An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1: MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books 1 and 2 — John Locke — John Shaqi
An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1: MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books 1 and 2
John Locke · en
The bookseller will not forgive me if I say nothing of this New
Edition, which he has promised, by the correctness of it, shall make
amends for the many faults committed in the former. He desires too,
that it should be known that it has one whole new chapter concerning
Identity, and many additions and amendments in other places. These I
must inform my reader are not all new matter, but most of them either
further confirmation of what I had said, or explications, to prevent
others being mistaken in the sense of what was formerly printed, and
not any variation in me from it.
I must only except the alterations I have made in Book II. chap. xxi.
What I had there written concerning Liberty and the Will, I thought
deserved as accurate a view as I am capable of; those subjects having
in all ages exercised the learned part of the world with questions and
difficulties, that have not a little perplexed morality and divinity,
those parts of knowledge that men are most concerned to be clear in.
Upon a closer inspection into the working of men’s minds, and a
stricter examination of those motives and views they are turned by, I
have found reason somewhat to alter the thoughts I formerly had
concerning that which gives the last determination to the Will in all
voluntary actions. This I cannot forbear to acknowledge to the world
with as much freedom and readiness; as I at first published what then
seemed to me to be right; thinking myself more concerned to quit and
renounce any opinion of my own, than oppose that of another, when truth
appears against it. For it is truth alone I seek, and that will always
be welcome to me, when or from whencesoever it comes. But what
forwardness soever I have to resign any opinion I have, or to recede
from anything I have writ, upon the first evidence of any error in it;
yet this I must own, that I have not had the good luck to receive any
light from those exceptions I have met with in print against any part
of my book, nor have, from anything that has been urged against it,
found reason to alter my sense in any of the points that have been
questioned. Whether the subject I have in hand requires often more
thought and attention than cursory readers, at least such as are
prepossessed, are willing to allow; or whether any obscurity in my
expressions casts a cloud over it, and these notions are made difficult
to others’ apprehensions in my way of treating them; so it is, that my
meaning, I find, is often mistaken, and I have not the good luck to be
everywhere rightly understood.