LOCKE
By
S. ALEXANDER
M.A., LL.D., PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE &r CO LTD
1908
A
PREFATORY NOTE
I DESIRE to acknowledge my obligations to Prof.
Campbell Eraser's books on Locke (especially
the introduction to his edition of the Essay),
and to Mr. H. R. Fox Bourne's very valuable
Life of John Locke (London, 1876). In the
concluding chapters I have derived help from
Sidgwick's History of Ethics, Stephen's History
of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century,
and Prof. Ch. Bastide's John Locke : ses theories
politiques (Paris, 1906). I am indebted to Prof.
G. F. Stout for several useful suggestions.
S. A.
280217
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
i. LIFE 1
TI. PHILOSOPHY (THE ESSAY) 24
in. OBSERVATIONS ON THE ESSAY .... 52
iv. ETHICS 69
v. POLITICS .75
vi. RELIGION ........ 84
BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED 91
LOCKE
CHAPTER I
LIFE
LOCKE'S life is one of those, not rare in the history
of English letters and science, in which the
scholar is doubled with the man of the world and
of public affairs. His instinct for speculation and
his delicate health marked him out for a life of
academic retirement; his talent for business and
his practical capacity secured him weight in
politics, and put within his reach, had he chosen
to accept them, important state employments.
He combined scholarly seclusion with public in-
fluence. In his latest years he held for a time
high office as a commissioner of trade; and all
his life he was in the background of politics, the
trusted adviser of Shaftesbury, of the party who
aimed at the establishment of William of Orange,
and finally, of Somers and Charles Montague.
Though he was always known as a man of eminent
parts, his fame as a writer was confined to his last
A i
LOCKE
fifteen years. He himself chose as his profes-
sion the more active work of medicine, though
he practised it only for a few years in Shaftes-
bury's family, and occasionally afterwards. His
life was in fact that of a savant, who lived in close
relation to the men of science of his time, such
as Boyle, Sydenham, and Newton, and who, like
Lord Acton in our own day, was at the same time
the confidential friend of statesmen. It cannot
be doubted that his intellectual and practical
interests acted and reacted upon each other.
Though not himself the author of great public
measures, he took his share in many and he
voiced the principles of liberty which inspired
them. On the other hand, the devotion to truth
which compels him to see things for himself, as
they are, within the limits of his vision, is accom-
panied in him by a native sagacity and caution,
an insight, perhaps acquired in affairs, into the
character of men, and a sympathy with the needs
of the plain average man, which fitted him to
be the exponent of a new method of thinking
and to set the tone of thought to the century
which succeeded him. More than in the case of
most philosophers, Locke's history is varied with
incident and involved with the history of the
anxious and seminal time in which he lived.
2
LIFE
He was born at Wrington, a village in Somerset- \ >
shire, on the 29th of August 1632. His father,
John Locke, was Clerk to the Justices of the
Peace, one of whom Alexander Popham took
command of a volunteer regiment of horse raised
in the parliamentary cause in 1642. The elder
Locke took up arms under him as a captain. He
suffered heavily in property by the Civil War. Of
his mother the younger John Locke expressed
himself in affectionate terms. His father educated
him with great care, treating him with rigour as
a child, but admitting him to friendship as he
grew up, a practice which Locke approves. A
letter to his father is preserved which testifies to
the tenderness Locke felt for him. Early years
are impressionable, and Locke writes in 1661, ' I
no sooner perceived myself in the world, but I
found myself in a storm which has lasted almost
hitherto/ By Popham's offices he was sent, pro-
bably in 1646, to Westminster School, then under
the government of the famous Dr. Richard Busby,
and was there put through an incessant drilling
in Greek and Latin, which may have made Locke
the good scholar he was, but may also explain the
depreciation which he afterwards, in his Thoughts
upon Education, expressed for such exercises.
From Westminster he proceeded in 1652, as a
3
LOCKE
junior student, to Christchurch, Oxford, the Dean
of which was then Dr. John Owen, appointed by
Cromwell. Owen was also Vice -Chancellor of
the University, and he and his Puritan colleagues
worked with a will towards redeeming the Univer-
sity from the idleness and contempt of learning
into which it had fallen. Owen proclaimed and
taught the doctrine of toleration a fact not to be
forgotten in the life of the future author of the
Letters concerning Toleration. Locke did not
relish the studies of the place, and regretted that
his father had sent him to Oxford. He disliked
the public disputations in the schools, which he
thought ' invented for wrangling and ostentation,
rather than to discover truth.' He regarded his
early years at Oxford as wasted, because the only
philosophy then known there 'was the peripatetic,
perplexed with obscure terms and useless ques-
tions/ He spent, we hear, a good part of his first
years in the University in reading romances. But
he attended the lectures of the mathematicians
Wallis and Ward, and was intimate with Pocock,
the professor of Arabic. It was, however, the
study of Descartes which first ' gave him a relish
of philosophical things. He was rejoiced in read-
ing them, because, though he very often differed
in opinion from this writer, he yet found that
4
LIFE
what he said was very intelligible, from whence
he was encouraged to think that his not having
understood others had possibly not proceeded
from a defect in his understanding/ It is not
easy to make out the sources of Locke's philo-
sophical thought except Descartes, and the Port
Royal Logic. Bacon he knew, and also Hobbes
(though, he says, not intimately), and he appears
to have been influenced by the atomism of
Gassendi. Leibniz he knew little, and expressed
in later life a low opinion of him. 1 Malebranche
he studied and criticised. But we can well believe
his own statement that he learned more from
intercourse with men than from books.
Locke became a senior student of Christchurch .
in 1659, and the emoluments of that office were,
with a small property inherited from his father of
about 70 a year, his main source of income till
1684, when he was deprived of his studentship.
Even when he lived in London, he paid frequent
and long visits to Oxford. After the Restoration,
a new order of things arose in the University,
which Locke welcomed. His bringing up as a
Puritan, combined with his disappointment with
1 The Nouveaux Essais, in which Leibniz expounded and
reviewed the Essay, Locke never saw, and indeed, owing to
Locke's death, it was not published in Leibniz's lifetime.
5
LOCKE
the Puritan rule, may have fostered the bent of
his mind towards latitudinarian views of theology,
and towards dislike of extreme fanaticism or ' en-
thusiasm/ He was appointed to lectureships at
Christchurch usually held by clergymen. His
father had designed him for the ministry. But
Locke declined a tempting offer leading to prefer-
ment in the Irish Church, not desiring to commit
himself to a profession which he could not divest
himself of, supposing that he failed in it. Finally,
he decided upon the profession of medicine. He
had for some years pursued the study of physical
science, and had consorted with Boyle and the
other members of the Oxford branch of the Royal
Society. Boyle's History of the Air, which Locke
edited after Boyle's death, contains observations
registered by Locke from 1660 to 1667. He never
obtained the doctorate in medicine, and there was
some difficulty in securing for him the degree of
Bachelor, because he had not attended the regular
courses of lectures in medicine. He began practice
at Oxford, as an amateur partner of his friend
Dr. Thomas.
In 1665 Locke obtained, in a way which is not
clear, the appointment of secretary to Sir Walter
Vane, who went to Cleves on a special embassy to
the Elector of Brandenburg. Letters to his friend
6
LIFE
John Strachey describe with somewhat heavy
humour the incidents of his stay there. Locke
must have shown his abilities, for, on his return, he
was offered an appointment in an embassy to Spain.
Though he was plainly much tempted, his good
genius saved him from diplomacy for philosophy,
and he remained at Oxford practising medicine.
It was in 1667 that, by an accident arising out of
his profession, he became acquainted with Shaftes-
bury an event which determined his future life.
Shaftesbury (then Lord Ashley) came to Oxford,
to drink the waters of the village of Astrop, not
far off, which were then much recommended.
Owing to some delay in the supply of the waters,
Locke, in the absence of Dr. Thomas, waited upon
Ashley to explain. The impression the two men
left upon each other was such as to lead to a
lasting friendship. Locke went to London in 1667
at Ashley's invitation, and thenceforth became a
member of Ashley's household. He acted as
physician to the household, though he also prac-
tised to some extent outside. Ashley himself
owed his life to an operation performed by Locke.
But he was not only the doctor, but was intrusted
with intimate private affairs of the family, arrang-
ing the marriage of Ashley's son, and becoming
thereafter tutor of the little boy who was to be the
LOCKE
Shaftesbury of the Characteristics and to disown
the philosophy of his tutor. More important still,
he became Ashley's confidential adviser, though it
is not necessary to suppose him privy to all the
statesman's political actions. He helped in draw-
ing up in 1663 the Fundamental Constitutions for
the government of Carolina, of which settlement
Ashley was one of the proprietors. A draft of the
scheme exists in Locke's handwriting, and whether
this scheme is due to him wholly or only in part,
its liberal provisions for freedom of religion, if
only belief in God is avowed, are in keeping with
Locke's opinions. When Shaftesbury became
Chancellor in 1672, Locke became secretary of
presentations (to benefices), and later, secretary of
the recently established Council of Trade and
Foreign Plantations (or Colonies), an office which
he retained till the Council was dissolved in 1675,
though he does not appear to have received the
salary due to him. While he was thus occupied
in practical affairs, he still carried on his work
in medicine, and was allied in friendship with
Sydenham, who commends him in no measured
terms in the preface to the third edition of his
Method of curing Fevers (1676). In 1668, he
became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Though
he was more than once a member of Council, he
8
LIFE
does not, however, seem to have taken any active
part in its proceedings. But about this time in a
small circle of friends there occurred the famous
meeting from which the Essay took its origin.
' Five or six friends,' he says, ' meeting at my
chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote
from this, found themselves quickly at a stand by
the difficulties that rose on every side. After
we had awhile puzzled ourselves without coming
nearer resolution of those doubts which perplexed
us, it came into my thoughts that we took a
wrong course, and that before we set ourselves
upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to
examine our own abilities, and see what objects
our understandings were or were not fitted to deal
with. This I proposed to the company, who all
readily assented, and thereupon it was agreed
that this should be our first inquiry. Some hasty
and undigested thoughts, on a subject I had never
before considered, which I set down against our
next meeting gave the first entrance into this
discourse/ We know the names of two of his
friends, Tyrrell and Thomas, and that the dis-
course was about the principles of worship and
revealed religion. A short paragraph dated 1671
of his common-place book has been preserved,
which marks the beginning of Locke's work.
9
LOCKE
Relieved of his office in 1675, Locke spent the
next four years in rest and travel in France.
His chest always was weak, and from this time
forward he had constantly to struggle against
asthma, for which the smoke-laden air of London
in the winter was peculiarly unfavourable. We
possess journals of his sojourn in France, which
enable us to follow his movements and the obser-
vations he made there (e.g. his report on the vine-
yards made for Shaftesbury ). Most of his time was
spent at Montpellier, the great medical school, and
Locke describes the initiation of a young doctor
there, in terms which recall the famous passage
of Moliere's Malade Imaginaire. Some consider-
able time he also spent in Paris, in the society
of learned friends. But he returned in 1670 to
serve again as adviser to Shaftesbury during the
troubled years of the Exclusion Bill and the Whig
Plots, in which his movements can only obscurely
be traced. Shaftesbury was obliged to escape to
Holland in 1681, where he die.d the next year,
and Locke, whose political associations brought
him into suspicion, thought it prudent to leave
England for Holland in 1683, and there h re-
mained till after the Revolution, returning in 1689.
