A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Modern Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

The Sources of Locke’s Thought. 1. His Puritan Ancestry. The ancestry of Locke is little known, and not much that appears in his personality can be explained by it. Both his father and mother were Puritans, and he seems to have inherited the severe piety, prudent, self-reliant industry, and love of liberty, that were common in English Puritan families of the middle class in the seventeenth century. During the first fourteen years he was schooled by his parents.

2. His Training in Tolerance. If Locke inherited in the least degree any temper of intolerance from his Puritan ancestry it entirely disappeared with his experiences before and during his life at the University of Oxford. In 1646, at the Westminster School, his mind revolted at the cruel intolerance on both sides in the events just succeeding the Civil War. He also rebelled at the stern scholastic training which he received. These negative influences were supplemented by positive incentives to freedom and toleration during his university life. John Owen was the liberal Vice-Chancellor of Oxford at that time, and the university granted freedom of thought to all Protestants. Locke felt Owen’s influence throughout his whole life. The fact that Locke’s intimate friend at Oxford was Professor Pococke, the most outspoken Royalist in the university, shows that whatever Puritanism there was in Locke’s nature had been ameliorated. Tolerance and liberty of opinion became now the key-note in the life of John Locke. “A gentle disposition, great love for his friends, an honest seeking after truth, and a firm faith in the importance of personal and political freedom are the traits mostremarkable in Locke as we know him from his books and letters.” His toleration was not of the same sort as that of his contemporary Leibnitz. Leibnitz sought to reconcile discordant elements by combining them into a new dogmatic theory; Locke neglected disagreements, sought no perfect harmony, but pointed out a via media that any individual might take. Leibnitz set forth a metaphysical system; Locke gave a practical method. He had great directness, and was a man of honesty of thought. Not being a partisan he had no side to defend; and he was not a partisan because philosophy was not his trade. Philosophy was to Locke the accomplishment of a gentleman who was interested in the puzzles of life. His diction is for ordinary people; it is simple and expressed in short Anglo-Saxon words. He shows no logic of thought; and while any sentence is admirable, the paragraph and the page are dull. His Essay is a chaos of plain truths, only here and there illuminated by imagination. He shows no poetic power, and the world in which he lived never fired his imagination. He studied the human mind as he would read the thermometer. To our fathers his Essay was a philosophical Bible. To us the Essay stands, not like a completely planned building, but like an enlarged cottage, very habitable, but making no single impression.

3. The Scientific Influence. As a fellow-countryman of Ockam and the two Bacons, Locke shows the same anti-mystical and positivist tendencies. He was a thorough Englishman in taste and temperament. When the “new philosophy” was finding its way into the Oxford circle, he was one of the first to welcome it. It came to the University through books; the lecturers were still true to Aristotle. Descartes, Hobbes, andBacon were widely read, as was also Gassendi’s exposition of Epicurus. Locke himself writes concerning the influence of Descartes upon him. He gave up all thought of becoming a clergyman; and his personal friendship for Bayle, a famous chemist, and for Sydenham, a no less famous physician, interested him in the empirical method as they applied it to chemistry and therapeutics. He owed his philosophical awakening to Descartes and the Port Royal logic. The lucidity of Descartes came to him as an inspiration of intellectual liberty; although he afterwards used the principles that Descartes had taught him to controvert his teacher’s doctrine.

During the first period of Locke’s life (1632–1666) he was nothing more than a student of medicine and a meteorological observer. He was the retired scholar who led so placid a life that it portended nothing noteworthy. He was a creditable scholar and teacher, but his life was negative in character. He had passed through stirring times, and they did not stir him.

4. The Political Influence. Locke’s interest in politics began when he was thirty-four years old—when he met Lord Ashley at Oxford. For fifteen years he shared the home and fortune of this most remarkable man of affairs in the reign of Charles II. This Lord Ashley (Earl of Shaftesbury) fled to Holland in 1682, and died there the next year. After the death of his patron Locke left England for exile in Holland until 1689, when he returned to England with William and Mary. In Holland he found a brilliant company, exiled from all countries; and he formed an intimate friendship with Limborch, the leader of liberal theology in Holland. Some of the time he lived with a Quaker.Locke’s friendship with Shaftesbury and his residence in Holland confirmed him in his belief in political liberty. So when William entered England and needed literary justification for the Revolution, he got it in Locke’s two Treatises on Government. Locke thus became the philosophical defender and intellectual representative of the Revolution that now after fifty years had reached its culmination.

Summary. On the whole, the inherited Puritanism of Locke was easily modified not only by his own moderate disposition, but also by his scientific interests and by his large political experiences. He naturally grew to be the apostle of the via media between traditionalism and empiricism. He published practically nothing before he was sixty years old. After his return from exile his principal works appeared in swift succession. Two accidents formed turning-points in his life. His accidental meeting with Shaftesbury in 1666 turned him to politics; and secondly, at an informal meeting of friends in the winter of 1670–1671 the question about the nature of sensations was accidentally raised, out of which grew his great Essay. His life was primarily one of affairs and of large acquaintance with men and things. To him life was the first thing, his interest in politics came second, and his philosophy third. That his ideas should have been the basis of extreme philosophical and political beliefs on the Continent is natural enough when one remembers the perils of misinterpretation to the man who preaches the doctrine of the via media.

