PART 18

The Enlightenment

18.1 John Locke: Chapter I from Essay Concerning Human Understanding

John Locke (1632–1704) laid the foundation for Enlightenment philosophy and political theory. Locke's
belief in the virtue of the middle class, the goodness of humanity, and possibility of human improvement
all marked the thought of later Enlightenment figures. In the excerpt included here, Locke argued that all
ideas are learned and not innate.

Source: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. I, by John Locke (New York: Dover Publica-
tions, 1959), pp. 37–50.

NO INNATE SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES

1. It is an established opinion amongst some men1, that there are in the understanding certain innate principles;
some primary notions, κοιυαι εννοιαι, characters, as it were stamped upon the mind of man; which the soul receives it
is very first being, and brings into the world with it2. It would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced readers of the false-
ness of this supposition, if I should only show (as I hope I shall in the following parts of this Discourse) how men, barely
by the use of their natural faculties3, may attain to all the knowledge they have, without the help of any innate impressions;
and may arrive at certainty, without any such original notions or principles. For I imagine any one will easily grant that it
would be impertinent to suppose the ideas of colours innate in a creature to whom God hath given sight, and a power to
receive them by the eyes from external objects: and no less unreasonable would it be to attribute several truths to the
impressions of nature, and innate characters, when we may observe in ourselves faculties fit to attain as easy and certain
knowledge of them as if they were originally imprinted on the mind.
But because a man is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts in the search of truth, when they
lead him ever so little out of the common road4, I shall set down the reasons that made me doubt of the truth of that opin-
ion, as an excuse for my mistake, if I be in one; which I leave to be considered by those who, with me, dispose themselves
to embrace truth wherever they find it.
2. There is nothing more commonly5 taken for granted than that there are certain principles, both speculative and
practical, (for they speak of both), universally agreed upon by all mankind: which therefore, they argue, must needs be the
constant impressions6 which the souls of men receive in their first beings, and which they bring into the world with them,
as necessarily and really as they do any of their inherent faculties.