In Holland he made many friends, one of them
in particular Van Limborch, the head of the Re-
10
LIFE
monstrant (or Arminian) College, to whom he
addressed the Epistola de Tolerantia in its Latin
form. After some travelling he settled at Utrecht
in 1684, where he learned that Charles n. had
compelled Fell, the Dean of Christchurch, to
deprive him of his Studentship as having behaved
'factiously and undutifully to the Government/
He was left now for his support to his small
private property and the annuity of 100 which
Shaftesbury had provided for him. Not long
after, his name was attached to a list of persons
whom James n. requested the Dutch Government
to hand over on suspicion of being implicated in
Monmouth's insurrection, from which Locke had
carefully held himself aloof. Locke remained in
hiding for some time at Amsterdam and after-
wards settled at Cleves under an assumed name.
The danger was probably not so great as he feared
the Dutch Government would probably not
have surrendered him. His friend Pembroke
secured him James's pardon and begged him to
return. Locke proudly declined the pardon as
having been guilty of no crime. But the danger
was past, and he was free to consult his own desire
for leisure for study and removed to Rotterdam,
where he lived in the house of a Quaker friend,
Furly, and was in close association with the
n
LOCKE
English exiles, more particularly Mordaunt, after-
wards Peterborough, and it appears even with
William of Orange himself. He followed William
to England in 1689.
With his return to London Locke's appear-
ance as an author begins in England. In 1690
appeared both the Essay concerning Human
Understanding and the Two Treatises of Govern-
ment, the latter work anonymously. The Letter ,
concerning Toleration had appeared in its Latin
form (Epistola de Tolerantia) in 1685, but the
English translation (by William Popple) appeared ;
in London in 1689. This was also anonymous,
and great was Locke's anger when he discovered
subsequently that his friend Limborch had di-
vulged his authorship, even td an intimate friend.
It was never acknowledged "by him except in his
will. Locke is thus one of the great writers whose
writings have appeared in advanced age, for in
1689 he was fifty-seven. But the entries in his
common-place books and journals show that the
Essay was in preparation ever since 1671, and had,
as he said, been the subject of interrupted labours
during his travels in France. There is evidence
that a draft of it was seen by Shaftesbury before
1683, but it was finally prepared during his exile
in Holland, where he had already published an
12
LIFE
abstract of it in his friend Leclerc's Bibliographic
Universelle in 1689. Nothing is more interesting
than to trace the preparation in Locke's mind for
his authentic deliverances, and the papers pre-
served to us show rather how early than how late
the central ideas of his various doctrines took
shape. Of particular interest are writings which
the industry of Mr. Fox Bourne has discovered
among the Shaftesbury papers, written by Locke
at various times and bearing specially on his
views of religious liberty. One of these dates from
1660: 'Whether the civil magistrate may lawfully
impoftfr and determine the use of indifferent things
in reference to religious worship ' ; which shows
Locke's impatience of the intolerance shown by
the Puritans, and the hopes, doorned'to disappoint-
ment, which he derived from the accession of
Charles n. Another is a paper of * Reflections on
the Roman Commonwealth' (written before 1667),
in which Numa is praised for his moderation in
what he regarded as the requirements of religion.
A still more important ' Essay concerning Tolera-
tion (1667) ' published in full by Mr. Fox Bourne
anticipates almost completely the Letter. It ex-
hibits the same desire towards non-interference
of the civil power with religion, exposing also the
folly of such interference; the same desire for
13
LOCKE
a comprehensive religion which should unite all
sects in one national church ; the same exception
from toleration of atheists and also of sects like
the Catholic in so far as they set up another
temporal authority against the civil authority of
the land. The main outlines of Locke's famous
Letter have become part and parcel of our ordi-
nary political thinking, and this diminishes our
interest in it and perhaps leads us to forget the
audacity and originality, which, though the Letter
had precedents in previous writers in England and
in the practice of Holland, we must still acknow r -
ledge in it, and which gave it its influence over
the mind of Europe. . All the more value attaches
to the earlier writings which enable us to detect
the existence of these doctrines in the history of
Locke's own mind.
Locke's years from 1690 to 1704, or at least
from 1691, were spent in semi -retirement in
Essex, varied by public business in London. He
held office under the Crown as Commissioner of
Appeals for eleven or twelve years, and in the
more important office of a Commissioner of Trade
from 1695, in which office he received a salary of
1000. He accepted this last office only under
pressure. He appears to have been in fact the
chief member of the Board, and projected im-
14
LIFE
portant work in promotion of Irish linen manu-
facture and of reform of the poor laws, though his
proposals in these respects were not put into
effect. His inability to bear the London winter
led to an early resignation which Somers pressed
him to reconsider, but he finally withdrew from
office in 1700. His influence was, however, not
confined to his official work. In the early years
of William's reign, letters from Soiners show how
much value was set upon his advice. One
incident of peculiar interest occurred in 1689,
when he was offered the post of ambassador to
Frederick i. the Elector of Brandenburg. Again
his good genius persuaded him to decline, on the
pretext of his weak health, the cold climate, and
his inability to support the ' warm drinking '
necessary in those parts for one who was to make
himself acceptable. And though he was invited
to go to Vienna instead, Locke persisted in his
refusal. William showed the value he set upon
Locke's services by summoning him urgently at
a later date from Essex in the winter, for some
purpose not sufficiently made out, but probably
again of a diplomatic character; but the summons
cost Locke several days of severe illness. During /
these later years Locke concerned himself largely j
with economic questions. In 1692, he published [
15
LOCKE
anonymously some letters (addressed, Mr. Fox
Bourne thinks, to Somers) on c The consequences
of the lowering of interest and raising the value of
money' which had reference to a proposal that
had been made to lower the rate of interest by law,
and to the serious problem of the depreciation of
the currency which caused Locke great anxiety.
When Lowndes, the Secretary to the Treasury,
made a proposal in 1695 for raising the value of
money, Locke returned to the subject and rendered
service to Somers and Montague, who had con-
sulted him, in their legislation for reform of the
coinage. In this year also some strictures which
Locke had written on the Licensing Act (which
maintained the censorship of the press) were read
in a conference of the two Houses, and helped
towards the demolition of the Act.
Locke's country residence was at Gates, in Essex,
where he finally took up his abode in 1691, in the
house of Sir Francis Mashain, as soon as he could
persuade that gentleman, at whose house Locke
had frequently been a visitor, to accept him as a
permanent guest upon suitable terms. Masham's
wife was the daughter of Cudworth the Cambridge
Platonist, with whose family Locke had long been
on terms of friendship. Lady Masham devoted
herself with unfailing affection to her friend,
16
LIFE
whose declining years and fragile health she
cheered with her intellectual companionship.
Her letter to Leclerc, written after Locke's death,
is a principal source of our knowledge of his life.
Masham's daughter Esther (his child by a former
wife) became a great friend of Locke, and a lively
correspondence passed when either was away from
home between ' Laudabridis' and 'Joannes/ While
at Gates, Locke carried on the greater part of the
immense literary work of his later life. The
details may be mentioned briefly. A second letter
concerning Toleration had appeared in 1690, in
answer to a criticism of the first by Jonas Proast,
and the long third letter published in 1692, was
a rejoinder to Proast's rejoinder. In 1693 Locke
published his Thoughts concerning Education,
containing the substance of letters written from
Holland to his friend Clarke about the education
of Clarke's son. Locke used his medical know-
ledge with much effect in the earlier part of his
treatise. The general body of the work reveals
his sagacious care for the growth of character,
and his aversion to studies calculated to cul-
tivate address, rather than progress in knowledge.
In all the methods of education, he looked to
their effect upon the pupil's mind. But he put
virtue and practical wisdom first and learning
B 17
LOCKE
last. 1 Probably Locke under-rates the value of
learning as itself a means of educating character
the topic on which it was reserved for Herbart
to insist. But his work deserves its place in
educational literature for its wisdom and sense
of life, and it has the historical importance of
having affected the Emile of Eousseau. Locke
was engaged continually in modifying the Essay,
of which a second edition appeared in 1694, and
a much amended fourth edition in 1700. In
1695, he published anonymously his Reasonable-
ness of Christianity (followed by two ' Vindica-
tions ' of it). Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester,
recognised in the writer of this work the author
of the Essay ; and when Toland, the deistical
writer, published next year his Christianity not
Mysterious, which he professed to found upon
Locke's Essay, attacked the Essay itself by way
of a defence of the Trinity against Toland and
the Unitarians. Locke replied to Stillingfleet's
attacks in a series of letters, between 1697 and
1 R. H. Quick (Educational Reformers], observes that this
work should be read in connection with the Conduct of the
Understanding, where instead of considering subjects of study
from the point of view of their usefulness for a young gentle-
man (as in the Thoughts], Locke considers them as means of
training, and urges that the value of study is to enable the
youth to use his reason for himself hereafter.
18
LIFE
1699, which supplemented in certain respects the
doctrine of the Essay, and overwhelmed his op-
ponent with argument and irony. Of Locke's
posthumous writings the most important philo-
sophically are a paper on Malebranche and The
Conduct of the Understanding.
Many friends came to see Locke during his re-
tirement at Gates, or received visits from him.
Among these was Newton, between whom and
Locke there subsisted a real affection. Locke
took some part in securing for Newton his ap-
pointment at the Mint. But Newton was not
always easy to deal with. Once, in consequence
of prolonged insomnia (due to dozing by the fire
in his room), he imagined a grievance against
Locke. A reader who remembers the greatness
of the two men will find something very touching
in the letter in which Newton contritely asks
forgiveness for entertaining and expressing an
evil opinion of his friend, and in Locke's reply
of surprise and generous affection. Another friend
of this later time, whom the Essay brought him,
was William Molyneux, 'the ingenious gentle-
man' of the Essay 'whom I am proud to call
my friend/ an Irish patriot before Swift, who
introduced the Essay into Trinity College, Dublin,
where it was to be read shortly by the young
19
LOCKE
Berkeley, and has ever since remained a text-
book. Molyneux' discussion of the Essay helped
Locke to several amendments, and he visited
Locke at Gates. Another new friend was Anthony
Collins, a young neighbouring squire, who after-
wards wrote one of the best known of the deistical
writings. Locke took a warm interest in a rela-
tion of his, Peter King, a young lawyer and
member of Parliament, who became his sole
executor. It was King's descendant, Lord Chan-
cellor King, who published in 1829 the Life
of John Locke. Still another young friend de-
serves mention, Pierre Coste, French tutor to
the boy Francis Masham, who wrote of Locke in
Bayle's magazine Les Nouvelles de la Rtpublique
des Lettres. Locke died on the 28th of October
1704, and was buried in the churchyard at High
Laver, the parish where he used to attend service.
