Comments on Professor Schouls' Paper

Extract

There are many echoes of Descartes and of other Cartesians (especially Arnauld) in Locke's Essay. There is one particularly curious passage in the Essay which is clearly taken from the Regulae. This passage may be the one clear instance of the method of analysis and synthesis in Locke. Before I cite that passage, I want to raise a few questions about some of the claims in Professor Schouls’ paper.

(1) Professor Schouls is right to call attention to the need for some careful analysis of the concept of experience in Locke. He concentrates upon the form experience takes initially (p. 583): lf“he means temporally first, as with infants (p. 595 speaks of “our initial sentient state“), the examples he cites do not fit this concept. The quotes he gives on p. 583 all refer to adult, sophisticated experience, not to the learning experience of children (Cf. p. 586). There is a rudimentary genetic psychology in Locke's Essay and in his Education. He does list some brief order in the acquisition of ideas by children, in the very earliest stages of experience, e.g., with the foetus, “some faint ideas of hunger, and thirst, and warmth, and some pains” are acquired (1.4.2).