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An essay concerning human understanding

  
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[title page]
  
To The Right Honourable Lord Thomas,
  
Epistle to the Reader

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Introduction An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
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Book I Neither Principles Nor Ideas Are Innate
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Book II Of Ideas
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Chapter I Of Ideas in general, and their Original
  
1. Idea is the object of thinking.
  
2. All ideas come from sensation or reflection.
  
3. The objects of sensation one source of ideas.
  
4. The operations of our minds, the other source of them.
  
5. All our ideas are of the one or the other of these.
  
6. Observable in children.
  
7. Men are differently furnished with these, according to the different objects they converse with.
  
8. Ideas of reflection later, because they need attention.
  
9. The soul begins to have ideas when it begins to perceive.
  
10. The soul thinks not always; for this wants proofs.
  
11. It is not always conscious of it.
  
12. If a sleeping man thinks without knowing it, the sleeping and waking man are two persons.
  
13. Impossible to convince those that sleep without dreaming, that they think.
  
14. That men dream without remembering it, in vain urged.
  
15. Upon this hypothesis, the thoughts of a sleeping man ought to be most rational.
  
16. On this hypothesis, the soul must have ideas not derived from sensation or reflection, of which there is no appearance.
  
17. If I think when I know it not, nobody else can know it.
  
18. How knows any one that the soul always thinks? For if it be not a self-evident proposition, it needs proof.
  
19. "That a man should be busy in thinking, and yet not retain it the next moment," very improbable.
  
20. No ideas but from sensation and reflection, evident, if we observe children.
  
21. State of a child in the mother's womb.
  
22. The mind thinks in proportion to the matter it gets from experience to think about.
  
23. A man begins to have ideas when he first has sensation. What sensation is.
  
24. The original of all our knowledge.
  
25. In the reception of simple ideas, the understanding is for the most part passive.
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Chapter II Of Simple Ideas
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Chapter III Of Simple Ideas of Sense
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Chapter IV Idea of Solidity
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Chapter V Of Simple Ideas of Divers Senses
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Chapter VI Of Simple Ideas of Reflection
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Chapter VII Of Simple Ideas of both Sensation and Reflection
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Chapter VIII Some further considerations concerning our Simple Ideas of Sensation
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Chapter IX Of Perception
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Chapter X Of Retention
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Chapter XI Of Discerning, and other operations of the Mind
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Chapter XII Of Complex Ideas
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Chapter XIII Complex Ideas of Simple Modes:--and First, of the Simple Modes of the Idea of Space
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Chapter XIV Idea of Duration and its Simple Modes
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Chapter XV Ideas of Duration and Expansion, considered together
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Chapter XVI Idea of Number
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Chapter XVII Of Infinity
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Chapter XVIII Other Simple Modes
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Chapter XIX Of the Modes of Thinking
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Chapter XX Of Modes of Pleasure and Pain
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Chapter XXI Of Power
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Chapter XXII Of Mixed Modes
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Chapter XXIII Of our Complex Ideas of Substances
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Chapter XXIV Of Collective Ideas of Substances
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Chapter XXV Of Relation
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Chapter XXVI Of Cause and Effect, and other Relations
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Chapter XXVII Of Identity and Diversity
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Chapter XXVIII Of Other Relations
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Chapter XXIX Of Clear and Obscure, Distinct and Confused Ideas
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Chapter XXX Of Real and Fantastical Ideas
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Chapter XXXI Of Adequate and Inadequate Ideas
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Chapter XXXII Of True and False Ideas
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Chapter XXXIII Of the Association of Ideas
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Book III Of Words
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Book IV Of Knowledge and Probability

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1. Idea is the object of thinking.

Every man being conscious to himself that he thinks; and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there, it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas,--such as are those expressed by the words whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others: it is in the first place then to be inquired, How he comes by them?

I know it is a received doctrine, that men have native ideas, and original characters, stamped upon their minds in their very first being. This opinion I have at large examined already; and, I suppose what I have said in the foregoing Book will be much more easily admitted, when I have shown whence the understanding may get all the ideas it has; and by what ways and degrees they may come into the mind;--for which I shall appeal to every one's own observation and experience.

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