An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1

Where do our ideas come from? John Locke argues that there are no innate ideas, no truths stamped on the mind at birth, and that the mind begins as 'white paper', on which experience writes. All our knowledge, he says, comes from sensation, our experience of the outside world, and reflection, our awareness of our own minds, and from these simple ideas the mind builds complex ones. This first volume contains Books I and II, including his discussions of primary and secondary qualities, power and freedom, and personal identity, which he locates in consciousness and memory.

Locke (1632–1704) published the Essay in 1689, the same year as his political Second Treatise of Government, and it founded British empiricism. This edition follows the second edition, with its original seventeenth-century spelling, hence 'Humane'. The empiricist line continues in Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

John Locke (1632–1704) trained as a physician at Oxford and became adviser to the Earl of Shaftesbury, a leading opponent of the king. Suspected of plotting, he fled to the Netherlands in 1683 and returned only after the Revolution of 1688, when he published the works that made him famous.

His Essay Concerning Human Understanding argued that the mind begins as a blank slate filled by experience, and his Two Treatises of Government defended natural rights to life, liberty and property and government by consent. His Letter Concerning Toleration argued for religious freedom. His ideas shaped the American Declaration of Independence and modern liberal thought.