FREE ESSAY ON LOCKE AND SUBSTANCE

LOCKE AND SUBSTANCE

In his essay, "A Supposition of He Knows Not What," John Locke offers the reader an
intriguing view of substances and ideas. He argues for the existence of substances in our
world because there must logically be something greater than the ideas and thoughts that
occupy our minds. His argument for their existence maintains that we cannot see
substances in our realms, but we can perceive them and note their effects on other things
around us.
Locke first states that there are too many ideas in the world to stand alone. We cannot
see these ideas that form in our minds, but we know that the ideas we have cannot
persists as one single idea, because everything we think is "a complication of many ideas
together" (Reality 90). Since the simple ideas we have cannot exist alone, there must be
something larger behind them, and those, Locke asserts, are substances.
Locke maintains that we only see substances in our world as ideas, for they are too
complex for us to perceive. Because of the qualities of our ideas, we are able to
perceive that they exist. The only evidence we have for this belief is that we can put
together ideas on our own, and we can also put together ideas about substances, therefore
these substances must create our ideas. We perceive substances as ideas, because they are
too complicated for our minds and far from our realm of existence.
Therefore, Locke's notion of substances reverts back to Plato's idea of a form:
substances are things that underlie all thought, that we cannot perceive on our own, but
must exist in another place for they form our foundations of thought and ideas.