1
Locke does not name the ‘men’ of ‘innate principles’ whose ‘opinion’ he proceeds to criticize; nor does he quote their words in evidence of what
they intended by the opinion. He says (ch. ii. § 15) that after he had argued out objections to the ‘established opinion,’ his attention was directed to
the arguments in its defence in the De Veritate of Lord Herbert, which thereupon he proceeds to controvert. From the first, Descartes, with whose
writings he was early familiar, was probably in his view. According to Descartes there are three sources of ideas: ‘Entre ces idés, les unes semblent
étre nés avec moi; les autres être étrangères et venir de dehors; et les autres être faites et inventées par moi-même.’ (Méd. iii. 7.) But even the ‘idées
nées avec moi’ of Descartes were not regarded by him as in consciousness until ‘experience’ had evoked them from latency—a position which
Locke’s argument always fails to reach. Though Locke nowhere names More, Hale, or Cudworth, he might have found expressions of theirs which,
on a superficial view, appear to countenance the sort of innateness which he attributes to the ‘established opinion.’ See Hume’s Inquiry concerning
Human Understanding, in Note A, on ‘innate ideas,’ and Locke’s ‘loose sense of the world idea.’
2
The impossibility of resolving the intellectual necessities, which govern and constitute knowledge and existence, into transitory data of sense; or of
explaining, by means of nature and its evolutions, the spiritual elements in human experience, which connect man with the supernatural, the infinite,
the divine—has suggested that those elements, presupposed by experience, must have been innate, or born with the mind; thus potentially belonging
to it, antecedently to all required knowledge. This hypothesis has found expression in many forms; and it has waxed or waned, as the spiritual or the
sensuous was most developed in the consciousness of the philosopher or of the age. Locke assails it in its crudest form, in which it is countenanced
by no eminent advocate; according to which the ideas and principles which ultimately constitute knowledge are supposed to be held consciously,
from birth, or even before it, in every human mind, being thus ‘stamped’ on us from the beginning, and ‘brought into the world’ with us. It is easy to
refute this; for it can be shown that there are no principles of which all men are aware as soon as they are born, or even in which all mankind are
agreed when they are adult. That data of experience are needed, to awaken what must otherwise be the slumbering potentialities of man’s spiritual
being; and that human knowledge is the issue of sense when sense is combined with latent intellect, is an interpretation of the ‘established opinion,’
which Locke does not fairly contemplate.
3
Locke recognises the innateness of ‘faculties’ in calling them ‘natural’; but without examining whether any, and if so what, ideas and judgments are
(consciously or unconsciously) presupposed in a rational exercise of the innate faculties.
4
‘Originally imprinted’ and which therefore, he concludes, must have been present consciously from the first, before our faculties were exercised in
experience.
5
This dogma of the conscious innateness of certain principles, or ‘maxims,’ is represented as the ‘common road’; departure from which seems to
Locke to give his Essay that air of ‘novelty’ to which he so often refers.
6
‘Constant impressions,’ I. e. of which there is a conscious impression in all human beings from birth, and about which all, even infants and idiots,
are agreed.
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3. This argument, drawn from universal consent, has this misfortune in it, that if it were true in matter of fact, that
there were certain truths wherein all mankind agreed, it would not prove them innate, if there can be any other way shown
how men may come to that universal agreement, in the things they do consent in, which I presume may be done7.
4. But, which is worse, this argument of universal consent, which is made use of to prove innate principles, seems
to me a demonstration that there are none such: because there are none to which all mankind give an universal assent. I
shall begin with the speculative, and instance in those magnified principles of demonstration, ‘Whatsoever is, is,’ and ‘It
is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be’; which, of all others, I think have the most allowed title to innate8.
These have so settled a reputation of maxims universally received, that it will no doubt be thought strange if any one
should seem to question it. But yet I take liberty to say, that these propositions are so far from having an universal assent,
that there are a great part of mankind to whom they are not so much as known.
5. For, first, it is evident, that all children and idiots have not the least apprehension or thought of them. And the
want of that is enough to destroy that universal assent9 which must needs be the necessary concomitant of all innate truths:
it seeming to me near a contradiction to say, that there are truths imprinted on the soul, which it perceives or understands
not: imprinting, if it signify anything, being nothing else but the making certain truths to be perceived. For to imprint
anything on the mind without the mind’s perceiving it, seems to me hardly intelligible. If therefore children and idiots have
souls, have minds, with those impressions upon them, they must unavoidable perceive them, and necessarily know and
assent to these truths; which since they do not, it is evident that there are no such impressions. For if they are not notions
naturally imprinted, how can they be innate? and if they are notions imprinted, how can they be unknown? To say a notion
is imprinted on the mind, and yet at the same time to say, that the mind is ignorant of it, and never yet took notice of it,
is to make this impression nothing. No proposition can be said to be in the mind which it never yet knew, which it was
never yet conscious of10. For if any one may, then, by the same reason, all propositions that are true, and the mind is
capable ever of assenting to, may be said to be in the mind, and to be imprinted: since, if any one can be said to be in the
mind, which it never yet knew, it must be only because it is capable of knowing it; and so the mind is of all truths it ever
shall know. Nay, thus truths may be imprinted on the mind which it never did, nor ever shall know; for a man may live long
and die at last in ignorance of many truths which his mind was capable of knowing11, and that with certainty. So that if the
capacity of knowing be the natural impression contended for, all the truths a man ever comes to know will, by this account,
be every one of them innate; and this great point will amount to no more, but only to a very improper way of speaking;
which, whilst it pretends to assert the contrary, says nothing different from those who deny innate principles. For nobody,
I think, ever denied that the mind was capable of knowing several truths. The capacity, they say, is innate; the knowledge
acquired. But then to what end such contest for certain innate maxims? If truths can be imprinted on the understanding
without being perceived, I can see no difference there can be between any truths the mind is capable of knowing in respect
of their original: they must all be innate or all adventitious: in vain shall a man go about to distinguish them12. He there-
fore that talks of innate notions in the understanding, cannot (if he intend thereby any distinct sort of truths) mean such

