Meditations René Descartes Sixth Meditation Sixth Meditation: The existence of material things, and the real distinction between mind and body The remaining task is to consider whether material things exist. Insofar as they are the subject-matter of pure mathematics, I perceive [here = ‘conceive’] them vividly and clearly; so I at least know that they could exist, because anything that I perceive in that way could be created by God. (The only reason I have ever accepted for thinking that •something could not be made by him is that there would be a contradiction in my perceiving •it distinctly.) My faculty of imagination, which I am aware of using when I turn my mind to material things, also suggests that they really exist. For when I think harder about what imagination is, it seems to be simply an application of •the faculty of knowing to •a body that is intimately present to it—and that has to be a body that exists. To make this clear, I will first examine how •imagination differs from •pure understanding. When I imagine a triangle, for example, I don’t merely •understand that it is a threesided figure, but I also •see the three lines with my mind’s eye as if they were present to me; that is what imagining is. But if I think of a chiliagon [= ‘thousand-sided figure’, pronounced kill-ee-a-gon], although I •understand quite well that it is a figure with a thousand sides, I don’t •imagine the thousand sides or see them as if they were present to me. When I think of a body, I usually form some kind of image; so in thinking of a chiliagon I may construct in my mind—·strictly speaking, in my imagination·—a confused representation of some figure. But obviously it won’t be a chiliagon, for it is the very same image that I would form if I were thinking of, say, a figure with ten thousand sides. So it wouldn’t help me to recognize the properties that distinguish a chiliagon from other many-sided figures. In the case of a pentagon, the situation is different. I can of course understand this figure without the help of the imagination (just as I can understand a chiliagon); but I can also imagine a pentagon, by applying my mind’s eye to its five sides and the area they enclose. This imagining, I find, takes more mental effort than understanding does; and that is enough to show clearly that imagination is different from pure understanding. Being able to imagine isn’t essential to me, as being able to understand is; for even if I had no power of imagination I would still be the same individual that I am. This seems to imply that my power of imagining depends on something other than myself; and I can easily understand that ·if there is such a thing as my body—that is·, if my mind is joined to a certain body in such a way that it can contemplate that body whenever it wants to—then it might be this very body that enables me to imagine corporeal things. So it may be that imagining differs from pure understanding purely like this: •when the mind understands, it somehow turns in on itself and inspects one of its own ideas; but •when it imagines, it turns away from itself and looks at something in the body (something that conforms to an idea—either one understood by the mind or one perceived by the senses). I can, I repeat, easily see that this might be how imagination comes about if the body exists; and since I can think of no other equally good way of explaining what imagination is, I can conjecture that the body exists. But this is only a probability. Even after all my careful enquiry I still can’t see how, on the basis of the idea of corporeal nature that I find in my imagination, to prove for sure that some body exists. 28 Meditations René Descartes As well as the corporeal nature that is the subject-matter of pure mathematics, I am also accustomed to imagining colours, sounds, tastes, pain and so on—though not so distinctly. Now, I perceive these much better by means of the senses, which is how (helped by memory) they appear to have reached the imagination. So in order to deal with them more fully, I must attend to the senses—that is, to the kind of thinking [here = ‘mental activity’] that I call ‘sensory perception’. I want to know whether the things that are perceived through the senses provide me with any sure argument for the existence of bodies. To begin with, I will (1) go back over everything that I originally took to be perceived by the senses, and reckoned to be true; and I will go over my reasons for thinking this. Next, I will (2) set out my reasons for later doubting these things. Finally, I will (3) consider what I should now believe about them. (1) First of all, then, I perceived by my senses that I had a head, hands, feet and other limbs making up the body that I regarded as part of myself, or perhaps even as my whole self. I also perceived by my senses that this body was situated among many other bodies that could harm or help it; and I detected the favourable effects by a sensation of pleasure and the unfavourable ones by pain. As well as pain and pleasure, I also had sensations of hunger, thirst, and other such appetites, and also of bodily states tending towards cheerfulness, sadness, anger and similar emotions. Outside myself, besides the extension, shapes and movements of bodies, I also had sensations of their hardness and heat, and of the other qualities that can be known by touch. In addition, I had sensations of light, colours, smells, tastes and sounds, and differences amongst these enabled me to sort out the sky, the earth, the seas and other bodies from one another. All I was immediately aware of in each case Sixth Meditation were my ideas, but it was reasonable for me to think that what I was perceiving through the senses were external bodies that caused the ideas. For I found that these ideas came to me quite without my consent: I couldn’t have that kind of idea of any object, even if I wanted to, if the object was not present to my sense organs; and I couldn’t avoid having the idea when the object was present. Also, since the ideas that came through the senses were much more lively and vivid and sharp than •ones that I formed voluntarily when thinking about things, and than •ones that I found impressed on my memory, it seemed impossible that sensory ideas were coming from within me; so I had to conclude that they came from external things. My only way of knowing about these things was through the ideas themselves, so it was bound to occur to me that the things might resemble the ideas. In addition, I remembered that I had the use of my senses before I ever had the use of reason; and I saw that the ideas that I formed were, for the most part, made up of elements of sensory ideas. This convinced me that I had nothing at all in my intellect that I had not previously had in sensation. As for the body that by some special right I called ‘mine’: I had reason to think that it belonged to me in a way that no other body did. ·There were three reasons for this·. •I could never be separated from it, as I could from other bodies; •I felt all my appetites and emotions in it and on account of it; and •I was aware of pain and pleasurable ticklings in parts of this body but not in any other body. But why should that curious sensation of pain give rise to a particular distress of mind; and why should a certain kind of delight follow on a tickling sensation? Again, why should that curious tugging in the stomach that I call ‘hunger’ tell me that I should eat, or a dryness of the throat tell me to drink, and so on? I couldn’t explain any of this, except to say that nature taught me so. For there is no connection (or 29 Meditations René Descartes none that I understand) between the tugging sensation and the decision to eat, or between the sensation of something causing pain and the mental distress that arises from it. It seems that nature taught me to make these judgments about objects of the senses, for I was making them before I had any arguments to support them. Sixth Meditation senses didn’t depend on my will was not enough to show that they came from outside me; for they might have been produced by some faculty of mine that I didn’t yet know. (3) But now, when I am beginning to know myself and my maker better, although I don’t think I should recklessly accept everything I seem to have acquired from the senses, neither do I think it should all be called into doubt. First, I know that if I have a vivid and clear thought of something, God could have created it in a way that exactly corresponds to my thought. So the fact that I can vividly and clearly think of one thing apart from another assures me that the two things are distinct from one another—·that is, that they are two ·—since they can be separated by God. Never mind how they could be separated; that does not affect the judgment that they are distinct. ·So my mind is a distinct thing from my body. Furthermore, my mind is me, for the following reason·. I know that I exist and that nothing else belongs to my nature or essence except that I am a thinking thing; from this it follows that my essence consists solely in my being a thinking thing, even though there may be a body that is very closely joined to me. I have a vivid and clear idea of •myself as something that thinks and isn’t extended, and one of •body as something that is extended and does not think. So it is certain that •I am really distinct from •my body and can exist without it. Besides this, I find that I am capable of certain special kinds of thinking [= ‘mental activity’], namely imagination and sensory perception. Now, I can vividly and clearly understand •myself as a whole without •these faculties; but I can’t understand •them without •me, that is, without an intellectual substance for them to belong to. A faculty or ability essentially involves acts, so it involves some thing that acts; so I see that •I differ from •my faculties as •a thing differs from •its properties. Of course there are other (2) Later on, however, my experiences gradually undermined all my faith in the senses. A tower that had looked round from a distance appeared square from close up; an enormous statue standing on a high column didn’t look large from the ground. In countless such cases I found that the judgments of the external senses were mistaken, and the same was true of the internal senses. What can be more internal than pain? Yet I heard that an amputee might occasionally seem to feel pain in the missing limb. So even in my own case, I had to conclude, it was not quite certain that a particular limb was hurting, even if I felt pain in it. To these reasons for doubting, I recently added two very general ones. •The first was that every sensory experience I ever thought I was having while awake I can also think of myself as having while asleep; and since I don’t believe that what I seem to perceive in sleep comes from things outside me, I didn’t see why I should be any more inclined to believe this of what I think I perceive while awake. •The second reason for doubt was that for all I knew to the contrary I might be so constituted that I am liable to error even in matters that seem to me most true. (I couldn’t rule this out, because I did not know—or at least was pretending not to know—who made me.) And it was easy to refute the reasons for my earlier confidence about the truth of what I perceived by the senses. Since I seemed to be naturally drawn towards many things that reason told me to avoid, I reckoned that I should not place much confidence in what I was taught by nature. Also, I decided, the mere fact that the perceptions of the 30 Meditations René Descartes Sixth Meditation ·Those are the •clearly understood properties of bodies •in general·. What about •less clearly understood properties (for example light or sound or pain), and properties of •particular bodies (for example the size or shape of the sun)? Although there is much doubt and uncertainty about them, I have a sure hope that I can reach the truth even in these matters. That is because God isn’t a deceiver, which implies that he has given me the ability to correct any