Descartes believed that the mind held all knowledge and people just had to think about small things and little by little you will know more complex things. His principles had four steps, “the first was, never accept anything as true” (182), the next three steps included separating the parts of the truth into parts, thinking about the parts individually then surveying the new founded thought so it could not omit anything.
Locke on the other hand brought the idea that knowledge and the principles were all based on sensations. Human minds start out blank, “as we say, white paper, blank of all characters, without any ideas,”(186) then through experience with objects and other sensations the human mind is shaped and tested ideas to become truth. Leibnitz answered Locke, in that that the principles of science were not just based on sensations,
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He added “that mankind should believe the soul to be immortal;”(194) stating through his essay that the soul continues to be taught even after death by St. Bernard and God.
While reading Hume there was an idea that was brought up in class, in which that if someone has no concept of a table it cannot exist. Hume’s idea on this is that “ we can never think of anything which we have not seen without us , or felt in our own minds.”(197) That was one of Hume’s principles along with experience and knowledge is based on learning cause and effect relationships.
La Mettrie had an opinion that was a combination of Locke and Voltaire. In which humans have a part called the soul that is completely unknown to everyone, but shapes how people behave and think. “In disease the soul is sometimes hidden, showing no sign of life;” … “Sometimes the greatest genius becomes imbecile and no longer recognizable.”(204) La Mettrie’s principle was that knowledge was gained through sensory data but that data was controlled by the soul which could be