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" Truly it- was high time; not only that little private club, but the whole age was demanding such an in vestigation. " Some hasty undigested thoughts on a subject I had never before considered, which I set down against our next meeting, gave the first entrance into this Discourse. " Thus Locke describes the occasion and the motive of his book, glancing backward from its final completed state (probably in 1689) just on the eve of publication, and contemplating its starting-point. Just when this was cannot now be told with exactness. But in Locke s common place book of the year 1671 we find that he was thinking about " the human Intellect," in this fashion: " First I imagine that all knowledge is founded on and ultimately derives itself from sense or something analogous to it, and may be called Sensation. prev next |