Analysis Of John Locke's 'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'

William Molyneux was a philosopher born in Dublin in 1616. After attaining a Bachelor of Arts in Dublin, he moved to London in order to study law and there he married Lucy Domville who became ill, which led to her blindness, and died at a young age after marriage. What happened to his wife was the reason behind Molyneux’s question which was initially represented to John Locke who answered and discussed the question in his second edition of the book “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”. Molyneux’s question as stated by John Locke, in his book, is: “Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one
Locke differentiated in his book between primary and secondary qualities in which he stated that primary qualities are qualities that are considered in the body itself, they are inseparable from the body, are independent of the perceiver, resemble the idea of the object, and do not depend on the context of experience. Primary qualities according to Locke, include: solidity, extension, figure, motion, rest, and number. Whereas secondary qualities are not in the object itself, but they are rather the powers that the object has to produce sensations in us, secondary qualities include: warmth, color texture, etc… This differentiation shows that primary qualities are in the object itself and resemble the object, whereas secondary qualities are not in the objects but are powers that produce sensations in us (the perceivers) which makes them dependent on the perceiver unlike primary qualities. Additionally, Locke stated that certain simple ideas (primary qualities) such as space, extension, figure, rest, and motion can be accessed through both sight and touch in which those ideas can be conveyed to the mind by either touching them or seeing them which makes readers believe that Locke will give a positive answer to Molyneux’s question since he stated
However, perceiving distance isn’t due to angles and lines that we draw where the larger the angle the closer the object and vice versa since when we look at objects we do not see the lines and angles and calculate the distance, but the ideas that mediate the visual perception of vision are eye movement in which the sensation that we get every time we move our eyes lets us infer distance due to previous experience, confusedness in which the greater the distance the lesser the confusedness and vice versa; the two ideas are not naturally connected but are connected through experience, and straining of the eyes in which when a far object is brought closer to the eye more straining occurs causing the appearance of the object to become more confused. Those three ideas that Berkeley stated oppose the optics point of view which say that we perceive distance from seeing angles (the larger the angle the closer the object), divergence of the rays on the pupil, and lastly bodily movement. Magnitude, according to Berkeley like distance cannot be immediately perceived by sight, for instance standing on earth and looking at the moon you would see a small circle with light but when you get closer to the moon you would perceive a