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The Aristotelian conception of scientific knowledge wledge prevailed prior to Locke’s work stated that scientific knowledge concerned certain knowledge of necessary truths. Locke, upon realization that this demand of scientific knowledge was too strict for the experimental science of his time, developed a new conception that was more appropriate, while retaining the Aristotelian scientific knowledge as an ideal.[[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)|p. 4]] According to Locke, there are two kinds of scientific knowledge, and they differ in their degree of certainty. Intuition is knowledge understood instantly, and demonstration is knowledge understood after a set of intermediate steps. Both intuition and demonstration are forms of certain knowledge.[[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)|p. 8]]
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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''". Locke's belief that all knowledge comes from sense experience is '''empiricism'''.[[CiteRef::Locke (2015b)|p. 18]] Unlike Descartes, Locke does not seriously entertain the possibility that his senses are fundamentally unreliable. He writes that, "We certainly find that pleasure or pain follows upon the application to us of certain objects whose existence we perceive (or dream we perceive!) through our senses; and this certainly is as great as we need for practical purposes, which are the only purposes we ought to have". [[CiteRef::Locke (2015d)|p. 202]] When our senses are applied to particular perceptible objects, they convey into the mind perceptions of those things. This source of most of our ideas, Locke calls '''sensation'''is the source of most of our ideas. We can also perceive the workings of our own mind within us, which gives us ideas of the mind's 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)]] Loc
As a corpuscularist, Locke took all observable bodies to be composed of invisibly small material particles called corpuscles and took direct physical contact to be the primary or sole means of communicating motion. Material bodies had certain '''primary qualities''' that are impossible to separate from them; size, shape, texture, and motion. They also had '''secondary qualities''', which the object's abilities to produce in people sensations of color, sound, taste, and smell when they interact with their primary qualities. [[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)]] Unlike Descartes, Locke accepted the possibility that the soul might be material. In book IV of his Essay, he wrote that "anyone who will allow himself to think freely...will hardly find reason directing him firmly for or against the soul's materiality". He argued that the materiality of the soul was consistent with "the great ends of religion and morality", since God might effect the material resurrection of the dead on judgment day. [[CiteRef::Locke (2015b)|p. 205]]
=== Locke on Scientific Methodology ===
Like many of his time, Locke sought to replace the Aristotelian scholastic approach to knowledge, which supposed that scientific knowledge was certain knowledge of necessary truths, with conclusions deduced from self-evident premises. Locke realizes that this is too stringent a demand for the new experimental science of the Royal Society. He takes knowledge to be "nothing but the perception of the connection and agreement, or disagreement and incompatibility, of any of our ideas". [[CiteRef::Locke (2015d)|p. 196]][[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)]] Locke distinguishes between '''nominal essences''' which are the set of observable qualities we use to classify a thing, and '''real essences''' which are the causal grounds of a substance's perceivable qualities. For Locke, true knowledge in natural philosophy would be knowledge of the real essences of material substances and the necessary connections to qualities flowing from them. With such knowledge, we could deduce the tertiary qualities of substances; their powers to produce certain effects in other substances. Just as a locksmith knows that a particular key opens one lock but not another, we could know that opium produces sleep, and hemlock causes death and the reasons why. This however, would require knowledge of the minute corpuscular particles of matter, beyond the range of human senses. Locke believes that their are certain epistemic agents, such as God and the angels, who are capable of such knowledge, but that humans are not.
Locke’s conception of scientific knowledge concerned certain kinds of objects: real essences and the connections that flowed between them. Locke drew a distinction between real and nominal essences. While '''nominal essences''' consisted in the observable qualities used to describe and organize a thing, the '''real essence''' is what makes the thing what it is.[[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)|p. 9]] To Locke, people have scientific knowledge of a thing if they know both its real essence and the necessary connections between the real essence and other qualities.[[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)|p. 10]] This also holds for scientific knowledge in natural philosophy. However, says Locke, accessing either is impossible for people, due to the fact that real essences escape them.
