out matters that are beyond our comprehension. 'Our business is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct', he wrote. This Essay is often regarded as the foundation charter of a particularly British school of philosophy. Historians of philosophy often contrast continental and British philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the continentals on one hand were rationalists, trusting to the speculations of reason, while the British were empiricists¾ basing knowledge on the experience of the senses.
             In his work on the human intellect Locke tried to determine the possibilities and limits of knowledge without the presuppositions of metaphysics. This began a tradition of distrust towards metaphysics and of emphasis on epistemological considerations. The Cartesian concept of ideas was the s
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