Rejection of Innate Knowledge
The guiding thematic principle overlaying the entirety of the essay is a rejection of Cartesian philosophy suggesting that knowledge arises without causality. Locke’s search for the source of knowledge is inspired by theories of innate understanding expressed by philosophers like Herbert of Cherbury which proposed and expounded the idea that the human mind comes into being with a certain principles already imprinted upon its consciousness. The logical philosophical extension of this theory would naturally lead to the conclusion that any principles with which every human is born would also make these principle true. It was from closer scrutiny of this long-held view and the realization of its inherently fallacious logic that Locke devised his extended argument of rejection.
Tabula Rasa
The most immediately striking logical fallacy of the theory of innate knowledge led to a concrete idea which becomes the thematic foundation for all of Locke’s subsequent investigation into human understanding. The theory of innate knowledge could be easily disproven through the simple existence of children and mentally defective adults whose lack of any principles supposed to inscribed at birth served to refute the underlying basis. From this, Locke develops his theme the acquisition of knowledge being like a blank slate. Rather than a mind being born with innate principles, Locke argues, every human mind is actually a tabula rasa: a blank slate with no ideas or principles already written upon it.
The Birth of Empiricism
Although covering a wide array of specific topics and individual explanations for how knowledge is apprehended, the bulk of the rest of the essay is essentially related to theme of how ideas come to be written on that slate if it is blank at birth. This theme can effectively be explained as the birth of the empiricism, a school of thought that would dominate British philosophy from the point of the essay’s publication. Locke’s answer to the question of how information comes to be written upon mind is that it is all through experience. Experience relates to sensory input such as seeing, hearing, touching, etc., but also extends to how the mind perceives sensory information. Key to the explaining human understanding is that experience is not limited merely to that which relates directly to the five senses, but also how once this information has been perceived, it can also be reflected upon to draw correspondence with abstract ideas which have not or cannot be apprehended through sensory experience.
