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John Locke vs Rene Descartes on Mind

Descartes treats the mind as a thinking substance whose nature is grasped by clear and distinct ideas independent of the body, with innate ideas (including the idea of God and the principles of mathematics) present prior to experience. Locke rejects innate ideas: the mind at birth is a blank slate, and even the most apparently necessary truths arise from the operations of the understanding on materials supplied by sensation and reflection.

About this topic

Philosophy of mind asks what mental states are, how they relate to bodies and brains, and how thought, perception, and feeling are possible at all. Classical sources from Plato through Descartes treated the mind as a distinct substance, while later philosophers proposed varieties of materialism, functionalism, and emergentism in its place. Phenomenologists in the twentieth century turned attention to consciousness as it is lived from the inside. Contemporary philosophy of mind works in close dialogue with cognitive science.

For a side-by-side overview of the two philosophers more broadly, see the full John Locke vs Rene Descartes comparison. To browse philosophy more widely on this theme, see the the Mind quotes hub.

Representative quotes on mind

John Locke on mind

  • “Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”

    As quoted in "Hand Book : Caution and Counsels" in The Common School Journal Vol. 5, No. 24 (15 December 1843) by Horace Mann , p. 371

  • “There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men.”

    Sec. 121

  • “The three great things that govern mankind are reason, passion and superstition. The first governs a few, the two last share the bulk of mankind and possess them in their turns. But superstition most powerfully produces the greatest mischief.”

    Journal entry (16 May 1681), quoted in Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957; 1985), p. 200

  • Attributed to John Locke:

    “The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good.”

Rene Descartes on mind

  • “I think, therefore I am.”

    Je pense, donc je suis.

  • “M. Desargues puts me under obligations on account of the pains that it has pleased him to have in me, in that he shows that he is sorry that I do not wish to study more in geometry, but I have resolved to quit only abstract geometry, that is to say, the consideration of questions which serve only to exercise the mind , and this, in order to study another kind of geometry, which has for its object the explanation of the phenomena of nature... You know that all my physics is nothing else than geometry.”

    Letter to Marin Mersenne (July 27, 1638) as quoted by Florian Cajori , A History of Mathematics (1893) letter dated in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. 3, The Correspondence (1991) ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch

  • Attributed to Rene Descartes:

    “It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.”

  • Attributed to Rene Descartes:

    “Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.”

  • Attributed to Rene Descartes:

    “Cogito, ergo sum.”

All 9 Rene Descartes quotes on mind →

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