LORD SHAFTESBURY.
I thank you for this concession. Although I cannot yet be convinced of the total impropriety of an earlier voyage, I am pleased to find you do not interdict the thing itself. Many wise persons among us have even talked at that rate. But you are more reasonable; and indeed that extravagance was not to be apprehended from your true sense and superior knowledge of human nature.
MR. LOCKE.
I have that esteem of your Lordship’s kind opinion, as to be very unwilling to forfeit any share of it. Yet what I have now to advance will, I readily foresee, expose me to some risk, in that particular.
For now your Lordship has expressed your regard for a superior knowledge of human nature, it emboldens me to add that such knowledge (which I have small right to claim to myself) is not to be acquired but by the largest and most extensive observation of the human species: so that I may be found at last even a warmer advocate for the uses of foreign travel, than your Lordship.
I hold then that the knowledge of human nature (the only knowledge, in the largest sense of the expression, deserving a wise man’s regard) can never be well attained but by seeing it under all its appearances; I mean, not merely, or chiefly, in that fair and well-dressed form it wears amid the arts and embellishments of our western world; but in its naked simplicity, and even deformities; nay, under all its disguises and distortions, arising from absurd governments and monstrous religions, in every distant region and quarter of the globe.
The subject appears to me of that importance, that it almost warms me, an old philosopher as I am, into some emulation of your Lordship’s enthusiasm.
I would say then, “that, to study HUMAN NATURE to purpose, a traveller must enlarge his circuit beyond the bounds of Europe. He must go, and catch her undressed, nay quite naked, in North-America, and at the Cape of Good Hope. He may then examine how she appears crampt, contracted, and buttoned up close in the strait tunic of law and custom, as in China and Japan: or, spread out and enlarged above her common size, in the loose and flowing robe of enthusiasm, among the Arabs and Saracens: or, lastly, as she flutters in the old rags of worn-out policy and civil government, and almost ready to run back naked to the deserts, as on the Mediterranean coast of Africa.”
These, my Lord, are the proper scenes for the philosopher, for the citizen of the world, to expatiate in. The tour of Europe is a paltry thing: a tame, uniform, unvaried prospect: which affords nothing but the same polished manners and artificial policies, scarcely diversified enough to take, or merit, our attention.
It is from a wider and more extensive view of mankind that a just estimate is to be made of the powers of human nature. Hence we collect what its genuine faculties are: what ideas and principles, or if any, are truly innate and essential to it; and what changes and modification it is susceptible of from law and custom.