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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
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Chapter IV Of the Reality of Knowledge
  
1. Objection. "Knowledge placed in our ideas may be all unreal or chimerical."
  
2. Answer: "Not so, where ideas agree with things.
  
3. But what shall be the criterion of this agreement?
  
4. As, First, all simple ideas are really conformed to things.
  
5. Secondly, All complex ideas, except ideas of substances, are their own archetypes.
  
6. Hence the reality of mathematical knowledge.
  
7. And of moral.
  
8. Existence not required to make abstract knowledge real.
  
9. Nor will it be less true or certain, because moral ideas are of our own making and naming.
  
10. Misnaming disturbs not the certainty of the knowledge.
  
11. Thirdly, Our complex ideas of substances have their archetypes without us; and here knowledge comes short.
  
12. So far as our complex ideas agree with those archetypes without us, so far our knowledge concerning substances is real.
  
13. In our inquiries about substances, we must consider ideas, and not confine our thoughts to names or species supposed set out by names.
  
14. Objection against a changeling being something between a man and beast, answered.
  
15. What will become of changelings in a future state?
  
16. Monsters.
  
17. Words and species.
  
18. Recapitulation.
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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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3. But what shall be the criterion of this agreement?

It is evident the mind knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them. Our knowledge, therefore is real only so far as there is a conformity between our ideas and the reality of things. But what shall be here the criterion? How shall the mind, when it perceives nothing but its own ideas, know that they agree with things themselves? This, though it seems not to want difficulty, yet, I think, there be two sorts of ideas that we may be assured agree with things.

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