of it; but we must have experience of the constituent parts of that complex idea.

With this in place, Locke can deploy his "historical, plain method" (I.i.2) of inquiring into the mind and its contents as a weapon against dogmatists of every stripe. Human knowledge is limited to the ideas we receive either in sensation or in reflecting on what passes in our minds themselves. Although Locke is clearly sympathetic to the mechanical philosophy, he denies that it can show us the 'real essence' or nature of physical things. God has given us our senses to help us navigate through the world and discover His existence but has provided no means for knowing real essences. Descartes' dream was to give science a foundation that in no way relies on experience. Locke sees that this is impossible. The real job of philosophy is at once to remove the unjustified views that impede scientific progress and to rein in its frequent pretensions to having attained the ultimate truth of things.

When we turn from the physical world to the nature of the mind, we find that Locke is no less hostile to the Cartesian view that 'what thinks in us' is an immaterial substance. The fundamental nature of the mind is just as mysterious as that of the physical world. For all we know, the thinking part of a human being might be no more an immaterial substance than a heart or lung, a position that drew charges of atheism. But for Locke, whatever we need to regulate our lives and make moral judgments can be known without recourse to extravagant claims about the ontological status of the human mind. Thus in his celebrated discussion of personal identity (II.xxvii), Locke argues that whatever feature makes us numerically the same over time depends not on the continued existence of a substance but only on the continuity of consciousness available to introspection. An afterlife of rewards or punishments does not require the persistence of a Cartesian soul, only the continuation of stages of consciousness linked by memory.

What emerges from Locke's work is a solution to the problems of his age and, indirectly, our own. But his solution is skeptical rather than dogmatic: It seeks to confine our speculations to questions we can in principle answer rather than bogging down in disputes about meaningless words. We must think for ourselves, neither dismissing the deliverances of science nor taking them for unquestionable revelations. To this end, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding is an indispensable guide. As Locke says, "he who has raised himself above the alms-basket, and, not content to live lazily on scraps of begged opinion, sets his own thoughts on work, to find and follow truth, will (whatever he lights on) not miss the hunter's satisfaction."

A Note on the Text

This edition is that of A. C. Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), which is based on a collation of the first four editions of the Essay and the French translation on which Locke worked with Pierre Coste. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized.

Walter R. Ott is an assistant professor of philosophy at East Tennessee State University. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Virginia and is the author of Locke's Philosophy of Language, as well as numerous articles on modern philosophy.

Editorial Reviews

This abridgment by Kenneth Winkler is the best that has ever been done. Winkler's judgment as to what must be kept and what may be dropped is unerring, and his literary skill has enabled him to fashion a text that reads smoothly. An illuminating Introduction and comprehensive glossary enhance the value of this volume for students. —Vere Chappell, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Locke's Essay is a massive, scarcely organized work that is easy for students to get lost in and difficult for teachers to lend coherence to. But Winkler's abridgment succeeds remarkably at bringing out the underlying structure of Locke's masterpiece without sacrificing any of the long and important passages that put the meat on that structure. I didn't think this could be done until I came across Winkler's abridgment. It certainly makes teaching Locke much easier, since it makes the structure of the Essay more apparent, and leaves the teacher thus freer to concentrate on the details of the text. I know of no passages from the Essay left out of this abridgment that I would prefer to use in a lower-level class. If anything, I would have made the abridgment shorter still. But to my knowledge, nobody has yet done a better job than Winkler. —Michael Rolf, University of Pennsylvania

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