An Excerpt from John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Describing One of his Fundamental Conclusions

An Excerpt from John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Describing One of his Fundamental Conclusions

Excerpt from Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding showing how the human mind gains opinions from experience.

John Locke

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Batoche Books, 2001.

Batoche Books

Rahul
Rahul Shah

Oxford English Dictionary, "A Treatise of Human Nature", David Hume, "Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event", Edmund Burke

English

“All our ideas are of the on 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…And how great a mass of knowledge soever he imagines to be lodged there, he will, upon take a strict view, see that he has not any idea in his mind but what one of these two have imprinted…” (Locke. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 75)