falsity there may be in my opinions. Indeed, everything that I am ‘taught by nature’ certainly contains some truth. For the term ‘nature’, understood in the most general way, refers to God himself or to the ordered system of created things established by him. And my own nature is simply the totality of things bestowed on me by God. As vividly as it teaches me anything, my own nature teaches me that I have a body, that when I feel pain there is something wrong with this body, that when I am hungry or thirsty it needs food and drink, and so on. So I shouldn’t doubt that there is some truth in this. Nature also teaches me, through these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I (a thinking thing) am not merely in my body as a sailor is in a ship. Rather, I am closely joined to it—intermingled with it, so to speak—so that it and I form a unit. If this were not so, I wouldn’t feel pain when the body was hurt but would perceive the damage in an intellectual way, like a sailor seeing that his ship needs repairs. And when the body needed food or drink I would intellectually understand this fact instead of (as I do) having confused sensations of hunger and thirst. These sensations are confused mental events that arise from the union—the intermingling, as it were—of the mind with the body. Nature also teaches me that various other bodies exist in the vicinity of my body, and that I should seek out some of these and avoid others. Also, I perceive by my senses a faculties—such as those of moving around, changing shape, and so on—which also need a substance to belong to; but it must be a bodily or extended substance and not a thinking one, because a vivid and clear conception of those faculties includes extension but not thought. Now, I have a passive faculty of sensory perception, that is, an ability to receive and recognize ideas of perceptible objects; but I would have no use for this unless something—myself or something else—had an active faculty for producing those ideas in the first place. But this faculty can’t be in me, since clearly it does not presuppose any thought on my part, and sensory ideas are produced without my cooperation and often even against my will. So sensory ideas must be produced by some substance other than me—a substance that actually has (either in a straightforward way or in a higher form) all the reality that is represented in the ideas that it produces. Either (a) this substance is a body, in which case it will •straightforwardly contain everything that is represented in the ideas; or else (b) it is God, or some creature more noble than a body, in which case it will contain •in a higher form whatever is to be found in the ideas. I can ·reject (b), and· be confident that God does not transmit sensory ideas to me either directly from himself or through some creature that does not straightforwardly contain what is represented in the ideas. God has given me no way of recognizing any such ‘higher form’ source for these ideas; on the contrary, he has strongly inclined me to believe that bodies produce them. So if the ideas were transmitted from a source other than corporeal things, God would be a deceiver; and he is not. So bodies exist. They may not all correspond exactly with my sensory intake of them, for much of what comes in through the senses is obscure and confused. But at least bodies have all the properties that I vividly and clearly understand, that is, all that fall within the province of pure mathematics. 31 Meditations René Descartes great variety of colours, sounds, smells and tastes, as well as differences in heat, hardness and so on; from which I infer that the bodies that cause these sensory perceptions differ from one another in ways that correspond to the sensory differences, though perhaps they don’t resemble them. Furthermore, some perceptions are pleasant while others are nasty, which shows that my body—or rather my whole self insofar as I am a combination of body and mind—can be affected by the various helpful or harmful bodies that surround it. However, some of what I thought I had learned from nature really came not from nature but from a habit of rushing to conclusions; and those beliefs could be false. Here are a few examples: •that if a region contains nothing that stimulates my senses, then it must be empty; •that the heat in a body resembles my idea of heat; •that the colour I perceive through my senses is also present in the body that I perceive; •that in a body that is bitter or sweet there is the same taste that I experience, and so on; •that stars and towers and other distant bodies have the same size and shape that they present to my senses. To think clearly about this matter, I need to define exactly what I mean when I say that ‘nature teaches me’ something. I am not at this point taking ‘nature’ to refer to the totality of what God has given me. From that totality I am excluding things that belong to the mind alone, such as my knowledge that what has been done can’t be undone (I know this through the natural light, without help from the body). I am also excluding things that relate to the body alone, such as the tendency bodies have to fall downwards. My sole concern here is with what God has given to me as a combination of Sixth Meditation mind and body. My ‘nature’, then, in this limited sense, does indeed teach me to avoid what hurts and to seek out what gives pleasure, and so on. But it doesn’t appear to teach us to rush to conclusions about things located outside us without pausing to think about the question; for knowledge of the truth about such things seems to belong to the mind alone, not to the combination of mind and body. So, although a star has no more effect on my eye than a candle’s flame, my thinking of the star as no bigger than the flame does not come from any positive ·‘natural’· inclination to believe this; it’s just a habit of thought that I have had ever since childhood, with no rational basis for it. Similarly, although I feel heat when I approach a fire and feel pain when I go too near, there is no good reason to think that something in the fire resembles the heat, or resembles the pain. There is merely reason to suppose that something or other in the fire causes feelings of heat or pain in us. Again, even when a region contains nothing that stimulates my senses, it does not follow that it contains no bodies. I now realize that in these cases and many others I have been in the habit of misusing the order of nature. The right way to use the sensory perceptions that nature gives me is as a guide to what is beneficial or harmful for my mind-body complex; and they are vivid and clear enough for that. But it is a misuse of them to treat them as reliable guides to the essential nature of the bodies located outside me, for on that topic they give only very obscure and confused information. I have already looked closely enough at how I may come to make false judgments, even though God is good. Now it occurs to me that there is a problem about •mistakes I make regarding the things that nature tells me to seek out or avoid, and also regarding •some of my internal sensations. Some cases of this are unproblematic. Someone may be tricked into eating pleasant-tasting food that has poison 32 Meditations René Descartes concealed in it; but here nature urges the person towards the pleasant food, not towards the poison, which it doesn’t know about. All this shows is that the person’s nature doesn’t know everything, and that is no surprise. Sixth Meditation ‘nature’ as a way of comparing one thing with another—a sick man with a healthy one, a badly made clock with an accurate one—whereas I have been using ‘nature’ not to make comparisons but to speak of what can be found in the things themselves; and this usage is legitimate. When we describe a dropsical body as having ‘a disordered nature’, therefore, we are using the term ‘nature’ merely to compare sick with healthy. What has gone wrong in the mind-body complex that suffers from dropsy, however, is not a mere matter of comparison with something else. There is here a real, intrinsic error of nature, namely that the body is thirsty at a time when drink will cause it harm. We have to enquire how it is that the goodness of God does not prevent nature from deceiving us in this way. ·This enquiry will fall into four main parts·. •There is a great difference between the mind and the body. Every body is by its nature divisible, but the mind can’t be divided. When I consider the mind—i.e. consider myself purely as a thinking thing—I can’t detect any parts within myself; I understand myself to be something single and complete. The whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, ·but not by a uniting of parts to parts, because:· If a foot or arm or any other part of the body is cut off, nothing is thereby taken away from the mind. As for the faculties of willing, of understanding, of sensory perception and so on, these are not parts of the mind, since it is one and the same mind that wills, understands and perceives. ·They are (I repeat) not parts of the mind, because they are properties or powers of it·. By contrast, any corporeal thing can easily be divided into parts in my thought; and this shows me that it is really divisible. This one argument would be enough to show me that the mind is completely different from the body, even if I did not already know as much from other considerations ·in (3) on page 30·. ·Other cases, however, raise problems. They are ones where· nature urges us towards something that harms us ·and this can’t be explained through nature’s not knowing something·. Sick people, for example, may want food or drink that is bad for them. ‘They go wrong because they are ill’—true, but the difficulty remains. A sick man is one of God’s creatures just as a healthy one is, and in each case it seems a contradiction to suppose that God has given him a nature that deceives him. A badly made clock conforms to the laws of its nature in telling the wrong time, just as a well made and accurate clock does; and we might look at the human body in the same way. We could see it as a kind of machine made up of bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood and skin in such a way that, even if there were no mind in it, it would still move exactly as it now does in all the cases where movement isn’t under the control of the will or, therefore, of the mind. If such a body suffers from dropsy [a disease in which abnormal quantities of water accumulate in the body], for example, and is affected by the dryness of the throat that normally produces in the mind a sensation of thirst, that will affect the nerves and other bodily parts in such a way as to dispose the body to take a drink, which will make the disease worse. Yet this is as natural as a healthy body’s being stimulated by a similar dryness of the throat to take a drink that is good for it. ·In a way, we might say, it is not natural·. Just as we could say that a clock that works badly is ‘departing from its nature’, we might say that the dropsical body that takes a harmful drink is ‘departing from its nature’, that is, from the pattern of movements that usually occur in human bodies. But that involves using 33 Meditations René Descartes •The mind isn’t immediately affected by all parts of the body but only by the brain—or perhaps just by the small part of it which is said to contain the ‘common sense’. [Descartes is Sixth Meditation them bears witness to the power and goodness of God. For example, when the nerves in the foot are set in motion in a violent and unusual manner, this motion reaches the inner parts of the brain via the spinal cord, and gives the mind its signal for having a sensation of a pain as occurring in the foot. This stimulates the mind to do its best to remove the cause of the pain, which it takes to be harmful to the foot. God could have made our nature such that this motion in the brain indicated something else to the mind—for example, making the mind aware of the actual motion occurring in the brain, or in the foot, or in any