[An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. by John Locke]@TWC D-Link book
An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II.

CHAPTER VII
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Our intellectual progress is from particulars and involuntary recipiency, through reactive doubt and criticism, into what is at last reasoned faith.].

Though afterwards the mind takes the quite contrary course, and having drawn its knowledge into as general propositions as it can, makes those familiar to its thoughts, and accustoms itself to have recourse to them, as to the standards of truth and falsehood.

[Footnote: This is the philosophic attitude.

Therein one consciously apprehends the intellectual necessities that were UNCONCIOUSLY PRESUPPOSED, its previous intellectual progress.

In philosophy we 'draw our knowledge into as general propositions as it can' be made to assume, and thus either learn to see it as an organic while in a speculative unity, or learn that it cannot be so seen in a finite intelligence, and that even at the last it must remain 'broken' and mysterious in the human understanding.


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