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An essay concerning human understanding

  
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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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Book III Of Words
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Book IV Of Knowledge and Probability
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Chapter I Of Knowledge in General
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Chapter II Of the Degrees of our Knowledge
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Chapter III Of the Extent of Human Knowledge
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Chapter IV Of the Reality of Knowledge
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Chapter V Of Truth in General
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Chapter VI Of Universal Propositions: their Truth and Certainty
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Chapter VII Of Maxims
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Chapter VIII Of Trifling Propositions
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Chapter IX Of our Threefold Knowledge of Existence
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Chapter X Of our Knowledge of the Existence of a God
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Chapter XI Of our Knowledge of the Existence of Other Things
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Chapter XII Of the Improvement of our Knowledge
  
1. Knowledge is not got from maxims.
  
2. (The occasion of that opinion.
  
3. But from comparing clear and distinct ideas.
  
4. Dangerous to build upon precarious principles.
  
5. To do so is no certain way to truth.
  
6. But to compare clear, complete ideas, under steady names.
  
7. The true method of advancing knowledge is by considering our abstract ideas.
  
8. By which morality also may he made clearer.
  
9. Our knowledge of substances is to be improved, not by contemplation of abstract ideas, but only by experience.
  
10. Experience may procure us convenience, not science.
  
11. We are fitted for moral science, but only for probable interpretations of external nature.
  
12. In the study of nature we must beware of hypotheses and wrong principles.
  
13. The true use of hypotheses.
  
14. Clear and distinct ideas with settled names, and the finding of those intermediate ideas which show their agreement or disagreement, are the ways to enlarge our knowledge.
  
15. Mathematics an instance of this.
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Chapter XIII Some Further Considerations Concerning our Knowledge
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Chapter XIV Of Judgment
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Chapter XV Of Probability
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Chapter XVI Of the Degrees of Assent
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Chapter XVII Of Reason
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Chapter XVIII Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces
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Chapter XIX Of Enthusiasm
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Chapter XX Of Wrong Assent, or Error
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Chapter XXI Of the Division of the Sciences

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5. To do so is no certain way to truth.

If, therefore, those that pass for principles are not certain, (which we must have some way to know, that we may be able to distinguish them from those that are doubtful,) but are only made so to us by our blind assent, we are liable to be misled by them; and instead of being guided into truth, we shall, by principles, be only confirmed in mistake and error.

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