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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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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
  
1. Extent of our knowledge.
  
First, It extends no further than we have ideas.
  
2. Secondly, It extends no further than we can perceive their agreement or disagreement.
  
3. Thirdly, Intuitive knowledge extends itself not to all the relations of all our ideas.
  
4. Fourthly, Nor does demonstrative knowledge.
  
5. Fifthly, Sensitive knowledge narrower than either.
  
6. Sixthly, Our knowledge, therefore, narrower than our ideas.
  
Whether Matter may not be made by God to think is more than man can know.
  
7. How far our knowledge reaches.
  
8. Firstly, Our knowledge of identity and diversity in ideas extends as far as our ideas themselves.
  
9. Secondly, Of their co-existence, extends only a very little way.
  
10. Because the connexion between simple ideas in substances is for the most part unknown.
  
11. Especially of the secondary qualities of bodies.
  
12. Because necessary connexion between any secondary and the primary qualities is undiscoverable by us.
  
13. We have no perfect knowledge of their primary qualities.
  
14. And seek in vain for certain and universal knowledge of unperceived qualities in substances.
  
15. Of repugnancy to co-exist, our knowledge is larger.
  
16. Our knowledge of the co-existence of powers in bodies extends but a very little way.
  
17. Of the powers that co-exist in spirits yet narrower.
  
18. Thirdly, Of relations between abstracted ideas it is not easy to say how far our knowledge extends.
  
Morality capable of demonstration.
  
19. Two things have made moral ideas to be thought incapable of demonstration: their unfitness for sensible representation, and their complexedness.
  
20. Remedies of our difficulties in dealing demonstratively with moral ideas.
  
21. Fourthly, Of the three real existences of which we have certain knowledge.
  
22. Our ignorance great.
  
Its causes.
  
23. First, One cause of our ignorance want of ideas.
  
I. Want of simple ideas that other creatures in other parts of the universe may have.
  
24. Want of simple ideas that men are capable of having, but have not, because of their remoteness.
  
25. Because of their minuteness.
  
26. Hence no science of bodies within our reach.
  
27. Much less a science of unembodied spirits.
  
28. Secondly, Another cause, want of a discoverable connexion between ideas we have.
  
29. Instances.
  
30. Thirdly, A third cause, want of tracing our ideas.
  
31. Extent of human knowledge in respect to its universality.
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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
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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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6. Compounding.

The next operation we may observe in the mind about its ideas is Composition; whereby it puts together several of those simple ones it has received from sensation and reflection, and combines them into complex ones. Under this of composition may be reckoned also that of enlarging, wherein, though the composition does not so much appear as in more complex ones, yet it is nevertheless a putting several ideas together, though of the same kind. Thus, by adding several units together, we make the idea of a dozen; and putting together the repeated ideas of several perches, we frame that of a furlong.

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