No principles are innate.
Locke denies that the mind comes stamped with ready-made principles or ideas. Universal agreement, where it exists, does not prove that anything was imprinted on the soul before experience.
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An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Locke argues that the mind holds no innate ideas and that all knowledge is built from experience through sensation and reflection.
Mind Map
Map of the book's core ideas
Core Message
What the book is really saying
The mind begins empty.
He asks the reader to suppose the mind to be like white paper, void of all characters, and then to ask how it comes to be furnished with its vast store of ideas.
Experience supplies the materials.
Every idea, Locke holds, ultimately derives from experience: from the senses observing external objects, and from the mind observing its own inner operations.
Ideas combine but cannot be invented.
From simple ideas the understanding can repeat, compare, and unite them into complex ideas, yet it can neither invent a single new simple idea nor destroy one already received.
Summary
The essence in plain English
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding sets out to examine the origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge. The first part of the work is a sustained attack on the doctrine that the mind is born already furnished with principles and ideas.
Locke argues that there are no innate principles, whether speculative or practical. The common appeal to universal consent fails, since even widely held maxims are not assented to by all, and agreement would not prove that the principles were imprinted rather than learned.
Having cleared away innate ideas, Locke offers his own account. He invites the reader to suppose the mind to be white paper, void of all characters, and asks how it comes to be filled. His answer is one word: experience.
Experience flows from two fountains. Sensation conveys into the mind the ideas of sensible qualities through the senses, while reflection furnishes ideas drawn from the mind's notice of its own operations, such as perceiving, thinking, doubting, and willing.
From these simple ideas the understanding builds. It can repeat, compare, and unite them into complex ideas without limit, but it cannot frame a wholly new simple idea or annihilate one already there. Knowledge, for Locke, is assembled from materials that experience alone supplies.
Key Concepts
The ideas to keep
No Innate Principles
Locke denies that the mind is born stamped with speculative or practical principles, and argues that universal consent would not prove them innate.
Why it matters
It clears the ground for an account of knowledge built entirely from experience.
Mind as White Paper
He asks the reader to suppose the mind to begin as white paper, void of all characters, then to ask how it comes to be furnished.
Why it matters
It frames the central question of where all our ideas come from.
Sensation and Reflection
Experience supplies ideas through two fountains: the senses observing external objects, and the mind observing its own operations.
Why it matters
These two sources, in Locke's account, are the only origins of every idea we have.
Mental Models
Reusable ways to think
Experience First
Treat every idea as something that must have entered through experience rather than been present from birth.
How it helps
It prompts the reader to trace any belief back to its origin in sensation or reflection.
Two Fountains
Outward sense observes the world; inward reflection observes the mind at work, and together they feed the understanding.
How it helps
It separates knowledge of things from knowledge of one's own mental operations.
Simple to Complex
Complex ideas are made by repeating, comparing, and uniting simple ideas that experience first supplied.
How it helps
It shows how rich thought can be built without anything being invented from nothing.
Selected Quotes
Short passages from the source
To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself.
These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.
it is not in the power of the most exalted wit, or enlarged understanding, by any quickness or variety of thought, to INVENT or FRAME one new simple idea in the mind
Source
Text used for this page
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1 by John Locke.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10615/pg10615-images.html
Project Gutenberg states that this ebook is for use at no cost with almost no restrictions in the United States and most other parts of the world, subject to local law.
First published 1689; the Project Gutenberg source is Volume 1 (Books I and II) of the Essay.