by Will Durant
For two years (1673–75) Locke served as secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations (Colonies), of which Shaftesbury was president. He helped Shaftesbury to draft a constitution for Carolina, of which the Earl was a founder and a chief proprietor; these “Fundamental Institutions” were not generally carried out in the colony, but the freedom of conscience provided in them was largely accepted by the new settlement. 108
When Shaftesbury fell from office in 1675 Locke traveled and studied in France. There he met François Bernier, who introduced him to the philosophy of Gassendi; therein he found a reasoned rejection of “innate ideas,” the comparison of the unborn child’s mind to a tabula rasa, or clean slate, and the key sentence that was to be later bandied across the Channel: Nihil est in intellectu nisi quod prius fuerit in sensu—“There is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses.”
Locke returned to London and Shaftesbury in 1679, but as the Earl ventured closer and closer to revolution, Locke retired to Oxford (1680), and resumed the life of a scholar. Shaftesbury’s arrest, escape, and flight to Holland cast royal suspicion upon his friends. Spies were sent to Oxford to catch Locke in remarks that might serve as a basis for prosecuting him. 109 Feeling insecure, and foreseeing the accession of his enemy James II, Locke too sought refuge in Holland (1683). The abortive revolution of the Duke of Monmouth (1685) provoked James to demand from the Dutch government the extradition of eighty-five Englishmen on the charge that they had shared in the plot to overthrow the new King; Locke was named among them. He hid, and took a false name. A year later James sent him an offer of pardon, but Locke preferred to remain in Holland. Living in Utrecht. Amsterdam, and Rotterdam, he enjoved the friendship not only of English refugees but of Dutch scholars like Jean Le Clerc and Philip van Limborch, both of them leaders in the liberal Arminian theologv. In that environment Locke found much encouragement for his ideas of popular sovereignty and religious freedom. There he wrote his Essay concerning Human Understanding, and the first drafts of his treatises on education and toleration.
In 1687 he joined in the plot to replace James II with William III on the throne of England. 110 When the expedition of the Stadholder succeeded in this enterprise, Locke sailed to England (1689) on the same vessel that carried the future Queen Mary. 111 Before leaving Holland he wrote to Limborch, in Latin, a letter whose warmth of sentiment may correct the supposition that his habitual moderation stemmed from coldness of character:
In going away, I almost feel as though I were leaving my own country and my own kinsfolk; for everything that belongs to kinship, good will, love, kindness—everything that binds men together with ties stronger than that of blood—I have found among you in abundance. I leave behind me friends whom I can never forget, and I shall never cease to wish for an opportunity of coming back to enjoy once more the genuine fellowship of men who have been such friends that, while far away from my own connections, while suffering in every other way, I have never felt sick at heart. As for you, best, dearest, and most worthy of men, when I think of your learning, your wisdom, your kindness and candor and gentleness, I seem to have found in your friendship alone enough to make me always rejoice that I was forced to pass so many years amongst you. 112
In an England governed by his friends, Locke passed through a succession of official employments. In 1690 he was a commissioner of appeals; in 1696–1700 he was a commissioner of trade and plantations. He was intimate with John Somers, attorney general, with Charles Montagu, first Earl of Halifax, and with Isaac Newton, whom he aided in reforming the coinage. After 1691 he lived most of the time at Oates Manor in Essex with Sir Francis Masham and his wife, Lady Damaris Masham, a daughter of Ralph Cudworth. He remained in that quiet haven, writing and rewriting, till his death.
2. Government and Property
When he came back from exile he was already fifty-six years old. So far he had published only some minor articles, and a French epitome of his Essay in Le Clerc’s Bibliothèque universelle (1688). He was not yet known as a philosopher except to a few friends. Then, all in one annus mirabilis, he sent to the press three works that made him a major figure in European thought. In March, 1689, his Epistola de Tolerantia appeared in Holland; it was translated into English in the fall; and it was followed in 1690 by a Second Letter concerning Toleration. In February, 1690, he issued his two Treatises on Government, the cornerstone of modern democratic theory in England and America; and a month later the Essay concerning Human Understanding, the most influential book in modern psychology. Though this had been completed before he left Holland, he preceded it in print by the Treatises on Government because he was anxious to provide a philosophical basis for the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. This purpose was frankly stated in the preface to the first treatise: “to establish the throne of our great restorer, our present William III; to make good his title in the consent of the people . . . and to justify to the world the people of England, whose love of their just and natural rights, with their resolution to preserve them, saved the nation when it was on the brink of slavery and ruin.” 113
The first and lesser treatise undertook to answer the Patriarcha, or The Natural Power of Kings Asserted, which Sir Robert Filmer had written about 1642 to uphold the divine right of Charles I, but which had only recently (1680) reached print in the heyday of Charles II’s triumphant absolutism. It was not the best of Sir Robert’s writings. He published anonymously in 1648 The Anarchy of a Limited Mixed Monarchy, anticipating Hobbes’s views. Though he suffered imprisonment for his defense of a losing cause, he defended it again in Observations upon Aristotle’s Politiques, published anonymously in 1652, a year before the author’s death.
Filmer presented government as an extension of the family. God conferred sovereignty over the first human family upon Adam, from whom it descended to the patriarchs. Those who (like Filmer’s opponents) believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible must admit that the patriarchal family, and the power of the patriarch, were sanctioned by God. From the patriarchs this sovereignty passed to kings; the early kings were patriarchs, and their authority was a form and derivative of parental rule. Monarchy, therefore, goes back to Adam, and so to God; its sovereignty, except when it commands an explicit violation of God’s law, is divine and absolute; and rebellion against it is a sin as well as a crime. 114
Against the theory that man is born free, Filmer points out that man is born subject to the customs and laws of the group, and to the natural and legal rights of parents over their children; “natural freedom” is a romantic myth. It is also a myth that government was originally established by the consent and agreement of the people. “Representative government” is another myth; actually the representative is chosen by a small and active minority in each constituency. 115 All government is of a majority by a minority. It is in the nature of government to be above the laws, for by definition a legislature is empowered to make and unmake laws. “We do but flatter ourselves if we hope ever to be governed without an arbitrary power.” 116 If government is to depend upon the will of the governed, there will soon be no government, for every individual or group will claim the right to rebel according to “conscience.” That would be anarchy, or mob rule; and “there is no tyranny to be compared to the tyranny of the multitude.” 117
Locke felt that his first task, as defender of the Glorious Revolution, was to dispose of Filmer’s arguments. He thought “there was never so much glib nonsense put together in well-sounding English” as in Sir Robert’s discourses. 118 “I should not speak so plainly of a gentleman long since past answering, had not the pulpit, of late years, publicly owned his doctrine and made it the current divinity of the times”—i.e., had not the Anglican clergy upheld the divine right of kings even under Catholic James II. Locke proceeded with playful, sometimes ungracious, sarcasm to question Filmer’s derivation of royal authority from the supposed sovereignty of Adam and the patriarchs; we need not follow him in his long Biblical refutation; today we rationalize our political p
rejudices by other than Scriptural means. Something of Filmer remains after Locke’s rough handling of him—the attempt, however mistaken in detail, to illuminate the nature of government by seeking its origins in history, even in biology. Probably both Filmer and Locke underestimated the role of conquest and force in the establishment of states.
In the Second Treatise of Civil Government Locke turned to the task of finding for the rule of William III in England some more defensible basis than a divine right that would unfortunately return the power to James II. In deriving William’s title from the consent of the governed he assumed more than he could historically prove: the people had not given their consent to William’s conquest of England, and the aristocrats who had maneuvered it had thought not of securing popular consent, but only of avoiding public resistance. Nevertheless, in building a philosophical prop for William’s power, Locke raised an impressive defense of popular sovereignty. While defending a monarch he developed the theory of representative government; and while offering a rationale to the Whigs and the defenders of property he formulated the gospel of political liberty. He ended, in English political philosophy, the ascendancy of Hobbes.
He followed Hobbes in assuming a primitive “state of nature” before the rise of states; like Hobbes and Filmer he fashioned history to his purpose; but, unlike Hobbes, he imagined that individuals in the “state of nature” were free and equal; he used this word as Jefferson was to use it in following him, to mean that no man had by nature more “rights” than any other; and he allows to man in the “natural condition” certain social instincts as a psychological preparation for society. Occasionally Locke makes some amiable assumptions—“Every man being . . . naturally free, and nothing being able to put him into subjection to any earthly power without his consent . . .” 119 The state of nature, in this theory, was not a Hobbesian war of each against all, for the “law of nature” supported the rights of men as reasoning animals. By reason (Locke supposed) men came to an agreement—made a “social contract” with one another—to surrender their individual rights of judging and punishing not to a king but to the community as a whole. Hence the community is the real sovereign. By its majority vote it selects a chief administrator to implement its will. 120 He may be called king, but, like any other citizen, he is bound to obey the laws enacted by the community. If (like James II) he seeks to violate or circumvent them, the community has the right to withdraw from him the authority which it has conferred.
Locke was really defending not William against James, but (the now victorious) Parliament against any king. The highest power in a state should be the legislature. It should be chosen by the unpurchased vote of the people, and the laws should punish severely any attempt to buy the vote of a citizen or a legislator; Locke did not foresee that his admired William III would be forced to buy the vote of M.P.s, and that powerful families would continue for yet 140 years to control and dispose of the vote of “rotten boroughs.” The functions of the legislature should be strictly separate from those of the executive, and each of these branches of the government should serve as a check upon the other.
