I’ll be honest, I didn’t understand much of what we read this week. I got the part about everything coming from either sensation or reflection but, once he started talking about the different types of qualities, I was lost. But that’s okay because Locke himself says that we don’t need to know everything. In fact, Locke says that we don’t even have the capacity to know everything and that we should understand our limits. That’s what really stuck out to me from this reading. I always thought that the goal of the Enlightenment was to learn everything about everything. Maybe that’s what it eventually became, but Locke says here that there is a definite limit to how much we can know. His goal was to find the limits of human knowledge. And so, I have amended my thoughts of the Enlightenment. I thought they wanted to know everything but they simply wanted to know everything possible. That may not seem like much of a difference, but that one word changes everything. The Enlightenment thinkers wanted to know things, but they also recognized that mankind has a place in this universe. A lot of them, especially Locke, just wanted to figure out exactly what that place is. They didn’t expect to be able to know everything. In fact, they were pretty good about knowing when they’d reached their limit. Locke says that “it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man...to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities.” Not everyone is going to have the same limit, but there are some things that nobody can understand fully, and those are the limits that Locke set out to find. However, my limit is definitely far less than Locke’s, so I’m going to take his advice and “sit down in a quiet ignorance.”
P.S. I commented on Stephen’s and Drew’s posts.
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