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Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays by George Santayana
page 23 of 78 (29%)
either for Locke or for Descartes to clear their fresh conceptions
altogether from those ancient dreams.

What views precisely did Locke oppose to these radical tendencies of
Descartes?

In respect to the nature of matter, I have indicated above the position
of Locke: pictorially he accepted an ordinary atomism; scientifically, the
physics of Newton.

On the other two points Locke's convictions were implicit rather than
speculative: he resisted the Cartesian theories without much developing
his own, as after all was natural in a critic engaged in proving that our
natural faculties were not intended for speculation. All knowledge came
from experience, and no man could know the savour of a pineapple without
having tasted it. Yet this savour, according to Locke, did not reside at
first in the pineapple, to be conveyed on contact to the palate and to the
mind; but it was generated in the process of gustation; or perhaps we
should rather say that it was generated in the mind on occasion of that
process. At least, then, in respect to secondary qualities, and to all
moral values, the terms of human knowledge were not drawn from the objects
encountered in the world, but from an innate sensibility proper to the
human body or mind. Experience--if this word meant the lifelong train of
ideas which made a man's moral being--was not a source of knowledge but
was knowledge (or illusion) itself, produced by organs endowed with a
special native sensibility in contact with varying external stimuli. This
conclusion would then not have contradicted, but exactly expressed, the
doctrine of innate categories.

As to the soul, which might exist without thinking, Locke still called it
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