All knowledge came
from experience, and no man could know the savour of a pineapple without
having tasted it. Yet this savour, according to Locke, did not reside at
first in the pineapple, to be conveyed on contact to the palate and to the
mind; but it was generated in the process of gustation; or perhaps we
should rather say that it was generated in the mind on occasion of that
process. At least, then, in respect to secondary qualities, and to all
moral values, the terms of human knowledge were not drawn from the objects
encountered in the world, but from an innate sensibility proper to the
human body or mind. Experience--if this word meant the lifelong train of
ideas which made a man's moral being--was not a source of knowledge but
was knowledge (or illusion) itself, produced by organs endowed with a
special native sensibility in contact with varying external stimuli. This
conclusion would then not have contradicted, but exactly expressed, the
doctrine of innate categories.
As to the soul, which might exist without thinking, Locke still called it
an immaterial substance: not so immaterial, however, as not to be conveyed
bodily with him in his coach from London to Oxford. Although, like Hobbes,
Locke believed in the power of the English language to clarify the human
intellect, he here ignored the advice of Hobbes to turn that befuddling
Latin phrase into plain English. Substance meant body: immaterial meant
bodiless: therefore immaterial substance meant bodiless body.
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