Locke's capacity of friendship, which included
love of children and young people, is apparent
from his whole history. Lady Masham and Coste
have left us a charming and amiable picture of
his personality 4 his singular humanity and good
breeding, which made him alike conversible with
all sorts of people,' and made him lead people to
talk of what they understood best; his fondness
of raillery and banter, * though rarely if ever, to
20
LIFE
the least offence of any person, but rather to dwell
on some very slight fault, or else that which was
usually commendable and for their honour to be
known ' ; his wit in conversation ; his kindness and
charity, which, however, were always directed to
encourage industry. 'He was a great lover of
economy, and an exact keeper of accounts ' and he
was very neat in his dress and habits, without
any affectation or singularity. He was quick-
tempered and sometimes against unfair assailants
he did not conceal his anger, but he was easily
appeased. When some one quoted in his hearing
some words of Horace, 'Ah/ said Locke, ' I am like
Horace in both these things. I love the warmth
of the sun, and though I am prone to be angry,
my hot temper soon goes down/
If we had not his letters and the testimony of
these friends, we could easily guess from the style
of his writing and particularly of the Essay what
manner of man he was. It suggests a man saga-
cious, cautious, skilled in the knowledge of men
and regardful above all things of what it concerns
man's happiness to know and to be, a foe to ' en-
thusiasm/ but of broad spirit and sympathy. He
writes leisurely, as if he were talking out of a full
mind ; determined to see things clearly ; anxious
to make his meaning plain; yet not over-care-
21
LOCKE
ful of precision, but content, as a man of the
world, to allow one part of his discourse to supply
the qualification of another part. Prolix his style is,
exceeding the measure of our less spacious times,
and when it is controversial, protracted into tedi-
ousness. Its uniform level is diversified here and
there by phrases of striking and even pungent wit
(' God when he makes the prophet doth not un-
make the man'), more often by quiet humour
('every drowsy nod shakes their doctrine who
teach that the soul is always thinking ') or irony,
which is always courteous (and therefore more
effective) except when it is directed against an
unworthy criticism. It betrays little imagination,
though occasionally there is a touch of tenderness
and fancy as in the passage : ' The ideas as well as
children of our youth often die before us ; and our
minds represent those tombs to which we are
approaching ; where though the brass and marble
remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time
and the imagery moulders away ' ; or when he
allows himself to consider the possibility of con-
tinuous grades of spirits in the world, though
there the imagination belongs rather to the
thought than to the style. Often there are pas-
sages of sustained eloquence like the concluding
pages of the Reasonableness of Christianity. But
22
LIFE
its general tone is that of equable common-sense,
without emphasis, without enthusiasm, restrained
in its judgment, careful of measure, never dull
but reflecting evenly from a candid surface,
modest when it is most original, because con-
cerned with the faithful presentment of things,
rather lambent than fiery, an inspired pedes-
trianism.
CHAPTER II
PHILOSOPHY (THE ESSAY)
NOTHING enables us so well to understand the
meaning of a philosophic writer as to know the
spirit in which he undertook his inquiries, and it
is fortunate for us that the more personal and
autobiographical method of writers like Descartes,
Locke, and Spinoza (in one of his treatises) and
others, admits us into this secret. Locke's spirit
is that of criticism. The method of criticism in
philosophy is principally associated with the name
of Kant, who avowed and described it. It is the
^ method of determining the limits of our know-
ledge by an inquiry into the instrument. In this
sense Locke has been rightly described as ' the
first critical philosopher/Jand different as his pro-
cedure was from Kant's, and different as was the
outcome of their thinking, their affinity of spirit is
profounder than their divergence. The words in
which Locke describes, at the opening of the
Essay, the occasion of his writing it remind us of
the later words of Kant in his preface to the
24
PHILOSOPHY
Critique of Pure Reason. 'I thought,' Locke
says, ' that the first step towards satisfying several
inquiries the mind of man was very apt to run
into, was to take a survey of our own understand-
ings, examine our own powers, and see to what
things they were adapted. Till that was done I
suspected we began at the wrong end and in vain
sought for satisfaction in a quiet and sure posses-
sion of truths that most concerned us, whilst we
let loose our thoughts into the vast ocean of being ;
as if all that boundless extent were the natural
and undoubted possession of our understandings,
wherein there was nothing exempt from its de-
cision, or that escaped its comprehension. Thus
men extending their inquiries beyond their capac-
ities, and letting their thoughts wander into those
depths where they can find no sure footing, it is
no wonder that they raise questions and multiply
disputes, which, never coming to any clear resolu-
tion, are proper only to continue and increase
their doubts, and confirm them at last in perfect
scepticism. Whereas were the capacities of our
understandings well considered, the extent of our
knowledge once discovered and the horizon found
which sets the bounds between the enlightened
and dark parts of things between what is and
what is not comprehensible by us men would
25
LOCKE
perhaps with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed
ignorance of the one, and employ their thoughts
and discourse with more advantage and satisfac-
tion in the other.' With Locke the speculative
impulse is an out-growth from practical needs.
' Our business here is not to know all things but
those which concern our conduct/ He is per-
suaded that for two evils to which the mind is
liable : scepticism which bids us doubt everything
because there are some things which cannot be
understood ; and on the other hand extravagant
pretensions to knowledge : there is but one cure,
to know how much we can know. The Essay is
thus a doctrine of the limits of knowledge.
All its multifarious inquiries converge to this
end. The extent of knowledge is indeed the
proper subject of only one book, the fourth and
last. Knowledge is to Locke the perception of
the agreement or disagreement of our ideas, that
is to say, of the objects of our understanding. A
preliminary survey was therefore necessary of
these ideas, and because to him words, the signs
of ideas, were an index to the nature of ideas
themselves, and the misuse of language was partly
provoked by unclearness in our ideas, and partly
provoked it, the study of ideas and the study of
words are conjoined. These inquiries occupy the
26
PHILOSOPHY
major part of the Essay in Books n. and in. [it
is a method Locke describes as the 'plain, his- (
torical method/ But history means to him not \
simply or primarily the record of the origin and
growth of our ideas, but rather it has the sense in
which Bacon and Aristotle used the word before i
him, and in which we still speak of Zoology as
natural history. The history of our minds means
a description of the contents of our mind as we
find them, arranging them into sorts, and assign-
ing them to their appropriate faculties.) Q^Ee
second book of Locke's Essay, which is a survey
of ideas, is in fact an inventory of our experience.
But Locke does not distinguish the inquiry into
the contents of our ideas from the inquiry into
their origin, and hence arises one of the chief
defects of the Essay. For in analysing our ideas
into their simplest elements, which is his prin-
cipal object, he implies and even says, that these
simple elements exist first and that the more
complex ones are constructed out of them. But
the ' history ' which may be true as a description
and an analysis is not necessarily true as an
account of the order of growthj
Locke's method has sometimes been described
as psychological, and it has been made a charge
against him as well as against his successors,
27
LOCKE
Berkeley and Hume, that they give us psychology
instead of philosophy. This charge is founded
upon a misunderstanding of the spirit of their
work. While they are founders of English
psychology, their primary interest is philosophical
or metaphysical, and they are only incidentally
psychologists. The object of psychology is to
describe the process by which the mind acquires
its experiences. Necessarily such a classification
as Locke gives of these experiences, referring
them to the mental capacities by which we
acquire them, supplies at the same time the
material of a psychology. But Locke's object is
to describe the different kinds of objects the mind
thinks about; and in fact the processes of ob-
servation, perception, willing and the like, which
are the subject-matter of psychology (a word
which Locke himself does not employ), are for
him merely one portion of the contents of human
experience, that which he describes as ideas of
reflection.
By ' idea ' (a term which he borrows from Des-
cartes) Locke means 'whatever is the object of
the understanding, when a man thinks ' or ' what-
ever it is which the mind can be employed about
in thinking.' It includes thus the simplest
experiences like heat, and the most complex like
28
PHILOSOPHY
those of civilisation or mathematical relations ; and
not merely experience of things, but of events,
whether in the external world, or, like the process
of conceiving, in the mind itself; not only ideas
of particular things but general or abstract ideas.
Careless as Locke's use of language is, there is
never any doubt as to his use of this word.
Sometimes he describes an idea by reference to
the capacity which supplies it an idea of sensa-
tion is thus an idea supplied by sense ; sometimes
by reference to its contents, as when he speaks of
an idea of heat, in other words heat so far as it
is experienced. They are objects of mind: they
would not be what they are if they were not ex-
perienced ; but they are objects still. They are in
fact the appearances of things, in so far as these
appearances are presented to the mind, or as
Locke and his followers more often say 'are in
the mind/ Butjhe does not answer, because he
does not raise, the question as to what the nature
of these ideas is or how they arise. He is content
to say that when a hot thing excites the skin and
the movement is continued to the brain, it pro-
duces in the mind the idea of heat in this case
an idea of sensation or perception. He assumes
that there is an external thing, and a mind, and
that upon suitable occasion the mind apprehends
29
LOCKE
an idea related to the thing. But while these
ideas are for Locke appearances of things, they
cannot be described as being identical with things
in so far as the things appear to us under different
aspecT^PThe ideas are not attributes of the things
themselves, they are to Locke copies of the things
to which they refer. Locke insists that we can
only know reality through ideas which are its
copies, that ideas or their relations are the proper
objects of mind, and in fact his whole effort is to
determine just how much, in extent and in kind,
these ideas can tell us of the real world which he
assumes. The world of ideas constitutes therefore
(to neglect certain qualifications to be mentioned
hereafter) a body of representations of real thingij
But while he thus assumes that the objects of
mind are themselves mental in character Locke
never describes them in the modern phrase of
' states of consciousness/ He never says (and does
not believe) that we know nothing but our own
states. He does indeed constantly speak of
ideas as being ' in the mind/ and it is easy to find
passages which suggest that the ideas are mental
.affections. ' The pictures drawn in our minds/ he
says, ' of the ideas of memory ' (what we should
now call the images of memory) ' are laid in fading
colours, and if not sometimes refreshed, vanish
30
PHILOSOPHY
and disappear/ But it is clear that an idea of
perception, e.g. the idea of a tree is not an affec-
tion of the mind in the same sense as the act of
perception itself is. Nor does Locke, who main-
tains that mathematical ideas have a reality of
their own, mean that a triangle is a mere affec-
tion of the mind which vanishes when we cease to
think of it. Locke does not in the Essay raise the
problem which is involved in this phrase affec-
tion or modification of mind a problem which
agitated the followers of Descartes; and when
he meets it in his posthumous treatise on Male-
branche he is impatient of it and pushes it aside.
To have the modification of mind involved in
seeing the purple colour of a violet (Malebranche
called this sensation a ' sentiment ' in distinction
from the idea), is the same thing as ' to have the
idea of purple in my mind.' To Locke what is
important is that ' when we think of a colour or a
figure which we did not think of before there is
some alteration in the mind/ But how we come
to have ideas he cannot explain. ' I see or per-
ceive or have ideas when it pleases God that I
should, but in a way that I cannot comprehend/
r'The phrase, that ideas are in the mind, cannot
^therefore be pressed it might be replaced by the
phrase, ideas are before the mind. The word 'idea/
LOCKE
therefore, contains for Locke no theory ; it means
simply an_ object of the understanding when we
think. Unfortunately he also did not inquire
J what was involved in assigning to ideas a twilight
existence between the things they represent and
the mind which understands them. That he did
not do so is a philosophical deffcfjQjput if we are to
apprehend his meaning, we must beware of import-
ing into his philosophy doctrines that he does not
maintain.
Let us follow Locke in mis inventory of ideas.
They may be distinguished, in the first place,
according to their 'original/ All our ideas, all
the materials of our thought and knowledge, are
derived directly or indirectly from experience, and
from two sources of it, sensation and reflection.
External sensible objects supply us with the one
set of ideas, ideas of sensation; our own opera-
tions about the ideas got by sensation, when the
mind comes to reflect upon these operations,
supply us with the other set, the ideas of reflec-
tion : such ideas as the acts of perceiving, willing,
thinking, feeling. Apart from experience, then,
directly or indirectly received, the mind is to
Locke a White paper, void of all characters, with-
out any ideas, a tabula rasa ; or it is compared to
a dark cabinet into which the senses let in light.
