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Locke supposed that human knowledge was limited to what he called '''sensitive knowledge'''; knowledge of nominal essences that comes every day within the notice of our senses. [[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)]][[CiteRef::Osler (1970)]] Like Francis Bacon, Locke maintained that an important part of the methodology of natural philosophy is the construction of natural histories giving systematic accounts of phenomena, with hypotheses playing only a minor role, though he did accept the value of the theories expressed in Newton's ''Principia''. [[CiteRef::Anstey (2011)|p. 70]] He wrote that "We should not take up any one [hypothesis] ''too hastily'' ... till we have very well examined particulars and made several experiments in that thing we would explain by our hypothesis, and see whether it will agree to them all". [[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)|p. 231]] Like Newton, he supposed that knowledge could be obtained by observation, experiment, and inductive generalization. Locke’s ''Essay'' came to be considered the start of '''British empiricism''', with contributions by subsequent Anglophone thinkers including Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Russell and Ayer.[[CiteRef::Chappell (1994)|p. 261]]
|Criticism=Locke’s ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' was heavily criticized. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) responded, point-by-point, to Locke’s work in his rebuttal, ''New Essays on Human Understanding''. Leibniz finished this work in 1704, but appeared sixty years later. Leibniz rejected Locke's empiricism where he disagreed with Locke’s rejection of innate ideas. Leibniz writes that there is no way all our ideas could come from experience since there are no real causal interactions between substances. In addition, Locke’s claim that the mind was a blank paper at birth violated Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles.[[CiteRef::Cook (2013)]] Fellow empiricist George Berkeley was also critical of Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities—Berkeley claimed that primary qualities as well as secondary qualities were a product of the human mind, and not a part of the object.[[CiteRef::Berkeley (1957)]]
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