Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/177

THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. 155 (a) Theory of Exiowledge. — Locke's theory of knowledge is controlled by two tendencies, one native, furnished by the Baconian empiricism, and the other Continental, sup- plied by the Cartesian question concerning the origin of ideas. Bacon had demanded the closest connection with experience as the condition of fruitful inquiry. Locke supports this commendation of experience by a detailed description of the services which it renders to cognition, namely, by showing that, in simple ideas, perception supplies the material for complex ideas, and for all the cognitive work of the understanding. Descartes had divided ideas, according to their origin, into three classes: those which are self-formed, those which come from without, and those which are innate (p. 92), and had called this third class the most valuable. Locke disputes the existence of ideas in the understanding from birth, and makes it receive the elements of knowledge from the senses, that is, from with- out. He is a representative of sensationalism, — not in the stricter sense, first put into the term by those who subse- quently continued his endeavors, that thought arises from / perception, that it is transformed sensation — but in the , wider sense, that thought is (free) operation with ideas, which are neither created by it nor present in it from the first, but given to it by perception, that, consequently, the cognitive process begins with sensation and so its first attitude is a passive one. From the standpoint of the Cartesian problem, which he solves in a sense opposite to Descartes, Locke supplements the empiricism of Bacon by basing it on a psychologically developed theory of knowl- edge. That in the course of the inquiry he introduces a new principle, which causes him to diverge from the true empirical path, will appear in the sequel. The question " How our ideas come into the mind " re- ceives a negative answer (in the first book of the Essay) : 1869, and an exposition of his theory of substance by De Fries in 1879. Victor Cousin's Philosophic de Locke has passed through six editions. [Among more recent English discussions reference may be made to Green's Introduction to Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, 1874 (new ed. 1890), which is a valuable critique of the line of development, Locke, Berkeley, Hume ; Fowler's Locke, in the English Men of Letters, 1880; and Eraser's Locke, in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, 1890. — Tr.]