John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is a foundational text of modern empiricism. This first volume, covering Books 1 and 2, contains Locke’s famous rejection of innate ideas and his account of how all knowledge arises from experience — through sensation and reflection — building from simple ideas to the complex ideas of substances, modes, and relations.
This free EPUB edition follows the second edition (MDCXC) and has been carefully cleaned and formatted for modern e-readers. Locke’s patient analysis of the mind reshaped epistemology and laid the groundwork for the British empiricist tradition that ran through Berkeley and Hume.