Human Understanding

Abstract

Hooke’s ideas on the nature and origin of human knowledge are mainly to be found in the text of a lecture delivered at the Royal Society on June 14, 1682 and in a short manuscript kept in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. In Hooke’s later writings there is no place for innate Cartesian ideas, as all human knowledge originates from the senses. The human mind is described as a “piece of soft wax,” both impressions and ideas as corporeal alterations of the brain. “These ideas,” Hooke writes, “I will suppose to be material and bulky, that is to be certain bodies of determinate bigness, and impregnated with distinctive motions, and to be in themselves distinct.” Like Kenelm Digby, Hooke thinks of ideas as the stamps left on the brain by material impressions. These stamps take the shape of “little images.” Although every sense conveys to the brain different kinds of impressions, Hooke does not distinguish them because all “are generally comprised under one name.” The only difference among ideas is due to their different degrees of complexity and composition. Some of them are “more immediate,” others “more mediate and complex.” Immediate ideas “are the more first and more simple, such as are the results of the impressions of the senses.” Complex ideas have different degrees of composition, being the result of the comparison of a variable number of simple ideas. Therefore, “the ideas that are made from fewer and more simple ideas, are less compounded ideas”; on the contrary “those which are made from a greater number, and those more compounded ideas, are yet more and more compounded, and more and more accomplish’d and perfect.”