Enlightenment and knowledge · 1689 onward
Empiricism
Overview
Knowledge originates in sensory and lived experience. What cannot be traced there does not get a free pass.
Locke, Berkeley and Hume start from the other end. What is in the mind got there through experience. Locke thinks of the mind as furnished by sensation and by reflection on our own operations. Berkeley pushes until ordinary objects are, for him, ideas a mind perceives. Hume presses the hardest on what experience never actually shows you.
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Hume’s cut on causation is the famous one. You see one event and then another. You do not see a secret tie called “must.” The expectation that the second will follow is a habit, a very successful habit, and still a habit. He makes a similar cut in morals: a description of what is, however complete, does not by itself hand you what ought to be. The “ought” was added by a feeling or a further principle, and that addition should be shown, not smuggled.
Empiricism’s discipline is the trace. If a grand noun cannot be walked back to an impression, ask whether the noun is doing work or only wearing a costume. The school can be too severe with things reason seems to know. It is rarely fooled by a word that has no experience behind it.
Where it answers
How do we know?
If it did not come through experience, I do not yet have a reason to believe it.
Key terms
- Tabula rasa
- The blank slate: Locke’s picture of the mind at birth, before experience writes on it.
- Impressions and ideas
- Hume’s split between vivid perceptions and the fainter copies we think with.
- Problem of induction
- Past experience cannot by itself prove that the future will resemble the past.
- Esse est percipi
- Berkeley’s claim that to be is to be perceived.
In their words
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”
Further reading
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding · John Locke
- A Treatise of Human Nature · David Hume
- Principles of Human Knowledge · George Berkeley
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A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “Empiricism.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/ideas/empiricism. Accessed 13 November 2026.