ABSTRACT
It was not only the middle ages, ruled by Aristotle’s authority, which stayed faithful to the conception of the common man. Even Locke in his famous Essay concerning Human Understanding shows himself to be at one with Aristotle in his results in this regard. He counts spatial extension among those simple ideas which, in contrast to the sensory qualities, are imparted to us through several of the senses. He is unmistakably thinking here not of a pure sensation of space but of sensations of concreta in which we find spatial as well as qualitative determinations. For how otherwise could he have contested the existence of innate ideas, since human beings do not after all come into the world without sensations of touch and vision (and even with closed eyes we still see the darkness of the visual field). Yet in these sensations everything was concrete, and therefore unlike what Locke had called simple ideas, from out of which he then allowed the complex ideas to grow.
