The first comprehensive statement of the liberal philosophy is to be found in Locke, the most influential though by no means the most profound of modern philosophers. In England, his views were so completely in harmony with those of most intelligent men that it is difficult to trace their influence except in theoretical philosophy; in France, on the other hand, where they led to an opposition to the existing regime in practice and to the prevailing Cartesianism in theory, they clearly had a considerable effect in shaping the course of events. This is an example of a general principle: a philosophy developed in a politically and economically advanced country, which is, in its birthplace, little more than a clarification and systematization of prevalent opinion, may become elsewhere a source of revolutionary ardour, and ultimately of actual revolution. It is mainly through theorists that the maxims regulating the policy of advanced countries become known to less advanced countries. In the advanced countries, practice inspires theory; in the others, theory inspires practice. This difference is one of the reasons why transplanted ideas are seldom so successful as they were in their native soil.
Before considering the philosophy of Locke, let us review some of the circumstances in seventeenth-century England that were influential in forming his opinions.
The conflict between king and Parliament in the Civil War gave Englishmen, once for all, a love of compromise and moderation, and a fear of pushing any theory to its logical conclusion, which has dominated them down to the present time. The principles for which the Long Parliament contended had, at first, the support of a large majority. They wished to abolish the king’s right to grant trade monopolies, and to make him acknowledge the exclusive right of Parliament to impose taxes. They desired liberty within the Church of England for opinions and practices which were persecuted by Archbishop Laud. They held that Parliament should meet at stated intervals, and should not be convoked only on rare occasions when the king found its collaboration indispensable. They objected to arbitrary arrest and to the subservience of the judges to the royal wishes. But many, while prepared to agitate for these ends, were not prepared to levy war against the king, which appeared to them an act of treason and impiety. As soon as actual war broke out, the division of forces became more nearly equal.
The political development from the outbreak of the Civil War to the establishment of Cromwell as Lord Protector followed the course which has now become familiar but was then unprecedented. The Parliamentary party consisted of two factions, the Presbyterians and the Independents; the Presbyterians desired to preserve a State Church, but to abolish bishops; the Independents agreed with them about bishops, but held that each congregation should be free to choose its own theology, without the interference of any central ecclesiastical government. The Presbyterians, in the main, were of a higher social class than the Independents, and their political opinions were more moderate. They wished to come to terms with the king as soon as defeat had made him conciliatory. Their policy, however, was rendered impossible by two circumstances: first, the king developed a martyr’s stubbornness about bishops; second, the defeat of the king proved difficult, and was only achieved by Cromwell’s New Model Army, which consisted of Independents. Consequently, when the king’s military resistance was broken, he could still not be induced to make a treaty, and the Presbyterians had lost the preponderance of armed force in the Parliamentary armies. The defence of democracy had thrown power into the hands of a minority, and it used its power with a complete disregard for democracy and parliamentary government. When Charles I had attempted to arrest the five members, there had been a universal outcry, and his failure had made him ridiculous. But Cromwell had no such difficulties. By Pride’s Purge, he dismissed about a hundred Presbyterian members, and obtained for a time a subservient majority. When, finally, he decided to dismiss Parliament altogether, “not a dog barked”—war had made only military force seem important, and had produced a contempt for constitutional forms. For the rest of Cromwell’s life, the government of England was a military tyranny, hated by an increasing majority of the nation, but impossible to shake off while his partisans alone were armed.
Charles II, after hiding in oak trees and living as a refugee in Holland, determined, at the Restoration, that he would not again set out on his travels. This imposed a certain moderation. He claimed no power to impose taxes not sanctioned by Parliament. He assented to the Habeas Corpus Act, which deprived the Crown of the power of arbitrary arrest. On occasion he could flout the fiscal power of Parliament by means of subsidies from Louis XIV, but in the main he was a constitutional monarch. Most of the limitations of royal power originally desired by the opponents of Charles I were conceded at the Restoration, and were respected by Charles II because it had been shown that kings could be made to suffer at the hands of their subjects.
James II, unlike his brother, was totally destitute of subtlety and finesse. By his bigoted Catholicism he united against himself the Anglicans and Nonconformists, in spite of his attempts to conciliate the latter by granting them toleration in defiance of Parliament. Foreign policy also played a part. The Stuarts, in order to avoid the taxation required in war-time, which would have made them dependent upon Parliament, pursued a policy of subservience, first to Spain and then to France. The growing power of France roused the invariable English hostility to the leading Continental State, and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes made Protestant feeling bitterly opposed to Louis XIV. In the end, almost everybody in England wished to be rid of James. But almost everybody was equally determined to avoid a return to the days of the Civil War and Cromwell’s dictatorship. Since there was no constitutional way of getting rid of James, there must be a revolution, but it must be quickly ended, so as to give no opportunity for disruptive forces. The rights of Parliament must be secured once for all. The king must go, but monarchy must be preserved; it should be, however, not a monarchy of Divine Right, but one dependent upon legislative sanction, and so upon Parliament. By a combination of aristocracy and big business, all this was achieved in a moment, without the necessity of firing a shot. Compromise and moderation had succeeded, after every form of intransigeance had been tried and had failed.
