At Otes he was busy with his pen. The Letter on Toleration involved him in controversy. An Answer by Jonas Proast of Queen’s College, Oxford, had drawn forth in 1690 a Second Letter. A rejoinder in 1691 was followed by Locke’s elaborate Third Letter on Toleration in the summer of the following year. In 1691 currency and finance were much in his thoughts, and in the following year he addressed an important letter to Sir John Somers on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money. When he was in Holland he had written letters to his friend Clarke of Chipley about the education of his children. These letters formed the substance of the little volume entitled Thoughts on Education (1693), which still holds its place among classics in that department. Nor were the “principles of revealed religion” forgotten. The subtle theological controversies of the 17th century made him anxious to show how simple after all fundamental Christianity is. In the Reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures (anonymous, 1695), Locke sought to separate the divine essence of Christ’s religion from later accretions of dogma, and from reasonings due to oversight of the necessary limits of human thought. This intended Eirenicon involved him in controversies that lasted for years. Angry polemics assailed the book. A certain John Edwards was conspicuous. Locke’s Vindication, followed by a Second Vindication in 1697, added fuel to this fire. Above all, the great Essay was assailed and often misinterpreted by philosophers and divines. Notes of opposition had been heard almost as soon as it appeared. John Norris, the metaphysical rector of Bemerton and English disciple of Malebranche, criticized it in 1690. Locke took no notice at the time, but his second winter at Otes was partly employed in An Examination of Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing all Things in God, and in Remarks upon some of Mr Norris’s Books, tracts which throw light upon his own ambiguous theory of perception through the senses. These were published after his death. A second edition of the Essay, with a chapter added on “Personal Identity,” and numerous alterations in the chapter on “Power,” appeared in 1694. The third, which was only a reprint, was published in 1695. Wynne’s well-known abridgment helped to make the book known in Oxford, and his friend William Molyneux introduced it in Dublin. In 1695 a revival of controversy about the currency diverted Locke’s attention. Events in that year occasioned his Observations on Silver Money and Further Considerations on Raising the Value of Money.
In 1696 Locke was induced to accept a commissionership on the Board of Trade. This required frequent visits to London. Meantime the Essay on Human Understanding and the Reasonableness of Christianity were becoming more involved in a wordy warfare between dogmatists and latitudinarians, trinitarians and unitarians. The controversy with Edwards was followed by a more memorable one with Stillingfleet, bishop of Worcester. John Toland, in his Christianity not Mysterious, had exaggerated doctrines in the Essay, and then adopted them as his own. In the autumn of 1696, Stillingfleet, an argumentative ecclesiastic more than a religious philosopher, in his Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity, charged Locke with disallowing mystery in human knowledge, especially in his account of the metaphysical idea of “substance.” Locke replied in January 1697. Stillingfleet’s rejoinder appeared in May, followed by a Second Letter from Locke in August, to which the bishop replied in the following year. Locke’s Third Letter, in which the ramifications of this controversy are pursued with a copious expenditure of acute reasoning and polished irony, was delayed till 1699, in which year Stillingfleet died. Other critics of the Essay entered the lists. One of the ablest was John Sergeant, a priest of the Roman Church, in Solid Philosophy Asserted Against the Fancies of the Ideists (1697). He was followed by Thomas Burnet and Dean Sherlock. Henry Lee, rector of Tichmarch, criticized the Essay, chapter by chapter in a folio volume entitled Anti-Scepticism (1702); John Broughton dealt another blow in his Psychologia (1703); and John Norris returned to the attack, in his Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World (1701-1704). On the other hand Locke was defended with vigour by Samuel Bolde, a Dorsetshire clergyman. The Essay itself was meanwhile spreading over Europe, impelled by the name of its author as the chief philosophical defender of civil and religious liberty. The fourth edition (the last while Locke was alive) appeared in 1700, with important additional chapters on “Association of Ideas” and “Enthusiasm.” What was originally meant to form another chapter was withheld. It appeared among Locke’s posthumous writings as The Conduct of the Understanding, one of the most characteristic of his works. The French translation of the Essay by Pierre Coste, Locke’s amanuensis at Otes, was issued almost simultaneously with the fourth edition. The Latin version by Richard Burridge of Dublin followed a year after, reprinted in due time at Amsterdam and at Leipzig.
In 1700 Locke resigned his commission at the Board of Trade, and devoted himself to Biblical studies and religious meditation. The Gospels had been carefully studied when he was preparing his Reasonableness of Christianity. He now turned to the Epistles of St Paul, and applied the spirit of the Essay and the ordinary rules of critical interpretation to a literature which he venerated as infallible, like the pious Puritans who surrounded his youth. The work was ready when he died, and was published two years after. A tract on Miracles, written in 1702, also appeared posthumously. Fresh adverse criticism of the Essay was reported to him in his last year, and the book was formally condemned by the authorities at Oxford. “I take what has been done rather as a recommendation of the book,” he wrote to his young friend Anthony Collins, “and when you and I next meet we shall be merry on the subject.” One attack only moved him. In 1704 his adversary, Jonas Proast, revived their old controversy. Locke in consequence began a Fourth Letter on Toleration. A few pages, ending in an unfinished paragraph, exhausted his remaining strength; but the theme which had employed him at Oxford more than forty years before, and had been a ruling idea throughout the long interval, was still dominant in the last days of his life.
