Locke

by Thomas Fowler

"Many children imputing the pain they endured at school to their books they were corrected for, so join those ideas together, that a book becomes their aversion, and they are never reconciled to the study and use of them all their lives after; and thus reading becomes a torment to them, which otherwise possibly they might have made the great pleasure of their lives. There are rooms convenient enough, that some men cannot study in, and fashions of vessels, which though never so clean and commodious, they cannot drink out of, and that by reason of some accidental ideas which are annexed to them and make them offensive. And who is there that hath not observed some man to flag at the appearance or in the company of some certain person not otherwise superior to him, but because, having once on some occasion got the ascendant, the idea of authority and distance goes along with that of the person, and he that has been thus subjected is not able to separate them."

Had Locke's Essay ended with the Second Book, we should hardly have detected in it any incompleteness. It might have been regarded as an analytical work on the nature and origin of our ideas, or, in other words, on the elements of our knowledge. There are, however, a third and fourth book—the former treating "Of Words," the latter "Of Knowledge and Opinion." Locke's notion appears to have been that, after treating of "Ideas," mainly as regarded in themselves, it was desirable to consider them as combined in Judgments or Propositions, and to estimate the various degrees of assent which we give or ought to give to such judgments, when formed. The Fourth Book thus, to a certain extent, takes the place, and was probably designed to take the place, of the Logic of the Schools. "But," to quote Locke's own language in the Abstract of the Essay, "when I came a little nearer to consider the nature and manner of human knowledge, I found it had so much to do with propositions, and that words, either by custom or necessity, were so mixed with it, that it was impossible to discourse of knowledge with that clearness we should, without saying something first of words and language."

The last three Chapters of the Third Book are remarkable for their sound sense, and may still be read with the greatest advantage by all who wish to be put on their guard against the delusions produced by misleading or inadequate language—those "Idola Fori" which Bacon describes as the most troublesome of the phantoms which beset the mind in its search for truth. Some of the best and freshest of Locke's thoughts, indeed, are to be found in this book, and especially in the less technical parts of it.

The Fourth Book, under the head of Knowledge, treats of a great variety of interesting topics: of the nature of knowledge, its degrees, its extent, and reality; of the truth and certainty of Universal Propositions; of the logical axioms, or laws of thought; of the evidence for the existence of a God; of Faith and Reason; of the Degrees of Assent; of Enthusiasm; of Error. Into these attractive regions it is impossible that I can follow my author, but the reader who wishes to see examples of Locke's strong practical sense and, at the same time, to understand the popularity so soon and so constantly accorded to the Essay, should make acquaintance at least with the four chapters last named.

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From the task of description I now pass to that of criticism, though this must be confined within still narrower limits than the former, and indeed, amongst the multiplicity of subjects which invite attention, I must confine myself to one only: the account of the ultimate origin of our knowledge, which forms the main subject of the Essay.

Locke, as we have seen, derived all our knowledge from Experience. But experience, with him, was simply the experience of the individual. In order to acquire this experience, it was indeed necessary that we should have certain "inherent faculties." But of these "faculties" he gives no other account than that God has "furnished" or "endued" us with them. Thus, the Deus ex machina was as much an acknowledged necessity in the philosophy of Locke, and was, in fact, almost as frequently invoked, as in that of his antagonists. Is there any natural account to be given of the way in which we come to have these "faculties," of the extraordinary facility we possess of acquiring simple and forming complex ideas, is a question which he appears never to have put to himself. Inquiries of this kind, however, we must recollect, were foreign to the men of his generation, and, in fact, have only recently become a recognized branch of mental philosophy. Hence it was that his system left so much unexplained. Not only the very circumstance that we have "inherent faculties" at all, but the wide differences of natural capacity which we observe between one man or race and another, and the very early period at which there spring up in the mind such notions as those of space, time, equality, causality, and the like, are amongst the many difficulties which Locke's theory, in its bare and unqualified form, fails satisfactorily to answer. It was thus comparatively easy for Kant to show that the problem of the origin of knowledge could not be left where Locke had left it; that our à posteriori experiences presuppose and are only intelligible through certain à priori perceptions and conceptions which the mind itself imposes upon them; or, to use more accurate language, through certain à priori elements in our perceptions and conceptions, which the mind contributes from itself. Thus the child appears, as soon as it is capable of recognizing any source of its impressions, to regard an object as situated in space, an event as happening in time, circumstances which have occurred together as likely to occur together again. But Kant's own account was defective in leaving this à priori element of our knowledge unexplained, or, at least, in attempting no explanation of it. The mind, according to him, is possessed of certain Forms and Categories, which shape and co-ordinate the impressions received from the external world, being as necessary to the acquisition of experience, as experience is necessary to eliciting them into consciousness. But here his analysis ends. He does not ask how the mind comes to be possessed of these Forms and Categories, nor does he satisfactorily determine the precise relation in which they stand to the empirical elements of knowledge. When studying his philosophy, we seem indeed to be once more receding to the mysterious region of Innate Ideas. But the mystery is removed at least several stages back, if we apply to the solution of these mental problems the principle of Heredity, which has recently been found so potent in clearing up many of the difficulties connected with external nature. What are the "Innate Ideas" of the older philosophers, or the Forms and Categories of Kant, but certain tendencies of the mind to group phenomena, the "fleeting objects of sense," under certain relations and regard them under certain aspects? And why should these tendencies be accounted for in any other way than that by which we are accustomed to account for the tendency of an animal or plant, belonging to any particular species, to exhibit, as it developes, the physical characteristics of the species to which it belongs? The existence of the various mental tendencies and aptitudes, so far as the individual is concerned, is, in fact, to be explained by the principle of hereditary transmission. But how have these tendencies and aptitudes come to be formed in the race? The most scientific answer is that which, following the analogy of the theory now so widely admitted with respect to the physical structure of animals and plants, assigns their formation to the continuous operation, through a long series of ages, of causes acting uniformly, or almost uniformly, in the same direction—in one word, of Evolution. This explanation may have its difficulties, but it is at any rate an attempt at a natural explanation where no other such attempt exists, and it has the merit of falling in with the explanations of corresponding phenomena now most generally accepted amongst scientific men in other departments of knowledge.

