Some notes on Kant and Locke from the book, Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance. I think these are all from page 8.

John Locke introduced the idea of the mind as tabula rasa, a blank tablet, and held that consciousness is shaped largely by external experience.

Immanuel Kant:

• Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
• Observed that metaphysicians (Locke) were unable to show how external objects shape human perception
• “if the material world appears knowable, it is because the human mind makes it so”
• The categories of understanding that are intuitive to us all determine the way we perceive what we call reality

…and a bonus quote from James Freeman Clarke: “until Coleridge showed me from Kant that though knowledge begins with experience, it does not come from experience“