The Age of Louis XIV
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But at least he would define his terms. He protests against the “affected obscurity” of some philosophers. 131 “The knowing precisely what our words stand for would . . . in many cases . . . end the dispute.” 132 It must be allowed that Locke’s teaching in this particular is better than his practice. He defines understanding as “the power of perception,” but he uses perception to include (1) the perception of ideas in our minds; (2) the perception of the signification of signs (words); and (3) the perception of the agreement or disagreement between ideas. 133 But what is idea? Locke uses the term to mean (1) the impress of external objects upon our senses (what we should call sensation); or (2) the internal awareness of this impress (what we should call perception); or (3) the image or memory connected with the idea (what we should call idea); or (4) the “notion” that combines many individual images into a general or abstract or “universal” concept of a class of similar objects. Locke does not always make clear in which sense he uses this troublesome term.*
He begins by rejecting “innate principles.” “It is an established opinion, amongst some men, that there are in the understanding certain innate principles, some primary notions . . . stamped upon the mind of man, which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it.” He proposes to show “the falseness of this supposition.” 135 He does not deny innate tendencies—what were later called tropisms, reflexes, or instincts; but these, in his view, are physiological habits, not ideas. Following Hobbes, he describes such processes as “trains of motion in the animal spirits, which, once set going, continue in the steps they have been used to, which, by often treading, are worn into a smooth path, and the motion in it becomes easy, and as it were natural” or inborn. 136 He is inclined to reduce the associations of ideas to such physiological paths. Descartes had supposed that the idea of God is innate in us; Locke denies this. Some tribes have been found without it, and those that profess it have such different conceptions and images of the deity that it is wiser to reject the notion of innateness, and rest our belief in God upon “the visible marks of extraordinary wisdom and power . . . in all the works of creation” 137—i.e., upon experience. Likewise there are “no innate practical principles”—no inborn conceptions of right and wrong; history shows so great, sometimes so contradictory, a variety of moral judgments that they cannot be a part of man’s natural inheritance; they are a social inheritance, differing from place to place and from time to time. 138
Having disposed of innate ideas, Locke proceeds to inquire how ideas are generated. “Let us then suppose the mind [at birth] to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? . . . To this we answer in one word, from experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself.” 139 All ideas are derived either from sensation or from reflection on the products of sensation. Sensations themselves are physical; their mental result is perception, which is “the first faculty of the mind.” 140
Locke saw no reason to doubt that we can have true or valid knowledge of the external world, but he accepted the long-established distinction between the primary and secondary qualities of objects perceived. Primary qualities are “such as are utterly inseparable from the body, in what state soever it be”: solidity, extension, figure, number, and motion or rest. Secondary qualities “are nothing in the objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities”; so colors, sounds, tastes, and odors are secondary qualities produced in us by the bulk, figure, texture, or motion of objects; the objects themselves have no color, weight, taste, smell, sound, or warmth. This distinction, as old as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, had been accepted by Descartes, Galileo, Hobbes, Boyle, and Newton; Locke’s exposition and emphasis gave it new and wider currency; theoretically the external world was now imagined by science as a colorless and silent neutrality, whose flowers and fruit had lost all fragrance and flavor. Poetry may have been depressed by this conception into the prosy verse of the “Augustan Age”—the early eighteenth century in England; but it ultimately discovered that qualities felt are as real as the objects themselves; and romanticism revenged itself on classicism by making feelings the supreme reality.
