Locke's theory of perception



Locke’s Theory of Perception 245
it is all too obvious that, as Locke himself naively asserted,
when one’s body moves say from London to Oxford, it does
not leave its mind behind in London. And if it does not, then
the mind accompanies the body, and is wherever it is, at least
as long as the body continues to live—that is, be animated
by the mind. But Locke was unorthodox in believing this to
be the case. On the one hand, Descartes had taught that
mind is in all respects what matter is
not, so that if matter is
localizable and has spatial properties, mind has none of
them. On the other hand, there was a Scholastic dogma to
the effect that mind is
ubi, or everywhere, hence can have no
circles drawn around it to give it definite position
in space.
What is more, both the Cartesian and the Scholastic doc-
trines are supported by much evidence. There seem to be
many things in the mind to which spatial characteristics sim-
ply cannot be attached without making sheer nonsense. Such
questions as, what is the shape and velocity of your idea of a
billiard ball ? are meaningless ; yet they ought not to be mean-
ingless if the mind which contains such ideas itself has spatial
dimensions. Moreover, it seems that one can be
in thought
in many places that the body is not occupying or can never
occupy, hence the apparent reasonableness of the view that
mind is everywhere. Be that as it may, Locke assigns a place
in space to mind, and that place is primarily the position of
the body that has that mind.1

But though the mind is “immersed in flesh,”2 and hence is
where the body is, Locke never says definitely that it has the
body’s shape. I mean to say that Locke’s intention is not to
outline a mind in space as definitely as he outlines its body
in space, but only to locate it in the general region of the or-
ganism
so as to insure its commerce with the sense-organs.

ɪ ɪi, 23, 19-20.

2 ɪɪɪ, ɪɪ, 23.



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