Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/196

174 LOCKE. port from some (rationalistic) principle elsewhere obtained. , ^Thinkers who trace back all simple ideas to outer and ' inner perception we expect to reject every attempt to vW extend knowledge beyond the sphere of experience, to declare the combinations of ideas which have their origin in sensation trustworthy, and those which are formed with- out regard to perception, illusory ; or else, with Protagoras, to limit knowledge to the individual perceiving subject, with a consequent complete denial of its general validity, /^utocactljrthe op posite of all th essisjCLundiii Locke. The I remarkable spectacle is presented of a philosopher who admits no other sources of ideas than perception and the vol- untaTy_comb^ijniation^of^perceptions. tr anscending _the limits of experi ence with proofs o f thgjdi vine ex istence, viewing with suspicion the^i^easj)LsubManc£^iQrmedaX_^ of experi ence, and reducing natural^cience to the sphere of m^re opinion ; while, on the other han d, he^ascribes real- ity^and eternal validity jot he co mbjuations^of ideas formed iiidependently of perception, which are employed by math- ematics andjethics, and completely abandons the individu- alistic position in his naive faith in the impregnable validity of the relations of ideas, which is evident to all who turn their attention to them. The ground for the universal validity of the relations among ideas as well as of our knowledge of them, naturally lies not in their empir- ical origin (for my experience gives information to me alone, and that only concerning the particular case in question), but in the uniformity of man's rational constitution. If two men really have the same ideas — not merely think tbey have because they use similar language — it is impossi- ble, according to Locke, that they should hold different opinions concerning the relation of their ideas. With this conviction, that the universal validity of knowledge is rooted in the uniformity of man's rational constitution, and the further one, that we attain certain knowledge only when things conform to our ideas, Locke closely approaches Kant ; while his assumption of a fixed order of relations among ideas, which the individual understanding can- not refuse to recognize, and the typical character assigned to mathematics, associate him ^yith Malebranche and