The analysis of an object into qualities led to the question, What is the substance in which the primary qualities seem to inhere? Locke confessed that we know nothing of that mysterious substratum except its qualities; take these away, and the substance—the underlying ground of the qualities—loses all meaning, apparently all existence. 141 Berkeley entered here. If we know only the qualities of objects, and know these only as ideas, then all reality is perception; and Locke, the great champion of empiricism—of experience as the source of all knowledge—becomes an idealist, reducing matter to idea. Moreover, the “mind” is as suppostitious as substance, body, or matter. In a remarkable passage Locke overleaps Berkeley and anticipates Hume:
The same thing happens concerning the operations of the mind, viz. thinking, reasoning, fearing, etc., which we, concluding not to subsist of themselves, nor apprehending how they can belong to body or be produced by it, are apt to think the actions of some other substance, which we call spirit, whereby yet it is evident that, having no other idea or notion of matter but something wherein those many sensible qualities which affect our senses do subsist, [so] by supposing a substance wherein thinking, knowing, doubting, and a power of moving, etc., do subsist, we have as clear a notion of spirit as we have of body: the one being supposed to be (without knowing what it is) the substratum to those simple ideas we have derived from without; and the other supposed (with a like ignorance of what it is) to be the substratum to those operations we experiment [experience] in ourselves within. 142
Admitting, then, that “our idea of substance is equally obscure, or none at all, in both” worlds, and that “it is but a supposed I know not what to support those ideas we call accidents,” Locke concludes that in both cases we are warranted in believing in a substance, though we cannot know it: in a matter behind and emitting the sensory qualities, and in a mind behind and possessing the ideas—a spiritual agent performing the various operations of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and willing. 143
Whatever the mind is, its operations are all of one kind—the play of ideas. Locke rejects the Scholastic notion of “faculties” in the mind, such as thought, feeling, and will. Thought is the combination of ideas, feeling is the physiological reverberation of an idea; will is an idea flowing into action, as all ideas tend to do unless checked by another idea.* But how can an idea become an action—how can a “spiritual” process become a physiological process and a physical motion? Locke reluctantly accepts the dualism of corporeal body and incorporeal mind; but in an imprudent moment he suggests that “mind” might be a form of “matter.” This is a locus classicus in Locke:
Possibly we shall never be able to know whether any mere material being thinks or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation, to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter, fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to matter, so disposed, a thinking immaterial substance; it being, in respect of our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that God can, if He pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking, than that He should add to it another substance with a faculty of thinking. . . . He that considers how hardly sensation is, in our thoughts, reconcilable to extended matter, or existence to anything that has no extension at all, will confess that he is very far from certainly knowing what his soul is. . . . He who will give himself leave to consider freely . . . will scarce find his reason able to determine him fixedly for or against the soul’s materiality. 145
Though Hobbes had already leaped upon the materialistic horn of the dilemma, the suggestion of its possible truth was, in the intellectual context of Locke’s time, so offensive to orthodoxy that a hundred defenders of religion att
acked him as playing recklessly into the hands of the atheists. They paid little attention to his passing obeisance to revelation, or to his earlier statement that “the more probable opinion is that consciousness is annexed to, and the affection of, one individual immaterial substance.” 146 Perhaps they foresaw how La Mettrie, d’Holbach, Diderot, and other materialists would see in Locke’s suggestion a secret inclination to their view. Bishop Stillingfleet accused him of precisely such a tendency, and warned him that it endangered the whole Christian theology. Forgetting his usual caution, Locke warmly reasserted the possibility of the material hypothesis, in a controversy that lasted, with Stillingfleet and others, till 1697.
Despite its critics, its occasional contradictions, obscurities, and other faults, the Essay gathered prestige and influence with every year. Four editions of it were called for in the fourteen years between its publication and Locke’s death. A French edition appeared in 1700, and was greeted with enthusiastic admiration. It became a topic in English drawing rooms; Tristram Shandy assured his hearers that a reference to the Essay would enable anyone to cut “no contemptible figure in a metaphysical circle.” 147 The influence of the Essay on Berkeley and Hume was so great that we might date from it the turn of British philosophy from metaphysics to epistemology. Perhaps Pope had Locke in mind when he wrote that “the proper study of mankind is man.”
A French edition appeared in 1700, and was greeted with enthusiastic hyperboles. “After so many speculative gentlemen had formed the romance of the soul,” wrote Voltaire, “one truly wise man appeared who has, in the most modest manner imaginable, given us its real history. Mr. Locke has laid open to man the anatomy of the soul, just as some learned anatomist would have done that of the body.” 148 And again, “Locke alone has developed the human understanding in a book where there is nothing but truths, a book made perfect by the fact that these truths are stated clearly.” 149 The Essay became the psychological bible of the French Enlightenment. Condillac adopted and extended Locke’s sensationism, and thought nothing had been done in psychology between Aristotle and Locke 150—a manifest injustice to the Scholastics and Hobbes. D’Alembert, in the discours préliminaire of the Encyclopédie, credited Locke with having created scientific philosophy as Newton (he supposed) had created scientific physics. Despite its professions of orthodoxy, the Essay made for a rationalistic empiricism that soon discarded the soul as a needless hypothesis, and passed on to apply the same reasoning to God.
4. Religion and Toleration
Locke himself had no sympathy with such extremes. Whatever his private doubts, he felt, like an English gentleman, that good manners and morals required public support of the Christian church. If philosophy should take from the people their faith in a divine justice standing behind the apparent injustices and sufferings of life, what could it offer to sustain the hopes and courage of men? A slow progress toward a democratic utopia? But in that utopia would not the natural greed and inequality of men forge new means for the use and abuse of the simple or the weak by the clever or the strong?
