Some of the primitive
presuppositions of human reason might have been correct and inevitable,
whilst the tendency to deny them might have sprung from a plausible
misunderstanding, or the exaggeration of a half-truth: so that the
critical opinion itself, after destroying the spontaneous assumptions on
which it rested, might be incapable of subsisting.
In Locke the central presuppositions, which he embraced heartily and
without question, were those of common sense. He adopted what he calls a
"plain, historical method", fit, in his own words, "to be brought into
well-bred company and polite conversation". Men, "barely by the use of
their natural faculties", might attain to all the knowledge possible or
worth having. All children, he writes, "that are born into this world,
being surrounded with bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them"
have "a variety of ideas imprinted" on their minds. "External material
things as objects of Sensation, and the operations of our own minds as
objects of Reflection, are to me", he continues, "the only originals from
which all our ideas take their beginnings." "Every act of sensation", he
writes elsewhere, "when duly considered, gives us an equal view of both
parts of nature, the corporeal and the spiritual. For whilst I know, by
seeing or hearing,... that there is some corporeal being without me, the
object of that sensation, I do more certainly know that there is some
spiritual being within me that sees and hears.
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