No Mans Knowledge Here Can Go

From Book II, Chapter 1 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke's foundational statement of empiricism. Against the rationalist tradition — including René Descartes and later Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — Locke argued that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa (blank tablet), acquiring all its ideas exclusively from experience: either sensation (input from the external world) or reflection (awareness of one's own mental operations). This claim made experience both the source and the limit of human knowledge.