“John Locke believed that human beings are capable of reason and can learn from experience.”

For the individual, Locke wants each of us to use reason to search after truth rather than simply accept the opinion of authorities or be subject to superstition. … In Book II Locke claims that ideas are the materials of knowledge and all ideas come from experience.

He offered an empiricist theory according to which we acquire ideas through our experience of the world. … The mind is then able to examine, compare, and combine these ideas in numerous different ways. … Locke defines a person as “a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it.”

Locke and Reid, for instance, believe that the human mind is endowed with certain abilities that, when developed in the usual course of nature, will lead us to acquire useful knowledge of the external world.

In Book 4, Locke sets out to explain how all of our knowledge comes from reason and experience … In Book 4 of the Essay, Locke develops his empiricist account of knowledge. Empiricism emphasizes knowledge from empirical observation, but some knowledge depends only on a reflection of our ideas received from experience.

For nobody, I think, ever denied that the mind was capable of knowing several truths. The capacity, they say, is innate; the knowledge acquired. … Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper [tabula rasa], void of all characters without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, From experience: in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself.

Since it is the UNDERSTANDING that sets man above the rest of sensible beings, and gives him all the advantage and dominion which he has over them; it is certainly a subject, even for its nobleness, worth our labour to inquire into. … If we can find out those measures, whereby a rational creature, put in that state in which man is in this world, may and ought to govern his opinions, and actions depending thereon, we need not to be troubled that some other things escape our knowledge. … The senses at first let in PARTICULAR ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet, and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them.

And we ought to magnify his goodness that he hath spread before all the world such legible characters of his works and providence, and given all mankind so sufficient a light of reason, that they to whom this written word never came, could not (whenever they set themselves to search) either doubt of the being of a God, or of the obedience due to him.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions

Once God had endowed men with the faculties of knowledge that they have, he was no more obliged by his goodness also to plant innate notions in their minds than he is obliged, after giving men reason, hands, and materials, also to build bridges or houses for them. … The truest and best notions men have of God were not ·innately· imprinted, but acquired by thought and meditation and a right use of their faculties

If we can find out those measures, whereby a rational creature, put in that state in which man is in this world, may and ought to govern his opinions, and actions depending thereon, we need not to be troubled that some other things escape our knowledge.

Whence has it all the MATERIALS of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. … And so we may observe how the mind, BY DEGREES, improves in these; and ADVANCES to the exercise of those other faculties of enlarging, compounding, and abstracting its ideas, and of reasoning about them, and reflecting upon all these; of which I shall have occasion to speak more hereafter.

John Locke has been widely hailed for providing an epistemological foundation for the experimental science of his day, articulating the new, probabilistic form of knowledge appropriate to it.

John Locke outlines the theory of tabula rasa, the idea that all humans are born as a blank slate and are influenced by experience rather than any innate humanity.

He describes the mind at birth as a blank slate (tabula rasa, although he did not use those actual words) filled later through experience.

We know by experience that we sometimes think; and from this we validly infer that there is in us something—·some substance·—that is able to think; but whether that substance perpetually thinks or not is a question we must answer on the basis of what experience informs us. … if •it can’t reflect on what is past, and make use of its former experiences, reasonings, and contemplations— then •what does it think for? … It seems to me as obvious that some of them sometimes reason as that they have sense; but when they reason it is only with particular ideas, just as they received them from their senses ·and not subjected to abstraction·.

Whereas, if we could be persuaded to quit every arbitrary hypothesis, and trust to fact and experience, a sound sleep any night would yield sufficient satisfaction in the present case, which thus may derive light even from the darkest parts of nature

Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. … I see no reason, therefore, to believe that the soul thinks before the senses have furnished it with ideas to think on; and as those are increased and retained, so it comes, by exercise, to improve its faculty of thinking in the several parts of it; as well as, afterwards, by compounding those ideas, and reflecting on its own operations, it increases its stock, as well as facility in remembering, imagining, reasoning, and other modes of thinking.

If we can find out those measures, whereby a rational creature, put in that state in which man is in this world, may and ought to govern his opinions, and actions depending thereon, we need not to be troubled that some other things escape our knowledge.