The Purpose of Locke. In the historical perspective of two centuries we to-day see Locke in his Essay on the Human Understanding delivering the inauguraladdress of the eighteenth century. He is making the first formal declaration of the intellectual rights of the individual in a lengthy, dry, and erudite psychological dissertation. Of course he never knew the historical importance of his own work. It grew out of the need of the hour. He would have been astonished to find himself the spokesman of the century of French Encyclopædists, materialists, and revolutionists, of English deists, of German Illuminati, of Hume, and of Voltaire. He had in mind to answer the restrictions of the high churchman on the one hand, and the arrogant claims of the atheists on the other, as to the power of the human intellect. He states that his design is to “inquire into the original certainty and extent of human knowledge.” In this declaration Locke foreshadows Kant, but he falls short of the insight of Kant. For Locke speaks for the spirit of the eighteenth and not the nineteenth century, and (1) he must keep within the range of concrete facts; (2) he must state only what can be stated clearly; and (3) he must be practical. It was, however, in its larger meaning a declaration of human freedom. Locke shows what limitations the human intellect has, what it can and what it cannot know. When the Enlightenment got momentum, it forgot the limitations to knowledge that the sober Locke had set down, and read in his words only a declaration of license. The Essay differs from any previous modern philosophical writing. Man and not the universe is the subject. For the first time we find an examination of the laws of mind, and not of the laws of the universe.

But it is the via media for which Locke stands, and not the lawless excesses of the eighteenth century. The human reason is not all-knowing—cannot solve allproblems, is not endowed with divine ideas; on the other hand, the human reason is not merely a string of sensations. The human reason is just this: it is human. It stands midway between divine intuition and animal sensation. Man is free, but free under his own limitations. “If by this inquiry it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things beyond its comprehension—we should then not be so forward, out of affection for universal knowledge, to perplex ourselves and others with disputes about things, to which our understandings are not suited and of which we have not any notions at all.” Human freedom stands between the absolute freedom of God and the absolute necessity of the animal. Human freedom lies within the limits and bounds of human ideas—the via media; and analysis of those ideas will show what those limits and bounds are. There can be no knowledge without ideas. Some ideas may be erroneous and out of all relation to reality. On the other hand, there may be ideas to which no experiences fit. Intellectual freedom consists in having not isolated ideas, but ideas in their relations, that is, in the form of judgments. Locke was moved in making his analysis of ideas by a general moral purpose to correct the faults and fallacies in mankind and in himself. “Man’s faculties were given him to procure the happiness which this world is capable of,” says Locke, and it might have been Bacon who had said it. The search for the via media is justified by its practical and utilitarian ends. The via media is the way of freedom.

Two Sides of Locke’s Philosophy. The search for the via media is an attempt to find “the limits and extent of human knowledge.” This involved Locke in adiscrimination as to what should be accepted and what rejected of the past. It gives his philosophy a positive and a negative aspect. In brief, on its negative side he makes a show of rejecting the entire past by rejecting all innate ideas, but really he inconsistently accepted from the past its conception of substance and of individuality. On its positive side he builds up from experience a theory of knowledge which he divides into intuitive, demonstrative, and probable. That is to say, while Locke affirms that all our knowledge must be derived from experience, it never occurs to him to doubt the traditional Cartesian theory of the existence of God, man, and matter.

(a) The Negative Side—Locke and Scholasticism. Locke issued an avowed defiance to scholasticism in the introduction of his Essay. Of the four books into which the Essay is divided, the first was composed last and added as an introductory declaration of independence. If it had been the only part ever written, the anarchism of the eighteenth century would have been right in finding its justification in the Essay. To a modern mind this first book looks harmless enough, but in Locke’s time it had a deep sociological and political meaning. It expresses his practical moral defiance of traditional mediævalism. “There exist no innate ideas,” says Locke. Innate ideas mean to him the tyranny of tradition—unexamined and unsubstantiated beliefs, conceptions unverified by fact. They stand for church dogma imposed upon the unthinking masses, the absolutism of monarchy and the divine right of kings, the inherited superstitions about nature. Spinoza had deduced his entire philosophy from the innate idea of substance; Descartes had found at least three innate ideas;Leibnitz believed all ideas innate. Locke pleads for the personal right to examine all ideas. Locke’s critics have claimed that no philosopher ever maintained the existence of innate ideas in the sense in which Locke attacked them. Locke was aiming at something more vulnerable than innate ideas themselves—he was attacking the mediæval habit of the individual who takes a thing as true because the thing has the weight of traditional authority.