32
IX
o
PHILOSOPHY
That we have no innate ideas, no objects of ex-
perience not derived from these two sources, is the!
implied doctrine, the subject-matter of Book iTl
whose significance may be deferred. Nor does
the mind think, except so far as it has ideas
before itfwe cannot say with Descartes that
because the essence of mind is to think, the mind
is always actually thinking. ' Every drowsy nod
shakes their doctrine who declare that the mind
thinks always.! But, while the mind is passive in
respect of tKese two sources of experience, sen-
sation and reflection, the mind is also active :
it can attend, it can compare, distinguish and
abstract. Hence arisesfthe first important classi-
fication of ideas into two classes simple and
complex ideas. Simple ideas are the ultimate
constituents of experience, the uncompounded ap-
pearances of things ; complex ideas are the work-
manship of the mmcy Simple ideas are either
the ideas of the sensible qualities of things de-
rived by sensation of all kinds, the ideas of white-
ness, heat and the like, or else they are the ideas
of the operations of our minds which come to us
by reflection, or else they are like pleasure or
pain or existence, ideas which convey themselves
into the mind by sensation or reflection indiffer-
ently, 'by all the ways of sensation and reflec-
C 33
LOCKE
tion.' These simple elements of experience the
mind can neither make nor destroy, it can only
receive ; had we fewer or more senses we should
receive fewer or more such ideas.r Among simple
ideas of sensation the most important distinction
is that between the ideas of the primary qualities
and the ideas of the secondary qualities of bodies
a distinction inherited by Locke from Descartes
but introduced mto philosoplry, in its modern
shape, by Galileo. V Extension, figure, number,
motion or rest, solraity, these are qualities which
bodies possess no matter what changes they
undergo. Pound an almond or melt wax, the
colours may change, but some figure and exten-
sion they still have. These qualities, then, are
powers in bodies themselves, and really in them,
whether any one's senses perceive them or no:
in virtue of which they produce exactly corre-
sponding ideas in us. But secondary qualities,
like colour, taste, and smell, which change with
varying circumstances, which may vanish for ex-
ample with the absence of illumination, or be
unfelt by a person who suffers from a cold, or
may change in character according to the condi-
tion of the percipient, are not qualities in bodies
themselves, but are powers which they possess of
producing certain ideas in us, in virtue of their
34
PHILOSOPHY
internal structure ; that is, in virtue of the primary
qualities of the insensible particles of which they
are composed, for Locke assumes material bodies
to be ultimately atomic in structure. It may be
added that there is a third sort of qualities of
bodies, powers which they possess to affect .other
external bodies, like the power of the sun to melt
wax. It is these last which are commonly called
powers. The ideas of the secondary qualities are,
therefore, in one important respect, unlike those
of the primary qualities; they do not resemble
anything in the object, though popular thought
thinks that bodies are in themselves red or sweet,
in the same way as they are extended.
\ ^Simple ideas of reflection may be grouped under
theTtwo heads of thinking and willing. Sensible
objects give us ideas. The acts of the mind, as
engaged upon these ideas, give us the ideas of
reflection by a kind of inner sense. \ Perception is
the simplest operation we can tfius be aware of,
for apparently the act of sensation is nothing but
bodily motion in the brain ; the simplest idea of
sensation is really an idea of perception. Re-
tention, discrimination, comparison, abstraction
(which puts a limit between man and brutes),
are other examples. It is characteristic of Locke's
imperfect consideration of what an idea is, that,
35
LOCKE
while strictly speaking, it is only * retention' or
'memory' itself that should be an idea of re-
fledlion, he yet constantly speaks of remembered
objects as ideas of reflection; though, in itself, a
remembered person is no more an object of reflec-
tion than a perceived person. By doing so he
seems to make the inner sense not only a source
of ideas of mental operations, but a source of ideas
which are not operations at all but in some sense
a special mental reduplication of ideas of sensa-
tion a doctrine full of fatal significance for sub-
sequent thought.
\ The complex ideas introduce distinctions which
present at once more interest and greater diffi-
culty r\ They are the voluntary creations of the
miiid, which manipulates the materials derived
from sensation and reflection; or they might be
described as resoluble into these elements to-
gether with an active element of construction
referable to the mind itself. [^Locke distinguishes
three sorts, Modes, Substances, and Relations, of
which Modes and Relations stand on an alto-
gether different footing from Substances. Modes
are complex ideas like jumping, triangle, grati-
tude, which are not regarded as self-subsistent
but as affections of substances. They are either
simple, or mixed, according as their simple con-
36
PHILOSOPHY
stituents are of the same or different sorts. Thus,
twelve is a mere repetition of unity ; beauty is re-
soluble into the heterogeneous elements of colour, U
figure, pleasure, etc. Simple modes are thus
variations of one simple idea e.g. the different
figures of extension, different sorts of motion,
different numbersTj One particularly interesting
mode is infinity or immensity, whether of space
or duration, which we get by (or is resoluble
into) the addition of unit to unit and joining to
this the negative idea that the process of addition
may be carried on without limit, never coming to
an end. Anticipating the more famous discussion
of the same problem by Kant,jjjpcke denies in-
finity to be a positive idea there is no idea of
a positive completed infinite ' you cannot adapt /^
a standing measure to a growing bulk.' The chief V
examples of mixed modes (those which are re-
soluble into heterogeneous elements) are to be
found in moral ideas, e.g. motive, justice. \ It is
true that combinations of qualities inTne real
world may correspond to these ideas, or even
suggest them. But in themselves they are put
together arbitrarily by the mind, and the im-
portant consequence follows (for these and simple
modes as well), that they have no standard ex-
ternal to themselves with which they can be com-
37
LOCKE
pared: they are their own archetypes, they are
their own guarantee of reality, f This same account
applies to ideas of Relation, such as relation of
king and subject, identity, cause and effect, and
the like. All of them ' terminate in simple ideas/
are 'concerned with their simple ideas/ and are
products of the mind's activity in considering
them, ' so as to carry its view from one to the
other/ \Some of the more special sorts of relations,
and TrTparticular moral relations, will occupy us
later.
< The ideas of Substances are of a different
nature. They, too, are the workmanship of the
mind. We find a number of ideas of simple
qualities going together in our experience, and we
combine these ideas together under a single name,
and regard them as belonging to one thing, but
we also go on to suppose some support or sub-
stratum to the qualities in the thing which pro-
duces these simple ideas in us. We do not know
what that support is, any more than the Indian
philosopher Locke loves to quote, who declared
that the world was supported by an elephant, the
elephant by a tortoise, and the tortoise by he
knew not what. This obscure idea of some
support we know not what is the idea we have
of substance in general, land ' it is the same every-
--*8
PHILOSOPHY
where.' 1 A particular kind of substance is then
nothing but a group of simple ideas, regarded as
so supported, and as flowing from the internal
constitution of this unknown somewhat.
The Church, in the person of the Bishop of
Worcester, alleged, in alarm for the doctrine of
the Trinity, that Locke was almost discarding
substance out of the world. Locke could answer
easily enough, that so far from discarding it, he
had catalogued it, vague as it was, in his in-
ventory of experience, and had explained what
kind of an idea it was. ^Lpcke might have been
more embarrassed if he had been asked to explain
how the mind could not only group together
simple ideas as the ideas of one thing, but was\
able to invent the new idea of a support however/
indefinite. He was content to note in his in-
ventory the. existence of this idea without more
narrowly analysing its nature. A
BulTtwo consequences he'clrew from his account
of substance, which are of great importance. The
first is, that the idea of a spiritual substance is no
less clear than that of a material one. A material
substance is the unknown support of sensible
qualities ; spiritual substance is the unknown
support of the qualities corresponding to the
1 First letter to the Bishop of Worcester.
39
LOCKE
ideas of reflection.? At the same time, this victori-
ous conclusion needs to be qualified. Bodies and
souls are alike the unknown supports of attri-
butes. But bodies to Locke have a microscopic
atomic constitution : a notion familiar to him
from the speculations of Gassendi, or indeed from
those of Bacon. It is but the coarseness of our
senses and of our intelligence which conceals this
constitution from us. Spirits more finely endowed
than ours, like the angels', may penetrate further
than ours into the constitution of bodies. But/in
regard to the soul, there is a peculiar obscurity.
A substance it is, but we do not know whether it
is an immaterial substance, or merely a material
substance to which God has attached the power
of thinking.^ The first hypothesis may be the
more probable, and only those ' whose thoughts
are immersed in matter' find it harder to con-
ceive a spiritual than a bodily substance. But
though God Himself, from whom all proceeds, is
certainly an immaterial substance, there is no con-
tradiction in the second hypothesis, which holds
Him to have added thought to certain systems of
senseless matter. ' All the great ends of worship
and religion are well enough secured without
philosophical proofs of the soul's immateriality.'
The identity of the soul, whichever view be
40
PHILOSOPHY
taken of it, consists in the identity of conscious-
ness.
"jfThe second conclusion is of a different nature.
A distinction was current in the schools, between
the real essence of substances and the nominal
essence or definition. Locke spends himself in
argument to prove that we know only nominal
essences, and that they are the names of sorts of
things by which we identify a particular thing as
belonging to a class, they are groups of ideas (J
connected together by names. They are thus
general ideas formed by abstraction. The real
essence is ' that real constitution of anything,
which is the foundation of the qualities combined
in the nominal essence/ it is to him that minute '
microscopic constitution, from which the obvious
sensible qualities combined in the definition are
supposed to flow. This real essence of things we
do not know, because our senses fail to carry us
so far. It follows, to anticipate a little, that our
knowledge of substances is confined to the abstract
collections of ideas which a<re signified by the
general names of substances. \
Our brief resume of th^cEIef titles in Locke's
inventory of experience is not intended to do
more than indicate the wealth of detailed descrip-
tion which makes the second book of the Essay
LOCKE
a storehouse of metaphysical and psychological
knowledge. Nor does it attempt at all to follow
Locke in his survey of words in the third book.
But we may conveniently stop for a moment,
before passing on to consider Locke's theory of
knowledge, in order to review the picture here
presented of the ideas which we possess, the
objects of our mind when we think. They are
all resoluble into two kinds of simple experiences,
ideas of sense qualities, and of mental operations.
