An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: To which are Now First Added, I. An Analysis of Mr. Locke's Doctrine of Ideas, on a Large Sheet. II. A Defence of Mr. Locke's Opinion Concerning Personal Identity, with an Appendix. III. A Treatise on the Conduct of the Understanding. IV. Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman. V. Elements of Natural Philosophy. VI. A New Method of a Common Place-book Extracted from the Author's Works, Volume 3

Front Cover

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 161 - Reason is natural revelation, whereby the eternal Father of light, and fountain of all knowledge, communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within the reach of their natural faculties. Revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries, communicated by God immediately, which reason vouches the truth of, by the testimony and proofs it gives, that they come from God...
Page 222 - I have mentioned mathematics as a way to settle in the mind a habit of reasoning closely and in train; not that I think it necessary that all men should be deep mathematicians, but that having got the way of reasoning, which that study necessarily brings the mind to, they might be able to transfer it to other parts of knowledge as they shall have occasion.30 For in all sorts of reasoning every single argument should be managed as a mathematical demonstration; the connection and dependence of ideas...
Page 30 - ... neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once? In effect, it is something imperfect that cannot exist, an idea wherein some parts of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together.
Page 161 - I mean enthusiasm : which, laying^ by reason, would set up revelation without it; whereby in effect it takes away both reason and revelation, and substitutes in the room of it the ungrounded fancies of a man's own brain, and assumes them for a foundation both of opinion and conduct.
Page 210 - The second is of those who put passion in the place of reason, and being resolved that shall govern their actions and arguments, neither use their own, nor hearken to other people's reason, any...
Page 110 - Secondly, The testimony of others, vouching their observation and experience. In the testimony of others is to be considered. 1. The number. 2. The integrity. 3. The skill of the witnesses. 4. The design of the author, where it is a testimony out of a book cited. 5. The consistency of the parts, and circumstances of the relation. 6. Contrary testimonies.
Page 151 - Thou art, of what sort the eternal life of the saints was to be, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive.
Page 125 - THE word REASON in the English language has different significations: sometimes it is taken for true and clear principles: sometimes for clear and fair deductions from those principles: and sometimes for the cause, and particularly the final cause. But the consideration I shall have of it here is in a signification different from all these; and that is, as it stands for a faculty in man, that faculty whereby man is supposed to be distinguished from beasts, and wherein it is evident he much surpasses...
Page 2 - And that which makes it yet harder to treat of mental and verbal propositions separately, is, that most men, if not all, in their thinking and reasonings within themselves, make use of words instead of ideas, at least when the subject of their meditation contains in it complex ideas.
Page 56 - And, secondly, we can know the truth, and so may be certain in propositions, which affirm something of another, •which is a necessary consequence of its precise complex idea,( but not contained in it : as that the external angle of all triangles is bigger than either of the opposite internal angles...

Bibliographic information