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This work aims to explore the ways the English philosopher John Locke shapes the terminology for describing the system of morality in philosophy. Terminology for presenting the principles, laws, and foundations of morality is chosen with respect to tradition of religious texts of the previous two centuries. Moreover, he does not use the concept of innate ideas, but tries to describe simple and complex ideas based on sensations, perceptions, and other psychological notions. However, we observe significant shifts in conceptual dominants that occur in Locke's text. The term 'conceptual dominant' being used in cognitive linguistics studying discourse is applied to Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The article examines in detail the concept of conceptual dominance in relation to Locke's philosophy and terminology of morality. This concept allows us to consider the emergence of a new point of view on human knowledge about the world, which is associated with its comprehension under the impact of socio-cultural factors that can bring to the fore certain conceptual characteristics in the semantics of language units in the process of communication. In Locke's discourse, a number of metaphors are highlighted that also help to understand how a scientist describes the processes of perception and understanding, among them LINE, PLANE, CONTAINER are highlighted, which help to describe the terminology of morality. We can observe that the scientist pays special attention to the perception of the world and the objects located in it, which become the SOURCES of knowledge ("fountains of knowledge"), as well as the heart, soul, understanding of a person. In his description, he relies on images known to his contemporaries.

The article provides the reconstruction of the English terminological
system of morality and its language features in one of the most famous papers of
John Locke An Essay Сoncerning Human Understanding (1689). We study this
philosophical paper within the framework of cognitive and discursive paradigm of
linguistic knowledge and aim to investigate the ideas about human nature and the
principles behind the work of human mind. Laws and principles were formulated
by the scholar on the basis of nature determination in human thinking and ideas
appearance in individual psychological system. The article investigates in detail
conceptual dominants of the moral philosophy and terminology in Locke's paper
and, besides that, key metaphors in Locke's discourse used for the description of
human thinking including tabula rasa, empty cabinet, fountains of knowledge,
knowledge is light. On the one hand, these conceptual metaphors are deeply rooted
in the historical and philosophical context, and on the other, they were understandable to his contemporaries, as he used recognizable words and images. Locke not
only changes the actual linguistic representation of some of the traditional philosophical metaphors, but shifts the emphasis, leading to novel interpretations and
complicating the system of ideas as a whole. To understand main components of the
philosopher's framework we took into account earlier papers of various scholars as
the material for comparison. These components include the process by which new
types of knowledge are formed and pathways by which the already existing types
are recategorized under the impact of sociocultural factors. It was shown that the
system of morality is grounded on the 17th-century views on how the human mind
works and embodies the language representation of terminological sphere of morality.