What is John Locke's theory of knowledge?
My theory of knowledge, detailed in the *Essay Concerning Human Understanding*, holds that all ideas originate from experience. There are no innate principles or ideas. Instead, the mind begins as a blank slate, and experience furnishes it with two sources: sensation, which gives us ideas of external objects, and reflection, which gives us ideas of our own mental operations. From these simple ideas, the mind combines them into complex ones. Knowledge consists in the perception of agreement or disagreement between ideas, and its certainty depends on the clarity of that perception. I distinguished three degrees of knowledge: intuitive, demonstrative, and sensitive, with intuition being the most certain.
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