The new king, being Dutch, brought with him the commercial and theological wisdom for which his country was noted. The Bank of England was created; the national debt was made into a secure investment, no longer liable to repudiation at the caprice of the monarch. The Act of Toleration, while leaving Catholics and Nonconformists subject to various disabilities, put an end to actual persecution. Foreign policy became resolutely anti-French, and remained so, with brief intermissions, until the defeat of Napoleon.
CHAPTER XIII
Locke’s Theory of Knowledge
JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704) is the apostle of the Revolution of 1688, the most moderate and the most successful of all revolutions. Its aims were modest, but they were exactly achieved, and no subsequent revolution has hitherto been found necessary in England. Locke faithfully embodies its spirit, and most of his works appeared within a few years of 1688. His chief work in theoretical philosophy, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was finished in 1687 and published in 1690. His First Letter on Toleration was originally published in Latin in 1689, in Holland, to which country Locke had found it prudent to withdraw in 1683. Two further letters on Toleration were published in 1690 and 1692. His two Treatises on Government were licensed for printing in 1689, and published soon afterwards. His book on Education was published in 1693. Although his life was long, all his influential writings are confined to the few years from 1687 to 1693. Successful revolutions are stimulating to those who believe in them.
Locke’s father was a Puritan, who fought on the side of Parliament. In the time of Cromwell, when Locke was at Oxford, the university was still scholastic in its philosophy; Locke disliked both scholasticism and the fanaticism of the Independents. He was much influenced by Descartes. He became a physician, and his patron was Lord Shaftesbury, Dryden’s “Achitophel.” When Shaftesbury
fell in 1683, Locke fled with him to Holland, and remained there until the Revolution. After the Revolution, except for a few years during which he was employed at the Board of Trade, his life was devoted to literary work and to numerous controversies arising out of his books.
The years before the Revolution of 1688, when Locke could not, without grave risk, take any part, theoretical or practical, in English politics, were spent by him in composing his Essay on the Human Understanding. This is his most important book, and the one upon which his fame most securely rests; but his influence on the philosophy of politics was so great and so lasting that he must be treated as the founder of philosophical liberalism as much as of empiricism in theory of knowledge.
Locke is the most fortunate of all philosophers. He completed his work in theoretical philosophy just at the moment when the government of his country fell into the hands of men who shared his political opinions. Both in practice and in theory, the views which he advocated were held, for many years to come, by the most vigorous and influential politicians and philosophers. His political doctrines, with the developments due to Montesquieu, are embedded in the American Constitution, and are to be seen at work whenever there is a dispute between President and Congress. The British Constitution was based upon his doctrines until about fifty years ago, and so was that which the French adopted in 1871.
His influence in eighteenth-century France, which was immense, was primarily due to Voltaire, who as a young man spent some time in England, and interpreted English ideas to his compatriots in the Lettres philosophiques. The philosophes and the moderate reformers followed him; the extreme revolutionaries followed Rousseau. His French followers, rightly or wrongly, believed in an intimate connection between his theory of knowledge and his politics.
In England this connection is less evident. Of his two most eminent followers, Berkeley was politically unimportant, and Hume was a Tory who set forth his reactionary views in his History of England. But after the time of Kant, when German idealism began to influence English thought, there came to be again a connection between philosophy and politics: in the main, the philosophers who followed the Germans were Conservative, while the Benthamites, who were Radical, were in the tradition of Locke. The correlation, however, is not invariable; T. H. Green, for example, was a Liberal but an idealist.
Not only Locke’s valid opinions, but even his errors, were useful in practice. Take, for example, his doctrine as to primary and secondary qualities. The primary qualities are defined as those that are inseparable from body, and are enumerated as solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number. The secondary qualities are all the rest: colour, sounds, smells, etc. The primary qualities, he maintains, are actually in bodies; the secondary qualities, on the contrary, are only in the percipient. Without the eye, there would be no colours; without the ear, no sounds, and so on. For Locke’s view as to secondary qualities there are good grounds—jaundice, blue spectacles, etc. But Berkeley pointed out that the same arguments apply to primary qualities. Ever since Berkeley, Locke’s dualism on this point has been philosophically out of date. Nevertheless, it dominated practical physics until the rise of quantum theory in our own day. Not only was it assumed, explicitly or tacitly, by physicists, but it proved fruitful as a source of many very important discoveries. The theory that the physical world consists only of matter in motion was the basis of the accepted theories of sound, heat, light, and electricity. Pragmatically, the theory was useful, however mistaken it may have been theoretically. This is typical of Locke’s doctrines.
