Indeed, it is held as a pretty general rule, that where there is want of reform, there is want of reason; and Bacon, by implication, thought the rule here applicable, when, in defending his “new philosophy” from the charge of arrogance, he apologised by saying that a “cripple in the right road would make better progress than a racehorse in the wrong.” That is, he claimed for himself, as he was bound logically to do, the plain good sense of directing his supposably humble faculties with an obvious regard to the end he proposed and professed, and he was ready to concede to his competitors all kinds of superiority but this.
The same simplicity characterises the reforming animus of the other great patriarch of “the new philosophy,” in its sister branch. The still debated point between the school of Locke and the old philosophy was, and is, of such a form as may be figured by the following hypothetical, and it may be, well-founded statement. Locke seems to have battled mainly for the principle that ideas that every one allows to be inferences, should be acknowledged by philosophy to be such, while the adherents of the old ideas maintained, in opposition to him, that ideas that every one allows to be inferences, should not be acknowledged by philosophy to be such. Or, in other words, Locke aimed to realise a certain first principle of reason, which I shall have hereafter to consider, which stands thus:—“That which it is,” while his opponents withstood this innovating pretension, finding it fatal to their doctrine. If the reader is somewhat startled at the statement I have just made, I will remind him that it amounts to nothing more than saying that in the contest between the new and the old philosophy, reason is entirely and absolutely on the side of the former, an assertion which, of course, I must both think admits of being substantiated, and must take myself, in some degree, to be able to aid in its being so.
The existing quarrel between the two philosophies might, perhaps, be personified through the medium of a principal champion on each side. For the new ideas I could only choose Locke, since he is admitted to have had no equally eminent successor; for the old I would choose M. Cousin, both on account of his superior merit and popularity, and also of his having made Locke the subject of some elaborate strictures that I happen to have read. On these, when they come again to hand, I should perhaps have something to remark; meanwhile I must content myself with addressing myself to one of them in the following manner:—
In antiquity and the middle ages, the schoolmaster and the philosopher were one and the same individual. The new philosophy was the first to separate these two departments; perceiving that the communication of truth is a distinct office from its investigation, and that that difference of office in each case necessitates a corresponding difference in the public, that is the proper object of its exercise. Since, moreover, society may be discriminated into two sorts of mind, admitting of being pictured as the childish and the adults, it is evident that the instructor must find his audience more especially in the former, while the investigator of truth must appeal exclusively to the latter. This he must needs do, to whichever of the sciences he ministers; and not only so, but he must more particularly address himself to a small and select portion of this itself selecter class, constitute them the witnesses and judges of his proceedings, and perceive that both his success in philosophy and the acknowledgment of it can only be founded first and foremost on their approbation. As even in jockeyism and prize-fighting, there are “the knowing ones,” similar referees are, by the nature of things, required for the flourishing estate of any science; and evidently in proportion as they might be incompetent to such an office, false or imperfect science must be the result.
Locke, acting on this instinctive view, communicated to the public certain observations he had made in mental philosophy, and entitled his work, An Essay on the Human Understanding. He properly called it an essay, because a person who simply aims to investigate truth, undertakes to do his best in the way of trial, endeavor, and experiment, in such sort as to make the word essay appropriate to what he does. The word moreover implies that the thing done, though it is the writer’s best, is liable to be incomplete, comparatively imperfect, and, indeed, in the more difficult questions of philosophy, as well as in the less advanced stages of philosophising, is sure to be so. Locke accordingly, having had his attention struck with certain phenomena of the human mind, told the public just what he had observed, and nothing else. Among the observations that he thus imparted, was the process through which the mind seems to go in arriving at the sum of its ideas, and especially the points from which it seems to start in this process.
M. Cousin, having apparently no conception of a way of acting so proper to legitimate inquiry, and having himself written a Course of Philosophy, evidently thinks Locke ought to have done the same; for he says that Locke is erroneous in the method of his philosophy, that he begins at the wrong end, that instead of having told us as he has how the ideas arise in the mind, he ought to have told us what the ideas are, instead of describing their origin to have described their actuality, to have given a list of the faculties of the mind, and so on. Which is just the same thing as saying that a traveller who publishes his explorations in America, ought instead to have gone to China.
I shall have to make some objections to Locke, but they will be of a nature exactly contrary to those of which he is usually made the subject. Instead of accusing his principles I shall have to impute to him the not sufficiently carrying them out; a fault due to his position as an early reformer, and perfectly consistent with his high character as such.
I have the more reason to note this distinction between M. Cousin’s department and the function exercised by Locke, because I am forced myself to take the benefit of it. Want of erudition would form very vulnerable points, were I to be judged by the former standard. In the little I have yet put forth on the subject of First Principles, I already find two or three errors of that sort, which a greater amount of reading would no doubt have enabled me to escape. My present letter may close with some correction of one of these.
Preliminary, I will venture to call “That which is is,” a first principle of reason, and “Two and two make four,” one of its derivatives, leaving this topic for future explanation, and then proceed thus:—When in my last letter I represented first principles as bounding the horizon of human knowledge, I left it to be inferred that both the kinds of “first principles” I had mentioned were thus describable in common. I find, however, that this metaphysical character belongs exclusively to first principles of sensuous experience, and no more belongs to first principles of reason than to first principles of grammar, or to first principles of rhetoric. That is, first principles of reason are merely the result of one of those analytical inquiries in which we arrive at something absolutely simple, and must there stop, just as in the science of numbers we may thus arrive at unity.