Ideas from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Back to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

1002 ideas

Sample Ideas

Perception exists in some degree in all animals, though the number and quickness of their senses vary according to their condition and needs; this gradation in perceptual capacity manifests the wisdom and goodness of the Creator.
In natural religion, once we clearly conceive the ideas of a finite, dependent, intelligent being and an eternal, omnipotent, perfectly wise and good Being on whom it depends, we can as certainly know that man is obliged to honour, fear, and obey God as we can know simple arithmetical truths or that the sun is shining when we see it; nonetheless, such moral and religious truths can remain unknown to those who never take the pains to employ their faculties on them.
It is difficult to determine whether any of our ideas really arise from privative causes, since that would require settling whether rest itself is more a privation than motion.
The real source of obstinate error is not people’s relying on their past judgments as such, but their having judged and settled opinions without prior fair and thorough examination; nonetheless, since life forces us to decide in conditions of incomplete evidence, we must often determine ourselves on one side where knowledge is unattainable.
Time stands to duration as place stands to expansion: both are determinate, landmark‑based portions of the otherwise uniform and boundless 'oceans' of eternity and immensity, used to fix the positions of finite beings by reference to known points.
Human cognitive capacities, though far short of universal comprehension, are well suited to our condition and concerns, providing enough light for life, virtue, and knowledge of God and duty; it is childish ingratitude to resent our limits instead of using and improving the knowledge we have.
Although the imperfect, variable nominal essences of substances suffice for civil and common conversation—where names are loosely regulated by obvious sensory qualities—they are ill‑suited to philosophical inquiry, because differing complex ideas attached to the same word prevent agreement on universal propositions and the consequences drawn from them.
Unlike simple ideas where the mind is passive, the mind actively exercises liberty in voluntarily combining simple ideas to form complex ideas.
Expansion is like a three‑dimensional solid whose lengths can be 'turned every way' to make figure, breadth, and thickness, whereas duration is like the length of a single straight line extended to infinity, incapable of multiplicity, variation, or figure, and serving as one common measure in which all existing things equally partake of the same present moment; we cannot clearly conceive real existence with a total negation of either expansion or duration, though we are ignorant of how spirits relate to space and only know that bodies each occupy and exclude others from their proper portion of it.
Locke offers a systematic taxonomy of the main ways in which words and ideas fail the ends of language: (1) using words without determinate ideas, (2) lacking names for complex ideas, (3) using the same word inconstantly for different ideas, (4) applying words contrary to common usage, and (5) using names for fictitious, non‑existent beings; these failures respectively yield meaningless noise, slow and cumbersome expression, misunderstanding, gibberish, and chimerical 'knowledge'.