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|Historical Context=Locke was born into a an English Puritan family of modest means, but was able to obtain an excellent education by way of his father's connections. [[CiteRef::Dunn (2003)]] In 1647, at the age of fifteen, he began studies at Westminster School, considered London's best. At twenty, he began studies at Christ Church College, Oxford. His studies focused on logic, metaphysics, and languages taught within the framework of '''Aristotelian scholasticism''', for which he developed an intense dislike. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)| pp. 3-4]][[CiteRef::Milton (1994)]] Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) had posited his '''heliocentric cosmology''' in 1543, more than a century earlier. Forty years earlier, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) published his observations with the telescope in 1610. These developments had cast Aristotelianism into doubt. [[CiteRef::Westfall (1980)|p. 6]] Like many ambitious students of the time, Locke sought alternative resources outside the formal curriculum, which were abundant at Oxford. He became involved with a discussion group organized by John Wilkins (1614-1672)and was exposed to the '''experimental philosophy''' and the ideas of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who argued for an '''inductive methodology''' for science. The Wilkins group was the nucleus of what would later become the 'Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge', known simply as the '''Royal Society'''. England's main society for the promotion of natural philosophy, the Royal Society became a formal institution in the 1660's. The society would set itself in opposition to the Aristotelian scholasticism of the universities, advocating the study of nature rather than of ancient texts. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)|p. 4]] Locke's notebooks indicate a strong interest in medicine and chemistry. He attended the lectures of the great anatomist Thomas Willis (1621-1675) and took careful notes. [[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)|p. 217]][[CiteRef::Anstey (2011)|p. 6]]

Locke became personal physician to Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621-1683) (Lord Ashley), a leading English 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)]]

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]] 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 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)]]

  While Locke holds that the mind is As a blank slate regarding content, he believes that people are born with faculties with which to manipulate said content. Through sensation and reflectioncorpuscularist, 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 took all observable bodies to limit the application be composed of that idea. Sensation invisibly small material particles called corpuscles and reflection can also give rise took direct physical contact to other ideas like: numbers, space, time, power and moral relations. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)|p. 19]] ==== Locke on Primary and Secondary Qualities ==== Also in Book Two, Locke also distinguishes between two kinds of qualities that objects or substances can have. “Whatever be the mind perceives in itself—whatever the immediate object of perception, thought, primary or understanding—I call an idea; and the power to produce an idea in our mind I call a quality if the thing that has that power.” [[CiteRef::Locke (2015b)|p. 28]] The first kind sole means of qualities an object may have are primary qualitiescommunicating motion. These are qualities that are impossible to separate from the object, no matter how finely one divides it. Locke gathers that these Material bodies had certain '''primary qualities''' that are how people can observe the simple ideas such as occupying space (extension)impossible to separate from them; size, having shape, being in motion or at resttexture, and having texturemotion. The second types of qualities an object may have are called They also had '''secondary qualities'''; these, according to Locke, are objects’ which the object's abilities to produce in people sensations that occur through people’s interactions with the objects’ primary qualities. These sensations consist of: color, sound, taste , and smell.  Locke also discerns a third kind of quality: tertiary when they interact with their primary qualities, which is defined as object or substance’s power to affect another object, like fire melting wax.[[CiteRef::Locke Kochiras (2015b2014)]] 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 maintains argued that objects produce ideas in the minds materiality of the soul was consistent with "the great ends of people through physical impact upon themreligion and morality", through small particles—corpuscles—that travel from the object to since God might effect the mind material resurrection of the persondead on judgment day.[[CiteRef::Locke (2015b2015d)|p. 29205]]