Locke: La mente es una «tabula rasa»

The philosophy of Locke brings a needed social adjustment to established dictatorship and rationalism. But while trying to oppose the extreme abstraction of Descartes, Locke loses himself and appears as equally extremist in trying to justify empirism, to the point that he contradicts himself. In this regard, Hume was much more moderate.

In trying to justify external objects as substances, Locke says we can't fully prove they exist. Well, if you can't prove something your sensations perceive exists, then your assumptions of the truthfulness of reality cannot be obtained empirically, and only possibly by rational means. I believe that self-doubting empirism is what originated solipsism. Hume contributes to empirism with skepticism, which is more moderate because it includes a probabilistic component. Science nowadays is based on gathering empirical evidence and suggesting a generalistic view of explaining reality by resource of reason. Locke missed this aspect: he intended science to be empirical, but forgot to account for probability. When we say something works like so in sicence, we do so because we repeatedly gathered so much empirical evidence that, in all probability, suggests a certain truth. It does not mean it is universally, objectively true. It is the best empirical based model that we have to rationalize reality as probably true.

Regardless of his lacking epistemology, his political, social and educational views are much more “common sense”. From those topics, you can see Locke was really trying to adjust society by creating better, more virtuous civilians which, despite his puritanism, involved backing the idea of decoupling religious entities from the state.