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Vogt, Philip, John Locke and the Rhetoric of Modernity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 2; and “Seascape with Fog: Metaphor in Locke's Essay
,” Journal of the History of Ideas
54, no. 2 (1998): 1–18
Google Scholar. Regarding the image of the white paper, Vogt notes that “Locke has direct recourse to it exactly twice in the Essay and makes indirect reference to it exactly four times more” (“Seascape,” 13). Vogt underscores that in the Essay Locke nowhere mobilizes the tabula rasa metaphor. It appears instead in the “Abstract of the Essay” that Locke sent to Père le Clerc in France and that Peter King, Locke's nephew, subsequently published in England. In the “Abstract” Locke observes, “In the thoughts I have had concerning the Understanding, I have endeavoured to prove that the mind is at first rasa tabula. But that being only to remove the prejudice that lies in some men's minds, I think it best in this short view I design here of my principles, to pass by all that preliminary debate which makes the first book, since I pretend to show in what follows the original from whence, and the ways whereby, we receive all the ideas our understandings are employed about in thinking” (quoted in Vogt, John Locke and the Rhetoric of Modernity, 62). Vogt's interpretation of this reference to the blank slate metaphor is compelling. As he suggests, “The metaphor of the tabula rasa is not offered as a model of the human mind. Instead, it functions polemically, to undermine alternative theories, and heuristically, to illustrate how our preconceptions must be purged of erroneous doctrines like innatism… . [Locke] is not saying that the mind ever exists in an empty state. He is simply asking us to take up the problem of the origin of knowledge without the encumbrance of the discredited theory of ‘native’ or innate ideas” (Vogt, John Locke and the Rhetoric of Modernity, 62).
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