Locke’s philosophy, as it appears in the Essay, has throughout certain merits and certain demerits. Both alike were useful: the demerits are such only from a theoretical standpoint. He is always sensible, and always willing to sacrifice logic rather than become paradoxical. He enunciates general principles which, as the reader can hardly fail to perceive, are capable of leading to strange consequences; but whenever the strange consequences seem about to appear, Locke blandly refrains from drawing them. To a logician this is irritating; to a practical man, it is a proof of sound judgement. Since the world is what it is, it is clear that valid reasoning from sound principles cannot lead to error; but a principle may be so nearly true as to deserve theoretical respect, and yet may lead to practical consequences which we feel to be absurd. There is therefore a justification for common sense in philosophy, but only as showing that our theoretical principles cannot be quite correct so long as their consequences are condemned by an appeal to common sense which we feel to be irresistible. The theorist may retort that common sense is no more infallible than logic. But this retort, though made by Berkeley and Hume, would have been wholly foreign to Locke’s intellectual temper.
A characteristic of Locke, which descended from him to the whole Liberal movement, is lack of dogmatism. Some few certainties he takes over from his predecessors: our own existence, the existence of God, and the truth of mathematics. But wherever his doctrines differ from those of his forerunners, they are to the effect that truth is hard to ascertain, and that a rational man will hold his opinions with some measure of doubt. This temper of mind is obviously connected with religious toleration, with the success of parliamentary democracy, with laissez-faire, and with the whole system of liberal maxims. Although he is a deeply religious man, a devout believer in Christianity who accepts revelation as a source of knowledge, he nevertheless hedges round professed revelations with rational safeguards. On one occasion he says: “The bare testimony of revelation is the highest certainty,” but on another he says: “Revelation must be judged by reason.” Thus in the end reason remains supreme.
His chapter “Of Enthusiasm” is instructive in this connection. “Enthusiasm” had not then the same meaning as it has now; it meant the belief in a personal revelation to a religious leader or to his followers. It was a characteristic of the sects that had been defeated at the Restoration. When there is a multiplicity of such personal revelations, all inconsistent with each other, truth, or what passes as such, becomes purely personal, and loses its social character. Love of truth, which Locke considers essential, is a very different thing from love of some particular doctrine which is proclaimed as the truth. One unerring mark of love of truth, he says, is “not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.” Forwardness to dictate, he says, shows failure of love of truth. “Enthusiasm, 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.” Men who suffer from melancholy or conceit are likely to have “persuasions of immediate intercourse with the Deity.” Hence odd actions and opinions acquire Divine sanction, which flatters “men’s laziness, ignorance, and vanity.” He concludes the chapter with the maxim already quoted, that “revelation must be judged of by reason.”
What Locke means by “reason” is to be gathered from his whole book. There is, it is true, a chapter called “Of Reason,” but this is mainly concerned to prove that reason does not consist of syllogistic reasoning, and is summed up in the sentence: “God has not been so sparing to men to make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational.” Reason, as Locke uses the term, consists of two parts: first, an inquiry as to what things we know with certainty; second, an investigation of propositions which it is wise to accept in practice, although they have only probability and not certainty in their favour. “The grounds of probability,” he says, “are two: conformity with our own experience, or the testimony of other’s experience.” The King of Siam, he remarks, ceased to believe what Europeans told him when they mentioned ice.
In his chapter “Of Degrees of Assent” he says that the degree of assent we give to any proposition should depend upon the grounds of probability in its favour. After pointing out that we must often act upon probabilities that fall short of certainty, he says that the right use of this consideration “is mutual charity an
d forbearance. Since therefore it is unavoidable to the greatest part of men, if not all, to have several opinions, without certain and indubitable proofs of their truth; and it carries too great an imputation of ignorance, lightness, or folly, for men to quit and renounce their former tenets presently upon the offer of an argument which they cannot immediately answer and show the insufficiency of; it would, methinks, become all men to maintain peace and the common offices of humanity and friendship in the diversity of opinions, since we cannot reasonably expect that any one should readily and obsequiously quit his own opinion, and embrace ours with a blind resignation to an authority which the understanding of man acknowledges not. For, however it may often mistake, it can own no other guide but reason, nor blindly submit to the will and dictates of another. If he you would bring over to your sentiments be one that examines before he assents, you must give him leave at his leisure to go over the account again, and, recalling what is out of his mind, examine the particulars, to see on which side the advantage lies; and if he will not think over arguments of weight enough to engage him anew in so much pains, it is but what we do often ourselves in the like case; and we should take it amiss if others should prescribe to us what points we should study: and if he be one who wishes to take his opinions upon trust, how can we imagine that he should renounce those tenets which time and custom have so settled in his mind that he thinks them self-evident, and of an unquestionable certainty; or which he takes to be impressions he has received from God himself, or from men sent by him? How can we expect, I say, that opinions thus settled should be given up to the arguments or authority of a stranger or adversary? especially if there be any suspicion of interest or design, as there never fails to be where men find themselves ill-treated. We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance, and endeavour 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, or at least those we would force upon them, when it is more than probable that We are no less obstinate in not embracing some of theirs. For where is the man that has uncontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say, that he has examined to the bottom all his own or other men’s opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay, often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than to restrain others…. There is reason to think, that if men were better instructed themselves, they would be less imposing on others.”*
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