: the philosophical system of John Locke that denies the existence of innate ideas and asserts that the mind originally resembles a tabula rasa so that all knowledge comes from experience specifically from sense perception and from reflection upon the relations of apprehended ideas and the operations of the mind itself, maintains that the primary qualities of objects (as extension, figure, number, motion, rest) inhere in the objects independently of being perceived and that the secondary qualities (as color, sound, odor) are caused by external objects but do not resemble them, and holds that political sovereignty is based on the consent of the governed
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Merriam-Webster unabridged
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