7
Conscious consent on the part of every human being cannot be alleged on behalf of any abstract principle, as Locke is easily able to show. There is
no proposition which some one has not been found to deny. A better criterion of the supernatural or divine, in man and in the universe, than this of
‘universal consent,’ which Locke makes so much of, is found, when it is shown,—that the full and adequate exercise of our faculties in experience
necessarily presupposes principles of which the mass of mankind may be only dimly conscious, or wholly unconscious.
Locke ignores the main issue; and when he explains his meaning is found nearer than he supposes to those who hold the innateness of reason in
experience. He acknowledges innateness of faculty. Also that knowledge involves and is based upon what is self-evident is a prominent lesson of the
Fourth Book. ‘That there can be any knowledge without self-evident propositions,’ he assures Stillingfleet that he is so far from denying, ‘that I am
accused by your lordship for requiring more such in demonstration than you think necessary’ (Third Letter, p. 264). ‘I contend for the usefulness and
necessity of self-evident propositions in all certainty, whether of intuition or demonstration’ (p. 286). ‘I make self-evident propositions necessary to
certainty, and found all knowledge or certainty in them’ (p. 340).
8
These two, called by logicians the principles of identity and of contradiction, are again treated of in Bk. IV. ch. vii, where his distinction between
consciousness of them at birth, which he denies, and the gradual discovery of their self-evidence, which he recognises, is illustrated. The second of
the two is the axiom of axioms with Aristotle, itself indemonstrable because presupposed in all proof.
9
‘Assent,’ I. e. actual or conscious, not potential or unconscious, although the whole question turns upon the latter. In Bk. IV. he confines ‘assent’ to
judgments of probability exclusively thus contrasting it with ‘knowledge’ or absolute certainty.
10
The argument in this section assumes that ideas cannot be held mentally in a latent or unconscious state, that there cannot be impressions made on
the mind without accompanying consciousness of them, a mental impression and a consciousness of it being regarded as identical. That there may
be conditions, implied in the constitution of reason, to which our ideas, when they do emerge in consciousness, must conform, by necessity of
reason, is a conception foreign to his view. Locke argues that no idea can be said to be ‘in the mind’ of which that mind is not neither actually
percipient, or through memory capable of becoming percipient.
11
Locke never asks, as Kant afterwards did, what this ‘capacity,’ which he allows to be latent or innate, necessarily implies.
12
Not so; if the primitive necessities which constitute reason in us and in the universe can be distinguished by marks from the empirical generalisation
of sense, and from generalised sense data. Not so; if there are ideas (concepts) which, by an intellectual necessity, on certain occasions in
experience, form themselves in us, without our forming them by tentative generalisation. The question still remains—What does a capability of
having experience imply?
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truths to be in the understanding as it never perceived, and is yet wholly ignorant of. For if these words ‘to be in the
understanding’ have any propriety, they signify to be understood. So that to be in the understanding, and not to be under-
stood; to be in the mind and never to be perceived, is all one as to say anything is and is not in the mind or understand-
ing. If therefore these two propositions, ‘Whatsoever is, is,’ and ‘It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be,’
are by nature imprinted, children cannot be ignorant of them: infants, and all that have souls, must necessarily have them
in their understandings, know the truth of them, and assent to it13.
6. To avoid this, it is usually answered, that all men know and assent to them, when they come to the use of
reason14; and this is enough to prove them innate. I answer:
7. Doubtful expressions, that have scarce any signification, go for clear reasons to those who, being prepossessed,
take not the pains to examine even what they themselves say. For, to apply this answer with any tolerable sense to our pre-
sent purpose, it must signify one of these two things: either that as soon as men come to the use of reason these supposed
native inscriptions come to be known and observed by them; or else, that the use and exercise of men’s reason, assists them
in the discovery of these principles, and certainly makes them known to them.
8. If they mean, that by the use of reason men may discover these principles, and that this is sufficient to prove
them innate; their way of arguing will and thus, viz. that whatever truths reason can certainly discover to us, and make
us firmly assent to, those are all naturally imprinted on the mind; since that universal assent, which is made the mark of
them, amounts to no more but this,—that by the use of reason we are capable to come to a certain knowledge15 of and
assent to them; and, by this means, there will be no difference between the maxims of the mathematicians, and theorems
they deduce from them: all must be equally allowed innate16; they begin all discoveries made by the use of reason, and
truths that a rational creature may certainly come to know, if he apply his thought rightly that way.
9. But how can these men think the use of reason necessary to discover principles that are supposed innate, when
reason deducing unknown truths from principles or propositions that are already known? That certainly can never be
thought innate which we have need of reason to discover; unless, as I have said, we will have all the certain truths that
reason ever teaches us, to be innate17. We may as well think the use of reason necessary to make our eyes discover visi-
ble objects, as that there should be need of reason, or the exercise thereof, to make the understanding see what is original
engraven on it, and cannot be in the understanding before it be perceived by it. So that to make reason discover those truths
thus imprinted, is to say, that the use of reason discovers to a man what he knew before: and if men have those innate
impressed truths originally, and before the use of reason, and yet are always ignorant of them till they come to the use of
reason, it is in effect to say, that men know and know them not at the same time18.