His first concern was to “lay down the measures and boundaries between faith and reason”; and this he aimed to do in Chapter 18 of Book IV of the Essay. “I find every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, It is a matter of faith, and above reason.” 151 “Whatever God hath revealed is certainly true,” 152 but only reasoning on the available evidence can tell us whether a scripture is the word of God, and “no proposition can be received for divine revelation if it be contrary to our clear intuitive knowledge.” 153 When a matter can be decided by such direct observation, our knowledge is above any supposed revelation, for it is clearer than any certainty we can have that the revelation in question is really divine. However, “there being many things wherein we have very imperfect notions, or none at all; and other things, of whose past, present, or future existence, by the natural use of our faculties, we can have no knowledge at all; these, as being . . . above reason, are, when revealed, the proper matter of faith.” 154 Locke concludes: “Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or asserted as a matter of faith wherein reason hath nothing to do.” 155 “One unerring mark of” the love of truth is “not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.” 156 “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.” 157
So, in 1695, Locke published The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures. He read the New Testament again, as one might read a new book, putting aside (as he thought) all dogmas and commentaries. He was overwhelmed by the lovable nobility of Christ, and the beauty of nearly all his teaching as the best and brightest hope of mankind. If anything could be a divine revelation, this narrative and doctrine seemed divine. Locke proposed to accept it as divine, but also to prove it, in all its essentials, to be in the profoundest agreement with reason.
But those essentials, it seemed to him, were far more modest and simple than the complex theology of the Thirty-nine Articles, the Westminster Confession, or the Athanasian Creed. He quoted passage after passage from the New Testament requiring of a Christian only the belief in God and in Christ as his divine messenger or Messiah. Here, said Locke, is a plain and intelligible religion, fit for any man, and independent of all learning and theology. As to the existence of God, he felt that “the works of nature in every part of them sufficiently evidence a Deity”; 158 from his own existence he argued to a First Cause; and since he found perception and knowledge in himself, he concluded that such attributes must also belong to God; God is “eternal Mind.” 159 When Locke’s critics complained that he had left out such vital doctrines as the immortality of the soul and everlasting punishments and rewards, he replied that in accepting Christ he accepted Christ’s teachings, in which those doctrines were included. So Locke came out by the same door wherein he went.
However, he insisted that all forms of Christianity except Catholicism should enjoy full liberty in England. He had written an essay on toleration as early as 1666. When he moved to Holland (1683) he found much more freedom of worship than in England; and while he was there he must have noted Bayle’s powerful defense of toleration (1686). Moved by the persecution and migration of the Huguenots (1685), he wrote a letter to his friend Limborch, who urged its publication; it was printed in Latin in 1689 as Epistola de Tolerantia, and appeared in an English translation before the year was out. An Oxford don denounced it; Locke, now in England, defended it in a second and third Letter concerning Toleration (1690, 1692). The Toleration Act of 1689 fell far short of his proposals; it excluded Catholics, Unitarians, Jews, and pagans, and barred Dissenters from public affairs. Locke also made exceptions: he would not tolerate atheists, because he thought their word could not be trusted, since they feared no God; or any religion that did physical harm, as by human sacrifice; or any religion demanding allegiance to a foreign power; he gave Mohammedanism as an example, but was understood to mean Catholicism too. 160 He explicitly called for toleration of Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arminians, and Quakers. He did not dare include Unitarians, though the first Shaftesbury, dying in Amsterdam (1683), he had imbibed Arianism and Socinianism (Unitarianism) from his secretary Locke. 161
The law, said Locke, should concern itself only with the preservation of social order; it has a right to suppress expressions destructive of the state, but it has no jurisdiction over men’s souls. No church should have the power to compel adherence. How ridiculous to punish persons in Denmark for not being Lutherans, in Geneva for not being Calvinists, in Vienna for not being Catholics! After all, which individual or group can have the full truth about human life and destiny? Locke noted that most of the religions demanded toleration when they were weak, but refused it when they were strong. Persecution, he felt, comes from lust for power, and from jealousy masquerading as religious zeal. Persecution creates hypocrites, toleration pr
omotes knowledge and truth. And how can a Christian persecute, being pledged to charity?
Locke continued his campaign for toleration till the close of his life. He was engaged in writing a fourth letter on the subject when his time ran out. Death came to him (1704) while he sat quietly listening to Lady Masham reading Psalms.
Even before his death he had reached in philosophy a reputation surpassed only by Newton’s in science; men already spoke of him as “the philosopher.” While he ended in almost orthodox piety, his books, unable to change with age, passed through editions and translations into the thought of educated Europe. “The Western Enlightenment,” said Spengler, “is of English origin. The rationalism of the Continent comes wholly from Locke.” 162 Of course not wholly. But of whom else would one now risk such hyperbole?
VI. SHAFTESBURY: 1671–1713
His pupil, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, was a credit to Locke the educator. Not that Locke was responsible for Shaftesbury’s style; the explorative psychologist wrote a pedestrian prose, simple and usually clear (this side the stake), but seldom beautiful; Shaftesbury, a man of wealth and leisure, wrote with confident urbanity, tolerant humor, and almost Gallic grace—the English seigneur condescending to be a philosopher. We must stay with him a while, for he almost founded aesthetics in modern philosophy, and, by rescuing feeling and sympathy from the cold hands of Hobbes and Locke, fed the stream of sentiment that culminated in Rousseau.