SparkNotes: Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Summary.
Good and evil, as I showed in xx.2 and xxi.42, are nothing but pleasure or pain, or what procures pleasure or pain for us. So moral good and evil is only the conformity or disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law, through which good or evil is drawn on us by the will and power of the law-maker.
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Locke’s Essays inspired Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) to write his New Essays Concerning Human Understanding and Victor Cousin analyzed all four books in his 1834 Elements of Psychology. - Summary by Craig Campbell.
Excerpt: 1 ) An Request into the understanding, pleasant and useful. Since it is the understanding that sets gentleman above the rest of sensible creatures, and gives him all the edge and dominion which this individual has over them; that is definitely a subject, even for its nobleness, worth our labour to inquire in.
An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Source: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). This opinion I have at large examined already; and, I suppose, what I have said in the foregoing book will be much more easily admitted, when I have shown whence the understanding may get all the ideas it has, and by what ways and degrees they.
John Locke wrote four essays on human (or humane) understanding. The first and second have been recorded into LibriVox. This recording is a repetition of the second of Locke's Essays. All of his essays were, and are, very influential. Edward Stillingfleet 1635-1699 (Bishop of Worcester) wrote a Critique of Locke’s ideas and many letters to him.