These simple ideas all correspond to the real
things, whose existence Locke assumes, and which
are supposed to produce them in our minds : they
are ' such perceptions as God has fitted us to
receive, and given power to external objects (he
is speaking of simple ideas of sensation), to pro-
duce in us by established laws and ways, suitable
to his wisdom and goodness, though incompre-
hensible to us.' They are in Locke's language
real, adequate, and true. Some of them are exact
copies of their originals, others do not resemble
them. But they are but the materials of our
experience. The finished objects of our experi-
ence are our own handiwork. On the one hand,
we have a set of objects, of which the chief are
mathematical and ethical constructions, which
are real and adequate in their own right, self-
42
PHILOSOPHY
contained because not fashioned according to any
exemplar beyond them. These objects contain a
wealth of properties, which may be drawn from
them by demonstration. On the other hand
we have substances, whether material things or
minds, and these we do not experience in them-
selves, but only so far as we receive simple ideas
from them. fWe are left then strangely with a
twofold reality. There is one reality, which
belongs to certain of our ideas, like the mathe-
matical ones, because they are wholly of our
making. There is another reality of substances
which supply us with the ideas that we receive
from them ; which are behind the veil of the ap-
pearances by which we know them. This reality we
know only partially, and cannot thoroughly knowj
This survey of ideas anticipates the answer to
the problem of the limits of knowledge, which it
was Locke's main object to solve. I Knowledge, as
already explained, is the perceptionoT the agree-
ment or disagreement of ideas. Ideas are but
the elements of knowledge, we have knowledge
when we perceive their connections. What is
known is thus ideas in their connection. Accord-
ing to Locke, the connection may be one of four
kinds. It may be that of identity or diversity, as
when we perceive that white is white, and is not
43
LOCKE
black; or of relation, e.g. three is greater than
two ; or co-existence, e.g. gold is ' fixed/ which
means the co-existence of fixedness with the de-
fining qualities of gold ; or lastly, there is a fourth
kind of agreement or disagreement, ' that of actual
real existence agreeing to an idea/ which may be
reserved for later explanationj
[Knowledge so defined, to be really knowledge,
is either directly or indirectly intuitive. Direct
intuition is the immediate perception of such
agreement or disagreement : it is immediate cer-
tainty ' irresistible/ ' like bright sunshine ' ; and
on it all certainty of knowledge depends. Indirect
intuition is demonstration, where our ideas are
brought into relation by the mediation of a third,
each step in the demonstration being itself in-
tuitive. ( Supposing that there could be innate
ideas and principles which the mind brings along
with it, their intuitive character would accord-
ingly not serve to distinguish them from any
other kind of knowledge which is knowledge in
the strict sense. But jStiere are three questions
which may profitably be asked about knowledge,
concerned as it is with ideas. How far does it
extend? How far is it real or conformable to
things ? How much can it tell us of actual
existence? x
44
PHILOSOPHY
The answer to the first two questions turns
entirely on the difference between ideas of sub-
stances and all other ideas. Our senses are not
acute enough to tell us of the primary qualities of
the minute particles of bodies, nor our intelligence
to inform us of the structure composed by these
'particles. We can therefore neither know why
the body ' produces in us the ideas of certain
qualities included in their nominal essence, nor,
what is more important, what is the connection
between these qualities themselves, and conse-
quently between these qualities and other qual-
ities which we may discover in them. Further
we have to remember, as Locke says in a striking
passage, that substances do not stand alone, but
are related to one another, and dependent for their
qualities on remote causes which may be unper-
ceived. ' Separate a piece of gold from all other
bodies, and it would lose all its colour and weight
and perhaps malleableness too/ 'We see and
perceive some of the actions and grosser opera-
tions of things here about us, but whence the
streams come that keep all these curious machines
in motion and repair, how conveyed and modified,
is beyond notice and apprehension. . . . Things,
however absolute and entire they seem in them-
selves, are but retainers to other parts of nature
45
LOCKE
for that which they are most taken notice of
by us.'
It is plain then that] our knowledge cannot
extend beyond our ideas, but also that it must fall
short of the range of our ideas, whenever we fail
to bring our ideas into relation with one another.
Thus though we have an idea of matter and of
thinking we may never be able to know whether
matter thinks.^ fWe are limited in our knowledge
of the co-existence of qualities in bodies because
we do not know the ultimate constitution of
things. We can go little further than our ex-
perience. And if this is true of bodies, it is still
more true of spirits which are only known in our
persons, while we know nothing of other possible
spirits in the universe, but can only conjecture.
Whereas the extent of our knowledge of mathe-
matical and moral relations appears to be inde-
finite and inexhaustible!
rWhen we ask how far our knowledge is real
oTfrue how far, that is, it differs from mere im-
agination and conforms to things the answer is
p. similar. Mathematical and moral knowledge, since
these ideas are their own archetypes, is real and
true. But our ideas of substances are referred to
archetypes existing beyond ideas. Our knowledge
of them can only therefore be true 'so far as it is
46
PHILOSOPHY
founded upon experience and sensible observa-
tions, i Hence, to state the same thing otherwise,
the important result that a definite limit is set to
our acquisition of universal knowledge.!"" So far as
ideas are abstract their agreement or disagreement
will constitute universal knowledge ; wherever
therefore, as in mathematics, we have abstract
ideas we Can obtain universal knowledge. Now of
substances we know only their nominal essences.
These are abstract, but we can derive very little
further knowledge from them because.as explained,
not knowing the constitution of things, we do not
know the connection between the qualities which
make up the nominal essence. We are then
limited to the particular knowledge of substances
derived from particular experiences. Such gener-
alisations as we can make as to the co-existence
of their properties, wanting as they are in adequate
foundation, do not amount to more than pro-
bability, useful enough for practice, but falling
short of science. Thev are not matter of know-
ledge but of judgment} Science, which is uni-
versal, is thus only possible in the unfolding of
an abstract idea, and consequently Locke is ' apt
to doubt a science of physical bodies as out of
our reach'; our physical knowledge is at best
empirical.
47
LOCKE
The inadequacy of our knowledge of substances
is plainer still if we ask ourselves what are the
things of which we are warranted in holding not
merely that they are real or true like mathe-
matics but that they have actual existence. At
first sight it might seem difficult to understand
how, if knowledge is the perception of the agree-
ment of ideas, we can have knowledge of actual
existence at all. For actual existence outside the
world of ideas is not itself an idea and cannot be
compared with other ideas. But what Locke
means is clear enough : it is the undoubted fact
that certain ideas come to us with a ' coefficient
of reality/ as it has been called, a ' tang ' which
distinguishes them from mere ideas or imagina-
tions. They carry us beyond the mere idea to
something else, which is what we call real exist-
ence. There are two such ideas of whose existence
we may have certainty: ourselves and God. Of
our own existence we have intuitive knowledge ;
to doubt it is, in Descartes' language which Locke,
accepts, to be assured of it in the very act of
doubting. Of God's existence we have demon-
strative knowledge. For I myself exist; there
must therefore be some real being to account for
my beginning to be, and this real being must
exist from all eternity (or it too would have had
48
PHILOSOPHY
a beginning and therefore a further cause). More-
over this being as the source of all our powers
and knowledge must be most powerful and most
knowing in a word, it is God. The pungency of
my own existence is thus by this argument com-
municated through the principle of causality to
God. But Locke, though he regards it as an intui-
tive truth that nothing can begin to be except it is
produced by some real thing, does not ask himself
how the idea of causation, gathered according to
his own account from the suggestion of connected
changes in things, can be extended so as to apply
to a cause like God which never can be presented
in sensible or reflective experience.
Of the existence of ourselves and of God we
have thus, according to Locke, complete con-
viction. When we turn to material things, we
find that while we can at pleasure call up or lay
by the ideas of memory or fancy, we are passive
in respect of external objects. When we look at
the sun, we cannot avoid having the idea of light.
There must needs be ' some exterior cause which
produces these ideas in my mind whether I will
or no.' Moreover a present material thing affects
us with a certain force or vivacity which distin-
guishes it from a mere imagination. It is the
difference between seeing the sun by day and think-
D 49
LOCKE
Ing of it by night. To the objector who urges that
the fire may be all a dream, Locke never tires of
begging him ' to dream this answer ' ; that there
is a manifest difference between dreaming of
being in the fire and being actually in it, and at
any rate the pain of the second experience makes
the difference between our weal and woe, and de-
termines us practically. Such knowledge Locke
calls sensitive knowledge. It is less than intui-
tion and is therefore less than knowledge proper,
but it is more than mere 'judgment.' Our know-
ledge of the nature of sensible things is thus the
particular knowledge of our observations of them,
and our knowledge of their actual existence is the
sensible experience of their presence so long as
they are present ; or it may be added, the memory
that they were once so sensibly perceived.
What falls outside the range of knowledge thus
described belongs to the sphere of judgment or
probability, and it thus includes the greater part
of our beliefs and the propositions we make, in
particular the greater part of what is thought to
constitute physical science. It supplies what is
necessary for conduct, where the conviction or
intuition necessary for knowledge fails us. Such
propositions are attended not by certainty but by
assent. The mind puts ideas together, when their
So
PHILOSOPHY
agreement is not perceived, but only presumed.
It may do this in respect of matter of fact, either
because of conformity to our own observation, or
the ground of probability may be the testimony
of others. In matters which are not open to the
observation of the senses, like the minute con-
stitution of things, we rely in our judgments upon
analogy. The strength of our assent varies in
degree according to various circumstances, the
concurrence of testimony, the agreement of testi-
mony with experience, the remoteness of the testi-
mony and the like. But Locke has supplied no
rules by which we may judge 'the relative pro-
bability of judgments, such as are offered by
' inductive ' logic.
CHAPTER III
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ESSAY
LIKE other great writers and thinkers, Locke
leaves many strands of thought not woven into
one perfect tissue ; loose ends are not connected,
gaps are left to be filled in the structure. It is
not difficult to point out these defects, and his
successors were occupied in overcoming them.
But it is more helpful to begin by indicating
certain features of the Essay which are impres-
sive by their fertility of suggestion.
1. The general character of his method, in
reviewing the contents of experience as a means
towards indicating the limits of knowledge, follows
the habit of the practical man, which begins with
certain loose assumptions that, in the course of
the inquiry, take on a changed aspect and receive
a new signification. Locke's assumption of real
substances, to which knowledge conforms in vari-
ous degrees, is easy enough to criticise. If the
only objects of our minds are ideas, how can
things which are not themselves ideas be made
52
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ESSAY
the object of thought, still less be compared with
ideas ? The answer is that Locke, insisting on the
philosophical doctrine that all the objects of our
thought are mental in the sense before defined,
is content to assume side by side with these the
existence of minds and of material things. But
things which at the beginning of the Essay are
the mysterious causes of our ideas turn out in
the end to be merely the limits of our knowledge. 1
Step by step as he proceeds in the inquiry the
material thing receives definition. The ideas of
the primary qualities are exact copies of the
primary qualities themselves, or in other words,
in certain vital respects the contents of the real
object are the same as those of the representative
one. The secondary qualities are still as in the
thing entirely unlike their ideas. But even this
apparent breach is narrowed. For the ultimate
nature of the thing is held to be a structure of
particles insensible to us, and were our senses and
our intelligence acute enough to know the primary
qualities of these particles and the plan of their
combination, we should have an exact repre-
sentation of the thing. 'The now secondary
qualities of bodies would disappear if we could
1 The same observation is true of Kant, though Kant's result
is different.
53
LOCKE
discover the primary ones of their minute parts.
. . . We should see an admirable texture of parts of
a certain size and figure.' 1 The sensible qualities
and the gross superficial (macroscopic) primary
ones would be replaced by microscopic primary
ones. Were this result but attained (and we
must add, the connection of things with other
things also observed), knowledge would be en-
tirely adequate. For though our knowledge
would still be of ideas, there would be nothing
in the things themselves which would not have
its exact counterpart in ideas, except the un-
known something which makes the^difference
between ideas and actual things. {Ultimately
therefore the limit to our knowledge of things
is set by our defective sense and intelligence.
Though no finite spirit which knows only by
ideas could behold reality face to face, reality is
in the end something not remote from ideas, for
it corresponds to them, and it is but our defi-
ciencies which prevent us from knowing it, as far
as it can be known at all? Locke declines the
question of the real constitution of spirit, whether
it is an immaterial substance or a material sub-
stance to which is attached the power of thinking.
But he speaks of ' thinking and willing as primary
1 Essay, Book n., ch. xxiii. 11.
54
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ESSAY
qualities of spirit.' l Had he asked himself what
reason there was for supposing thinking as in the
mind to be different from the thinking which we
apprehend the idea of thinking he might have
seen that his separation of ideas in general from
things was needless.
S'fOne of Locke's cardinal merits is his insist-
Lav***
ence that no mere words shall take the place of
a clear description of the contents of our experi-
ence, or shall make us think that we have ideas fj
which we cannot find in our experience. Books i.
to in. are a long descant upon this theme. And
it is this which gives point to a famous portion of
Locke's theory which we have not yet described,
his denial of innate ideas whether in thinking or
in moral^ In the abstract which he wrote of the l
Essay^fo^ Leclerc's Bibliotheque Universelle he
omits this topic which occupies the whole first
Book of the Essay, with the remark that it was
designed to overcome the prejudices entertained
against the belief that the mind was tabula rasa.
