Human Understanding
...as John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Hardly a book on the subject is written in England from the time of its publication through the Romantic period which does not respond in some way to Locke's text. The text itself is a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the mechanisms of human thought. An analysis which Locke believed had the potential to shed new light on social and religious thought. In the course of the book, Locke himself attempts to use his model to explain many philosophical dilemmas, such as the relationship between the material world, subjectivity and the divine.
The books most sustained influence on British thought was, however, not a result of his philosophizing about these relationships, but rather of his initial impetus to categorize and describe the relationship between various types of human thought. It is the nature of the model of cognition that Locke develops which lead John Stuart Mill, for example, to dub him the unquestioned founder of the analytic philosophy of mind. Many later British thinkers would disagree with Locke, but few would be able to refrain from constructing their own cognitive models as justifications for their social, aesthetic, or religious philosophies in the face of the weight of the Influence of Locke's Essay.
In John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding", he makes a distinction between the sorts of ideas we can conceive of in the perception of objects. Locke separates these perceptions into primary and secondary qualities. Regardless of any criticism of such a distinction, it is a necessary one in that, without it, perception would be a haphazard affair. To illustrate this, an examination of Locke's definition of primary and secondary qualities is necessary.
Starting from common-sense notions of perception, namely that there must be something in order to perceive...
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