own words, "to be brought into
well-bred company and polite conversation". Men, "barely by the use of
their natural faculties", might attain to all the knowledge possible or
worth having. All children, he writes, "that are born into this world,
being surrounded with bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them"
have "a variety of ideas imprinted" on their minds. "External material
things as objects of Sensation, and the operations of our own minds as
objects of Reflection, are to me", he continues, "the only originals from
which all our ideas take their beginnings." "Every act of sensation", he
writes elsewhere, "when duly considered, gives us an equal view of both
parts of nature, the corporeal and the spiritual. For whilst I know, by
seeing or hearing,... that there is some corporeal being without me, the
object of that sensation, I do more certainly know that there is some
spiritual being within me that sees and hears."

Resting on these clear perceptions, the natural philosophy of Locke falls
into two parts, one strictly physical and scientific, the other critical
and psychological. In respect to the composition of matter, Locke accepted
the most advanced theory of his day, which happened to be a very old one:
the theory of Democritus that the material universe contains nothing but a
multitude of solid atoms coursing through infinite space: but Locke added
a religious note to this materialism by suggesting that infinite space, in
its sublimity, must be an attribute of God. He also believed what few
materialists would venture to assert, that if we could thoroughly examine
the cosmic mechanism we should see the demonstrable necessity of every
complication that ensues, even of the existence and character of mind: for
it was no harder for God to endow matter with the power of thinking than
to endow it with the power of moving.

In the atomic theory we have a graphic image asserted to describe
accurately, or even exhaustively, the intrinsic constitution of things, or
their primary qualities. Perhaps, in so far as physical hypotheses must
remain graphic at all, it is an inevitable theory. It was first suggested
by the wearing out and dissolution of all material objects, and by the
specks of dust floating in a sunbeam; and it is confirmed, on an enlarged
scale, by the stellar universe as conceived by modern astronomy. When
today we talk of nuclei and electrons, if we imagine them at all, we
imagine them as atoms. But