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Locke supposed that human knowledge was limited to what he called '''sensitive knowledge'''; knowledge of nominal essences that comes every day within the notice of our senses. [[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)]][[CiteRef::Osler (1970)]] Like Francis Bacon, Locke maintained that an important part of the methodology of natural philosophy is the construction of natural histories giving systematic accounts of phenomena, with hypotheses playing only a minor role, though he did accept the value of the theories expressed in Newton's ''Principia''. [[CiteRef::Anstey (2011)|p. 70]] He wrote that "We should not take up any one [hypothesis] ''too hastily'' ... till we have very well examined particulars and made several experiments in that thing we would explain by our hypothesis, and see whether it will agree to them all". [[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)|p. 231]] Like Newton, he supposed that knowledge could be obtained by observation, experiment, and inductive generalization. Locke’s ''Essay'' came to be considered the start of '''British empiricism''', with contributions by subsequent Anglophone thinkers including Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Russell and Ayer.[[CiteRef::Chappell (1994)|p. 261]]
|Criticism=Locke’s ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' was heavily criticized. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) responded, point-by-point, to Locke’s work in his a book length rebuttal, ''New Essays on Human Understanding''. Leibniz , which he finished this work in 1704, but appeared sixty years later. Leibniz rejected Locke's empiricism , maintaining that the senses only provide specific instances, and cannot provide the logically necessary general principles that make knowledge possible. Since such necessary truths, such as those of pure mathematics, logic, and some areas of metaphysics and ethics cannot come from the senses, and so "the proof of them can only come from inner principles, which are described as innate. It would indeedbe wrong to think that we can easily read these eternal laws of reason in the soul. . .without effort or inquiry; but it is enough that they can be discovered inside us if we give them our attention: the senses provide the prompt, and the results of experiments also serve to corroborate reason, rather as checking procedures in arithmetic helpus to avoid errors of calculation in long chains of reasoning" [[CiteRef::Leibniz(1705a)|p. 3]]