13
Universal consent may mean that any who do think such propisitions intelligently must think them in one and the same way; not that every human
being does in fact think them with conscious intelligence. In any other meaning universal consent could be no criterion of reason being innate or
latent in us, and in the universe; for there are no propositions to which all human beings, including infants, give conscious consent.
14
Locke often uses ‘reason’ for reasoning; so here he means, when they come to the conscious use of the deductive faculty, which elicits previously
known propositions from those already known.
15
‘Knowledge’ and ‘assent,’ here used convertibly, are in Bk. IV distinguished emphatically—self-evidence and demonstrable evidence constituting
knowledge, while assent is determined by weighing probabilities.
16
As Leibniz held, who argued that all arithmetic and all geometry are virtually innate, and may (with effort) be found in the mind; as Plato showed
when he made Socrates oblige a child to admit abstract truths without telling him anything. The innate knowledge of Plato and Leibniz is
characterised, not by its independence of, and priority to, mental development in the individual, but by its intuited necessity and universality after it
has been awakened into consciousness, in the exercise of intuitive and discursive reason.
17
Not so; if the criterion of innateness is sought, not in the process, but in the intellectual characteristics of the product.
18
The unconscious presence of principles which can be proved (by philosophical analysis) to be virtually presupposed in our certainties, and even in
our assent to probability, is here overlooked.
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15. The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet19, and the mind by degrees grow-
ing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards, the mind proceeding
further, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names20. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished
with ideas and language, the materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty. And the use of reason becomes daily
more visible, as these materials that give it employment increase21. But though the having of general ideas and the use of
general words and reason usually grow together, yet I see not how this any ways proves them innate. The knowledge of
some truths, I confess, is very early in the mind; but in a way that shows them not to be innate. For, if we will observe,
we shall find it still to be about ideas, not innate, but acquired; it being about those first which are imprinted by external
things, with which infants have earliest to do, which make the most frequent impressions on their senses22. In ideas thus
got, the mind discovers that some agree and others differ, probably as soon as it has any use of memory; as soon as it is
able to retain and perceive distinct ideas. But whether it be then or no, this is certain, it does so long before it has the use
of words; or comes to that which we commonly call ‘the use of reason.’ For a child knows as certainly before it can speak
the difference between the ideas of sweet and bitter (i.e. that sweet is not bitter), as it knows afterwards (when it comes to
speak) that wormwood and sugarplums are not the same thing23.

