Analysis Of John Locke's 'Meditations' By Descartes

This essay by John Locke, is an argument against innate principles and ideas from a empirical view point. He starts his essay exactly where Descartes started his Meditations, and begins by outlining his attack on these principle's. Locke gives an understanding of the word "idea," which is when someone thinks, "I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking; and I could not avoid frequently using it" (641). He does give way to general truths like mathematics, but does so with hesitation (644). In the first book he is beginning his attack on innate idea's and informing his reader what to expect in the coming chapters. He does not begin to give his reader

He than tells his audience that are minds start as white paper and it is then colored in by our experience and this is where our knowledge is found through the sensations (644). He is trying to say that the ideas come from outside our minds, but they are happening inside his mind. The idea of, "the qualities that affect our senses are , in the things themselves, so united and blended, that there is no separation, no distance between them…the ideas they produce in the mind enter by the senses simple and unmixed" (646). And this is the same thing for coldness, smelling and many other sensors from the body. These two simple ideas, are the only why the ideas enter the mind (646). Locke, explains that Ideas are categorized by way of simple and complex and gives four ways that things come to the mind, "by one sense only," "by more senses than one," by "reflection only" and "by all the ways of the sensation and reflection" (647). He does continue to explain the idea of sensory and how it effects the mind, and informs the his reader that there are "two great principal actions of the mind" (649), which he feels that we should notice them; they are "Perception or Thinking;