Book IV Summary and Analysis

After having gone through an analysis of experience, ideas, and words, in Book IV Locke takes up the subject that he originally set out to investigate: knowledge. The setup is necessary as here Locke plans to give an account of knowledge based only on the concepts he has explained in the previous part of the book. An account of knowledge with no innate ideas and based only on the ideas generated from experience, or, as we would say today, an empiricist theory of knowledge. As Locke believes he has shown, the mind and its faculties of understanding have no other object than ideas, hence knowledge only consists of connections between ideas. We can only have knowledge of things that we perceive or could perceive. Given that knowledge only consists in certain relations between ideas, Locke believes those relations can...