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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
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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
  
1. Our assent ought to be regulated by the grounds of probability.
  
2. These cannot always be actually in view; and then we must content ourselves with the remembrance that we once saw ground for such a degree of assent.
  
3. The ill consequence of this, if our former judgments were not rightly made.
  
4. The right use of it, mutual charity and forbearance, in a necessary diversity of opinions.
  
5. Probability is either of sensible matter of fact, capable of human testimony, or of what is beyond the evidence of our senses.
  
6. The concurrent experience of all other men with ours, produces assurance approaching to knowledge.
  
7. Unquestionable testimony, and our own experience that a thing is for the most part so, produce confidence.
  
8. Fair testimony, and the nature of the thing indifferent, produce unavoidable assent.
  
9. Experience and testimonies clashing infinitely vary the degrees of probability.
  
10. Traditional testimonies, the further removed the less their proof becomes.
  
11. Yet history is of great use.
  
12. In things which sense cannot discover, analogy is the great rule of probability.
  
13. One case where contrary experience lessens not the testimony.
  
14. The bare testimony of divine revelation is the highest certainty.
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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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previous sectionChapter VIII Some further considerations concerning our Simple Ideas of Sensation An essay concerning human understanding
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14. They depend on the primary qualities.

What I have said concerning colours and smells may be understood also of tastes and sounds, and other the like sensible qualities; which, whatever reality we by mistake attribute to them, are in truth nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us; and depend on those primary qualities, viz., bulk, figure, texture, and motion of parts as I have said.

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