Is Rationality the Only Form of Human Understanding?

Locke’s essay is simple in stating and analyzing the fountains of human knowledge and understanding, sensation and reflection. His language is simplistic and he refrains from using metaphors to avoid from producing any sense of ambiguity. Human understanding has been a prominent theme in both Mather’s and Edwards’s essays in an attempt to portray a division among people who have natural knowledge and spiritual knowledge. In the Introduction of Mather’s essay he conveys that those who are influenced by the glory of God will “rise into that Superior Way of Thinking and of Living” but that he will achieve this by “using his Rational Faculties in viewing the Works of God” (22-23, 13-14). Yet, Edwards essay illustrates two forms of knowledge achieved by man: knowledge that God conveys through the influence of natural means and spiritual knowledge that God communicates himself. If Locke’s views the origin of ideas and human knowledge as arising from external sensible objects and the ways in which we internally perceive these objects, then is it safe to say that relying on rationality alone can supply us with all the knowledge we need? There is no mistaking that the ultimate author of this knowledge is the Lord himself, but what is Locke implying in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding? According to Locke, humans gain their knowledge from experience, but in order to understand these experiences or minds must be supplied by some material ways of thinking and these he states are sensation and reflection. This form of understanding is what Edwards believed was imparted by God to the unregenerate person as an “extrinsic, occasional agent” (3).
The simplistic style that Locke employs is evidence of the form of human understanding in his essay as one that is based solely on rationality. He formats his essay with numbers stating each idea in italics and then proceeding to further explain his ideas. There is no ambiguity in where he believes human knowledge comes from because he highlights Experience, Sensation, and Reflection by writing them in all caps. Yet, it is evident in the end of the fourth bullet that Locke does not believe that human understanding relies on rationality alone. Although he employs a straightforward technique in outlining this principle, he states that: “the objects of SENSATION…as the objects of REFLECTION, are to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings” (par. 4). At first I had interpreted this statement to support my argument that Locke believed in rationality as the only form of human understanding because he calls sensation and reflection the “only originals,” but then in re-reading the statement over again I began to think of an idea presented in Edwards’ essay. On the third page of Edwards’s essay under the first bullet in explaining how God communicates his idea through the principle of nature he states: “Not only are remaining principle assisted to do their work freely and fully, but those principles are restored that were utterly destroyed by the fall.” Edwards implies that there were principles that man had once had to govern his conscience, but since the fall of man the principles of nature, which Locke outlines as Sensation and Reflection, have taken over to restore these principles. Therefore, Locke’s essay supports Edwards’s idea that the origin of our ideas takes root from what we sense and reflect upon from our experiences because after the fall man had to reason through natural means because he had been separated from the Lord. Yet, Locke’s essay implies that sensation and reflection are where our “ideas take their beginnings” therefore, human understanding does not end at here, but only begins here.