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An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

John Locke·English

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The founding text of British empiricism. Locke argues that the mind at birth is a blank slate and that all ideas come from experience: either from sensation or from reflection.

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience. In that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself.

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