Candice asked:

In Book 2 of Locke's Essay on Human UnderstandingI am having trouble understanding his point or
view on Ch. 23 sec 28. I think he means to say that the mind controls our actions but that's all I can
get from it.

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I can see why you're confused. Locke is here using two concepts that were legacies of scholastic
theories on motion, and sets out to show that they are not satisfactory. The scholastics thought of
bodies in collision imparting to each other some portion of 'impulse', so that (for instance) if you kick a
ball, your foot transfers some quantity of 'impulse' to the ball. Note that Locke actually says this: "we
can have no other conception but of the passing of motion out of one body into another," but he
rightly calls this obscure, because motion is not a 'something' that can actually and demonstrably be
transferred. In a word, this type of explanation explains nothing. He then goes on to the idea of
thought causing motion (e.g. I'm hungry, I think I'll go to the fridge and see what's in it) and finds that
thought causing motionis more readily acceptable than bodies causing motion.For if you put down
two Lego blocks side by side, neither of them is going to get up and push the other away; where you
need only to will it and it can happen. — So, yes: you did misunderstand the passage: he is saying
nothing more in this paragraph than that the idea of motion is better explained if we suppose that
mind and matter are not absolutely incompatible, since obviously mind can (somehow) move matter.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney