Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature’s beauties can
In some other wiser man.’
MR. LOCKE A GREAT PLAGIARIST
| The Examiner.] | [February 25, 1816. |
Mr. Locke has at this day all over Europe the character of one of the most profound and original thinkers that ever lived, and he is perhaps, without any exception, the most barefaced, deliberate, and bungling plagiarist, that ever appeared in philosophy. The reputation which he has acquired, as the founder of the new system in philosophy, or of any part of that system, is a pure imposition. Hobbes was the undoubted founder of the system; and he not only laid the foundation, but he completed the building. Every one of the principles of the modern, material philosophy of the mind, is to be found in his works, perfect and entire, as it is in the latest commentators of the French school. He not only took for his basis the principle that there is no other original faculty in the mind but sensation: he also pushed this principle into all its consequences, with a severe, masterly, and honest logic, of which there is scarcely any other example. By thus shewing the full extent of his system, ‘the very head and front of his offending,’ without any disguise, he only got himself an ill name, and his system was consigned to infamy or oblivion. Mr. Locke adopted the first principle, with a clumsy addition to it, but so as to secure himself the reputation of an original thinker; and at the same time, by not following it in a bold and decided manner into any one of its necessary consequences, he avoided giving the alarm to popular apprehension, and made a temporary compromise with the common sense and prejudices of his readers. The door being however opened to the introduction of this philosophy, by the admission of the general principle, all the rest by degrees followed as a matter of course; and it has been the business of the ablest metaphysicians ever since to clear what has been considered as the philosophy of Locke, from the inconsistences and imperfections which he had suffered to creep into it: all which improvements on Locke’s Essay are only a recurrence to the principles laid down by Hobbes, in the most explicit and unequivocal manner. To shew how little this last writer has been read, even by professed metaphysicians, Hume attributes the doctrine, that there are no abstract ideas, to Berkeley as an original discovery, though the arguments used by Berkeley are almost word for word taken from those used by Hobbes on the same subject. Yet Locke, in order we suppose to prevent inquiry into the originality of his own claims, calls Hobbes ‘a justly exploded author.’ This question is curious (philosophy apart) as a branch of literary history. It is, we know, dangerous to tamper with established reputation; nor should we perhaps have ventured to hazard the accusation we have here made, if we had not been supported by the authority of so well informed, candid, and respectable a writer as Dugald Stewart, whose testimony is of the more value, as he does not seem to be aware of the general propensity of Mr. Locke to appropriate the ideas of others to his own use, without disguise or acknowledgement. To any one who takes the trouble to peruse Professor Stewart’s very elegant Dissertation just published, on the rise and progress of modern Metaphysics, it will be evident that every one of those original discoveries, to which the author of the Essay on Human Understanding owes his celebrity, and on which he particularly plumed himself, is taken in substance and almost in words from writers of whom he does not once make mention; for example, his proposed division of the sciences, brought forward with great parade and formality, into Physics, Ethics, and Logic, which is the old division of the Greek philosophy; his definition of words which are definable or not definable, which is taken expressly from Descartes; his account of the origin of our ideas, that of association, of the social compact, etc. which are borrowed from Hobbes; his distinction of the properties of matter into primary and secondary, and his theory of consciousness or reflection as a distinct source of ideas, which belong to Descartes; his hypothesis about animal spirits, as the medium of association of ideas, adopted from Malbranche; his account of judgment and wit, which is to be found in Hobbes, &c. &c. If it be asked, whether Mr. Locke has not had the merit of combining the materials thus derived from other sources into a complete and masterly system, the answer would be, that his work is one of the most confused, undigested, and contradictory, that has been published on the subject. There is no one to whom those lines of the poet were ever more applicable.
‘Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil