THE SEEKERS

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Remarkably, none of these practical concerns distracted Locke from wider speculations that would place him in the vanguard of Seekers. Somehow these experiences stimulated him to pursue the large questions of philosophy and political theory, which made him a prophet of the English empirical spirit. Locke’s checkered active life as he shared the volatile political career of Anthony Ashley Cooper delayed the leisure needed for his works of philosophy and political theory, but enriched his understanding. In his early years at Oxford, Locke had been stimulated to do his most important work when he explored problems of philosophy and science in regular meetings in his chamber with five or six friends. These meetings, he explained in the Introductory Epistle to his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while “discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves at a stand by the difficulties that arose on every side.” Locke decisively led them “to examine our own abilities and see what objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with.” The group agreed that Locke had hit on the basic question—the limits of human knowledge.

  Out of this casual beginning arose the work that would give Locke his repute as the philosopher of modern revolutions. By 1671 Locke had begun making drafts of his Essay. Four years in France would have as decisive an effect on his thinking as Locke himself would have on the French Voltaire a half century later. There he became acquainted through lectures with the ideas of the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), who had been a friend of Galileo and Kepler, and had attacked the ideas of both Aristotle and Descartes, urging a return to the Epicurean emphasis on sense experience. Locke had lost his powerful English patron when Shaftesbury, who had been tried for treason, after acquittal fled to Holland. In 1683, Locke, too, fled to Holland, where he found the tolerant commercial atmosphere congenial and made new friends. His five years in Holland gave him the leisure to draw together his thoughts and prepare for publication. In 1688 when Princess Mary crossed to England to be crowned queen beside William of Orange as king, Locke was in her party. He retired to the house in Essex of his friends Sir Francis and Lady Masham. There as guru of the Whigs he continued to counsel the leaders of Parliament, and saw the fulfillment of the bloodless Glorious Revolution that would be a basis of Western liberal societies in the next centuries. For England it meant a constitutional monarchy with Parliament supreme, the rule of law and an independent judiciary, and freedom of speech and the press.

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  Displacing theology by philosophy, Locke sought not a system of truths but something more modest—a definition of the limits of human knowledge. His political ideas, too, were a by-product of his refutation of divine absolutes. And his thoughts on education were simply letters of advice to a good friend on how to raise his son. Locke’s notions of toleration were based on his view of government as the protector of all persons and material interests. With some reason, detractors alleged that Locke favored toleration (as he saw it in Holland) because it “tended to the advancement of trade and commerce.”

  Over all hovered Locke’s cautionary spirit and hostility to absolute government along with all other absolutes. “We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance,” he warned in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “and endeavor to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information; and not instantly treat others ill, as obstinate and perverse, because they will not renounce their own, and receive our opinions.” So “our assent ought to be regulated”—not by the dictates of some imagined Truth, but only “by the grounds of probability.”

  Locke’s efforts as Seeker for the proper ends of thought and of government were thus not the product of sudden insight or inspiration but developed over decades, in the bright light of the scientific and political experience of his day.

  In an age replete with pioneer scientists, Locke was alert to the advances of science yet not unaware of the quibbles of theologians and the visions of mystics. While he was a patient and loyal friend of “the incomparable Mr. Newton” (as Locke called him), it is not certain that Locke had a firm grasp of Newton’s Principia. But the broad interests of both Locke and Newton in religion and science brought them together. Newton shared with Locke his critical thoughts on the New Testament texts of John and Timothy and looked forward to Locke’s further “judgment upon some of my mystical fancies.”

  When “the commonwealth of learning” boasted such “master-builders” as Boyle, Sydenham, Huygens, and Newton, Locke explained in his Epistle to the Reader of his Essay, “it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.” With that modest profession, Locke sounded the leitmotif of the modern Seeker.

  Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690-1700), the constantly revised product of his last thirty years, thus set out to define the limits of human knowledge, so man could economize his efforts by ventures into the possible. “If we can find out how far the understanding can extend its view, how far it has faculties to attain certainty, and in what cases it can only judge and guess, we may learn to content ourselves with what is attainable by us in this state.” The modesty and the limits of his project were displayed even in his title. This was no “treatise” but a mere “essay” or trial. Montaigne (1533-1592), had given the word French literary form and meaning, and in this sense the word had only lately come into the English language. The tentative spirit of the “essay” and the hope to reach beyond the learned was already expressed in Francis Bacon’s Essays (1597-1625). “Essays” would have increasing vogue in English literature—for Addison, Pope, Macaulay, Arnold, Lamb, and countless others. Locke’s focus, too, was not on Truth but only on “human understanding.” His day did not know our distinction between the philosopher and the scientist. Both shared Locke’s objective—“Nothing but the true knowledge of things.”

  Incidentally, Locke expressed another modern obsession—not with the empyrean Truth to be known, but with the idiosyncrasies and vagaries of the knowing self. Here was a new, more ruthless, and more punishing application of the ancient Greek motto “Know thyself.” Locke revealed anew how modern man felt imprisoned in the self. The first “rubbish” that Locke set out to clear away from our paths to knowledge was the notion of “innate” knowledge—or ideas supposed to be inborn and universal. So he opens his Essay with an attack. If there were “some primary notions . . . as it were stamped upon the mind of men, which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it,” all men would have these same ideas. But, he argued, there are no ideas that are universally assented to—not even the idea of God. Innate ideas naturally had a special appeal to preachers and teachers. Such notions “eased the lazy from the pains of search and stopped the inquiry of the doubtful concerning all that was once styled innate.” A pioneer in the sociology of knowledge, Locke showed how liberation from the notion of innate ideas freed each man to do his own thinking. The path from the empirical mind to a liberal society was laid open.

  Then Locke offers his own deceptively simple answer to the mind’s source of knowledge. “Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from EXPERIENCE; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself.” This antidote to absolutes offered everyone a personal arena of independence.

  Though experience was the source of knowledge, according to Locke, the objects of thought were always ideas. And so, paradoxically, Locke’s way of seeking was both the Way of Experience and the Way of Ideas. Locke saw no contradiction here because his two sources of ideas were both forms of experience. One was sensation, or external experience, those “sensible qualities” that external objects convey into the mind. And the other was reflection, or internal experience—“the perception of the operations of our own minds within us, as it is employed about the id
eas it has got, which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas which could not be had from things without.”

  Locke significantly concludes his Essay—Book IV: Of Knowledge and Opinion—with miscellaneous observations on the degrees of knowledge and on a resounding cautionary note. Rounding out his Way of Ideas, he describes Knowledge as the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas. The perception of this agreement or disagreement he calls intuitive knowledge. “We can have knowledge no farther than we have ideas,” so he warns against unfounded universal propositions, the facile wisdom of maxims, and the extravagant uses of “self-evidences.” Not surprisingly, in one of his least original and least persuasive chapters he piously asserts, “We are capable of knowing certainly that there is a God.” But beware of “enthusiasm, which laying by reason, would set up revelation without it. Whereby in effect it takes away both reason and revelation, and substitutes in the room of it the ungrounded fancies of a man’s own brain.”

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  It was as an amateur—not as a professional philosopher—that Locke had come to philosophy. While Locke called his work on philosophy a mere “Essay,” on government he wrote “two Treatises.” Both are concerned with limits—the Essay on the limits of human knowledge, the Treatises on the proper limits of government. The Two Treatises, as Peter Laslett has shown, were not written after the fact to “justify” the Revolution of 1688. They originated as early as 1679, and were, in fact, a demand for a revolution still to happen, not a rationalization of revolution that had already happened.

  The Treatises, like the Essay, begin with a negative. Just as “innate ideas” provide a foil against which to outline the true sources and limits of our understanding, so now in the first Treatise, “The False Principles and Foundation,” the Divine Right of Kings (in the writings of Sir Robert Filmer and his followers), provides Locke’s point of departure. The Second Treatise then is “An Essay concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil-Government.” It is surprising that a work so ill proportioned and labored, in a style so awkward, flat, and uninspired could itself have become an inspiration and justification of great Western political revolutions in succeeding centuries. It is the persuasive simplicity of the ideas that explains the enduring power of the work.

  The power and originality of the Second Treatise—a gospel for Jefferson and the makers of the American Revolution of 1776—was its novel emphasis on limits. Just as the Essay was an antidote to absolutes in thought—against “enthusiasts” and champions of innate ideas—so the Treatises were an antidote to absolutes in government. Earlier political philosophers had enchanted with their visions of political perfection—Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, and Hobbes’s Leviathan. They all had the appeal of a constructive poetic imagination. Locke’s Treatise on limits—the proper and necessary limits of civil government—lacked the poetry of the grand vision. But it offered a commonsense prosaic frame for the Seeker, a plan for community where all could make their personal sallies.

  Locke’s argument, though not beautifully logical or systematic, was appealing. Few of Locke’s ideas were original, but the form that he gave to mostly familiar ideas was simple and intelligible enough to encourage revolutions, to justify revolutions, and to help reshape institutions after revolutions. These cataclysmic possibilities may not have been entirely unimagined by Locke. He not only refused publicly to avow his authorship when the Two Treatises was published. He actually acted irritated when good friends “accused” him of authorship and demanded his confirmation.

  In his Two Treatises Locke did not appeal especially to the facts of English history. But he did appeal to all human history, what he called the universal experience of mankind. He based his theory of government on a parable describing how government first came into being. He argued that it was not fair to object to his account of the origins of government just because there were no examples in recorded history of its happening in the way he suggested.

