In the evening Mr. G. remarked on our debt to Macaulay, for guarding the purity of the English tongue. I recalled a favourite passage from Milton, that next to the man who gives wise and intrepid counsels of government, he places the man who cares for the purity of his mother tongue. Mr. G. liked this. Said he only knew Bright once slip into an error in this respect, when he used “transpire” for “happen.” Macaulay of good example also in rigorously abstaining from the inclusion of matter in footnotes. Hallam an offender in this respect. I pointed out that he offended in company with Gibbon.
Monday, Dec. 28.—We had an animated hour at breakfast.
Oxford and Cambridge.—Curious how, like two buckets, whenever one was up, the other was down. Cambridge has never produced four such men of action in successive ages as Wolsey, Laud, Wesley, and Newman.
J. M.—In the region of thought Cambridge has produced the greatest of all names, Newton.
Mr. G.—In the earlier times Oxford has it—with Wycliff, Occam, above all Roger Bacon. And then in the eighteenth century, Butler.
J. M.—But why not Locke, too, in the century before?
This brought on a tremendous tussle, for Mr. G. was of the same mind, and perhaps for the same sort of reason, as Joseph de Maistre, that contempt for Locke is the beginning of knowledge. All very well for De Maistre, but not for a man in line with European liberalism. I pressed the very obvious point that you must take into account not only a man's intellectual product or his general stature, but also [pg 477]
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his influence as a historic force. From the point of view of influence Locke was the origin of the emancipatory movement of the eighteenth century abroad, and laid the philosophic foundations of liberalism in civil government at home. Mr. G. insisted on a passage of Hume's which he believed to be in the history, disparaging Locke as a metaphysical thinker.[292] “That may be,” said I, “though Hume in his Essays is not above paying many compliments to ‘the great reasoner,’ etc., to whom, for that matter, I fancy that he stood in pretty direct relation. But far be it from me to deny that Hume saw deeper than Locke into the metaphysical millstone. That is not the point. I'm only thinking of his historic place, and, after all, the history of philosophy is itself a philosophy.” To minds nursed in dogmatic schools, all this is both unpalatable and incredible.
Somehow we slid into the freedom of the will and Jonathan Edwards. I told him that Mill had often told us how Edwards argued the necessarian or determinist case as keenly as any modern.