 Classical empiricists insisted that the origins of knowledge lay in sensory experience. They were motivated, in part, by the concern that rationalistic accounts, seeking to trace knowledge to thought alone (rather than particular, independent sense stimuli), were too unchecked. Without the limits imposed by sense experience, philosophy would continue to produce wild and divergent dogmatisms. There was in classical empiricism, as in Dewey, a genuine interest in scientific progress; for science to advance, it needed to escape unfettered speculation. The account developed, then, by figures such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume claimed that (in Locke’s version) the world writes on a receptive blank slate, the mind, in the language of ideas. By the faculties of memory, association, and imagination, knowledge is generated; further elaborations of what is known must, on the empiricists’ account, be checkable against its origins in sense experience.