An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~160,000 words · 738 passages
Cite this work
- APAJohn Locke. (n.d.). An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-locke/an-essay-concerning-humane-understanding-volume-2
- MLAJohn Locke. An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-locke/an-essay-concerning-humane-understanding-volume-2.
- ChicagoJohn Locke. An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-locke/an-essay-concerning-humane-understanding-volume-2.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The second volume of Locke's Essay: Books III and IV, on words and on how far human knowledge reaches.
Context and history
Published in 1689 with the date 1690, and rewritten across five editions up to Locke's death. The catalogue holds it in two volumes: the first contains Books I and II — the refutation of innate ideas and the building up of all ideas out of sensation and reflection — and the second Books III and IV, on language and on the limits of what we can know. The spelling 'Humane' in the title is not an error: it is the orthography of the day. The whole English philosophical vocabulary comes out of this book, including primary and secondary qualities and the first modern discussion of personal identity; both Berkeley and Hume begin by arguing with it.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
By the same way that they come by the general name and idea of MAN, they easily advance to more general names and notions. For, observing that several things that differ from their idea of man, and cannot therefore be comprehended out under that name, have yet certain qualities wherein they agree with man, by retaining only those qualities, and uniting them into one idea, they have again another and more general idea; to which having given a name they make a term of a more comprehensive extension: which new idea is made, not by any new addition, but only as before, by leaving out the shape, and some other properties signified by the name man, and retaining only a body, with life, sense, and spontaneous motion, comprehended under the name animal. 9. General natures are nothing but abstract and partial ideas of more complex ones. That this is the way whereby men first formed general ideas, and general names to them, I think is so evident, that there needs no other proof of it but the considering of a man's self, or others, and the ordinary proceedings of their minds in knowledge. And he that thinks GENERAL NATURES or NOTIONS are anything else but such abstract and partial ideas of more complex ones, taken at first from particular existences, will, I fear, be at a loss where to find them. For let any one effect, and then tell me, wherein does his idea of MAN differ from that of PETER and PAUL, or his idea of HORSE from that of BUCEPHALUS, but in the leaving out something that is peculiar to each individual, and retaining so much of those particular complex ideas of several particular existences as they are found to agree in?…