Readers of the Essay are often provoked with
what they think the triviality of Locke's attempted
refutation of innate ideas, amounting, they think,
to little more than the proof that we do not have
these ideas at birth, and that we acquire them
1 Essay, Book n., ch. xxiii. 30.
55
LOCKE
only by experience, after we have acquired other
portions of knowledge no less evident. Such
innate ideas, it is urged, are not those which Lord
Herbert of Cherbury assumed, or Descartes in-
tended by his innate ideas, nor are they such as
have been intended by others after Locke who,
admitting that experience is needed to evoke these
principles to explicit operation, have urged that
they themselves are implicit in the mind. Now
it was just this conception of implicit knowledge
which Locke desired to repudiate. 'To imprint
anything on the mind without the mind's perceiv-
ing it seems to me hardly intelligible/ Whatever
is in the mind must be discoverable there, and
he thought that the notion of innate principles
clouded the issue with words and substituted
empty language for the real effort to discover ideas.
He did not deny the truth or the self-evidence
of these principles, and he even thought them use-
ful as a means of avoiding sophistry in controversy.
Still less did he maintain that the mind itself
though a white paper to the world of objects was
itself a passive instrument. But he claimed, and
he claimed rightly, that the mind should not be
credited with mysterious knowledge, not verifiable
as an idea, and his answer is still valid against
those who would endow the mind with methods
56
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ESS A Y
of envisaging objects (categories and the like)
which it imports into the object itself. It is this
consideration, that what is claimed to be a factor
in experience must be found there and catalogued
in the inventory, which gives its philosophical im-
portance to Locke's polemic. And it is therefore
not strange, that the attack upon innate ideas
should have come to be that part of Locke's teach-
ing which the public connected habitually with
his name.
480 far as Locke himself attempted the problem
raised by such ' categories ' of thought, and he did v
not seriously attempt it, he supplied indications
of a better way. He looked, for instance, for the
relation of causality, or power, to experience itself,
and crude and imperfect as his description of it
is, he found it there. I But he added that it is less
obviously experienced in the relations of material
bodies than in the operation of the mind itself
when it wills the direction of its ideas, or controls
the movement of its body a just view though
misunderstood, and therefore rejected, by Hume.
So far, at least, he sought to find for what after-
wards were called categories their real counter-
parts in his experience. And what he did went
but a little way. He never applied the same
principle to the better understanding of the
57
LOCKE
nature of substance from observation of the con-
tinuity of mental operations. Had he carried this
line of thought a little further, he might have
recognised in the structure of the system of ideas,
whether of sense or reflection, certain fundamental
ideas which form the skeleton of the structure
and have thus a prerogative place in experience.^
3. Locke's declaration that physical science is
impossible, because universal knowledge can only
be derived from abstract ideas, is notable be-
cause it makes mathematics the ideal of scientific
thought.\ Compared with mathematics, physics
as a collection of empirical knowledge supplies
only probability. He stands thus in strong con-
trast with those of his successors (like J. S. Mill)
who, attempting to put mathematics on an empiri-
cal basis, have sought to reduce it to the level of
the physical sciences. At the same time Locke's
doctrine, that if there is to be physical science
at all it must be derived from the investigation
of abstract ideas, has been the parent of much
similar thought, and it is revived without Locke's
pessimism as to physics in a doctrine which at
the present time is at any rate highly accredited,
that scientific conceptions and truths are con-
venient abstractions which happen to be attested
and verified by facts, but are themselves merely
58
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ES8A7
creations of the mind, which serve as a short-
hand or compendious description of physical data.
Both Locke's doctrine and its modern counterpart
have their characteristic difficulties. Locke held
that mathematics, while derived from the con-
struction of mind, is no mere analysis of what
was contained in certain conceptions, but led to
new truths : it discovered not ' trifling ' or ' verbal '
but 'instructive' propositions. But he neither
inquired what compulsive force there was in fig-
ures or numbers which drove their investigators
into fresh discovery, nor how or in what sense
these abstract creations could be exemplified in
the world of fact. The same difficulties may
be objected to the current revival of Locke's
doctrine in physical science.
The last topic naturally leads on to the mention
of some of Locke's palpable defects, which not all
his cautious efforts to trace the boundaries be-
tween the enlightened and the dark parts of
things can conceal. But Locke's defects had the
value of stimulating the thought of his successors
Out of Locke grew not only Berkeley^and Hume,
but indirectly Kant and Reid. Thesejdefects turn
upon one or two main points his imperfect con- <
nection and imperfect disconnection of the mind
and external things, the individualistic character
59
LOCKE
of his philosophy, his oversight of the central fact
of continuity .3
ll Hie antithesis between the two kinds of
realities, the constructions of the mind and sub-
stances, raises at once difficulties which Locke
never resolved.X Mathematical figures, to take
them as incontestable examples of modes, owe
their elements to sense, but their construction to
the mind. Now Locke admits that moral ideas,
which he places on the same footing as rnathe-
nrfatical ideas, may be gathered from observation.
This is obviously true of mathematical ideas also.
But how can it be more than a coincidence ? \JHe
does not explain how mathematical and moral
reality can be applicable to sensible reality. ( Modes
are, indeed, defined as groups of ideas' regarded
not as independent, but as affections of sub-
stances. Yet in the sequel, they are treated as
real in their own right, and floated off into an
atmosphere of their own. At the same time
Locke sees, as has just been noticed, that crea-
tures as they are of the mind, they constrain us
to think about them in certain ways as much as
if they were sensible objects. And yet they do
this, not because they correspond to anything in
the nature of the mind, but because they are
triangles or circles or moral ideas. They are as real
60
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ESSAY
as substances, but they have no actual existence,
and yet they are exemplified in the world of actual
existence. j[t was this problem left unsolved or
rather unraised by Locke which Kant attempted
(impelled no doubt in part by Locke), when he
asked how mathematics can be true of the real
world or in the technical phrase how the syn- \)
thetic propositions of mathematics are possible.
His answer, or at least part of it, was that space
and time were brought by the mind itself to
experience, f Whatever value can be attached to
the solution, it was of the highest importance
to raise the problem. Locke would have rejected
the solution, but his own conception of mathe-
matics and their place in experience prepared
the way for it.
2. Locke's object was to describe the contents
of experience, but his method was a mixture of
description and assumption, and the severance of
ideas from things as the mental copies of them
arises from this defect^Had he described without
assumption what he found in his mind, he would
have discovered nothing but objects of various ^
sorts ; which he might have called ideas to indi- ^
cate their relation to mind. There would have
been substances, possibly vaguely apprehended, in
which simple qualities inhered, but there would
61
LOCKE
have been no world behind the ideak^ But he
( assumed from common thought the existence of
permanent things independent of our apprehen-
sions of them, and he maintained with this the
philosophical tenet derived from Descartes that
the only objects we know must be ideas. The
true proposition, that things show themselves to
be related to mind in so far as we apprehend
them, he converted like his teacher into the pro-
position that we do not know things directly but
only through mental phantasms, which are not
indeed mere affections of mind, but are suspended
somewhere betwixt mind and real things, and
sometimes dangerousb^jipproach the condition
of mental affections, j This is what Hume after-
wards described as the philosophical invention of
a twofold existence a doctrine fathered by philo-
sophy upon common-sense, but which common-
sense does jnot entertain, because it has not faced
the question/ It is true that Locke himself, as
has been insisted, cared little about the problems
he had so raised, and that his whole interest lay
in knowing how far these ideas could give us
knowledge of their exemplars. But subsequent
philosophy has employed itself with varying
success in ridding itself of the phantasms which
Descartes and Locke have conjured up. Locke
62
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ESSAY
himself saw that ideas of primary qualities stood
in an intimacy of relation with their archetypes
which half destroyed their separatenessj It was
easy for Berkeley to show that there was no reason
for preferring them to the ideas of secondary
qualities in this respect. And therefore, he denied
the existence of sensible things in Locke's sense,
denied, that is, the distinction of sensible things
from ideas of sensation, ) Reid took a different
line, and insisted that our elementary experiences
are judgments, that our sensations * suggest' real
external things, that is, are the occasions upon
which we, according to a natural law, apprehend
external things, of which we are therefore directly
aware. jHad Locke confined himself to ideas in
his <? own sense, he would have recognised (as he
does) that we experience both minds and sensible
things, as supplied by reflection and sensation
respectively ; and that sensible things, while they
claim a real existence, are mental in character in
so far as they are inter-related with minds in the
same universe and affect them.
3. One vital consequence followed from Locke's
conception of ideas. So far as ideas are presented
to (or are in the mind), these objects are the
peculiar possession of the individual mind which
thinks them. On the other hand, so far as they
63
LOCKE
are always regarded as corresponding to some
thing, which by God's good pleasure produces
them, we tend to forget their individual char-
acter. Locke faithfully describes the world as he
finds it, but because there is the background of
independent real things, we forget that the ideas
are relative only to the individual. Locke, in
fact, invests his ideas with all the characters that
belong to the real world of objects, which are not
confined to one man's inspection, but are open to
all. Strictly speaking, the ideas belong only to
the individual, and Locke is ready to admit that
this is so. The common use of language between
man and man implies that they give the same
names to corresponding ideas, but ' when he re-
presents to himself other men's ideas by some of
his own, if he consent to give them the same
names that other men do, it is still to his own
ideas.' 1 But when mental objects are thus indi-
vidual, they fail of the universal character which
we attribute to the objects of knowledge. To quote
the famous example of Kant, there is a great
difference between the experience that when I see
the sun shine I feel the stone grow warm, and the
experience that the sun warms the stone. The
second proposition is knowledge, and is the
1 Essay y Book in., ch. ii. 2.
6 4
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ESSAY
common object of all ; the first is part of the con-
tents of the mind of an individual, or if we use
the word history in Locke's sense, it is part of the
life-history of an individual. Strictly speaking,
llulowledge, as Locke conceives it, is part of the *
life-history of an individual. Such individualism
is inevitable, if the objects we know, the ideas,
are detached from the objects themselves. /We
can no more acquire common knowledge from
putting together the life-histories of individuals, 'Q
than we could get a state from putting together
a number of purely self-seeking agents. It was
Kant's ..great merit to have recognised this
problem, though it by no means follows that
we must Accept his solution of it. ^What we may ~
do is to deny the existence of ideas, as copies of
things, and to recognise that we directly appre-
hend the things themselves^
4. Locke's individualism arose from his sever-
ing ideas from things. Had he, describing experi-
ence, omitted ideas or omitted things, he need
not have been open to this charge. He can only
bring mind and mind together by the happy
accident that they think alike. But in another
important respect he falls short of his own ideal
of describing the contents of experience. MHe Q
overlooks the fact of continuity. The objects of
E 65
LOCKE
experience are to him fragmentary and discon-
nectedA It is not strictly true to say, as has some-
times been said, that for him every idea must be
gone as soon as apprehended. For ideas may
contain the relations of persistence and identity.
