John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

In “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” written in 1690, John Locke unpacks the process through which thoughts and ideas are created in our minds. In order to accomplish this he conducts a thought experiment, where we imagine our mind as a “white paper, void of all characters,” now how does our minds become “furnished’? (186) To Locke there are two “fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring,” (186) and those two are sensation and reflection. Sensation as Locke defines it, are the ideas based on the senses that gives “distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them,” (186) and these are external elements that exist in the world that we classify, such as color, taste, sound, brightness, toughness and so on. Reflection is the “perception of the operations of our own minds” it is what produces all of our “thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different acting of our own mind,” which we “receive into our understanding as distinct ideas, as we do from bodies affecting our senses,” (187) and the fact that certain ideas can affect us on such an

“External objects furnish the mind with sensible qualities,” and “the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations.” (187) To give an example of this in action, let’s say you come upon a soccer-ball, you can feel the texture of the ball, see it’s black and white pattern, and watch and listen as you bounce it off the ground, and this is all information that gets uploaded into sensation. Handling this soccer ball may remind you that you like or dislike the sport, or you think that the ball may be too deflated to play with, or you may even think it has an ugly design, but the emotions that are elicited from your sensory experience are the operations of the mind that Locke is talking