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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
John Locke sometimes claims in An Essay Concerning the Human Understanding that secondary qualities are qualities of bodies and not simply ideas. Few commentators, however, have taken that claim seriously. This is at least partly because Locke also claims that ideas of secondary qualities do not resemble the secondary qualities of bodies and the commentators have taken these two doctrines to be irreconcilable. In this paper I shall briefly present the traditional reasons for thinking the two doctrines incompatible, and then present Locke's neglected attempt to reconcile these two claims.
Thomas Reid in his Philosophical Works tries to explain the traditional interpretation of Locke's claims about the nature of secondary qualities. In doing so he cites an “ancient hypothesis“:
… the mind, like a mirror receives the images of things from without, by means of the senses; so that their use must be to convey the images into the mind.
1 Thomas Reid, Philosophical Works, Fourth Edition, I, p. 140.
2 Ibid., p. 140.
3 Ibid., p. 140.
4 Ibid., p. 141.
5 I have argued elsewhere that Locke's arguments for the rejection of the ancient hypothesis which I present here, combined with certain other Lockian doctrines, makes plausible the claim that Locke thought that secondary qualities are qualities of bodies and not simply ideas, the long tradition of interpretation not withstanding. I cannot begin to take up that argument here but see my paper, “Locke's Primary-Secondary Quality Dictinction,” forthcoming.
6 Such references in the text of the paper refer to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, by John Locke. For example (II.viii.10) refers to Book II, chapter viii, paragraph 10 of the Essay.
7 These arguments for assimilating secondary qualities and mere powers would be unintelligible unless the primary-secondary quality distinction corresponded to the distinction between communicated qualities and produced qualities.
8 This paper was prepared with the assistance of a S. U. N. Y. VAC/J AC Faculty Research Fellowship.