Changes

The Aristotelian scholastic approach to knowledge saw scientific knowledge as certain knowledge of necessary truths, with conclusions deduced from premises that were self-evident. Like many others, Locke sought to replace these stringent demands with ones more compatible with the new experimental science, such as that practiced by 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. But he also argued further supposed that such knowledge was, for the most part, beyond human faculties. He wrote that "imperceptible corpuscles are the active parts of matter...on which depend not only all of bodies’ secondary qualities but also most of their natural operations. So our lack of precise distinct ideas of their primary qualities keeps us incurably ignorant of what we want to know about them." [[CiteRef::Locke (2015d)|p. 212]] He wrote further that "I have argued for this "in terms of the corpuscularian hypothesis...because that’s the theory that is thought to go furthest in intelligibly explaining those qualities of bodies; and I fear that the humanunderstanding hasn’t the power to replace it..." [[CiteRef::Locke (2015d)|p. 208]]