352 



ON HUMAN UNDERSTANDING. 



respect to the powers and process of the mind m acquiring knowledge. The 

 work consists of four divisions, the first of which, however, is merely intro- 

 ductory, and intended to clear the ground of that multitude of strong and 

 deep-rooted weeds at which we have already glanced, and which, under the 

 scholastic name of prcecognita, innate ideas, maxims, and dictates, or innate 

 speculative and practical principles, prevented the growth of a better har- 

 vest ; and, to a certain extent, superseded the necessity of reason, education, 

 and revelation, of national institutions and Bible societies ; by teaching that a 

 true and correct notion of God, of self or consciousness, of virtue and vice, 

 and, consequently, of religious and moral duties, is imprinted by nature on 

 the mind of every man ; and that we cannot transgress the law thus originally 

 implanted within us without exposing ourselves to the lash of our own con- 

 sciences. Discarding for ever all this jargon of the schools, the Essay before 

 us proceeds in its three remaining parts to treat of mEAs, which, in the popu- 

 lar, and not the scholastic, sense of the term, are the elements of knowledge ; 

 of WORDS, which are the signs of ideas, and consequently the circulating 

 medium of knowledge ; and of knowledge itself, which is the subject proposed, 

 and the great end to be acquired. 



The whole of the preceding rubbish, then, being in this manner cleared 

 away, the elaborate author proceeds to represent to us the body and mind as 

 eqilally at birth a tabula rasa, or unwritten sheet of paper: as consisting 

 equally of a blank or vacuity of impressions, but as equally capable of 

 acquiring impressions by the operation of external objects, and equally and 

 most skilfully endowed with distinct powers or faculties for this purpose ; 

 those of the body being the external senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, 

 and touch ; and those of the mind the internal senses of perception, reason, 

 judgment, imagination, and memory.* 



It is possible that a few slight impressions may be produced a short time 

 antecedently to birth ; and it is certain that various instinctive tendencies, 

 which, however, have no connexion with the mind, are more perfect, because 

 more needful, at the period of birth than ever afterward; and we have also 

 frequent proofs of an hereditary or accidental predisposition towards parti- 

 cular subjects. But the fundamental doctrine before us is by no means 

 affected by such collateral circumstances ; to the correctness of which our 

 most eminent logicians of later times have given their entire suffrage. Thus 

 Bishop Butler, and it is not necessary to go farther than tins eminent casuist: 

 — "In these respects," meaning those before us, "mankind is left by nature 

 an unformed, unfinished creature, utterly deficient and unqualified, before the 

 acquirement of knowledge, experience, and habits, for that mature state of 

 life which was the end of'his creation, considering him as related only to this 

 world. The faculty of reason is the candle of the Lord within us ; though 

 it can afford no light where it does not shme, nor judge where it has no prin- 

 ciples to judge upon."! 



External objects first impress or operate upon the outward senses, and 

 these senses, by means hitherto unexplained, and, perhaps, altogether inex- 

 plicable, immediately impress or operate upon the mind, or excite in it per- 

 ceptions or ideas of the presence and qualities of such objects ; the word 

 idea being employed in the system before us, not, as we have already hinted 

 at, in any of the significations of the schools, but in its broad and popular 

 meaning, as importing " v/hatever a man observes and is conscious to himself 

 he has in his mind ;"J whatever was formerly intended by the terms archetype, 

 phantasm, species, thought, notion, conception, or whatever else it may be, 

 which we can be employed about in thinking.^ And to these effects, without 

 puzzling himself with the inquiry how external objects operate upon the 

 senses, or the senses upon the mind, Mr. Locke gave the name of ideas of 

 SENSATION, in allusion to the source from which they are derived. 



* An abstract of this view of Mr. Locke's system, abbreviated for the occasion, the author found himself 

 called upon to introduce into liis Study of Medicine. Vol. iv. p. 50—55, 2d edit. 1825. 

 t Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, part i. ch. v. part ii. Conclusion, 

 t Locli e, book i. ch. 1, $ 3. § lb. $ 8. 