“Government,” said Locke, “has no other end but the preservation of property.” 121 There had once been a primitive communism, when food grew without planting and men could live without toil; but when labor began communism ended, for a man naturally claimed as his separate property anything whose value had been created by his work. Labor, then, is the source of “ninety-nine hundredths” of all physical values. 122 (Here, quite without intending it, Locke offered one of its basic tenets to modern socialism.) Civilization grows through labor, and therefore through the institution of property as the product of labor. Theoretically no man should have more property than he can use; 123 but the invention of money enabled him to sell such surplus product of his labor as he could not utilize; and in this way there developed the great inequality of possessions among men. We might have expected at this point some criticism of the concentration of wealth; instead, Locke looked upon property, however unequally distributed, as natural and sacred; the continuance of social order and civilization requires that the protection of property shall be the paramount purpose of the state. “The supreme power cannot take from any man part of his property without his consent.” 124
On this basis Locke could not admit any revolution involving the expropriation of property. But as the “prophet and voice of the Glorious Revolution” 125 he could not deny the right to overthrow a government. “The people are absolved from obedience when illegal attempts are made upon their liberties or properties,” for “the end of government is the good of mankind. And which is best for mankind? That the people should be always exposed to the boundless will of tyranny, or that the rulers should be sometimes liable to be opposed when they grow exorbitant in the use of their power and employ it for the destruction and not the preservation of the properties of their people?” 126 Whereas some Huguenot and some Jesuit philosophers had sanctioned revolution to protect the one true religion, Locke sanctions it only to protect property. Secularization was changing the locus and definition of sanctity.
Locke’s influence on political thought remained supreme till Karl Marx. His philosophy of the state was so well suited to the Whig ascendancy and the English character that for a century its faults were ignored as trivial blemishes in a magnificent Magna Carta of the bourgeoisie. It provided a halo not only to 1689 but, by remarkable anticipation, to 1776 and 1789—i.e., to the three stages in the revolt of business against birth, of money against land. Today critics smile at Locke’s derivation of government from the consent of free men in a state of nature, just as he smiled at Filmer’s derivation of it from the patriarchs, Adam, and God. “Natural rights” are suspect and theoretical; in a lawless society the only natural right is superior might, as now among states; and in civilization a right is a liberty desired by the individual and not injurious to the group. Rule by the majority may exist in small communities on less than vital concerns; usually rule is by an organized minority. Governments now recognize greater obligations than the protection of property.
Nevertheless, the achievement of that second treatise remains immense. It broadened the victory of Parliament and the Whigs over the monarchy and the Tories into a theory of representative and responsible government that inspired one people after another in its climb to liberty. England rejected Locke’s separation of powers, and subordinated all government to the legislature; but his doctrine had aimed to check the executive, and that aim was completely achieved. Much of his trust in human reasonableness and decency, and his moderation in applying theory to practice, became standard procedure in English politics, making revolution imperceptible while real.
From England the ideas of Locke passed to France with Voltaire in 1729; they were taken up by Montesquieu on his visit to England in 1729–31; they found voice in Rousseau and others before and during the French Revolution, and appeared in full blast in the Constituent Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. When the American colonists rebelled against the resurgent monarchy of George III, they adopted the ideas, the formulas, almost the words, of Locke to express their Declaration of Independence. The rights that Locke had vindicated became the Bill of Rights in the first ten amendments to the American Constitution. His separation of governmental powers, as extended to the judiciary by Montesquieu, became a living factor in the American form of government; his solicitude for property passed into American legislation; his essays on toleration influenced the founding fathers in separating Church from state and decreeing religious liberty. Rarely in the history of political philosophy has one man had such lasting influence.
3. Mind and Matter
Locke’s influence was as extensive and profound in psychology as in the theory of government. He had been writing the Essay concerning Human Understanding since 1670; characteristically he sent it to the printer only after twenty years of revision; and then, for this masterpiece of psychological analysis, he received thirty poun
ds. He himself ascribed the inception of the Essay to a conversation in London in 1670:
Five or six friends 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 a while puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a solution of those doubts . . . 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 . . . which I set down against our next meeting gave the first entrance into this discourse. 127
Apparently the stimulus to the Essay was the contention of the Cambridge Platonists—who here followed the Scholastic philosophers—that we derive our ideas of God and morality not from experience but from introspection, and that these ideas are innate with us, part of our mental equipment, however unconscious, at our birth. This view, rather than Descartes’ incidental statements on “innate ideas,” led Locke to consider whether there were any ideas whatever that were not the result of impressions from the external world. 128 Locke came to the conclusion that all knowledge—including our ideas of God and right and wrong—is derived from our experience, and is not part of the inborn structure of the mind. He knew that in arguing for this empirical position he would offend many of his contemporaries, who felt that morality required the support of religion, and that both morality and religion would be weakened if their basic ideas had any less noble origin than God Himself. He asked his readers to be patient with him; and for his own part he approached the dangerous discussion in a spirit of modest uncertainty. “I pretend not to teach, but to inquire.” 129 He spoke quietly, moderately, leisurely. And he confessed that he was “too lazy, and too busy,” to be brief. 130