Essay Concerning Human Understanding

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) is John Locke's foundational work in empiricism — the text that established the tabula rasa as the default image of the human mind in modern philosophy. Locke's argument is methodical and devastating: if we search for ideas that are not derived from sensation or reflection, we find none. The mind is not furnished with innate ideas — moral principles, mathematical axioms, or religious truths inscribed by God or nature — but is instead a blank slate upon which experience writes all that it knows. The Essay launched British empiricism as a program and set the terms for the epistemological debates that would occupy philosophy for the next two centuries.