of the intermediate regions. referring to the pineal gland. The ‘common sense’ was a supposed faculty, postulated by Aristotle, whose role was to integrate the data from the five The signals that reach the mind depend upon what state this part of the brain is in, irrespective of the condition of the other parts of the body. There is abundant experimental evidence for this, which I needn’t review here. •Whenever any part of the body is moved by another part that is some distance away, it can be moved in the same fashion by any of the parts that lie in between, without the more distant part doing anything. For example, in a cord ABCD, if one end D is pulled so that the other end A moves, A could have been moved in just the same way if B or C had been pulled and D had not moved at all. Similarly, when I feel a pain in my foot, this happens by means of nerves that run from the foot up to the brain. When the nerves are pulled in the foot, they pull on inner parts of the brain and make them move; and nature has laid it down that this motion should produce in the mind a sensation of pain as though occurring in the foot. But since these nerves stretch from the foot to the brain through the calf, the thigh, the lumbar region, the back and the neck, that same sensation of ‘pain in the foot’ can come about when one of the intermediate parts is pulled, even if nothing happens in the foot. This presumably holds for any other sensation. •One kind of movement in the part of the brain that immediately affects the mind always produces just one kind of sensation; and it would be best for us if it were always the kind that would contribute the most to keeping us alive and well. Experience shows that the sensations that nature has given us are all of just such kinds; so everything about specialized senses.] [Descartes is here contrasting the foot with other parts of the body, and contrasting a feeling of pain with a merely intellectual awareness that a But nothing else would have been so conducive to the continued well-being of the body. In the same way, when we need drink a certain dryness arises in the throat; this moves the nerves of the throat, which in turn move the inner parts of the brain. That produces in the mind a sensation of thirst, because the most useful thing for us to know at this point is that we need drink in order to stay healthy. Similarly in the other cases. movement is occurring.] All of this makes it clear that, despite God’s immense goodness, the nature of man as a combination of mind and body is such that it is bound to mislead him from time to time. For along the route of the nerves from the foot to the brain, or even in the brain itself, something may happen that produces the same motion that is usually caused by injury to the foot; and then pain will be felt as if it were in the foot. This deception of the senses is natural, because a given kind of motion in the brain must always produce the same kind of sensation in the mind; and, given that this kind of motion usually originates in the foot, it is reasonable that it should produce a sensation indicating a pain in the foot. Similarly with dryness of the throat: it is much better that it should 34 Meditations René Descartes mislead on the rare occasion when the person has dropsy than that it should always mislead when the body is in good health. The same holds for the other cases. This line of thought greatly helps me to be aware of all the errors to which my nature is liable, and also to correct or avoid them. For I know that so far as bodily well-being is concerned my senses usually tell the truth. Also, I can usually employ more than one sense to investigate the same thing; and I can get further help from my memory, which connects present experiences with past ones, and from my intellect, which has by now examined all the sources of error. So I should have no more fears about the falsity of what my senses tell me every day; on the contrary, the exaggerated doubts of the last few days should be dismissed as laughable. This applies especially to the chief reason for doubt, namely my inability to distinguish dreams from waking experience. For I now notice that the two are vastly different, in that dreams are never linked by memory with all the other actions Sixth Meditation of life as waking experiences are. If, while I am awake, a man were suddenly to appear to me and then disappear immediately, as happens in sleep, so that I couldn’t see where he had come from or where he had gone to, I could reasonably judge that he was a ghost or an hallucination rather than a real man. But if I have a firm grasp of when, where and whence something comes to me, and if I can connect my perception of it with the whole of the rest of my life without a break, then I am sure that in encountering it I am not asleep but awake. And I ought not to have any doubt of its reality if that is unanimously confirmed by all my senses as well as my memory and intellect. From the fact that God isn’t a deceiver it follows that in cases like this I am completely free from error. But since everyday pressures don’t always allow us to pause and check so carefully, it must be admitted that human life is vulnerable to error about particular things, and we must acknowledge the weakness of our nature. 35 HCC, Intro to Phil-1301, Dr. Sally Parker-Ryan. Lecture Notes: Knowledge: Descartes Required Reading: Descartes, Rene, Meditations, 1 & 2. Topics and Discussion: We begin with Descartes arguments about the ‘method of doubt’, his reasons for doubting the senses, and his claim to be certain of his own existence. We will come to understand that Descartes’ views about ‘knowledge’ are known as ‘Rationalist’. This week we also look at Locke (see Lecture Notes for Locke), who we will see is opposed to Descartes understanding of human knowledge – Locke is known as an ‘Empiricist’. ! Rationalist: one who believes that the only knowledge that is certain and indubitable (un-doubtful), is the knowledge acquired through pure reasoning – without having to go out and observe anything empirically. Knowledge acquired through the senses, or observation, i.e. acquired empirically, is knowledge that is always open to doubt. Knowledge acquired through pure reason is not subject to doubt, and is known to be certain. ! Empiricist: one who believes that human knowledge can only be acquired through the senses: i.e. sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. Knowledge can only be acquired by empirical observation of the world around us; and all knowledge supposedly only available through pure reason can, in one way or another, be attributed, or traced back, to sensory experience. TOPIC 1: Descartes ! DESCARTES: Meditations 1, 2: Foundations for knowledge, skepticism and the method of doubt. ! Med. 1: Descartes employs his METHOD OF DOUBT to examine which of his beliefs are subject to doubt, and those that are not. He thinks that he can thereby discover certain and secure foundations for human knowledge. ! He first examines knowledge he has gained through his senses, i.e. EMPIRICAL knowledge. But he finds that this knowledge is subject to doubt. He has two arguments for why we should doubt knowledge gained by the senses: ! THE DREAMING ARGUMENT: since we can never tell, when dreaming, that we are dreaming, we could at any other time also be dreaming. Knowledge gained by the senses cannot determine for us if we are dreaming or not since it would be the same either way. ! THE EVIL GENIUS ARGUMENT: It is possible that all of the information we assume to be gained by the senses could simply be transmitted to us by some kind of Evil Genius, who is simply deceiving us that there is an external world causing our sensations. ! Med. 2: Descartes argues that although his senses can deceive him, he can never be deceived that he does not exist, because as soon as he is able to think, he knows that he must HCC, Intro to Phil-1301, Dr. Sally Parker-Ryan. exist. This is Descartes’ famous Cogito Ergo Sum argument: “I think, therefore I am”. Even if he is being deceived, he must exist to be deceived. Descartes, MEDITATION I: ‘On what can be called into doubt’: ! p. 1. Descartes explains he is on a quest to discover a secure foundation for human knowledge. ! So, the way to do that, according to Descartes, is to suspend assent from all previous knowledge i.e. from all opinions that are “…not completely certain and indubitable.” (Descartes, p. 1) ! Nothing is to be allowed back to count as ‘knowledge’ proper (as opposed to mere ‘opinion’) if there is any reason to doubt it whatsoever. He doesn’t have to check each individual belief one by one – je just needs to look at types of beliefs. ! p.1 The first set of knowledge to be attacked is that gained via the senses. What kind of knowledge is that? Well, anything that you can know through sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. You can know that you are wearing a red sweater, that you are in front of your computer, that your house is at number xyz on ABC street. And so on. All the kinds of things that can be known through observation. ! But Descartes claims that the senses have delivered false information, or have ‘deceived us’ all at least once – therefore, the information they deliver can never be trusted. Remember when you thought you saw, in the distance, a tower that looked round? But when you got closer, you saw that it was square – your senses deceived you into thinking the tower was round. If you hadn’t gone any closer, you would still think it is round. Now that’s not very ‘secure’ knowledge, is it? ! Descartes has TWO major arguments for why knowledge gained by the senses is unreliable: ! ! Dreaming Argument. Evil Genius Argument. Dreaming Arg: ! Descartes argues that he cannot be sure, nor can any of us, at any given moment, that we are not just dreaming, and therefore not experiencing the real world via the senses at all. After all, he reasons, everyone has had such realistic dreams that it was impossible to tell if, at the time, one was dreaming or really awake. So, this moment could be one such moment – we believe we are awake, but it may turn out that this was all a dream! ! Why does it show that information we gain by the senses is unreliable? HCC, Intro to Phil-1301, Dr. Sally Parker-Ryan. ! Descartes claims that he has no way of telling whether he is awake or asleep at any given time – do you agree with that? Are you convinced that you might be dreaming RIGHT NOW? Of course, in general there is a different ‘feel’ about dreaming versus being awake. But the point is that at any given moment we simply have no way of being absolutely certain that we are not now dreaming. ! He adds to this that (Descartes, p. 2) the thought that even though we might be dreaming, the things that appear in our dreams seem to be always made up out of the same sorts of things – so that we never seem to dream up completely new creatures. Some things, Descartes says, some universal and simple things, might not be open to doubt; whereas ‘composite’ things, or things made up out of the simple things are open to doubt: ! “For whether I am awake or asleep, two plus three make five, and a square has only four sides.” (p. 2) So, truths of math and geometry, at least, seem to be above suspicion since these do not appear to change whether we are asleep or awake. ! BUT: DESCARTES SAYS – HOW DO I KNOW THIS FOR SURE? It is only because I assume God does not want me to be deceived all the time that I believe this – what if there existed, not a supremely good God, but an Evil God ( or a ‘demon’ as Descartes calls it – we will call it an ‘Evil Genius’ to connect it with some modern thoughts about this kind of possible deception)? (Descartes, p. 3) Evil Genius arg: ! p. 3. Now, Descartes is going to consider the possibility that everything he counts as opinion or knowledge is false (so not just withholding his assent now). To combat believing things out of force of habit, he decides to “…turn his will in the opposite direction” – and pretend that everything he had previously thought to be true is false. ! SO: here Descartes is going to take all of his beliefs and opinions to be actually false, implanted in him somehow by an evil genius. ! A modern take on this idea is called the BRAIN-IN-A-VAT thought experiment. On this thought experiment, we imagine that, instead of us having a body and being here is this room, we are, unbeknownst to us, merely a brain suspended in some kind of nutritive liquid, with some number of electrodes attached to it, through which electrical impulses are sent, which cause us to perceive things as if we had a body, and were in this room right now. ! Anyone who has seen the Matrix or Total Recall will understand this possibility. How can we know for sure we are not just brains-in-vats, but embodied, moving, living agents? HCC, Intro to Phil-1301, Dr. Sally Parker-Ryan. ! Do you find this argument more convincing than the Dreaming Argument? Why/why not? ! How could one even being to argue against the idea that we might be brains-in-vats? Is there any way to prove this? WHO CAN SEE A PROBLEM WITH THESE ARGUMENTS? IS THERE ANY WAY TO REJECT THEM? ! One possibility is that although the senses SOMETIMES deceive us, it does not follow that therefore we should consider them to ALWAYS deceive us. ! For example, we might say to ourselves, we SOMETIMES make mistakes adding up. But that is not going to stop us from going shopping and knowing that MOST of the time we can add up just fine. Indeed, if we couldn’t add up, we couldn’t know that we had ever made a mistake. ! To conclude: Descartes arguments in Meditation 1 raise the possibility of what we call SKEPTICISM – about any knowledge gained via the senses; BUT ALSO about what the ‘external world’ (i.e. the world outside of our brains, that is supposed to be the cause of all of our perceptions) is like. It looks like a room with a view out on the trees and a garden, but in reality it is a laboratory, a large beaker, and a brain inside (and a crazy scientist messing with it!). The former is called EPISTEMOLOGICAL skepticism, and the latter is called ONTOLOGICAL skepticism (the first has to do with knowledge, the second has to do with what exists). Descartes, MEDITATION 2: ‘The Nature of the Mind, and how it is better known than the Body”: ! On p.4, Descartes claims he is going to continue with his meditations, even though his thought is in turmoil now. ! His plan is to treat all of his beliefs as false (or fictitious). He will now doubt everything he thinks he knows through the senses, including the idea that there is anything external to him, including that he has a body (for how do we find out that we have a body at all? We must see it or feel it, it is known to us via the senses). ! With all of this thrown into doubt, Descartes asks, “So, what remains true?” (p. 4) ! If he is able to doubt everything, and pretend it doesn’t exist – all of the material world, including his own body - he wonders if this means he can doubt that he exists as well? ! “No it does not follow (he says); for if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed.” (p.4) HCC, Intro to Phil-1301, Dr. Sally Parker-Ryan. ! BUT: Descartes thinks, where do my thoughts and perceptions, even if they are false, come from? There must be something outside of me to put them there. What if all these thoughts I am having right now were simply implanted in me by the demon? ! But that would mean that there must at least be a mind to put the thoughts and perceptions into – indeed it must be my mind. ! He says – ‘I must at least be something to be deceived’. ! He says he can imagine himself without a body, but it is impossible to conceive of not having a mind – because to conceive is to have a mind. ! This seems right: can YOU try to imagine that you do not exist? But then who or what is doing the imagining? Maybe it is the Evil Genius putting these thought there? But then, the thing that the thoughts are put into must exist, and since YOU are having the thoughts, You must exist! ! So, concluded Descartes, “I am, I exist, must be true whenever I assert or think it.” (p.4) This is Descartes Cogito Ergo Sum argument, i.e. “I think, therefore I am”. ! ! But there is more business to be dealt with, for Descartes. OK, he thinks he can be certain that he exists – at least insofar as he is able to think. ! But, Descartes asks himself, what kind of thing am I? ! I cannot be certain that I have any of the properties I have attributed to being a ‘body’ i.e. extension, shape, size etc. It is still the case that I cannot be certain that I really have a body. ! On the other hand, even if I am dreaming or being deceived, I must be a thinking thing – a mind at the very least. All I can be certain of is that I exist insofar as I think, imagine, am deceived, dream, believe etc. All I can be certain of, as to what kind of think I am, is that I am a thing that thinks (“…mind or soul or intellect or reason.”) p. 5. ! So, he finally has a (very tiny) bit of knowledge of which he can be absolutely certain, and about which he cannot be deceived: that he thinks and that he exists. ! Now, how or by what means does Descartes know these things? He has already shown that knowledge gained via the senses is deceptive. So he can’t know that he exists or that he thinks via the senses. Indeed the way he has found out that he exists and he thinks is…by HCC, Intro to Phil-1301, Dr. Sally Parker-Ryan. thinking alone. He did not have to go out and do any observation with the senses: he has been sitting alone at the fire all this time. He did not have to do any empirical observation to know what he now knows – he arrived at that piece of knowledge by pure reasoning. ! And now we have an idea of the kind of knowledge Descartes is comparing ‘knowledge via the senses with’. He is comparing it to ‘knowledge by reason’. It seems that there are two ways of coming to have beliefs or knowledge: one is to see things (hear, taste, smell etc.) But the other is to reason things out. For example, some thing I can come to know just by using my powers of reasoning (e.g. LOGIC), where I do not have to go out into the world to observe things. ! The truths of logic and math are like this. Think about geometry. If I know that a square has 4 sides only, then I do not have to go out into the world and have a look at every square to check that they only have 4 sides. I can know that “All dogs are canine” without having to go out and inspect every single dog to check that it is canine. It seems that, for certain types of knowledge, as long as I know the meanings of the terms involved (and learning meaning might involve me having to use my senses), but once I know the meaning of the word, say, “Triangle” I will also know that all of them have three, and only three sides. ! On the other hand, knowledge gained via sense-perception is different. Certain truths like “I am wearing a red sweater today” cannot be know by reasoning from the armchair. One has to use sense-perception to find this out. Descartes claims his knowledge of his own body is only arrived at via sense-perception. ! He believes this because: he can imagine himself still existing without a body. That is, because if he thinks, he exists, he can imagine existing even if he is only a thinking, disembodied thing. BUT: he cannot even try to imagine himself existing without a mind, i.e. without thought (because to imagine is to think, and therefore to exist. So: can YOU imagine existing without a mind? It is impossible.) ! He says “…for while I know for sure that I exist, I know that everything relating to the nature of body …could be mere dreams.” (p. 5) ! We distinguish these two types of knowledge by calling them “Knowledge via the senses” and “Knowledge via reason”. ! We also call them “a priori” (ah pree ory) versus “a posteriori” (ah post eery ory”) truths. Knowledge gained via reason is known prior to anything gained via the senses; and knowledge gained via the senses is gained after (posterior) the use of the senses. ! Consider these two truths: “All bachelors are unmarried males” = a priori? Or a posteriori? HCC, Intro to Phil-1301, Dr. Sally Parker-Ryan. ! “All bachelors wear brown socks” = a priori? Or a posteriori? And so, Descartes concludes that he knows that he exists and that he thinks as a priori truths: by knowledge gained purely by reasoning about it. He simply can’t know for sure if he is anything more than this, i.e. if he has a body, because knowing that one has a body is known through the senses: it is a posteriori knowledge – and this knowledge can always be deceptive. In the final section of Meditation 2 PIECE OF WAX ARGUMENT: ! Descartes claims he cannot remove the idea of ‘body’ from his head: he still keeps returning to the thought that bodies really do exist externally to his mind. He certainly still believes in his own body. ! So, he wants to consider what it is that we do know about ‘body’, and more importantly how we know it. ! He tells a soty about a piece of wax. How do we perceive this object? We might say “One perceives the piece of wax through the senses. You can see its color, feel its hard waxy texture, you can smell its scent etc. You might think that your knowledge of the piece of wax is completely acquired through the senses. ! BUT, Descartes continues, what if we put that piece of wax near the fire, and it starts to melt. All of those properties that we thought we knew about the wax: its color, texture, smell, shape etc. disappear! As the wax melts, it becomes a liquid puddle on the table. Descartes asks: “Is it still the same wax?” ! Of course it is, he says. But then, we could know the piece of wax in some other way than via the senses, since everything about it that the senses delivered has disappeared, and yet we still say it is the same piece of wax. ! From this thought, Descartes claims that he knows about the wax, not through the senses, but through the mind alone. He says this is because we think we know that there are bodies external to our minds because we perceive them through the senses. But, he says, what is really going on is that we “see” a bunch of properties: colors, sounds, tastes….and we judge that there are real objects, including people, out there. But judging is a mental operation – and so, he says, we perceive what we call “the external world” through the mind. (p. 7) Descartes holds that he perceives, not with his eyes, but with his mind. ! So, once again, Descartes is much more certain that he has a mind than that he has a body: or that there are any other bodies out there in the external world (anything material). This is because he perceives his own thing by pure reason, and not through the senses. Anything perceived by the senses is still untrustworthy. The only knowledge that can be trusted is that gained via the mind alone. HCC, Intro to Phil-1301, Dr. Sally Parker-Ryan. ! NOTE: The way Descartes uses the idea of ‘imagination’ in these meditations is not like we do, i.e. as a purely mental operation. For Descartes, it is a kind of mixing and matching of sense-perceptions that one has already had. So it is not an operation of ‘pure reason’. ! So, conclusion is: I must be a thinking thing – since what I do know about myself I know through my mind, I might be deceived about having a body, but I cannot be deceived that I am thinking. ! What do you thin about this idea? Is Descartes right? That ‘I”, for each of us at least, must exist? ! Do you think that therefore Descartes is right, and we should distrust knowledge gained by observation? Is the only knowledge we can really trust that gained by reason? Like the deductive arguments we have looked at? ! Who can see a problem with these arguments? Is there any way to reject them? ! One possibility is that although the senses SOMETIMES deceive us, it does not follow that therefore we should consider them to ALWAYS deceive us. ! For example, we might say to ourselves, we SOMETIMES make mistakes adding up. But that is not going to stop us from going shopping and knowing that MOST of the time we can add up just fine. Indeed, if we couldn’t add up, we couldn’t know that we had ever made a mistake. ! Food for thought! HCC, Intro to Phil-1301, Dr. Sally Parker-Ryan. CLASS  NOTES  WEEK  3:  Knowledge   Required  Reading:     Ø Locke,  John  (1690),  An  Essay  Concerning  Human  Understanding,  Book  I  &  2.   