John Locke: An Essay Concering Human Understanding part one: Of Ideas in General and Their Origin.

This chapter of Locke's essay primarily outlines his key ideas on empiricism. Empiricism is the idea that we are born as a blank slate, a 'Tabula Rasa'. He entirely rejects the idea of innate ideas and insists that all of our ideas come from experience. He suggests that knowledge is not 'a priori', (before experience) but rather 'a posteriori' (after experience).
On the whole I found this piece of text reasonably easy to read and surprisingly accessible to a modern audience. Admittedly, this did have something to do with the nicely set out, separated and numbered points. Locke manages to outline his ideas clearly and concisely which is a skill I wish more philosophers would invest in.

Locke begins his essay by asserting that all 'conscious' men have ideas, having an idea basically meaning to think. He then goes on to say that it is possible for men to have more than one idea at once and mentions abstract ideas such as 'whiteness, drunkenness' and 'elephant'. These would be classified as abstract ideas because there tends not to be one individual thing that we can think of when we think about these things; they are concepts as a whole.

One thing that I found when reading this is that Locke seems to repeat his key point, that ideas come from experience, several times in slightly different ways, probably as to emphasise his point more clearly, which to his credit he certainly manages.

For example:
• 'All ideas come from sensation or reflection'
• 'The soul begins to have ideas when it begins to perceive'
• 'A man begins to have ideas when he first has sensations'
• 'No ideas but from sensation and reflection, evident, if we observe children'
• 'a foetus in the mother’s womb differs not much from the state of a vegetable'
• (A foetus shows) 'few signs of a soul accustomed to much thinking'
• 'I see no reason, therefore, to believe that the soul thinks before the senses have furnished it with ideas to think on'

He also mentions without experience, we would always stay as 'Tabula Rasa'. This is hard to even conceptualise, but it is even harder to imagine never having any sensations. He suggests that ideas at first may be vague, until they are explored in more depth through conversation. This seems like a typical thing for any philosopher to assert, however it does seem to make sense, as the power to communicate is what sets Humans apart from other mammals, and could also be the key to our superior understanding of the world.

Locke talks in depth about dreaming, and this is the area that I found a little less straightforward. He suggests that the soul, which he seems to use interchangeably with the mind, does not think when we sleep, and even when we do think we cannot always perceive this thought. He uses the idea of dreaming to back this up by suggesting that the sleeping man thinks without knowing, he then goes on to say that the sleeping man and the awake man are separate people. He does manage to keep his arguments empirical by saying that if we cannot remember a dream, then there is no proof at all that there was a dream at all.

I personally like the way that Locke was free in his writing and was able to write what he thought without having to worry about official opinions. It is reported that the government supported his ideas. Although he is believed to be religious, he comes across as being a deist, so he tends not to involve God in his philosophy. It comes as little surprise to me that Locke is still so respected in the world of empiricist philosophy.