III.

Empiricism

Locke’s empiricism held that all knowledge other than deductive reasoning must be based on sensory experience. Empiricist ideas were put forward by the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon early in the 17th century, but Locke gave the doctrine a systematic expression in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). He regarded the mind of a person at birth as a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which experience imprinted knowledge. He rejected the belief in innate ideas, a concept that derived originally from Plato. See Epistemology.