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Experience, according to Locke, comes from sensation and reflection. '''Sensation''' is when a person’s senses are applied to specific perceptible objects, where the senses convey an object’s qualities into the mind. [[CiteRef::Locke (2015b)|p. 18]] '''Reflection''' occurs when a person is able to perceive the operations of their own mind from within their own mind, in a way that produces ideas which could not come from external objects. Reflection is when the mind is aware of what it is doing. [[CiteRef::Locke (2015b)|p. 18]]
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In the first book of his ''Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' Locke begins by arguing that there are no principles or ideas that are innate in human beings. In seventeenth century England, such principles were widely held to exist and to be necessary to the stability of religion and morality. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)]] "Nothing is more commonly taken for granted" he wrote, "than that certain principles both speculative and practical are accepted by all mankind. Some people have argued that because these principles are (they think) universally accepted, they must have been stamped into the souls of men from the outset." [[CiteRef::Locke (2015a)|p. 3]] He denies that we hold speculative innate principles, innate ideas of God, identity, or impossibility. If there were such principles, he supposes, they would be known to everyone, even "children, idiots, savages, and illiterate people". [[CiteRef::Locke (2015a)|p. 8]] Mathematical truths likewise cannot be innate, as these must be discovered by reason. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)]]
In the second book, Locke begins his positive account of how people acquire knowledge. "Let us suppose", he writes, "the mind to have no ideas in it, to be like ''white paper'' with nothing written on it. How then does it come to be written on?...To this I answer, in one word, from ''experience''". [[CiteRef::Locke (2015b)|p. 18]] When our senses are applied to particular perceptible objects, they convey into the mind perceptions of things. This source of most of our ideas, Locke calls '''sensation'''. We can also perceive the workings of our own mind within us, which gives us ideas of the minds own operations such as "perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different things our minds do", a process which Locke calls '''reflection'''. [[CiteRef::Locke (2015b)|p. 18]] Simple ideas produced by these processes can be grouped into complex ideas, such as those of substances and modes. '''Substances''' are independently existing things like God, angels, humans, animals, plants, and constructed things. '''Modes''' are dependently existing things like mathematical and moral ideas which form the content of religion, politics, and culture. Note that while Locke does not believe that we are born with ideas, he believes we are born with faculties to receive and manipulate them. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)]]
While Locke holds that the mind is a blank slate regarding content, he believes that people are born with faculties with which to manipulate said content. Through sensation and reflection, the mind can, first, organize simple ideas into complex ideas—the independent existences of substances and the dependent existences of modes. The mind can also combine simple and complex ideas and regard them together without uniting the two—what Locke calls relations. Furthermore, the mind can produce general ideas by extracting particulars in order to limit the application of that idea. Sensation and reflection can also give rise to other ideas like: numbers, space, time, power and moral relations. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)|p. 19]]