These relations are themselves part of our world
of ideas. What is true is that the connections
MM.
between ideas are external to them. Mutualities are
grouped together by the mechanical bond of an
underlying support or substance. \ Effect follows
cause in the external world in empirical succes-
sion. Ideas have identity ' when they vary not
at all from what they were at that moment
wherein we consider their former existence, and
to which we compare the present/ i.e. their
identity is not individual continuity but like-
ness of quality. The same account applies to
all the other ' relations ' between ideas which
knowledge directly apprehends. For though
when the ideas are ' considered together ' their
agreement or disagreement is not external but
follows from the nature of the ideas, yet the
ideas must first be ' considered together ' for their
relation to be perceived. Three is known to
be greater than two, and wKite different from
black as soon as they are compared, but there is
nothing, so far as Locke's description goes, in
66
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ESSAY
three or in white, which compels us to compare
them with two or with black. It is true that
Locke is feeling after the real nature of causality
when, as already mentioned, he seeks for it in the
experience of our volitions. ButJ,o all intents
and purposes, in spite of his urging the inter-re-
latedness of things, the world is to him a number *
of isolated atoms grouped together in the last
resort by the good pleasure of God, as indeed
his follower Berkeley explicitly affirmed.; Locke's
badinage of Malebranche's opinion tKat 'we see
all things in God' is a good illustration of his
insensibility to the cardinal fact of continuity.
Malebranche had said that ' when we would think
of anything in particular, we at first cast our view
upon all beings,' meaning that each thing is
seen as a fragment or a limitation of the whole
vague universe. ' I do not think/ says Locke,
' that my country neighbours, when they first
wake in the morning, find it impossible to think
of a lame horse they have, till they have run over
in their minds " all beings " that are, and then
pitch on dapple.'
The omission of continuity in the description
of experience is a case of oversight inexplicable
enough, were it not that description is the most
difficult of tasks, but shared with Locke by a long
67
LOCKE
line of successors. The failure to recognise it led
to frank scepticism in Hume, it led in Kant to
attempts to overcome the disconnectedness of the
world by mechanical inventions like the categories.
The oversight was not confined to sensible things ;
it applied to the mind also. For the mind as de-
scribed by Locke is as disconnected as the qualities
of external things. There is nothing but the
spiritual substance which supports the group or
succession of mental operations. Locke over-
looks the fact, as important and as plain to us as
thinking or willing itself, that the mind's action
is 'sensibly continuous.' It was not till recent
years that the face of psychology was changed by
substituting the experienced fact of mental con-
tinuity for the inherited conception or prejudice
that the mind is known only as a series of mental
events.
68
CHAPTER IV
ETHICS
LOCKE'S contribution to Ethics in the Essay is
short, but it is remarkable. jOood and evil are
nothing but 'pleasure and pain or that which
occasions pleasure and pain to us/ ' Moral good
or evil then is only the conformity or disagree-
ment of our voluntary actions to some law where-
by good and evil are drawn on us from the will ^
and power of the law-maker ; which good or evil,
pleasure or pain, attending our observance or
breach of the law, by the decree of the law-maker,
is that we call reward and punishment/ Moral
good or evil is thus a relation of human actions,
which are modes, to other modes which are rules
of action. |Locke enumerates three sorts of moral
codes, with their enforcements or ' sanctions ' the
divine law, ' which is the measure of sin and duty,
given by God whether by revelation or the light *\
of nature ' ; the civil law, the measure of crime
and innocence ; and the law of opinion, reputation
or fashion, which is the measure of virtue or
69
LOCKE
vicei these terms being partly coincident with
the divine law, but only so far as the opinion of
societies, tribes or clubs of men agrees with that
law, which it in a great measure does. When we
ask what the contents of the moral law are, Locke
offers us a startling doctrine. 'The idea of a
Supreme Being infinite in power, goodness and
wisdom, whose workmanship we are and on whom
we depend; and the idea of ourselves as under-
standing rational beings, being such as are clear
in us, would, I suppose, if duly considered and
pursued afford such foundations of our duty and
rules of action as might place morality amongst
the sciences capable of demonstration ; wherein I
doubt not but from self-evident propositions, by
necessary consequences as incontestable as those
in mathematics, the measures of right and wrong
might be made out.' JThe science which Aristotle
regarded as less certain even than physical science
Locke puts on the level of mathematics. He gives
as illustration two propositions ' as certain as any
demonstration in Euclid : ' where there is no pro-
perty, there is no injustice ' ; and ' no government
allows absolute liberty^jThe complexity of moral
ideas and their want of sensible representation are,
he thinks, the reasons why as compared with
mathematics morality is thought incapable of
70
ETHICS
demonstration. Molyneux urged Locke to publish
a treatise of Ethics based on this conception, and
Locke seems to have entertained the idea of doing
so, which was not however realised. How much
he recognised that human reasoning unassisted
by religion falls short of what is required by his
ideal of Ethics may be seen from a passage of
the Reasonableness of Christianity. ' Experience
shows that the knowledge of morality by mere
natural light (how agreeable soever it be to it)
makes but a slow progress and little advance in
the world. And the reason of it is not hard to be
found in men's necessities, passions, vices and
mistaken interests, which turn their thoughts
another way; and the designing leaders as well
as following herd find it not to their purpose to
employ much of their meditations this way.
Human reason unassisted failed men in its great
and proper business of morality. It never from
unquestionable principles made out an entire
body of the " law of nature." ' We can only con-
jecture what the science would have been. God
and His attributes are known to us by demonstra-
tion, and ourselves by direct intuition, and, as the
sentence just quoted indicates, Locke would pro-
bably, as Sidgwick suggests, have demonstrated
from man's nature the body of laws which under
LOCKE
the name of laws of nature he inherited from
Grotius and Puffendorf. It is certain that in
Locke's view the value of moral laws is not de-
rived from the pleasure and pain they bring by
way of sanction. He does not even allow with
Bentham and his school, the so-called Hedonists,
that human action is determined by the prospect
of pleasure or pain. On the contrary, he maintains
that it is determined by present ' uneasiness ' or
desire. Though we all do desire happiness and
in the end good is what is productive of pleasure,
the laws of morality are not based upon a utili-
tarian foundation but follow from the nature of
man and his relation to God.
Y*"
But ]the same unsolved problem which met us
in his treatment of mathematics, how mathe-
matical laws can be valid of sensible facts, con-
fronts us again in a corresponding form in Ethics.
How can propositions, which follow from abstract
human nature, be applicable to or true of a world
of concrete men ? Moral judgments vary from
country to country and from age to age. This
was one of Locke's reasons, and a correct one, for
denying the innateness of moral principles. But
it does not seem to have disturbed his belief in
the abstract character of moral laws. Yet it
implies either that these varying and conflicting
72
ETHICS
judgments are not moral or else that morality is
not abstract. / The greater the difficulty there is
in arriving "a<T an abstract conception of human
nature or of what God intended man to be, the
more it seems we must turn for a basis of moral
judgment to considering the actual passions and
circumstances of mankind.
The only other memorable chapter which Locke
writes on Ethics, or rather the psychology of
Ethics, is the extremely perplexed and perplex-
ing discussion of the freedom of the will which
he modified considerably in his life-time, and
j^rofessed himself dissatisfied with to the end.
] Locke denies that we can speak intelligibly of
ireedom of the will, since the will is one power
and freedom is another. It is the whole man
who is free. We are free so far as we can act or
forbear action ; yet we are not free to act other-
wise than we do ; to maintain that we are would
be to declare that a man is not pleased to do
what he is pleased to do. (Yet just when Locke
appears to be committing himself to determin-
ism, he declares that true freedom is found in the
power we have of suspending judgment before
action, and consequently the right improvement
of our liberty consists in right consideration, in
the government of the passions, in the constant
73
LOCKE
determination of 'prosecuting true felicity/ and
' suspending this prosecution in particular cases,
till they have looked before them, and informed
themselves whether that particular thing which
is then proposed or desired lie in the way to their
main end, and make a real part of that which is
their greatest good/
74
CHAPTER V
POLITICS
c THE power of the civil law/ Locke says in the
Essay y ' is the force of the commonwealth engaged
to protect the lives, liberties and possessions of
those who live according to its laws, and has
power to take away life, liberty or goods from him
who disobeys/ He uses precisely identical terms
in defining political power in the second and more
famous of the two Treatises of Government which
were published in 1690, in the same year as the
Essay. Half of what he wrote or designed appears
to have been lost, but Locke hopes that the
papers which remain 'are sufficient to establish
the throne of our great Restorer, our present
King William, and make good his title in the
consent of the people ; which, being the only one
of all lawful governments, he has more fully and
clearly than any prince in Christendom ; and to
j ustify to the world the people of England, whose
love of their just and natural rights, with their
resolution to preserve them, saved the nation
75
LOCKE
when it was on the very brink of slavery and
ruin/ The first treatise is a destructive criti-
cism of Filmer's Patriarcha, a work designed
to establish the claims of absolute monarchy as
inherited from Adam. Filmer appears to have
been so far historical in his method as the
Pentateuch, which he took for his authority, gives
us a picture of patriarchal society, which at any
rate was one form of government. But neither it
nor Locke's criticism of it interests us here.
The second treatise explains the nature of civil
society, by tracing its growth from the state of
nature or primitive condition of man, conceived
in the fashion in which it had come down from
the Stoics and Roman lawyers, who identified
it with the Age of Gold. It is a state of peace,
and is governed, if the term may be allowed, by
the law of nature supposed to be given to men by
the ' light of nature.' According to this law men
are free to dispose of themselves and their pos-
sessions as they think fit ; they are equal, and
bound in virtue of their equality to mutual bene-
volence. Their liberty is no licence; reason
teaches men that no one has a right to harm
another in his health, liberty or possessions. But
as he is bound to preserve himself, so he is to
preserve them. In the state of nature every man
76
POLITICS
has a right to punish a transgressor, requiting him
as reason and conscience dictate. Two doctrines
are of special interest and importance. The right
of property belongs to any man, in so far as he
takes any part of the common possession, and
mixes his labour with it a doctrine fruitful of
consequences in subsequent thought. The rights
and duty of the parent arise from the weakness
of the children, and the necessity of rearing them
through infancy; and Locke thinks that the in-
stitution of marriage depends on that of the
family : it is the fact that a second child may be
born before the first is independent of its parents
that leads to permanent marriage.
From the inconveniences of this state of nature
civil society arises. For there is no settled law
allowed by common consent; the law of nature
is indeed plain, but men are biassed by their
interest; there is no 'indifferent' judge and no
sufficient power of enforcement. Men therefore
by consent divest themselves of their natural
liberty by uniting into a community c for their
comfortable, safe and peaceable living in a secure
enjoyment of their properties'; the united body
acting through the will of the majority. This is
the institution of commonwealth in a contract of
citizens with one another. The first result of this
77
LOCKE
compact ' the first and fundamental positive
law ' is the establishing of the legislative power,
the supreme power to which government is dele-
gated in trust. But the law of nature is not
abandoned by the individual's surrender of his
liberties to the state, but on the contrary, 'its
obligations are only in many cases drawn closer,
and have by human laws known penalties an-
nexed to them, to enforce their observation.'
The legislative power receives therefore no arbi-
trary authority, but it is limited by the public
good of the society. An executive is established
for permanent enforcement of the law, but may
be removed by the legislative. The prince or
monarch holds his commission therefore as a
trust conferred on him by the law ; his preroga-
tive is but ' the power left in his hands to provide
for the public good, in such cases which, depend-
ing on unforeseen and uncertain occurrences, cer-
tain and unalterable laws could not safely direct/
When the prince abuses or neglects his trust, or
when the legislature abuses its trust, the govern-
ment is dissolved, and the people can provide for
themselves by establishing a new one.