19
In this and the two following sentences Locke anticipates his own account, in the Second Book, of the origin and elaboration of ideas, which ‘are all
at first particular,’ their generalisations being moreover only ‘accidental.’ The ‘empty cabinet’ represents the mind before its latent faculties have
been quickened into exercise in experience. The ‘sheet of blank paper’ and ‘waxed tablet’ are misleading metaphors, which, after Aristotle and
others, he elsewhere employs. In his endeavour to emphasise the difference between the continuous effort involved in the formation of human
knowledge, and the perfect knowledge eternally present in the Supreme Mind,—thus enforcing his favourite lesson of an active private judgment in
man,—he fails to see that to attribute to human knowledge innate elements, and also data of experience, is not contradictory, since all knowledge
may involve both elements. But Locke might have unconsciously in view what his favourite Hooker thus expresses:—’In the matter of knowledge
there is between the angels of God and the children of men this difference:—angels already have full and complete knowledge in the highest degree
that can be imparted to them; men, if we view them in their spring, are at first without understanding or knowledge at all. Nevertheless, from this
utter vacuity, they grow by degrees, till they come at length to be even as the angels themselves are. That which agreeth to the one now, the other
shall attain unto in the end; they are not so far disjoined and severed but that they come at length to meet. The soul of man being therefore at the
first as a book wherein nothing is, and yet all things may be imprinted, we are to search by what steps and degrees it riseth into perfection of
knowledge’ (Eccles. Polit. Bk. I. § 6). Leibnitz takes the analogy of the marble to illustrate the latent presence in experience of ideas and principles
which are influential without being recognised:—’Je me suis servi aussi de la comparison d’une pierre de marbre qui a des veines plutot que d’une
pierre de marbre tout unie ou de tablettes vides, c’est-à-dire de ce qui s’appelle tabula rasa chez les philosphes. Car si l’âme ressemblait à ces
tablettes vides, les vérités seraient en nous comme la figure d’Hercuel est dans un marbre quand le marbre est tout à fait indifférent à recevoir ou
cette figure ou queleque autre. Mais s’il y avait des veines dans la pierre qui marquassent la figure d’Hercuel préférablement à d’autres figures, cette
pierre y serait plus déterminé, et Hercuel y serait comme inné en quelque facon, quoiqu’il fallût du travail pour decouvrir ces veines, et pour les
nettoyer par la polissure, en retranchant ce qui les empêche de paraître. C’est ainsi que les idés et les vérités nous sont innés, comme des
inclinations, des dispositions, des habitudes, ou des virtualités naturelles, et non pas comme des actions; quoique ces virtualités soient toujours
accompagnés de quelques actions, souvent insensibles, qui y répondent.’ (Nouveaux Essais, Avant Propos.)
20
The process of human experience is here described as presenting three stages—perception or acquisition, retention, and elaboration of its material.
21
But the intellectual authority of a principle when evolved does not depend upon its natural genesis or evolution. That a judgment should arise in
one’s consciousness under natural law does not disprove its intrinsic necessity and universality, which reflective analysis may detect after it has thus
arisen.
22
“Les idées qui viennent des sens,’ says Leibniz, ‘sont confuses, et les vérités qui en dépendent le sont aussi, au moins en partie; au lieu que les idés
intellectuelles, et les vérités qui en dépendent sont distinctes, et ni les unes ni les autres n’ont point leur origine des sens; quoiqu’il soit vrai que
nous n’y penserious jamaìs sans les sens.’ (Nouv. Ess. I. i.)
23
That ‘sweet is not bitter’ involves recognition, in data of sense, of the abstract principle, that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be
‘at the same time.’ It is true that this concrete embodiment of it in a particular example is more evident to an uneducated mind than the highly
abstract maxim or axiom which the embodiment logically presupposes, when its principle remains unexpressed in words or in consciousness, like an
unexpressed premises in ordinary reasoning.
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16. A child knows not that three and four are equal to seven, till he comes to be able to count seven, and has got
the name and idea of equality; and then, upon explaining those words, he presently assents to, or rather perceives the truth
of that proposition. But neither does he then readily assent because it is an innate truth, nor was his assent wanting till then
because he wanted the use of reason; but the truth of it appears to him as soon as he has settled in his mind the clear and
distinct ideas that these names stand for. And then he knows the truth of that proposition upon the same grounds and by
the same means, that he knew before that a rod and a cherry are not the same thing; and upon the same grounds also that
he may come to know afterwards ‘That it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be,’ as shall be more fully shown
hereafter24. So that the later it is before any one comes to have those general ideas about which those maxims are; or to
know the signification of those general terms that stand for them; or to put together in his mind the ideas they stand for;
the later also will it be before he comes to assent to those maxims;—whose terms, with the ideas they stand for, being no
more innate than those of a cat or a weasel, he must stay till time and observation have acquainted him with them; and then
he will be in a capacity to know the truth of these maxims, upon the first occasion that shall make him put together those
ideas in his mind25, and observe whether they agree or disagree, according as is expressed in those propositions. And
therefore it is that a man knows that eighteen and nineteen are equal to thirty-seven, by the same self-evidence that he
knows one and two to be equal to three: yet a child knows this not so soon as the other; not for want of the use of reason,
but because the ideas the words eighteen, nineteen, and thirty-seven stand for, are not so soon got, as those which are sig-
nified by one, two, and three26.

Question:
1. What are the implication of Locke’s argument against innate ideas? Why was this notion considered
dangerous?

24
In Bk. IV. ch. ii. § I, and chi. vii. § 9, as well as in other places, the need of time, and the active continuous exercise of our faculties, as conditions
indispensable to a conscious intuition of the self-evidence of these and other truths, are insisted on.
25
They are thus distinguished from inductive generalisations, which presuppose calculated observations, which presuppose calculated observations,
and after all are only probabilities that may be modified by unexpected conditions.
26
And until the ‘ideas’ are got, the judgments into which they enter cannot be formed; while, on the other hand, mere idea (as the term is understood
by Locke) cannot be regarded as knowledge, as long as it is viewed in abstraction from judgment, which is the unit of knowledge and belief.