Human Nature - Locke
“For the understanding, like the eye, judging of objects only by its own sight, cannot but be pleased with what it discovers…”
Firstly, the person is born with a blank slate for a mind. Although the baby inside the womb may have ideas, those thoughts were not innate. The mind is like an unfurnished room that is designed as we experience things through our sensory receptors. Thus, like Hume, Locke believed that ideas are merely reflections of what we are exposed to.
Unlike Hume, however, Locke believed that we are able to know ourselves and our natural existence. It is through this belief that he derives his proof of God’s existence in a cosmological-type argument.
“From the certainty of our own existence that of the existence of God immediately follows. A person knows intuitively that he is "something that actually exists." Next a person knows with intuitive certainty, that "bare nothing can no more produce any real being, than it can be equal to two right angles." it is, therefore, "an evident demonstration, that from eternity there has been something. And since all the powers of all beings must be traced to this eternal Being, it follows that it is the most powerful, as well as the most knowing, that is, God.”