http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/authors/locke.html     Ø Topics  and  Discussion:  We  will  examine  the  tenets  of  Empiricism  as  they  feature  in  Locke.   We   will   become   familiar   with   Locke’s   rejection   of   the   Rationalist’s   “innate   ideas”   and   with   his   primary-­‐secondary  quality  distinction.     Rationalist:   one   who   believes   that   the   only   knowledge   that   can   be   acquired,   that   is   certain   and   indubitable  (un-­‐doubtful),  is  the  knowledge  acquired  through  pure  reasoning  –  without  having  to  go   out  and  observe  anything  empirically.   Empiricist:   one  who  believes  that  human  knowledge  can  only  be  acquired  through  the  senses:  i.e.   sight,  smell,  taste  touch  and  hearing.  Knowledge  can  only  be  gotten  by  empirical  observation  of  the   world  around  us.   TOPIC 2: Locke LOCKE: Empiricism versus Rationalism Ø Whereas DESCARTES is a RATIONALIST, LOCKE is an EMPIRICIST. Rationalism holds that the foundation for certain knowledge is gained through REASON not EXPERIENCE, that is through the exercise of knowledge that is gained not through the senses, or through observation, but is gained a priori, before any experience whatsoever. Ø Empiricism holds the opposite: that the foundation of all knowledge is experience and observation – knowledge gained via the senses. For the empiricist, there is no knowledge to be gained prior to that gained by the senses, and so there is no INNATE knowledge according to them, i.e. knowledge or the ability to gain knowledge before or independently of experience. Ø Locke argued against INNATE KNOWLEDGE: that babies or the mentally deficient do not seem to have the kind of ability to deductively reason, or to know the a priori truths of mathematics and logic that the rationalist would have us believe. Ø Locke argued that all knowledge is gained via the senses: from SIMPLE ideas, which are then combined to make more COMPLEX ideas Ø PRIMARY AND SECONDARY QUALITIES: Locke argued that some qualities are primary and exist “in the objects” independently of anyone ever perceiving the object; such as size, shape, number, mass, volume etc. On the other hand, many other qualities are only secondary. What this meant for Locke is that some qualities exist only in the perception or the perceiver, such as colors, sounds, tastes, and other sensory qualities. These qualities exist as HCC, Intro to Phil-1301, Dr. Sally Parker-Ryan. “powers” in objects (e.g. as “the power to cause a sensation of redness in me”), but an object is not, in itself, red – it merely has a particular textural surface, which light bends off from at a particular angle, and light itself is merely particles and waves and is also not itself colored. John Locke 1632-1704, British, also wrote a lot of political philosophy. The Essay was published in 1690, so LOCKE WOULD HAVE READ DESCARTES – and was, to a large extent, responding to him, and other Rationalists at the time. It is in this context we need to read Locke in.   BOOK  I,  CHPT  1:  INTRO:  Locke  explains  what  his  project  is  and  why  he  is  carrying  it  out:       Ø Locke  notes  that  he  is  interested  in  the  FOUNDATIONS  of  human  understanding.  What  is   everything  in  our  minds  –  knowledge,  belief,  opinion  etc.  based  on?  How  does  it  get  there?   Ø He says “The understanding is like the eye in this respect: it makes us see and perceive all other things, but doesn’t look in on itself.” (p. 1). Ø He notes that he is interested in finding out about what it is that marks the line between knowledge and opinion: because, he thinks, we certainly express our opinions with great assurance: so how are we to know which ones we ought to count as known. Ø Locke talks about “ideas or notions” – let us understand this as any of the content of the mind – i.e. any idea, thought, belief, image, hypothesis, perception – whatever is in the mind at all. Ø Here Locke puts forward his Empiricist thesis, that all knowledge is gained by the senses, through observation and experience, combined with reflection on them. Ø His theory of knowledge is like this: First we get basic sense impressions – like color, shape, size, number, then we put these together to form ideas of objects; then we get impressions of one event following another constantly, and we form the idea of causation; we see enough examples of things to abstract away from particular instances to generalize over things – e.g. we see enough cats and eventually classify them all as ‘feline’, we abstract out ideas of particular things having the same color, or shape etc., until we build up our entire repertoire of adult knowledge of the way the world is. Chpt 2: NO INNATE IDEAS Ø For the Rationalist, a priori knowledge is knowledge that is not arrived at empirically – not via experience or the senses. So it, or its potential is already had by all rational beings at birth: hence the thought that a priori knowledge is ‘innate’ to us. (recall Descartes’ view that this is the only knowledge that we could not be deceived about). Ø Remember what a priori knowledge is supposed to be? self-evident truths such as: Ø “For any x, it is either A or not-A” Ø “Nothing can be both red and green all over” Ø “It is impossible for the same thing to both be and not be” HCC, Intro to Phil-1301, Dr. Sally Parker-Ryan. Ø “2 and 2 is 4” Ø “A triangle has three sides” Ø “A square cannot be circular” Ø The Rationalist says that such a priori truths are not learned through experience or observation but are INNATE PRINCIPLES IN THE MIND THAT WE ARE BORN WITH. Ø The Empiricist rejects this possibility emphatically, and believes, rather, that we come into the world as a tabular rasa - a ‘blank slate’ which impressions are made upon by the external world through our senses. Ø Locke claims that he can shoe that all the knowledge that can be had by humanity can be gotten without the help of ‘innate knowledge or principles’ – namely he is going to argue, via experience. Ø We need to note that what this is, is a difference of opinion about the source of all knowledge: is all our knowledge acquired OR are we born with some kind of innate knowledge or principles or structures in the mind? Ø Then proceeds to refute each of the argument given for innate knowledge by the rationalist: 1. Universal Acceptance argument: Rationalist claims that a priori truths are accepted by everyone as soon as they hear them (and thus the truths must be innate). Locke argues this simply isn’t the case: he says many of the truths are not only not accepted by all of mankind, but many people have not ever even heard of them at all. Children and the (more politically correct) ‘mentally handicapped’ have no thought of them 2. The truths are supposed, somehow, to be ‘imprinted’ on the mind before birth – but if this is so, how can it be that so many people are totally unaware of their existence? How can something be in your mind without your being aware of it? Locke says “….if imprinting means anything it means making something to be perceived; to imprint anything on the mind without the mind’s perceiving it seems to me hardly intelligible” (p. 4). These problems can’t be ameliorated by saying: “Well it is not the actual knowledge that is innate – just the capacity to recognize a priori truths as true, that is innate”. To this Locke note that on that theory, every truth would count as innate: i.e. every truth that any human could come to assent to. Ø He goes on to examine some possible other ways the Rationalist may have intended to mean that some knowledge is innate: perhaps she meant “these are truths that will be recognized once a being comes to the full use of reason i.e. either by growing up or by not being mentally incapacitated.” Ø BUT: Locke complains, this wipes out the distinction between axioms (which are known self-evidently) and theorems (which have to be deduced from axioms by rational rules): HCC, Intro to Phil-1301, Dr. Sally Parker-Ryan. Ø EITHER a priori knowledge is of the former kind or the latter: if it is axiomatic, then problem is that not everyone accepts the truths, if it is knowledge of theorems then why is it that we have to use reason to arrive at a priori truths if they are supposed to be innate already? – this amounts, according to Locke to saying that “we need reason to allow a man to learn what he already knew”. Ø If we allow that a priori knowledge is supposed to be axiomatic i.e. assented to as soon as someone hears it – then the body of innate knowledge will grow out of all proportion and will include not only the so-called “analytic’ truths, but also truths of the ‘natural sciences’ such as “two bodies cannot be in the same place at the same time” etc. Self-evident propositions do not need to be understood as innate. Ø SECTION 21: Moreover, Locke argues: if the innate truths have to be proposed to a person before he or she can be said to assent to them, this proves that such knowledge is NOT innate, but has to be learned (through hearing it). Ø Locke’s view is that when such ideas are ‘proposed’ and then immediately assented to, they are in fact learned. Book II: on Ideas and how we get them. Ø We suppose the mind begins blank-like a white paper. Ideas get on it, according to Locke, by experience. READ SEC 2 “To this I answer….naturally have” = INTROSPECTION READ SEC 3: sense data i.e. a patch of red = a sense-datum Ø SEC 5-8: All our ideas from a) sensation and b) reflection Ø READ SEC 9: “mind is always thinking” – Criticism of Descartes. This is Descartes’ argument that thinking is essential to the mind – so that the mind cannot exist unless it is thinking. And that it is always thinking makes it possible to exist without the body. Ø To this Locke says: he is not always aware of himself as thinking, he doesn’t think he thinks when he sleeps, nor all the time that he is awake. He also argues that it cannot be argued that we are thinking even if unaware of it for, he argues that this would make thinking pointless: if we could be thinking and yet remain ignorant of what it was that we thought, makes thinking useless. Ø SO: this is against Descartes idea that the mind is an immaterial substance that is separable from having a body.   Ø By Section 23: Locke argues: “When does a man begin to have ideas? I think the true answer is: when he first has some sensation. Ø Now we come to Locke’s positive thesis about the origin of the content of the mind: it is through sensation in the body that causes a perception in the mind. Ø Locke’s view is that we form ‘ideas’ through a mixture of sensation and reflection. HCC, Intro to Phil-1301, Dr. Sally Parker-Ryan. Ø Through sensation we acquire ‘simple’ ideas and we combine them in reflection to form ‘complex’ ideas. Simple and Complex ideas: Ø Simple ideas are the basic data of our sensations – a color patch, a sound, a simple taste or texture. These are the “sense-data” which we combine together to form more complex ideas of say, a three dimensional figure, a tree, a landscape, another person….. Ø p. 25: “Getting ideas is entirely passive”: we are sort of like recorders or like photographic film….. Ø PAGE 29: must distinguish ideas (in the mind) and their causes (outside of the mind). BUT “Most ideas (in the mind) are no more like a thing existing outside us than the names that stand for them are like the ideas themselves”. Ø We often mistake the external world as resembling the representations we have in our minds. But the external world is, according to Locke, very different to the picture we have in mind, because many of our sensations are only in the mind –they are caused by things in the external world, but they do not actually look like those things…. PRIMARY SECONDARY QUALITY DISTINCTION: Ø PRIMARY QUALITIES: quantity, shape, extension, “qualities of this kind are those a body does not lose, however much it alters, however much force is used on it, however much it is divided”. Ø SECONDARY QUALITIES: are powers in things to cause sensations in us. Secondary qualities are e.g. color, taste, sound, texture. Ø External bodies cause ideas in us by causally interacting with our sensory apparatus. Ø But the causes, or ‘causal powers’ in the external world do not ‘resemble’ at all, the qualities which we perceive in our mind’s eye. Ø So, the external world, as it exists externally to us, is very different to the way it appears to us in perception.   