the author's purpose also from being a familiar word in ordinary discourse as well as in the language of philosophers. Herein, however, lay a danger from which he did not escape. In common usage 'idea' carries with it a suggestion of contrast with reality; and the opposition which the "new way of ideas" excited was due to the doubt which it seemed to cast on the claim of knowledge to be a knowledge of real things.

The Essay is divided into four books; the first is a polemic against the doctrine of innate principles and ideas; the others deal with ideas, with words, and with knowledge respectively. The first book is remarkable for the way in which the author brings to bear upon the question all the facts that could then be ascertained regarding the ideas and beliefs of primitive and savage races. He points to the variety of human experience, and to the difficulty of forming general and abstract ideas, and he ridicules the view that any such ideas can be antecedent to experience. It is in its most extreme form that the doctrine of innate ideas is attacked; but he cannot see any alternative between that form and his own view that all ideas have their origin in experience.

Locke wishes to avoid any presupposition about matter, or mind, or their relation. It is not difficult to see that the notions which he has expelled often re-enter unbidden. But the peculiar value of his psychology consists in his attempt to keep clear of them. He begins neither with mind nor with matter, but with ideas Their existence. needs no proof: "everyone is conscious of them in himself, and men's words and actions will satisfy him that they are in others." His first enquiry is "how they come into the mind"; his next business is to show that they constitute the whole material of our knowledge. In his answer to the former question we discover the influence of traditional philosophy, or rather of ordinary commonsense views of existence, upon his thought. All our ideas, he says, come from experience. The mind has no innate

ideas, but it has innate faculties: it perceives, remembers, and combines the ideas that come to it from without; it also desires, deliberates, and wills; and these mental activities are themselves the source of a new class of ideas. Experience is therefore twofold. Our observation may be employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds. The former is the source of most of the ideas which we have, and, as

it depends "wholly upon our senses," is called "sensa-servation

tion." The latter is a source of ideas which "every man has wholly in himself," and it might be called “internal sense"; to it he gives the name "reflection."

Hence the peculiarity of Locke's position. There are no innate ideas "stamped upon the mind" from birth; and yet impressions of sense are not the only source of knowledge: "the mind," he says1, "furnishes the understanding with ideas." No distinction is implied here between mind" and "understanding," so that the sentence might run, "the mind furnishes itself with ideas." As to what these ideas are, we are not left in doubt: they are "ideas of its own operations." When the mind acts, it has an idea of its action, that is, it is self-conscious. Reflection, therefore, means self-consciousness, and, as such, is assumed to be an original source of our knowledge. Afterwards both Hume and Condillac refused to admit reflection as an original source of ideas, and both, accordingly, found that they had to face the problem of tracing the growth of self-consciousness out of a succession of sensations. According to Locke, reflection is an original, rather than an independent, source of ideas. Without sensation mind would have nothing to operate upon, and therefore could have no ideas of its operations. It is "when he first has any sensation" that "a man begins to have any ideas 2." The operations of the mind are not themselves produced by sensation, but sensation is required to give the mind material for working on. --

1 II, i, 5.

S. E. P.

211, i, 23.

" The MEN

of the mind?"

8

The ideas which sensation gives "enter by the senses simple and unmixed1"; they stand in need of the activity of mind to bind them into the complex unities required for knowledge. The complex ideas of substances, modes, and relations are all the product of the combining and abstracting activity of mind operating upon simple ideas, which have been given, without any connection, by sensation or reflection. Locke's doctrine of knowledge has thus two sides. On the one side, all the material of knowledge is traced to the simple idea. On the other side, the processes which transform this crude material into knowledge are activities of mind which themselves cannot be reduced to ideas. Locke's metaphors of the tabula rasa, “white paper2," and "dark room" misled his critics and suggested to some of his followers a theory very different from his own. The metaphors only illustrate what he had in hand at the moment. Without experience, no characters are written on the "tablets" of the mind; except through the "windows" of sensation and reflection, no light enters the understanding. No ideas are innate; and there is no source of new simple ideas other than those two. But knowledge involves relations, and relations are the work of the mind; it requires complex ideas, and complex ideas are mental formations. Simple ideas do not, of themselves, enter into relation and form complex ideas. Locke does not, like Hobbes before him and Hume and Condillac after him, look to some unexplained natural attraction of idea for idea as bringing about these formations. Indeed, his treatment of 'the association of ideas' is an afterthought, and did not appear in the earlier editions of the Essay.

Starting from the simple ideas which we get from sensation, or from observing mental operations as they take

2 The same metaphor was used by Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, book 1, ch. vi: "The soul of man being therefore at the first as a book, wherein nothing is, and yet all things may be imprinted."

N

place, Locke has two things to explain: the universal element, that is, the general conceptions with which knowledge is concerned or which it implies; and the reference to reality which it claims. With the former problem Locke deals at great length; and the general method of his exposition is clear enough. Complex ideas arise from simple ideas by the processes of combination and abstraction carried out by the mind. It would be unfair to expect completeness from his enterprise; but it cannot be denied that his intricate and subtle discussions left many problems unsolved. Indeed, this is one of his great merits. He raised questions in such a way as to provoke further enquiry. Principles such as the causal relation, apart from which knowledge of nature would be impossible, are quietly taken for granted, often without any enquiry into the grounds for assuming them. Further, the difficulty of accounting for universals is unduly simplified by describing certain products as simple ideas, although thought has obviously been at work upon them.

In this connection an important inconsistency becomes apparent in his account of the primary data of experience. It is, indeed, impossible even to name the mere particular the 'this, here, and now' of sense-without giving it a flavour of generality. But, at the outset, Locke tries to get as near it as possible. Simple ideas (of sensation) are exemplified by yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, and so forth1. But, towards the end of the second book2, a very different list is given: extension, solidity, and mobility (from sensation); perceptivity and motivity (from reflection); and existence, duration, and number (from both sensation and reflection). These are said to be "our original ideas," and the rest to be "derived" from or to "depend" on them. It is difficult to compare the two lists, instance by instance; but one example may be taken. According to the first list, hard is a simple idea; according to the second list, solidity is the original (and therefore 2 11, xxi, 75.

1 II, i, 3.

simple) idea, and hard will be derived from it and depend on it. It is clear that, in making the former list, Locke was trying to get back to the primary data of our individual experience; whereas, in the second list, he is rather thinking of the objective reality on which our experience depends and which, he assumes, it reveals. But he does not observe the difference. He seems to forget his view that the original of all knowledge is to be found in the particular, in something "simple and unmixed." Thus he says1 without hesitation, "If any one asks me, what this solidity is, I send him to his senses to inform him. Let him put a flint or a football between his hands, and then endeavour to join them, and he will know." But he will not know without going a long way beyond the simple idea. The simple ideas in the case are certain muscular and tactual sensations; and he interprets these by other means (including knowledge of external objects and his own organism) when he says that the flint or the football is solid.

His doctrine of modes is also affected by this same oblivion of the fact that a simple idea must be really simple. Thus he holds that 'space or extension' is a simple idea given both by sight and by touch2. One would expect, therefore, that the original and simple idea of space would be the particular patch seen at any moment or the particular 'feel' of the exploring limb. But we are told that "each idea of any different distance, or space, is a simple mode" of the idea of space3. Here again the simple idea is unwittingly generalised. He professes to begin with the mere particulars of external and internal sense, and to show how knowledge-which is necessarily general-is evolved from them. But, in doing so, he assumes a general or universal element as already given in the simple idea.

Having gone so far, he might almost have been expected to take a further step and treat the perceptions of