How John Locke Explains the Origin of Simple Ideas: A Close Reading of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

  I. Why Locke Classifies Ideas by the Route They Take Chapter 3 opens with a statement of purpose that tells us what kind of inquiry Locke thinks he is conducting. The better to conceive the ideas we receive from sensation, he writes, it may not be amiss to consider them in reference to the different ways whereby they make their approaches to our minds and make themselves perceivable by us. Everything in the chapter follows from that sentence, so it is worth taking apart slowly. The first thing to observe is what Locke does not propose. He does not propose to sort ideas by the objects they represent, which would require him to have settled what those objects are. He does not sort them by their degree of clarity, nor by their importance, nor by whether they are true. He sorts them by the way they approach the mind. The principle of division is the pathway, not the cargo. This is consistent with the position he has already staked out in the opening chapters of Book II. Having denied in Book I that the mind comes stocked with any characters of its own, he must account for the entire contents of the understanding by describing how those contents arrived. If nothing is innate, then the question of origin is not one question among others. It is the only question, and every idea must be given a documented route. Locke also stipulates a second thing in that opening sentence: the ideas must not only approach the mind, they must make themselves perceivable by us. Approach alone is insufficient. An idea that arrives at the mind without being perceived would, for Locke, not be an idea at all, since he treats being perceived as constitutive of an idea’s existence. This condition