An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book I: Innate Notions John Locke Copyright © 2010–2015 All rights reserved. Jonathan Bennett [Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported on, between [brackets], in normal-sized type. First launched: July 2004 Last amended: December 2012 (I.iv.23 expanded) Contents Chapter i: Introduction 1 Chapter ii: No innate ·speculative· principles in the mind 3 Chapter iii: No innate practical principles 9 Chapter iv: Further points about innate principles, speculative and practical 13 Essay I John Locke i: Introduction Chapter i: Introduction 1. Since it is the understanding that sets man above all other animals and enables him to use and dominate them, it is certainly worth our while to enquire into it. The understanding is like the eye in this respect: it makes us see and perceive all other things but doesn’t look in on itself. To stand back from it and treat it as an object of study requires skill and hard work Still, whatever difficulties there may be in doing this, whatever it is that keeps us so much in the dark to ourselves, it will be worthwhile to let as much light as possible in upon our minds, and to learn as much as we can about our own understandings. As well as being enjoyable, this will help us to think well about other topics. with one another, and yet how fondly they are embraced and how stubbornly they are maintained—might have reason to suspect that either there isn’t any such thing as truth or that mankind isn’t equipped to come to know it. 3. So it will be worth our while to find where the line falls between opinion and knowledge, and to learn more about the ‘opinion’ side of the line. What I want to know is this: When we are concerned with something about which we have no certain knowledge, what rules or standards should guide how confident we allow ourselves to be that our opinions are right? Here is the method I shall follow in trying to answer that question. First, I shall enquire into the origin of those ideas or notions—call them what you will—that a man observes and is conscious of having in his mind. How does the understanding come to be equipped with them? Secondly, I shall try to show what knowledge the understanding has by means of those ideas—how much of it there is, how secure it is, and how self-evident it is. I shall also enquire a little into the nature and grounds of faith or opinion—that is, acceptance of something as true when we don’t know for certain that it is true. 2. My purpose, therefore, is to enquire into •the origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, and also into •the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent. I shan’t involve myself with the biological aspects of the mind. For example, I shan’t wrestle with the question of what alterations of our bodies lead to our having sensation through our sense-organs or to our having any ideas in our understandings. Challenging and entertaining as these questions may be, I shall by-pass them because they aren’t relevant to my project. All we need for my purposes is to consider the human ability to think. My time will be well spent if by this plain, factual method I can explain how our understandings come to have those notions of things that we have, and can establish ways of measuring how certainly we can know things, and of evaluating the grounds we have for our opinions. Although our opinions are various, different, and often wholly contradictory, we express them with great assurance and confidence. Someone observing human opinions from the outside—seeing how they conflict 4. I hope that this enquiry into the nature of the understanding will enable me to discover what its powers are—how far they reach, what things they are adequate to deal with, and where they fail us. If I succeed, that may have the effect of persuading the busy mind of man •to be more cautious in meddling with things that are beyond its powers to understand; •to stop when it is at the extreme end of its tether; and •to be peacefully reconciled to ignorance of things that turn out to be beyond the reach of our capacities. 1 Essay I John Locke Perhaps then we shall stop pretending that we know everything, and shall be less bold in raising questions and getting into confusing disputes with others about things to which our understandings are not suited—things of which we can’t form any clear or distinct perceptions in our minds, or, as happens all too often, things of which we have no notions at all. If we can find out what the scope of the understanding is, how far it is able to achieve certainty, and in what cases it can only judge and guess, that may teach us to accept our limitations and to rest content with knowing only what our human condition enables us to know. i: Introduction inclined either •to sit still, and not set our thoughts to work at all, in despair of knowing anything or •to question everything, and make no claim to any knowledge because some things can’t be understood. It is very useful for the sailor to know how long his line is, even though it is too short to fathom all the depths of the ocean. It is good for him to know that it is long enough to reach the bottom at places where he needs to know where it is, and to caution him against running aground. . . . 7. This was what first started me on this Essay Concerning the Understanding. I thought that the first step towards answering various questions that people are apt to raise ·about other things· was to take a look at our own understandings, examine our own powers, and see to what they are fitted for. Till that was done (I suspected) we were starting at the wrong end—letting our thoughts range over the vast ocean of being, as though there were no limits to what we could understand, thereby spoiling our chances of getting a quiet and sure possession of truths that most concern us. . . . If men consider the capacities of our understandings, discover how far our knowledge extends, and find the horizon that marks off •the illuminated parts of things from •the dark ones, •the things we can understand from •the things we can’t, then perhaps they would be more willing to accept their admitted ignorance of •the former, and devote their thought and talk more profitably and satisfyingly to •the latter. 5. For, though the reach of our understandings falls far short of the vast extent of things, we shall still have reason to praise God for the kind and amount of knowledge that he has bestowed on us, so far above all the rest of creation. Men have reason to be well satisfied with what God has seen fit to give them, since he has given them everything they need for the •conveniences of life and the •forming of virtuous characters—that is, everything they need to discover how to •thrive in this life and how to •find their way to a better one. . . . Men can find plenty of material for thought, and for a great variety of pleasurable physical activities, if they don’t presumptuously complain about their own constitution and throw away the blessings their hands are filled with because their hands are not big enough to grasp everything. We shan’t have much reason to complain of the narrowness of our minds if we will only employ them on topics that may be of use to us; for on those they are very capable. . . . 8. Before moving on, I must here at the outset ask you to excuse how frequently you will find me using the word ‘idea’ in this book. It seems to be the best word to stand for whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks; I have used it to express whatever is meant by ‘phantasm’, ‘notion’, ‘species’, or whatever it is that the mind 6. When we know what our ·muscular· strength is, we shall have a better idea of what ·physical tasks· we can attempt with hopes of success. And when we have thoroughly surveyed the powers of our own minds, and made some estimate of what we can expect from them, we shan’t be 2 Essay I John Locke can be employed about in thinking; and I couldn’t avoid frequently using it. Nobody, I presume, will deny that there are such ideas in men’s minds; everyone is conscious of them in himself, and men’s words and actions will satisfy ii: No innate ·speculative· principles him that they are in others. First, then: How do they come into the mind? Chapter ii: No innate ·speculative· principles in the mind 1. Some people regard it as settled that there are in the understanding certain innate principles. These are conceived as primary notions [= ‘first thoughts’]—letters printed on the mind of man, so to speak—which the soul [= ‘mind’; no religious implications] receives when it first comes into existence, and that it brings into the world with it. I could show any fair-minded reader that this is wrong if I could show (as I hope to do in the present work) how men can get all the knowledge they have, and can arrive at certainty about some things, purely by using their natural faculties [= ‘capacities’, ‘abilities’], without help from any innate notions or principles. Everyone will agree, presumably, that it would be absurd to suppose that the ideas of colours are innate in a creature to whom God has given eyesight, which is a power to get those ideas through the eyes from external objects. It would be equally unreasonable to explain our knowledge of various truths in terms of innate ‘imprinting’ if it could just as easily be explained through our ordinary abilities to come to know things. Anyone who follows his own thoughts in the search of truth, and is led even slightly off the path of common beliefs, is likely to be criticized for this; ·and I expect to be criticized for saying that none of our intellectual possessions are innate·. So I shall present the reasons that made me doubt the truth of the innateness doctrine. That will be my excuse for my mistake, if that’s what it is. Whether it is a mistake can be decided by those who are willing, as I am, to welcome truth wherever they find it. 2. Nothing is more commonly taken for granted than that certain principles, both speculative [= ‘having to do with what is the case’] and practical [= ‘having to do with morality, or what ought to be the case’] are accepted by all mankind. Some people have argued that because these principles are (they think) universally accepted, they must have been stamped onto the souls of men from the outset. 3. This argument from universal consent has a defect in it. Even if it were in fact true that all mankind agreed in accepting certain truths, that wouldn’t prove them to be innate if universal agreement could be explained in some other way; and I think it can. 4. Worse still, this argument from universal consent which is used to prove that there are innate principles can be turned into a proof that there are none; because there aren’t any principles to which all mankind give universal assent. I shall begin with speculative principles, taking as my example those much vaunted logical principles •‘Whatever is, is’ and 3 Essay I John Locke •‘It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be’, which are the most widely thought to be innate. They are so firmly and generally believed to be accepted by everyone in the world that it may be thought strange that anyone should question this. Yet I am willing to say that these propositions, far from being accepted by everyone, have never even been heard of by a great part of mankind. ii: No innate ·speculative· principles with certainty, many things that he doesn’t in fact come to know at any time in his life. So if the mere ability to know is the natural impression philosophers are arguing for, all the truths a man ever comes to know will have to count as innate; and this great doctrine about ‘innateness’ will come down to nothing more than a very improper way of speaking, and not something that disagrees with the views of those who deny innate principles. For nobody, I think, ever denied that the mind was capable of knowing many truths. Those who think that •all knowledge is acquired ·rather than innate· also think that •the capacity for knowledge is innate. If these words ‘to be in the understanding’ are used properly, they mean ‘to be understood’. Thus, to be in the understanding and not be understood—to be in the mind and never be perceived—amounts to saying that something is and is not in the mind or understanding. If therefore these two propositions, •‘Whatsoever is, is’ and •‘It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be’ are imprinted by nature, children cannot be ignorant of them; infants and all who have souls must necessarily have them in their understandings, know the truth of them, and assent to that truth. 