Locke Essay Toleration

Locke discussed another problem that had not before received sustained attention: that of personal identity.Assuming one is the same person as the person who existed last week or the person who was born many years ago, what fact makes this so?However, ideas of secondary qualities do not resemble any property in the object; they are instead a product of the power that the object has to cause certain kinds of ideas in the mind of the perceiver.

Locke discussed another problem that had not before received sustained attention: that of personal identity.Assuming one is the same person as the person who existed last week or the person who was born many years ago, what fact makes this so?However, ideas of secondary qualities do not resemble any property in the object; they are instead a product of the power that the object has to cause certain kinds of ideas in the mind of the perceiver.

Such diversity of religious and moral opinion cannot not be explained by the doctrine of innate ideas but can be explained, Locke held, on his own account of the origins of ideas. He begins by claiming that the sources of all knowledge are, first, sense experience (the red colour of a rose, the ringing sound of a bell, the taste of salt, and so on) and, second, “reflection” (one’s awareness that one is thinking, that one is happy or sad, that one is having a certain sensation, and so on).

These are not themselves, however, instances of knowledge in the strict sense, but they provide the mind with the materials of knowledge.

Locke was careful to distinguish the notion of sameness of person from the related notions of sameness of body and sameness of man, or human being.

Sameness of body requires identity of matter, and sameness of human being depends on continuity of life (as would the sameness of a certain oak tree from acorn to sapling to maturity); but sameness of person requires something else.

Association has remained a central topic of inquiry in psychology ever since.

Having shown to his satisfaction that no idea requires for its explanation the hypothesis of innate ideas, Locke proceeds in Book III to examine the role of language in human mental life.Whereas complex ideas can be analyzed, or broken down, into the simple or complex ideas of which they are composed, simple ideas cannot be.The complex idea of a snowball, for example, can be analyzed into the simple ideas of whiteness, roundness, and solidity (among possibly others), but none of the latter ideas can be analyzed into anything simpler.Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.Join Britannica's Publishing Partner Program and our community of experts to gain a global audience for your work!Ideas, Locke observes, can become linked in the mind in such a way that having one idea immediately leads one to form another idea, even though the two ideas are not necessarily connected with each other.Instead, they are linked through their having been experienced together on numerous occasions in the past.Investigations into the associations that people make between ideas can reveal much about how human beings think.Through his influence on researchers such as the English physician David Hartley (1705–57), Locke contributed significantly to the development of the theory of associationism, or associationist psychology, in the 18th century.But human infants have no conception of God or of moral, logical, or mathematical truths, and to suppose that they do, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, is merely an unwarranted assumption to save a position.Furthermore, travelers to distant lands have reported encounters with people who have no conception of God and who think it morally justified to eat their enemies.