  And if we may not suppose Men ever to have been in a State of Nature, because we hear not much of them in such a State, we may as well suppose the Armies of Salmanasser or Xerxes were never Children, because we hear little of them, till they were Men, and imbodied in Armies. Government is everywhere antecedent to Records, and Letters seldom come in amongst a People, till a long continuation of Civil Society has, by other more necessary Arts provided for their Safety, Ease, and Plenty. And then they begin to look after the History of their Founders, and search into their original, when they have out-lived the memory of it.

  In that early preliterate era before government, men everywhere lived in a State of Nature. And, as Josoph Acosta’s history of the Indies had recently shown, the people of Peru had once actually lived with “no Government at all.” Men were then free to live as they pleased, “but by consent were all equal, till by the same consent they set Rulers over themselves. So that their Politick Societies all began from a voluntary Union, and the mutual agreement of Men freely acting in the choice of their Governours, and forms of Government.” All depended on the original “State of Nature.”

  If Locke’s history (or prehistory!) was speculative, it nevertheless purported to be history. And his explanation was a momentous departure from earlier ways of justifying government. Like Filmer’s Divine Right, those accounts generally had traced the origins of political power to God’s delegation of authority to sacred persons. Such authority could be revoked only by its donor, who was God. But Locke’s civil government was wholly a matter of this world, founded in human convenience, in the people’s need and desire to preserve their lives, liberty, and property. These agents of the people, creatures of the people’s consent, then held their authority within the strict limits under which it had been given. So, if a government ceased to satisfy its earthly creators, its authority was dissolved. Experience, the foundation of Locke’s knowledge, was equally the basis of his civil government. To that earliest experience he traced majority rule.

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  Voltaire’s Summons to Civilization

  When we talk of the history of “civilization,” we are speaking in a thoroughly modern vocabulary. For “Civilization” is our legacy from the French Enlightenment—the Age of Voltaire. It is our inheritance from the way Voltaire (1694-1778) and other French philosophes saw human achievements (and weaknesses) in their time.

  At 9:30 A.M. on November 1, 1755, an earthquake shook Lisbon, a commercial center of the continent, killing some fifteen thousand people and leaving the city in ruins. In that catastrophe the wise men of Portugal and Europe saw the wrath of God—His Providence in punishing a profligate people’s sins. They even saw meaning in the few sacred images that had been spared. And they saw strangely confirmed the devout dogma of Alexander Pope’s recent (1732-34) Essay on Man:

  All Nature is but art, unknown to thee;

  All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

  All discord, harmony not understood;

  All partial evil, universal good:

  And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,

  One truth is clear: Whatever IS, is RIGHT.

  Voltaire the Seeker promptly refuted that pious optimism in his long poem The Lisbon Earthquake: An inquiry into the Maxim, “Whatever is, is right.” A few years later, Voltaire’s classic tale depicted his mock-hero Candide with his companion Pangloss, the world’s greatest philosopher, in Lisbon on that disastrous morning.

  Pangloss seized the opportunity to console the dying inhabitants “by assuring them that things could not be otherwise. ‘For,’ said he, ‘all this is for the best; for, if there is a volcano at Lisbon, it cannot be anywhere else; for it is impossible that things should not be where they are; for all is well.’ ” Then, as Voltaire reports in Candide, the wise men of Lisbon, in an earnest effort to prevent another earthquake, “could discover no more efficacious way . . . than by giving the people a splendid auto da fé. It was decided by the
University of Coimbra that the sight of several persons being slowly burned in great ceremony is an infallible secret for preventing earthquakes.” As part of this entertaining ceremony the irrepressible Pangloss was hanged and Candide was flogged to the rhythm of lovely plainsong music. In his Preface to his poem on the earthquake, Voltaire maintained “that ancient and sad truth that there is evil upon earth.” “If the various evils by which man is overwhelmed end in general good, all civilized nations have been wrong in endeavoring to trace out the origin of moral and physical evil.”

  Voltaire is most widely quoted for a tragic view of history—“that history in general is a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes, among which we now and then meet with a few virtues, and some happy times; as we sometimes see a few scattered huts in a barren desert.” But in retrospect, this pessimism is not what Voltaire the Seeker has added to our mosaic of belief. Though a passionate skeptic and enemy of religious dogma and fanaticism, Voltaire should be remembered as a long-term optimist. A hallmark of this optimism is Voltaire’s notion of “civilization.” Surprisingly, civilization in its modern sense does not enter our historical thought until Voltaire’s day, and is in large part due to what he and his fellow philosophes saw and wrote about in their time.

  On March 23, 1772, James Boswell reports, he tried to persuade Dr. Johnson to admit the noun “civilization” in our modern sense into his landmark Dictionary of the English Language. Still Dr. Johnson would admit the word only in the technical legal sense of “A law, act of justice, or judgment, which renders a criminal process civil.”