5. Children and idiots have no thought—not an inkling—of these principles, and that fact alone is enough to destroy the universal assent that any truth that was genuinely innate would have to have. For it seems to me nearly a contradiction to say that there are truths imprinted on the soul that it doesn’t perceive or understand—because if ‘imprinting’ means anything it means making something be perceived: to imprint anything on the mind without the mind’s perceiving it seems to me hardly intelligible. So if children and idiots have souls, minds, with those principles imprinted on them, they can’t help perceiving them and assenting to them. Since they don’t do that, it is evident that the principles are not innately impressed upon their minds. If they were naturally imprinted, and thus innate, how could they be unknown? To say that a notion is imprinted on the mind, and that the mind is ignorant of it and has never paid attention to it, is to make this impression nothing. No proposition can be said to be in the mind which it has never known or been conscious of. It may be said that a proposition that the mind has never consciously known may be ‘in the mind’ in the sense that the mind is capable of knowing it; but in that sense every true proposition that the mind is capable of ever assenting to may be said to be ‘in the mind’ and to be imprinted! Indeed, there could be ‘imprinted on’ someone’s mind, in this sense, truths that the person never did and never will know. For a man may be capable of knowing, and indeed of knowing 6. To avoid this conclusion, it is usually answered that all men know and assent to these truths when they come to the use of reason, and this is enough to prove the truths innate. I answer as follows. 7. People who are in the grip of a prejudice don’t bother to look carefully at what they say; and so they will say things that are suspect—indeed almost meaningless—and pass them off as clear reasons. The foregoing claim ·that innateness is proved by assent-when-reason-is-reached·, if it is to be turned into something clear and applied to our present question, must mean either 1 that as soon as men come to the use of reason these supposedly innate truths 4 Essay I John Locke come to be known and observed by them, or 2 that the use and exercise of men’s reason assists them in the discovery of these truths, making them known with certainty. ii: No innate ·speculative· principles demonstrations in this way: we grasp and assent to the latter only with the help of reason, using proofs, whereas the former—the basic maxims—are embraced and assented to as soon as they are understood, without the least reasoning. But so much the worse for the view that reason is needed for the discovery of these general truths [= maxims], since it must be admitted that reasoning plays no part in their discovery. And I think those who take this view ·that innate truths are known by reason· will hesitate to assert that the knowledge of the maxim that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be is a deduction of our reason. For by making our knowledge of such a principle depend on the labour of our thoughts they would be destroying that bounty of nature they seem so fond of. In all reasoning we search and flail around, having to take pains and stick to the problem. What sense does it make to suppose that all this is needed to discover something that was imprinted ·on us· by nature? 8. If they mean 2 that by the use of reason men may discover these principles, and that this is sufficient to prove them innate, they must be arguing for this conclusion: Whatever truths reason can enable us to know for certain, and make us firmly assent to, are all ·innate, i.e.· naturally imprinted on the mind; on the grounds that universal assent proves innateness, and that all we mean by something’s being ‘universally assented to’ in this context is merely that we can come to know it for sure, and be brought to assent to it, by the use of reason. This line of thought wipes out the distinction between the maxims [= ‘basic axioms’] of the mathematicians and the theorems they deduce from them; all must equally count as innate because they can all be known for certain through the use of reason. 11. . . . .It is therefore utterly false that reason assists us in the knowledge of these maxims; and ·as I have also been arguing·, if it were true it would prove that they are not innate! 9. How can people who take this view think that we need to use reason to discover principles that are supposedly innate?. . . . We may as well think that the use of reason is necessary to make our eyes discover visible objects as that we need to have (or to use) reason to make the understanding see what is originally engraved on it and cannot be in the understanding before being noticed by it. ‘Reason shows us those truths that have been imprinted’—this amounts to saying that the use of reason enables a man to learn what he already knew. 12. ·Of the two interpretations mentioned in section 7, I now come to the one labelled 1·. If by ‘knowing and assenting to them when we come to the use of reason’ the innatists mean that this is when the mind comes to notice them, and that as soon as children acquire the use of reason they come also to know and assent to these maxims, this also is •false and •frivolous. •It is false because these maxims are obviously not in the mind as early as the use of reason. We observe ever so many instances of the use of reason in children long before they have any knowledge of the maxim that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be. Similarly with illiterate people and savages. . . . 10. ·In reply to my final remark in section 8·, it may be said that maxims and other innate truths are, whereas mathematical demonstrations and other non-innate truths are not, assented to as soon as the question is put. . . . I freely acknowledge that maxims differ from mathematical 5 Essay I John Locke 13. ·All that is left for these innatists to claim is this·: Maxims or innate truths are never known or noticed before the use of reason, and may be assented to at some time after that, but there is no saying when. But that is true of all other knowable truths; so it doesn’t help to mark off innately known truths from others. ii: No innate ·speculative· principles [Sections 15 and 16 continue with this theme. A typical passage is this, from section 16:] The later it is before anyone comes to have those general ideas that are involved in ·supposedly innate· maxims, or to know the meanings of the general words that stand for them, or to put together in his mind the ideas they stand for; the later also it will be before he comes to assent to the maxims. . . . Those words and ideas are no more innate than is the idea of cat or of weasel. So the child must wait until time and observation have acquainted him with them; and then he will be in a fit state to know the truth of these maxims. 14. Anyway, even if it were true that certain truths came to be known and assented to at precisely the time when men acquire the use of reason, that wouldn’t prove them to be innate. To argue that it would do so is as •frivolous as the premise of the argument is •false. [Locke develops that point at some length. How, he demands, can x’s innateness be derived from the premise that a person first knows x when he comes to be able to reason? Why not derive something’s innateness from its being first known only when a person comes to be able to speak? (Or, he might have added even more mockingly, when a person first becomes able to walk? or to sing?) He allows some truth to the thesis that basic general maxims are not known to someone who doesn’t yet have the use of reason, but he explains this in terms not of innateness but rather of a theory of his own that he will develop later in the work. It rests on the assumption—which Locke doesn’t declare here—that to think a general maxim one must have general ideas, and that to express a general maxim one must be able to use general words. Then:] The growth of reason in a person goes along with his becoming able to form general abstract ideas, and to understand general names [= ‘words’]; so children usually don’t have such general ideas or learn the ·general· names that stand for them until after they have for a good while employed their reason on familiar and less general ideas; and it is during that period that their talk and behaviour shows them to be capable of rational conversation. 17. . . . .Some people have tried to secure universal assent to the propositions they call maxims by saying they are generally assented to as soon as they are proposed, and the terms they are proposed in are understood. . . . 18. In answer to this, I ask whether prompt assent given to a proposition upon first hearing it and understanding the terms really is a certain mark of an innate principle? If so, then we must classify as innate all such propositions, in which case the innatists will find themselves plentifully supplied with innate principles—including various propositions about numbers that everybody assents to at first hearing and understanding the terms. And not just numbers; for even the natural sciences contain propositions that are sure to meet with assent as soon as they are understood: •Two bodies cannot be in the same place ·at the same time· is a truth that a person would no more hesitate to accept than he would to accept •It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be, •White is not black, or •A square is not a circle. If assent at first hearing and understanding the terms were a mark of innateness, we would have to accept as innate every •proposition in which different ideas are denied one of another. We would have legions of innate propositions of this 6 Essay I John Locke one sort, not to mention all the others. . . . Now, I agree that a proposition is shown to be self-evident by its being promptly assented to by everyone who hears it and understands its terms; but self-evidence comes not from innateness but from a different source which I shall present in due course. There are plenty of self-evident propositions that nobody would be so fanciful as to claim to be innate. ii: No innate ·speculative· principles does proposing them print them more clearly in the mind than nature did? If so, then a man knows such a proposition better after he has been thus taught it—·that is, had it clarifyingly ‘proposed’ to him·—than he did before. This implies that these principles may be made more evident to us by others’ teaching than nature has made them by impression; which deprives supposedly innate principles of their authority, and makes them unfit to be the foundations of all our other knowledge, as they are claimed to be. . . . 