- Length
- 800 pagesNidditch, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Clarendon, 1975
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
The book that made the mind a subject for investigation rather than assumption, by asking what it can hold and where the contents came from. Locke's answer - nothing is in it at birth, and its reach is narrower than anyone had supposed - set the agenda for a century.
- Date
- 1689
- Author
- John Locke
- Region
- England and the Dutch Republic
- Language
- English
- 1700 French, Pierre Coste The version that carried the book to the continent Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 24 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 48 years
The founding text of British empiricism and the standard philosophy book of the eighteenth century, condemned at Oxford in 1703 and read by everyone anyway.
What the book says
Four books asking what the mind can do and where its contents come from. The first is demolition: there are no principles stamped on the mind at birth, because if there were, children and the illiterate would have them and plainly do not, and no moral rule commands the universal assent that innateness would require. So the mind starts empty, and everything in it arrives by experience - sensation, which gives the qualities of things, and reflection, which gives the operations of the mind itself. Book two builds from there: simple ideas which the mind receives passively, complex ones it assembles, and the distinction between qualities really in bodies, like shape and motion, and those that exist only as powers to produce sensations in us, like colour and taste. Book three is on words, and argues that a great many disputes are about language rather than things, since general terms name our own sorted ideas rather than the real inner constitutions of things, which we cannot reach. Book four draws the conclusion: knowledge is the perception of agreement between ideas, it is narrower than we assume, and most of what we live by is judgement rather than knowledge.
What it argues
That the mind's materials all arrive from outside or from watching itself work, and that knowing this shows how limited knowledge is. The limitation is the part usually forgotten. Locke argues that we know the qualities of things but not their real inner constitutions; that species boundaries are made by our sorting rather than found in nature; that we cannot demonstrate most of what we believe about the world and must live by probability. He also thinks this is enough - the candle set up in us shines bright enough for our purposes, and the proper response to the limits is to work within them rather than to despair or to pretend. The famous account of personal identity, added in the second edition, locates the self in continuity of consciousness rather than in a soul or a body.
What it answered
Meditations on First Philosophy 1641René Descartes
Innate ideas, in Descartes and in the English divines who used them to make moral and religious principles unarguable. The political stake is close to the surface: if fundamental principles are stamped on everyone, then whoever claims to read them off has authority over everyone else, and Locke's alternative puts every claim back into the space where it can be examined. The Essay and the Two Treatises are the same project on two subjects.
What answered it
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous 1713George Berkeley
Berkeley immediately and Hume a generation later, both by pressing the premises harder than Locke did. Leibniz wrote a chapter-by-chapter reply, the New Essays, and then withheld it when Locke died, so it did not appear for fifty years. Against these, Locke's account survived as the default: the eighteenth century largely thought in his terms, and the questions he opened - about concepts, about identity, about what perception delivers - are still open in the forms he gave them.
How it argues
By slow, plain, cumulative analysis, in English rather than Latin, addressed to a general reader. Locke apologises in the preface for the length and blames the way it was written, in fits over many years, and the apology is fair - the book repeats itself. But the plainness is doing philosophical work: he is arguing that these questions belong to ordinary educated people and not to a profession with a private vocabulary, and writing so that they can follow is part of the case.
The moment
Written across twenty years, much of it in exile. Locke was physician and adviser to the Earl of Shaftesbury, was implicated in the plotting that followed Shaftesbury's fall, and spent five years in the Dutch Republic before returning after 1688. The Essay and the Two Treatises were published within months of each other, the second anonymously; he acknowledged the Essay and denied the Treatises for the rest of his life.
How it travelled
Fast, wide and into politics. Four editions in Locke's lifetime, Coste's French translation in 1700, abridgements for students, and a place on the reading list of every educated person in Britain and much of Europe. Oxford moved to discourage it in 1703. Voltaire made him a hero of the Philosophical Letters, and the French Enlightenment took Lockean empiricism as its psychology. Its influence on the American founders ran through both books together.
The strongest objection
Berkeley's, because it uses nothing Locke has not conceded. Once it is granted that the immediate objects of perception are ideas, the material substance said to underlie them is by definition never perceived, and Locke himself describes it as a something-we-know-not-what. If the term names nothing we can encounter, it does no work; and the distinction between qualities really in bodies and qualities only in us cannot be established, since both are known only through ideas. Locke's position looks stable only if one forgets that the veil of ideas is his own device, and Berkeley simply declines to forget.
Why read it
Not straight through. Book one on innate ideas, the opening chapters of book two, the chapter on identity, and the whole of book three on language are the parts that repay a reader; book four is for specialists. It is long, repetitive and unusually pleasant company - Locke is the least intimidating major philosopher in English.
- First printed
- 1689
- First in English
- 1689
- Digitised
- Yes
The fourth edition of 1700 is the last Locke supervised and is the basis of the standard text; the chapters on identity and on the association of ideas were added after the first. Coste's French translation of 1700 carried the book to the continent.
Written in English. The text is public domain in all editions.
Where it stands
Live in the questions rather than the answers. Almost nobody holds Locke's theory of ideas, and the primary-secondary quality distinction survives in modified form; but personal identity as psychological continuity is a standard position, the problem of natural kinds is his, and the general shape of empiricism about concepts is still argued in his terms.
The passage
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book II chapter 1. Public domain, and Locke's own words.
Contested
How consistent the primary-secondary quality distinction is with the rest of the theory is a permanent dispute. Whether Locke's real essences are unknowable in principle or only in practice bears on how radical his conclusion is. The relation between the Essay and the Two Treatises, published together and acknowledged differently, is still discussed. And the extent to which Locke's account of persons was shaped by the legal and theological questions of his time - who is punished for what, and on what grounds - has been a productive line in recent scholarship.