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An essay concerning human understanding
[frontispiece]
[title page]
To The Right Honourable Lord Thomas,
Epistle to the Reader
Introduction An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
1.
Book I Neither Principles Nor Ideas Are Innate
2.
Book II Of Ideas
3.
Book III Of Words
4.
Book IV Of Knowledge and Probability
1.
Chapter I Of Knowledge in General
2.
Chapter II Of the Degrees of our Knowledge
3.
Chapter III Of the Extent of Human Knowledge
4.
Chapter IV Of the Reality of Knowledge
5.
Chapter V Of Truth in General
6.
Chapter VI Of Universal Propositions: their Truth and Certainty
7.
Chapter VII Of Maxims
8.
Chapter VIII Of Trifling Propositions
9.
Chapter IX Of our Threefold Knowledge of Existence
10.
Chapter X Of our Knowledge of the Existence of a God
11.
Chapter XI Of our Knowledge of the Existence of Other Things
12.
Chapter XII Of the Improvement of our Knowledge
13.
Chapter XIII Some Further Considerations Concerning our Knowledge
14.
Chapter XIV Of Judgment
15.
Chapter XV Of Probability
16.
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.
17.
Chapter XVII Of Reason
18.
Chapter XVIII Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces
19.
Chapter XIX Of Enthusiasm
20.
Chapter XX Of Wrong Assent, or Error
21.
Chapter XXI Of the Division of the Sciences
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An essay concerning human understanding
[Description: Black and White engraving of John Locke]
An essay concerning human understanding