Locke's conception of civil society and govern-
ment is thus completely foreign to that of a
theocracy, and is directed against such a concep-
78
POLITICS
tion. He maintained that civil society and the
church have entirely different concerns. 'The
power of civil government relates only to man's
civil interests/ But 'a church I take to be a
voluntary society of men joining themselves to-
gether, of their own accord, in order to the public
worshipping of God, in such a manner as they
judge acceptable to Him and effectual to the
salvation of their souls/ The whole doctrine of
the Letter Concerning Toleration, from which
these words are taken, follows from this. The
magistrate, as such, has no concern with religion ;
he cannot interfere with worship and belief. He
can only do so legitimately in so far as religious
worship or doctrine brings the members of a
church into conflict with the good of the civil
society. And it is only so far as this is the case
so far, that is, as they may be influenced in
their civil relations by obedience to an external
authority that Locke denies toleration to Roman
Catholics ; and only because to disbelieve in God
renders a man unfit for civil life that he excludes
Atheists from the benefit of the toleration which
he would extend to Mahomedans.
The effort of Locke's political doctrine (and
hence its historical, as distinguished from its philo-
sophical, importance) was to ' establish William's
79
LOCKE
throne on the consent of the people/ The effort
of Hobbes's doctrine of the State in the Leviathan
was to justify the divine right of the Stuarts.
With Hobbes the state of nature is one of warfare
from which the law of nature or reason bids
man depart in order to self-preservation, handing
over their rights to a man or body of men, the
sovereign. The sovereign, with Hobbes, bears the
rights of all the members of the society, is the
'person' of the commonwealth, and is therefore
distinct altogether from Locke's rnqnarch, or prince,
whose capacity is only fiduciary. WithXocke, on
the other hand, the state of nature is not left
behind, but the law of nature which regulated it
is continued into civil society and enforces the
ideal conditions of the state of nature. Both
writers employ the fiction of a social contract,
arising out of the supposed state of nature after
experience of its inconveniences. Locke pleads
that the state of nature may actually still be
traced in the relations of princes, and even in
certain peoples who act by popular consent. But
he says, in answer to those who doubt the genesis
of commonwealth from a state of nature, that
naturally enough the state of nature eludes our
historical search, for 'government is everywhere
anterior to records/ and early peoples are actually
80
ROLITICS
found already under paternal government, the
head or father of the group being chosen as the
fittest to govern. In truth, the picture of the
origin of society from a state of nature by an
original compact only illustrates the natural
tendency to account for society by analysing it
into its fundamental elements and then making
the historical assumptions that these elements
existed before the society itself was created. Ac-
cording as the imagination of the writer was more
impressed by the Yahoo or the Houyhnhnm in
human nature, he described the state of nature as
one of war or of benevolence. In Locke this
tendency is parallel to that which led him in his
philosophy partially to confuse the analysis of
complex ideas into their simple elements with the
historical statement or fiction that simple ideas
precede, and are combined by the mind into, com-
plex ideas.
The fiction of the original compact by consent
of the people (a fiction almost unavoidable if
abstract theories must be clothed in the language
of concrete life) really did attach the belief of
Locke, as it did that of Hobbes and of the writers
to whom Locke owes most for his political specu-
lation, of whom Hooker was the chief. It was
shared by the later writer, Rousseau, whom he
F 81
LOCKE
anticipated. /In^ an important respect Locke fell
short of Rousseau ; he did not reach that writer's
ifeh
conception of the ' general will ' as the sovereign,
but contented himself with the consent of the
people acting by the ma|<fr,ity, by what Rousseau
called the ' will of all/ He missed the organic
or personal feature in civil society. In this re-
spect Hobbes's conception of the sovereign as the
' person ' or bearer of the rights of the common-
wealth is superior to Locke's.\ Only once does he
approach this conception, ^Een he points to the
natural or 'federative' power of a commonwealth,
whereby (as in war^it acts as one body against
an external nation:|The body politic is, for Locke,
an aggregate of consenting individuals; just as in
metaphysics the knowledge, which is the common
property of all, appears to be the propositions
which all happen to make identically. And as in
( \ his metaphysics this defect was concealed by his
assumption of a world of real existences, which
was there for every one to acquire knowledge of
through ideas, it was concealed in his political
theory by the persistence of the supposed cfbjee-
tive and universal ' laws of nature/ from the state
of nature into civil society./
Locke's doctrine of civil government may be
said to have represented the better spirit of the
82
POLITICS
Revolution. But neither that doctrine nor the
doctrine of toleration was received with universal
or immediate acceptance in England. But they
set up the ideal of thinking in matters of civil
and religious liberty for the next century. Tolera-
tion was introduced in England not at once, nor
in the form which Locke demanded as the non-
interference of the state in religion, but in the
form of indulgence, of removal (and a qualified v
one) of the restrictions on dissenters as com-
pared with the favoured church. The specula-
tive foundations of Locke's political doctrine have
given way or have needed repair. But its politi-
cal influence was great, and due allowance being
made for its speculative defects, it represents not
only the ideals of the finer minds of 1688, but in
substance the common-sense of our political con-
stitution as we have come to understand it. It
exercised a most powerful influence through its
effect upon Montesquieu. When the terms of the
fundamental declaration of American independ-
ence were borrowed as they were from Locke's
political treatise, Locke rendered a greater service
to political liberty than when he drafted or helped
to draft the constitutions of Carolina, which ap-
pear to have been inoperative.
CHAPTER VI
RELIGION
THE concluding chapters of the Essay set forth
the boundaries between faith and reason. Assent
in Locke's sense varies in its degrees according to
the grounds of probability and it is always less
than knowledge. But there is ' one sort of pro-
positions which challenges the highest degree of
assurance, whether or not the thing proposed
agrees or disagrees with common experience and
the ordinary course of things.' These are the
truths of revelation, the assurance of which is
faith. While reason is the 'discovery of the
certainty or probability of propositions by ob-
servation from ideas got by sensation or reflec-
tion/ faith is ' the assent to any proposition not
thus made out, but upon the credit of the pro-
poser as coming from God in some extraordinary
manner/ Revelation can indeed give us no new
simple ideas which we had not before by sensation
or reflection ; and though it may make us know
propositions already known through reason it
84
RELIGION
cannot be admitted against the clear evidence
of reason. If this is true of direct revelation,
still less can revealed truths be accepted merely
on the authority of tradition, or of a book, unless
reason convinces us that the book itself is in- 1
spired. But there are subjects which, not being
contrary to reason, are above reason, and these if
revealed are matters of faith to which we can give
a full assurance, provided always that reason
judges whether the revelation is such, and what
the words mean in which it is contained. It
follows that even when we can judge by our
natural powers, 'an evident revelation should
determine our assent even against probability/
In the case of miracles when properly attested
their very strangeness makes them fitted to pro-
duce belief, when, Locke adds in significant words,
' they are suitable to ends aimed at by Him who
has power to change the course of nature.'
Thijs definition of the separate powers of faith
and reason, according to which faith 'cannot be
afforded to anything but upon good reason' and
so cannot be opposite to it, and at the same time
is described as an ' assent founded on the highest
reason/ makes Locke at once a believer and a
rationalist. [All that he does in the Essay to
elucidate his doctrine is to 'protest against what
85
LOCKE
he calls enthusiasm, what we should call fanati-
cism, upon which he added a chapter in the fourth
edition, which admirably illustrates both his
breadth and his cautious restraint. 'Revelation
is natural reason enlarged,' but enthusiasm, which
persuades itself of immediate intercourse with
God, without help of reason, but ' from the con-
ceits of a warmed or overweening brain/ pretend-
ing to an internal light, sins against the supreme
arbitration of reason. It takes away reason to
make way for revelation and puts out the light
of both. 'For God (he adds in a well-known
phrase) when He makes the prophet doth not un-
make the man/
But the real meaning of Locke's blending of
faith and rationalism and of the credence which
he attaches to miracles, is only adequately seen
when we take into account his Reasonableness of
Christianity, a book which, besides many tedious
pages, contains some of Locke's finest work. Locke
determined, he tells us, to put aside all works of
divinity and endeavour to discover the message
of the New Testament itself as it presented itself
to a candid and unbiassed reader. The plainness
of the doctrine made him surprised that every-
body did not see and embrace it. Though at his
first setting out he was ignorant where his search
86
RELIGION
would conduct him, he was impressed by the
'wonderful harmony leading to the same points
in all the parts of the sacred history of the
Gospels.' Two things, and only two things, he
found> besides belief in one God, are taught by
Jesus and by His apostles as the condition of
the new covenant : faith and repentance believ-
ing Jesus to be the Messiah, and through this
faith adopting a good life. This replaced the
Mosaic law of works and the morality of the
heathen. All else contained in the Scriptures
beyond these fundamental articles, though truths
and to be believed by one who knows them, a
man may still be ignorant of and yet be saved, or
may interpret differently from other men accord-
ing to his lights. That there is one God, that Jesus
is the Messiah, and that we must live a good
life, are enough. The essential reasonableness of
Christianity consisted, to Locke, therefore, in its
declaration of God's unity, no longer restricted
to one people but delivered to all mankind, and
its bringing to righteousness through this faith
weak men who cannot by reason attain to rules of
morality. 'Natural religion in its full extent
nowhere had been taken care of by the force of
natural reason.' ' Nobody that I know before our
Saviour's time ever did or went about to give us
87
LOCKE
a morality . . . which mankind might have re-
course to as their unerring rule. Such a law of
morality Jesus Christ hath given us in the New
Testament, but by the latter of these ways, by
revelation.'
It is plain, therefore, from the spirit of this work
(as well as from the little posthumous Discourse
on Miracles) that^for Locke not only the belief in
Christian revelation but in the miracles by which
it was supported depended on the evidence which
the revelation supplies of the < ends aimed at by
God.' ' The miracles are to be judged by the
doctrine, not the doctrine by the miracles.' 1 Their
significance to him lies not so much in their con-
trariety to ordinary events, as in the light they
threw upon the divine nature, which could use
them to enforce a system of morality, thoroughly
acceptable to the human reason^\ Locke's pro-
found belief in the concern which God has for His
universe which He creates, and his willingness to
base our theoretical conviction of God's existence
on a precarious use of the conception of causality,
leave as many questions unsolved as they solve.
But at least they do not blur the problem by
omitting one portion of the data.
1 From the Journal. See Fox Bourne, vol. i. p. 464 (quoted
by Fraser).
88
RELIGION
The rationalism of Locke made him the parent
of Deism, which neglected the faith which he com-
bined with his rationalism. In the controversy over
the question whether natural or rational religion
could be reconciled with Christianity as a revealed
religion supported by miracles, the Deists were
those who upheld natural religion and directly
and indirectly, with irony more or less concealed,
depreciated Christianity. The latitude practised
by the orthodox writers made them not always or
easily distinguishable from the Deists, one of whom
indeed claimed Archbishop Tillotson as the source
of Deism. It is not strange, therefore, that though
Locke must be reckoned on the side of the ortho-
dox, the Deists should have derived their inspira-
tion from him. The circumstances have been
related which brought Locke into conflict with
Stillingfleet. Toland's argument to show that
the Gospels contained nothing ' above reason' was
based by him on Locke's Essay and repudiated
by Locke. Collins who had been an ardent pupil
of Locke wrote in his Discourse of Free-thinking
one of the deistical books which excited the live-
liest controversy. jThe deistical doctrine passed
through various phases in England during the first
half of the eighteenth century and then died out.
But it left its traces in two minds of the first
G 89
LOCKE
order. In England it led to Hume's Essay on
Miracles and his Dialogues concerning Natural
Religion. Abroad it led to the deism of Voltaire,
who left England in 1728 to become the mission-
ary in Europe of the philosophy of Newton and
Locke. Hume and Voltaire represent (not in
religion only) the disintegrating and sceptical
tendency, which was one, but only one element
in Locke's philosophy. A new construction
followed in the latter part of the century, first
in Rousseau and then in Kant,
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