A Letter concerning Toleration; Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay; An Essay concerning Human Understanding; The Principles of Human Knowledge; An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
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The makers of Encyclopaedia Britannica bring you one of the Great Books of the Western World. This text captures major ideas, stories, and discoveries that helped shape Western culture.
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“Freedom, then, is not what Sir Robert Filmer tells us: ‘A liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws’; but freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it. A liberty to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not, not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man, as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of Nature.” (Page 29)
“Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws, with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good.” (Page 25)
“The difficulty is, when testimonies contradict common experience, and the reports of history and witnesses clash with the ordinary course of nature, or with one another; there it is, where diligence, attention, and exactness are required, to form a right judgment, and to proportion the assent to the different evidence and probability of the thing: which rises and falls, according as those two foundations of credibility, viz. common observation in like cases, and particular testimonies in that particular instance, favour or contradict it.” (Page 369)
“Secondly, but the only sure way of making known the signification of the name of any simple idea, is by presenting to his senses that subject which may produce it in his mind, and make him actually have the idea that word stands for.” (Page 303)
- Title: A Letter concerning Toleration; Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay; An Essay concerning Human Understanding; The Principles of Human Knowledge; An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
- Authors: John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume
- Edition: Second Edition
- Series: Great Books of the Western World
- Volume: 33
- Publishers: Robert P. Gwinn, Encyclopedia Britannica
- Print Publication Date: 1990
- Logos Release Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: Empiricism; Philosophy, English › 18th century; Philosophy, English › 17th century
- ISBNs: 0852295316, 9780852295311
- Resource ID: LLS:GBWW33
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T00:11:28Z