All the summer of 1704 he continued to decline, tenderly nursed by Lady Masham and her step-daughter Esther. On the 28th of October he died, according to his last recorded words, “in perfect charity with all men, and in sincere communion with the whole church of Christ, by whatever names Christ’s followers call themselves.” His grave is on the south side of the parish church of High Laver, in which he often worshipped, near the tombs of the Mashams, and of Damaris, the widow of Cudworth. At the distance of 1 m. are the garden and park where the manor house of Otes once stood.
Locke’s writings have made his intellectual and moral features familiar. The reasonableness of taking probability as our guide in life was in the essence of his philosophy. The desire to see for himself what is true in the light of reasonable evidence, and that others should do the same, was his ruling passion, if the term can be applied to one so calm and judicial. “I can no more know anything by another man’s understanding,” he would say, “than I can see by another man’s eyes.” This repugnance to believe blindly what rested on arbitrary authority, as distinguished from what was seen to be sustained by self-evident reason, or by demonstration, or by good probable evidence, runs through his life. He is typically English in his reverence for facts, whether facts of sense or of living consciousness, in his aversion from abstract speculation and verbal reasoning, in his suspicion of mysticism, in his calm reasonableness, and in his ready submission to truth, even when truth was incapable of being fully reduced to system by man. The delight he took in exercising reason in regard to everything he did was what his friend Pierre Coste remarked in Locke’s daily life at Otes. “He went about the most trifling things always with some good reason.” Above all things he loved order; and he had got the way of observing it in everything with wonderful exactness. As he always kept the useful in his eye in all his disquisitions, he esteemed the employments of men only in proportion to the good they were capable of producing; for which cause he had no great value for the critics who waste their lives in composing words and phrases in coming to the choice of a various reading, in a passage that has after all nothing important in it. He cared yet less for those professed disputants, who, being taken up with the desire of coming off with victory, justify themselves behind the ambiguity of a word, to give their adversaries the more trouble. And whenever he had to deal with this sort of folks, if he did not beforehand take a strong resolution of keeping his temper, he quickly fell into a passion; for he was naturally choleric, but his anger never lasted long. If he retained any resentment it was against himself, for having given way to so ridiculous a passion; which, as he used to say, “may do a great deal of harm, but never yet did anyone the least good.” Large, “round-about” common sense, intellectual strength directed by a virtuous purpose, not subtle or daring speculation sustained by an idealizing faculty, in which he was deficient, is what we find in Locke. Defect in speculative imagination appears when he encounters the vast and complex final problem of the universe in its organic unity.
Locke is apt to be forgotten now, because in his own generation he so well discharged the intellectual mission of initiating criticism of human knowledge, and of diffusing the spirit of free inquiry and universal toleration which has since profoundly affected the civilized world. He has not bequeathed an imposing system, hardly even a striking discovery in metaphysics, but he is a signal example in the Anglo-Saxon world of the love of attainable truth for the sake of truth and goodness. “If Locke made few discoveries, Socrates made none.” But both are memorable in the record of human progress.
In the inscription on his tomb, prepared by himself, Locke refers to his books as a true representation of what he was. They are concerned with Social Economy, Christianity, Education and Philosophy, besides Miscellaneous writings.
I. Social Economy.—(1) Epistola de Tolerantia (1689, translated into English in the same year). (2) Two Treatises on Government (1690) (the Patriarcha of Filmer, to which the First Treatise was a reply, appeared in 1680). (3) A Second Letter concerning Toleration (1690). (4) Some Considerations on the Consequence of Lowering the Rate of Interest and Raising the Value of Money (1691). (5) A Third Letter for Toleration (1692). (6) Short Observations on a printed paper entitled, “For encouraging the Coining of Silver Money in England, and after for Keeping it here” (1695). (7) Further Considerations concerning Raising the Value of Money (1695) (occasioned by a Report containing an “Essay for the Amendment of Silver Coins,” published that year by William Lowndes, secretary for the Treasury). (8) A Fourth Letter for Toleration (1706, posthumous).
II. Christianity.—(1) The Reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures (1695). (2) A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity from Mr Edwards’s Reflections (1695). (3) A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity (1697). (4) A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul to the Galatians, First and Second Corinthians, Romans and Ephesians. To which is prefixed an Essay for the understanding of St Paul’s Epistles by consulting St Paul himself (1705-1707, posthumous). (5) A Discourse of Miracles (1716, posthumous).
III. Education.—(1) Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693). (2) The Conduct of the Understanding (1706, posthumous). (3) Some Thoughts concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman (1706, posthumous). (4) Instructions for the Conduct of a Young Gentleman (1706, posthumous). (5) Of Study (written in France in Locke’s journal, and published in L. King’s Life of Locke in 1830).