524 JOHNLOCKE
Following his return to England, Locke published his two most important
works,Essay Concerning Human Understanding(1690) and Two Treatises of
Government(1690). Locke spent the rest of his life writing and serving the new
government as Commissioner of Appeals and, later, as Commissioner of Trade
and Plantations. He died quietly at the home of a friend in 1704.
Locke begins his first major work,Essays Concerning Human Understanding,
with several arguments against the Cartesian notion of innate ideas. He claims
that the mind is a tabula rasa, a blank tablet or “white paper, void of all charac-
ters, without any ideas.” All ideas come from one source: experience. Experience,
in turn, is of two types: sensation or reflection. Sensations are derived from our
sensory perceptions of the external world. Reflection, on the other hand, provides
ideas by the mind “reflecting on its own operations within itself.”
Having explained the originof ideas, Locke then explains the natureof ideas.
All ideas are either simple or complex. Simple ideas are uncompounded; that is,
they cannot be broken down further, such as the ideas of “sweetness” or “redness.”
Complex ideas are composed of two or more simple ideas, such as the idea of
a red, sweet apple. Locke then classifies simple and complex ideas by sources
(sensation, reflection, or both).
Having explained the sources of ideas, Locke next asks if the ideas that come
from sensation actually resemble the qualities of the external objects that gave
rise to them. He answers first by dividing qualities into primary and secondary.
Primary qualities are “utterly inseparable” from external objects regardless of
their state—such qualities include solidity, extension, figure, motion, rest, and
number. On the other hand, secondary qualities are “nothing in the objects them-
selves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities.”
These secondary qualities would include such characteristics as colors, sounds,
tastes, and the like. So, for example, the primary qualities of an apple (a solid,
being extended in space, etc.) have the power to produce the secondary quality of
a sweet taste and a red color. This analysis means that the world as we experience
itis only a representation of the way the world actually is. The blooming,
buzzing, colorful world of our experience is not the real world.
Finally, Locke asks what these primary and secondary qualities are qualities of.
He argues that there must be “some substratumwherein [ideas] do subsist, and from
which they do result, which therefore we call substance.” Although we cannot have
any idea of substance, nor can we explain the concept, we must posit substance as a
“supporter” of qualities—a “something I know not what,” Locke said.
Locke spent twenty years preparing his Essay Concerning Human Uunder-
standingfor publication in 1690. The Essaywent through several editions while
Locke was still living, including an abridgment with his consent. The following
selection is an abridgment by Walter Kaufmann, which I have modified. This
abridgment owes much to John Wynne’s (1695) editing and to the modern work
of A.S. Pringle-Pattison.
In addition this work, Locke wrote Two Treatises of Government(1690),The
Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695),
Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity(1695 and 1697), and several
“Letters” concerning toleration.
