Locke’s Conduct of Understanding. 122. The same praiseworthy diligence in hunting error to its lurking-places distinguishes the short treatise on the Conduct of the Understanding; which, having been originally designed as an additional chapter to the Essay,[876] is as it were the ethical application of its theory, and ought always to be read with it, if, indeed, for the sake of its practical utility, it should not come sooner into the course of education. Aristotle himself, and the whole of his dialectical school, had pointed out many of the sophisms against which we should guard our reasoning faculties; but these are chiefly such as others attempt to put upon us in dispute. There are more dangerous fallacies by which we cheat ourselves; prejudice, partiality, self-interest, vanity, inattention and indifference to truth. Locke, who was as exempt from these as almost any man who has turned his mind to so many subjects where their influence is to be suspected, has dwelled on the moral discipline of the intellect in this treatise better, as I conceive, than any of his predecessors, though we have already seen, and it might appear far more at length to those who should have recourse to the books, that Arnauld and Malebranche, besides other French philosophers of the age, had not been remiss in this indispensable part of logic.
[876] See a letter to Molyneux, dated April, 1697. Locke’s Works (fol. 1759), vol. iii., p. 539.
123. Locke, throughout this treatise, labours to secure the honest inquirer from that previous persuasion of his own opinion, which generally renders all his pretended investigations of its truth little more than illusive and nugatory. But the indifferency he recommends to everything except truth itself, so that we should not even wish anything to be true before we have examined whether it be so, seems to involve the impossible hypothesis that man is but a purely reasoning being. It is vain to press the recommendation of freedom from prejudice so far; since we cannot but conceive some propositions to be more connected with our welfare than others, and consequently to desire their truth. These exaggerations lay a fundamental condition of honest inquiry open to the sneers of its adversaries; and it is sufficient, because nothing more is really attainable, first to dispossess ourselves of the notion that our interests are concerned where they are not, and next, even when we cannot but wish one result of our inquiries rather than another, to be the more unremitting in our endeavours to exclude this bias from our reasoning.
124. I cannot think any parent or instructor justified in neglecting to put this little treatise in the hands of a boy about the time when the reasoning faculties become developed. It will give him a sober and serious, not flippant or self-conceited, independency of thinking; and while it teaches how to distrust ourselves, and to watch those prejudices which necessarily grow up from one cause or another, will inspire a reasonable confidence in what he has well considered, by taking off a little of that deference to authority, which is the more to be regretted in its excess, that, like its cousin-german party-spirit, it is frequently united to loyalty of heart, and the generous enthusiasm of youth.
CHAPTER XXX.
HISTORY OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND OF JURISPRUDENCE,
FROM 1650 TO 1700.
Sect. I.
ON MORAL PHILOSOPHY.
Pascal’s Provincial Letters—Taylor—Cudworth—Spinosa—Cumberland’s Law of Nature—Puffendorf’s Treatise on the same Subject—Rochefoucault and La Bruyere—Locke on Education—Fenelon.
Casuistry of the Jesuits. 1. The casuistical writers of the Roman church, and especially of the Jesuit order, belong to earlier periods; for little room was left for anything but popular compilations from large works of vast labour and accredited authority. But the false principles imputed to the latter school now raised a louder cry than before. Implacable and unsparing enemies, as well as ambitious intriguers themselves, they were encountered by a host of those who envied, feared, and hated them. Among those none were such willing or able accusers as the Jansenists whom they persecuted. |Pascal’s Provincial Letters.| Pascal, by his Provincial Letters, did more to ruin the name of Jesuit than all the controversies of Protestantism, or all the fulminations of the parliament of Paris. A letter of Antony Arnauld, published in 1655, wherein he declared that he could not find in Jansenius the propositions condemned by the pope, and laid himself open to censure by some of his own, provoked the Sorbonne, of which he was a member, to exclude him from the faculty of theology. Before this resolution was taken, Pascal came forward in defence of his friend, under a fictitious name, in the first of what have been always called Lettres Provinciales, but more accurately Lettres écrites par Louis de Montalte à un Provincial de ses Amis. In the first four of them he discusses the thorny problems of Jansenism, aiming chiefly to show that St. Thomas Aquinas had maintained the same doctrine on efficacious grace which his disciples the Dominicans now rejected from another quarter. But he passed from hence to a theme more generally intelligible and interesting, the false morality of the Jesuit casuists. He has accumulated so long a list of scandalous decisions, and dwelled upon them with so much wit and spirit, and yet with so serious a severity, that the order of Loyola became a bye-word with mankind. I do not agree with those who think the Provincial Letters a greater proof of the genius of Pascal than his Thoughts, in spite of the many weaknesses in reasoning which the latter display. They are at present, finely written as all confess them to be, too much filled with obsolete controversy, they quote books too much forgotten, they have too little bearing on any permanent sympathies, to be read with much interest or pleasure.