ABSTRACT
Lockean 'sensitive knowledge' is pre-theoretical and immediate, but extends less far even than the primitive awareness of objects which we need to ascribe to a baby. It does not include knowledge that the world is really and actually spatial. That 'a piece of Manna of sensible Bulk' and in motion can produce in us an idea of motion which 'represents it, as it really is in the Manna moving' may be something 'every Body is ready to agree to"," but on Locke's official account it is not something evident to the senses or arrived at without speculative thought. He did accept the metaphysical principle that whatever exists and acts is particular and therefore has position in objective space and time, but even that goes beyond the deliverances of the senses." His argument implies that the world as immediately known through sense-experience is entirely a world of powers. It was precisely this doctrine which was soon to seem to Berkeley an open invitation to advance a rival thesis about the reality to which those powers belong, i.e. that it is non-spatial and spiritual." In order to do justice to the immediacy of our knowledge that the world we perceive is in itself spatial, we need something Locke does not give us: an argument which implicates things' being spatial, and being perceived as spatial, with the very possibility of perceptual knowledge of them.
