John Locke in his prose An Essay Concerning Human Understanding displays an extremely individualistic take on human reason (126). Proposing a perspective that is especially interesting during his time in the 17th century, which catered to a shift towards individual morals and responsibilities - the Puritan movement (Kang).
The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Other Philosophical Writings: In Three Volumes, Vol. 1: Drafts A and B. Eds Peter H. Nidditch and G. A. J. Rogers (1990) The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: Locke on Money, Vol. 1. Ed. Patrick Hyde Kelly (1991).
In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, first published in 1690, John Locke (1632-1704) provides a complete account of how we acquire everyday, mathematical, natural scientific, religious and ethical knowledge.Rejecting the theory that some knowledge is innate in us, Locke argues that it derives from sense perceptions and experience, as analysed and developed by reason.
Recommended edition: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Excerpt: Since it is the understanding, that sets man above the rest of sensible beings, and gives him all the advantage and dominion, which he has over them; it is certainly a subject, even for its nobleness, worth our labour to inquire into.
I have here instanced in the corpuscularian hypothesis, as that which is thought to go furthest in an intelligible explication of those qualities of bodies; and I fear the weakness of human understanding is scarce able to substitute another, which will afford us a fuller and clearer discovery of the necessary connexion and coexistence of the.