An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is John Locke's masterpiece and one of the founding documents of modern philosophy. In it Locke set out to examine the origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, arguing against the notion of innate ideas and contending that the mind at birth is a blank sheet, a tabula rasa, upon which all our ideas are written by experience, through sensation and reflection. The Essay established the tradition of British empiricism carried forward by Berkeley and Hume, shaped the Enlightenment's confidence in reason and observation, and influenced the framers of the American republic, who drew on Locke's account of the mind as well as on his political philosophy. John Locke was a physician, philosopher, and political thinker whose Two Treatises of Government furnished the intellectual foundations of liberal constitutionalism, and whose ideas on toleration, property, and natural rights echo through the Declaration of Independence. Endlessly reprinted through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Essay long remained a standard text for students of philosophy.