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==== Locke on Innate Principles ====
Locke begins ''Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' by setting up reasons, as well as responses, to why he believes there are no innate notions or principles of the speculative (descriptive) or practical (moral, prescriptive) kinds. Locke treats innateness—the theory that there are innate notions—as a hypothesis and proceeds to provide arguments against it. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)|p. 15]] He first rejects the argument from universal consent:
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Locke became personal physician to Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621-1683) (Lord Ashley), a leading political figure during the 1670's and 1680's. [[CiteRef::Dunn (2003)]] He was an early member of the Royal Society and knew most of the major English natural philosophers, including [[Isaac Newton]] (1643-1727) and some continental ones as well. This community was concerned with arguing for the reliability of observation and experiment as a means of acquiring knowledge as opposed to Aristotelian intuition or Cartesian rationalism. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)|p. 4]] Locke's most important contribution to this argument was his ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'', published in 1689. Locke and Newton became directly acquainted while Locke was finishing this work. When Locke read Newton's ''Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica'', published in 1687, he found epistemological views similar to his own. Both had absorbed the views current in the Royal Society. Locke's essay received its warmest reception from the members of the society, and can be deemed an expression of their collective understanding of scientific methodology. [[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)]]
|Major Contributions==== Locke's Empiricism ===
In the first book of his ''Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' Locke argues that there are no principles or ideas that are innate in human beings, "stamped into the soul from the outset". [[CiteRef::Locke (2015a)|p. 3]] Such principles or ideas were apparently widely held to exist and to be necessary for the stability of religion and morality in seventeenth century England. 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 everyone, even ‘children and idiots’. Mathematical truths are not innate, as these must be discovered by reason. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)]]
"Nothing is more commonly taken for granted than that certain principles … are accepted by all mankind. Some people have argued that because these principles are … universally accepted, they must have been stamped into the souls of men from the outset." [[CiteRef::Locke (2015a)|p. 3]]