19. Don’t say that the less general self-evident propositions— One and two are equal to three, Green is not red, and so on—are accepted as the consequences of more general ones that are taken to be innate. Anyone who attends with care to what happens in the understanding will certainly find that the less general propositions are known for sure, and firmly assented to, by people who are utterly ignorant of those more general maxims; so the former can’t be accepted on the strength of the latter. [Section 22 briefly and unsympathetically discusses the suggestion that even before a man first has an innate maxim ‘proposed’ to him, he has an implicit knowledge of it.] [In section 23 Locke argues that the position he is now opposing—that a proposition counts as innate if it is assented to when first proposed and understood—looks plausible only because it is assumed that when the proposition is proposed and made to be understood nothing new is learned; that assumption might lead Locke’s opponents to say that he was wrong in section 21 to say that such propositions are taught. Against this he says:] In truth they are taught, and ·in such teaching the pupils· do learn something they were ignorant of before. They have learned the terms and their meanings, neither of which were born with them; and they have acquired the relevant ideas, which were not born with them any more than their names were. [Locke then presents at some length his own view about what really happens when someone assents to a self-evident proposition; all this will be developed further in Book II.] [In section 20 Locke considers the claim that the less general self evident truths are not ‘of any great use’, unlike the more general maxims that are called innate. He replies that no reason has been given for connecting usefulness to innateness, and that in any case he is going to question whether the more general maxims are of any great use.] 21. ·Here is another objection to inferring a proposition’s innateness from its being assented by anyone who hears it and understands its terms·. Rather than this being a sign that the proposition is innate, it is really a proof that it isn’t. It is being assumed that people who understand and know other things are ignorant of these ·self-evident and supposedly innate· principles till they are proposed to them. But if they were innate, why would they need to be proposed in order to be assented to? Wouldn’t their being in the understanding through a natural and original impression lead to their being known even before being proposed? Or 24. To conclude this argument about universal consent, I agree with these defenders of innate principles that if they are innate they must have universal assent. (I can no more make sense of a truth’s being innate and yet not assented to than I can of a man’s knowing a truth while being ignorant 7 Essay I John Locke of it.) But it follows that they can’t be innate, because they are not universally assented to, as I have shown. . . . ii: No innate ·speculative· principles education’. But if that were right, those innate truths ‘should appear fairest and clearest’ in the minds of ‘children, idiots, savages, and illiterate people’; yet in such people ‘we find no footsteps of them’.] One would think, according to the innatists’ principles, that all these native beams of light (if they existed) would shine out most brilliantly in people who are not skilled in concealing things, leaving us in no more doubt of their having them than we are of their loving pleasure and hating pain. But alas, amongst children, idiots, savages, and the grossly illiterate, what general maxims are to be found? What universal principles of knowledge? Their notions are few and narrow, borrowed only from the objects they have had most to do with, and which have most frequently and strongly impressed themselves upon their senses. . . . 25. It may be objected that I have been arguing from the thoughts of infants, drawing conclusions from what happens in their understandings, whereas we really don’t know what their thoughts are. [Locke at some length just denies this, claiming that we do know a good deal about the thoughts of children. The section ends thus:] The child certainly knows that the wormseed or mustard it refuses is not the apple or sugar it cries for: this it is certainly and undoubtedly assured of. But will anyone say that the child has this knowledge by virtue of the principle It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be? Someone who says that children join in these general abstract speculations with their sucking bottles and their rattles can fairly be thought to have less sincerity and truth than an infant, even if he outdoes the child in his passion and zeal for his opinion! 28. I don’t know how absurd my position on this may seem to logicians; and probably most people will find it, on a first hearing, hard to swallow. So I ask for a little truce with prejudice, and a holding off from of criticism, until I have been heard out in the later parts of this Book. I am very willing to submit to better judgments. Since I impartially search after truth, I shan’t mind becoming convinced that I have been too fond of my own notions; which I admit we are all apt to be when application and study have excited our heads with them. . . . [Section 26 winds up that whole line of argument.] [Section 27 advances a new argument. The innatist must allow that the truths innately implanted in our minds don’t always present themselves to our consciousness, and he is forced to explain that this happens because our innately given intellectual possessions may be smudged over, ‘corrupted by custom or borrowed opinions, by learning and 8 Essay II John Locke i: Ideas and their origin Chapter i: Ideas in general, and their origin 1. Everyone is conscious to himself that he thinks; and when thinking is going on, the mind is engaged with ideas that it contains. So it’s past doubt that men have in their minds various ideas, such as are those expressed by the words ‘whiteness’, ‘hardness’, ‘sweetness’, ‘thinking’, ‘motion’, ‘man’, ‘elephant’, ‘army’, ‘drunkenness’, and others. The first question, then, is How does he acquire these ideas? It is widely believed that men have ideas stamped upon their minds in their very first being. My opposition to this in Book I will probably be received more favourably when I have shown where the understanding can get all its ideas from—an account that I contend will be supported by everyone’s own observation and experience. so on—the so-called ‘sensible qualities’. When I say the senses convey ·these ideas· into the mind, ·I don’t mean this strictly and literally, because I don’t mean to say that an idea actually travels across from the perceived object to the person’s mind. Rather· I mean that through the senses external objects convey into the mind something that produces there those perceptions [= ‘ideas’]. This great source of most of the ideas we have I call SENSATION. 4. Secondly, the other fountain from which experience provides ideas to the understanding is the perception of the operations of our own mind within us. This yields ideas that couldn’t be had from external things—ones such as ·the ideas of· perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different things that our minds do. Being conscious of these actions of the mind and observing them in ourselves, our understandings get from them ideas that are as distinct as the ones we get from bodies affecting our senses. Every man has this source of ideas wholly within himself; and though it is not sense, because it has nothing to do with external objects, it is still very like sense, and might properly enough be called ‘internal sense’. But along with calling the other ‘sensation’, I call this REFLECTION, because the ideas it gives us can be had only by a mind reflecting on its own operations within itself. By ‘reflection’ then, in the rest of this work, I mean the notice that the mind takes of what it is doing, and how. (I am here using ‘operations’ in a broad sense, to cover not only the actions of the mind on its ideas but also passive states that can arise from them, such as is the satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought.) So that’s my thesis: all our ideas take their beginnings from 2. Let us then suppose the mind to have no ideas in it, to be like white paper with nothing written on it. How then does it come to be written on? From where does it get that vast store which the busy and boundless imagination of man has painted on it—all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience. Our understandings derive all the materials of thinking from observations that we make of •external objects that can be perceived through the senses, and of •the internal operations of our minds, which we perceive by looking in at ourselves.These two are the fountains of knowledge, from which arise all the ideas we have or can naturally have. 3. First, our senses when applied to particular perceptible objects convey into the mind many distinct perceptions of things, according to the different ways in which the objects affect them. That’s how we come by the ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all 18 Essay II John Locke i: Ideas and their origin of sensation· on what variety there is among the external objects that he perceives, and ·for ideas of reflection· on how much he reflects on the workings of his own mind. ·The focussed intensity of the reflection is relevant, because·: someone who contemplates the operations of his mind can’t help having plain and clear ideas of them, he won’t have clear and distinct ideas of all the operations of his mind and everything that happens in them unless he turns his thoughts that way and considers them attentively; any more than he can have ideas of all the details of a landscape painting, or of the parts and motions of a clock, if he doesn’t look at it and focus his attention on all the parts of it. The picture or clock may be so placed that he encounters them every day, but he’ll have only a confused idea of all the parts they are made up of, until he applies himself with attention to consider each part separately. those two sources—external material things as objects of sensation, and the operations of our own minds as objects of reflection. 5.. . . . When we have taken a full survey of •the ideas we get from these sources, and of their various modes, combinations, and relations, we shall find they are •our whole stock of ideas; and that we have nothing in our minds that didn’t come in one of these two ways. [Locke then challenges the reader to ‘search into his understanding’ and see whether he has any ideas other than those of sensation and reflection.] 6. If you look carefully at the state of a new-born child, you’ll find little reason to think that he is well stocked with ideas that are to be the matter of his future knowledge. He gets ideas gradually; and though the ideas of obvious and familiar qualities imprint themselves before the memory begins to keep a record of when or how, ideas of unusual qualities are different. Some of them come so late that most people can remember when they first had them. And if we had reason to, we could arrange for child to be brought up in such a way as to have very few ideas, even ordinary ones, until he had grown to manhood. In actuality children are born into the world surrounded by bodies that perpetually affect them so as to imprint on their minds a variety of ideas: light and colours are busy everywhere, as long as the eyes are open; sounds and some tangible qualities engage the senses appropriate to them, and force an entrance into the mind. But I think you’ll agree that if a child were kept in a place where he never saw any colour but black and white till he was a man, he would have no ideas of scarlet or green—any more than a person has an idea of the taste of oysters or of pineapples if he has never actually tasted either. 8. That’s why most children don’t get ideas of the operations of their own minds until quite late, and why some people never acquire any very clear or perfect ideas of most of their mental operations. Their mental operations ar...
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