says, “That it is absolutely necessary that a better and perfecter use and employment of the mind and understanding should be introduced.” “Necessariò requiritur ut melior et perfectior mentis et intellectûs humaniusus et adoperatio introducatur.”
2. Parts.—There is, it is visible, great variety in men’s understandings, and their natural constitutions put so wide a difference between some men in this respect, that art and industry would never be able to master, and their very natures seem to want a foundation to raise on it that which other men easily attain unto. Amongst men of equal education there is great inequality of parts. And the woods of America,[1] as well as the schools of Athens, produce men of several abilities in the same kind. Though this be so, yet I imagine most men come very short of what they might attain unto, in their several degrees, by a neglect of their understandings. A few rules of logic are thought sufficient in this case for those who pretend to the highest improvement, whereas I think there are a great many natural defects in the understanding capable of amendment, which are overlooked and wholly neglected. And it is easy to perceive that men are guilty of a great many faults in the exercise and improvement of this faculty of the mind,[2] which hinder them
- ↑ The woods of America. A suggestive expression when it is remembered that this Essay was written in 1697.
- ↑ Faculty of the mind. In the “Essay concerning the Human Understanding,” Bk. II. ch. xxi. § 5, Locke says: “The power of perception is that which we call the understanding,” and in § 6, “the ordinary way of speaking is that the understanding and will are two faculties of the mind; a word proper enough, if it be used, as all words should be, so as not to breed confusion in men’s thoughts, by being supposed (as I suspect it has been) to stand for some real beings in the soul that performed those actions of understanding and volition.”
