Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Tabula Rasa

John Locke (1632–1704) published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in December 1689, though the title page bears the date 1690, after some twenty years of intermittent composition that Locke himself traced back to a 1671 conversation with friends in his rooms, recorded in two early drafts (Draft A and Draft B) held at the Bodleian Library. The Essay opens, in Book I, with a sustained polemic against innatism, the view associated with Continental rationalists and with certain strands of Cambridge Platonism, notably Ralph Cudworth, that some ideas or principles — such as the law of non-contradiction or moral maxims — are stamped upon the mind from birth. Locke argues that no proposition, however seemingly self-evident, commands universal assent among all humans, including children and "idiots," and that universal assent, even if it existed, would not itself prove innateness, since it could equally arise from universal experience. This argument set Locke's entire project in direct opposition to Descartes's Meditations (1641) and to Continental rationalism's reliance on innate ideas as a foundation for certain knowledge, and it established the empiricist starting point that Berkeley and Hume would later inherit and radicalize.