According to this theory, there is both an à priori and an à posteriori element in our knowledge, or, to speak more accurately, there are both à priori and à posteriori conditions of our knowing, the à posteriori condition being, as in all systems, individual experience, the à priori condition being inherited mental aptitudes, which, as a rule, become more and more marked and persistent with each successive transmission. Now Locke lays stress simply upon the à posteriori condition, though he recognizes a certain kind of à priori condition in our "natural faculties," and the simple ideas furnished by reflecting on their operations. The very important condition, however, of inherited aptitudes facilitating the formation of certain general conceptions concurrently, or almost concurrently, with the presentation of individual experiences, did not occur to him as an element in the solution of the problem he had undertaken to answer, nor, in that stage of speculation, could it well have done so. His peculiar contribution to the task of solving this question consisted in his skilful and popular delineation of the à posteriori element in knowledge, and in his masterly exposure of the insufficiency of the account of the à priori element, as then commonly given. Locke's own theory was afterwards strained by Hume and Hartley, and still more by his professed followers in France, such as Condillac and Helvétius, till at last, in the opinion of most competent judges, it snapped asunder. Then, under the massive, though often partial and obscure, treatment of Kant, came the rehabilitation of the à priori side of knowledge. In recent times, mainly by aid of the light thrown on it from other branches of inquiry, a more thorough and scientific treatment of psychology has done much, as I conceive, towards completing and reconciling the two divergent theories which at one time seemed hopelessly to divide the world of philosophic thinkers. And yet, as it appears to me, the ultimate mystery which surrounds the beginnings of intellectual life on the globe has by no means been removed.

As closely connected with this general criticism of Locke's system, or rather as presenting the defects just criticised under another form, I may notice the tendency of the Essay to bring into undue prominence the passive receptivities of the Mind, and to ignore its activity and spontaneity. The metaphor of the tabula rasa, the sheet of "white paper," once admitted, exercises a warping influence over the whole work. The author is so busied with the variety of impressions from without, that he seems sometimes almost to ignore the reaction of the mind from within. And yet this one-sideness of Locke's conception of mind may easily be exaggerated. "When the Understanding is once stored with simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare, and unite them, even to an almost infinite variety, and so can make at pleasure new complex ideas." (Bk. II., ch. ii., § 2.) Moreover, amongst the simple ideas themselves are the ideas of Reflection, "being such as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations." The system, in fact, assumes an almost ceaseless activity of mind, after the simple ideas of sensation have once entered it. But where it fails is in not recognizing that mental reaction which is essential to the formation of even the simple ideas of sensation themselves, as well as that spontaneous activity of mind which often seems to assert itself independently of the application of any stimulus from without. Here again a more scientific psychology than was possible in Locke's day comes to our aid, and shows, as is done by Mr. Bain and other recent writers, that the nerves, stored with energy, often discharge themselves of their own accord, and that movement is at least as much an original factor in animal life as is sensation, while sometimes it even precedes it in time. Had the constant interaction of mental activity and mental receptivity, producing a compound in which it is often almost impossible to disentangle the elements, been duly recognized by Locke, it would certainly have made his philosophy less simple, but it would have made it more true to facts. Physiology, however, was in his days in far too backward a state itself to throw much light upon Psychology. And the reaction against the prevailing doctrine of Innate Ideas naturally led to a system in which the influences of external circumstances, of education and habit, were exaggerated at the expense of the native powers, or as they might more appropriately be called the inherited aptitudes, and the spontaneous activity of the mind.

Here, tempting as it is to follow my author along the many tracks of psychological, metaphysical, and logical discussion which he always pursues with sagacity, candour, and good sense, if not always with the consistency and profundity which we should require from later writers, my criticism must necessarily end.