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).
IV. PHILOSOPHY.--(1) _An Essay concerning Human Understanding_, in
four books (1690). (2) _A Letter to the Bishop of Worcester concerning
some passages relating to Mr Locke's Essay of Human Understanding in a
late Discourse of his Lordship's in Vindication of the Trinity_
(1697). (3) _Mr Locke's Reply to the Bishop of Worcester's Answer to
his Letter_ (1697). (4) _Mr Locke's Reply to the Bishop of Worcester's
Answer to his Second Letter_ (1699). (5) _An Examination of Father
Malebranche's Opinion of Seeing all Things in God_ (1706, posthumous).
(6) _Remarks upon Some of Mr Norris's Books, wherein he asserts Father
Malebranche's Opinion of Seeing all Things in God_ (1720, posthumous).
MISCELLANEOUS.--(1) _A New Method of a Common Place Book_ (1686). This
was Locke's first article in the _Bibliothèque_ of Le Clerc; his other
contributions to it are uncertain, except the _Epitome of the Essay_,
(in 1688). (2) _The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina_ (prepared
in 1673 when Locke was Lord Shaftesbury's secretary at Exeter House,
remarkable for recognition of the principle of toleration, published
in 1706, in the posthumous collection). (3) _Memoirs relating to the
Life of Anthony, First Earl of Shaftesbury_ (1706). (4) _Elements of
Natural Philosophy_ (1706). (5) _Observations upon the Growth and
Culture of Vines and Olives_ (1706). (6) _Rules of a Society which met
once a Week, for their improvement in Useful Knowledge, and for the
Promotion of Truth and Christian Charity_ (1706). (7) _A Letter from a
Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country_, published in 1875
(included by Des Maizeaux in his _Collection of Several Pieces of Mr
John Locke's_, 1720), and soon afterwards burned by the common hangman
by orders from the House of Lords, was disavowed by Locke himself. It
may have been dictated by Shaftesbury. There are also miscellaneous
writings of Locke first published in the biographies of Lord King
(1830) and of Mr Fox Bourne (1876).
_Letters_ from Locke to Thoynard, Limborch, Le Clerc, Guenellon,
Molyneux, Collins, Sir Isaac Newton, the first and the third Lord
Shaftesbury, Lords Peterborough and Pembroke, Clarke of Chipley and
others are preserved, many of them unpublished, most of them in the
keeping of Lord Lovelace at Horseley Towers, and of Mr Sanford at
Nynehead in Somerset, or in the British Museum. They express the
gracious courtesy and playful humour which were natural to him, and
his varied interests in human life.
I. _Social Economy._--It has been truly said that all Locke's
writings, even the _Essay on Human Understanding_ itself, were
occasional, and "intended directly to counteract the enemies of reason
and freedom in his own age." This appears in his works on social
polity, written at a time when the principles of democracy and
toleration were struggling with divine right of kings, and when "the
popular assertors of public liberty were the greatest engrossers of it
too." "The state" with Locke was the deliberate outcome of free
contract rather than a natural growth or organism. That the people, in
the exercise of their sovereignty, have the right to govern themselves
in the way they judge to be for the common good; and that civil
government, whatever form it assumes, has no right to interfere with
religious beliefs that are not inconsistent with civil society, is at
the foundation of his political philosophy. He rested this sovereignty
on virtual mutual contract on the part of the people themselves to be
so governed. But the terms of the contract might be modified by the
sovereign people themselves, from time to time, in accommodation to
changing circumstances. He saw that things in this world were in a
constant flux, so that no society could remain long in the same state,
and that "the grossest absurdities" must be the issue of "following
custom when reason has left the custom." He was always disposed to
liberal ecclesiastical concessions for the sake of peace, and he
recommended harmonious co-operation with the civil magistrate in all
matters of worship and government that were not expressly determined
by Scripture.
The social contract.
The attack on Sir Robert Filmer in Locke's _First Treatise on
Government_ was an anachronism. The democratic principle argued for in
the _Second Treatise_, while in advance of the practice of his age,
was in parts anticipated by Aquinas and Bodin, as well as by Grotius
and Hooker. Its guiding principle is, that civil rulers hold their
power not absolutely but conditionally, government being essentially a
moral trust, forfeited if the conditions are not fulfilled by the
trustees. This presupposes an original and necessary law of nature or
reason, as insisted on by Hooker. But it points to the constitution of
civil society in the abstract rather than to the actual origin of
government as a matter of fact and past history. There is no
historical proof that power was formally entrusted to rulers by the
conscious and deliberate action of the ruled. Indeed Locke seems to
allow that the consent was at first tacit, and by anterior law of
nature conditional on the beneficial purpose of the trust being
realized. His _Treatises on Government_ were meant to vindicate the
Convention parliament and the English revolution, as well as to refute
the ideas of absolute monarchy held by Hobbes and Filmer. They are
classics in the library of English constitutional law and polity.
Religious Toleration.
Locke's philosophical defence of religious liberty in the four
_Letters of Toleration_ is the most far-reaching of his contributions
to social polity. He had a more modest estimate of human resources for
forming true judgments in religion, and a less pronounced opinion of
the immorality of religious error, than either the Catholic or the
Puritan. The toleration which he spent his life in arguing for
involved a change from the authoritative and absolute to the relative
point of view, as regards man's means of knowledge and belief. It was
a protest against those who in theology "peremptorily require
demonstration and demand certainty where probability only is to be
had." The practice of universal toleration amidst increasing religious
differences was an application of the conception of human
understanding which governs his _Essay_. Once a paradox it is now
commonplace, and the superabundant argument in the _Letters on
Toleration_ fatigues the modern reader. The change is due more to
Locke himself than to anyone else. Free thought and liberty of
conscience had indeed been pleaded for, on various grounds, in the
century in which he lived. Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, Glanvill and
other philosophical thinkers in the Church of England urged toleration
in the state, in conjunction with wide comprehension in the church, on
the ground of our necessary intellectual limitation and inability to
reach demonstration in theological debates. Puritans like Owen and
Goodwin, whose idea of ecclesiastical comprehension was dogmatic and
narrow, were ready to accept sectarian variety, because it was their
duty to allow many religions in the nation, but only one form of
theology within their own sect. The existence of separate
nationalities, on the other hand, was the justification of national
churches according to the latitudinarian churchmen with whom Locke
associated: a national church comprehensive in creed, and thus
co-extensive with the nation was their ideal. Locke went far to unite
in a higher principle elements in the broad Anglican and the Puritan
theories, while he recognized the individual liberty of thought which
distinguishes the national church of England. A constant sense of the
limits of human understanding was at the bottom of his arguments for
tolerance. He had no objection to a national establishment of
religion, provided that it was comprehensive enough, and was really
the nation organized to promote goodness; not to protect the
metaphysical subtleties of sectarian theologians. The recall of the
national religion to the simplicity of the gospels would, he hoped,
make toleration of nonconformists unnecessary, as few would then
remain. To the atheist alone Locke refuses full toleration, on the
ground that social obligation can have no hold over him, for "the
taking away of God dissolves all." He argued, too, against full
toleration of the Church of Rome in England, on the ground of its
unnational allegiance to a foreign sovereign. The unfitness of
persecution as a means of propagating truth is copiously insisted on
by Locke. Persecution can only transform a man into a hypocrite;
belief is legitimately formed only by discernment of sufficient
evidence; apart from evidence, a man has no right to control the
understanding; he cannot determine arbitrarily what his neighbours
must believe. Thus Locke's pleas for religious toleration resolve at
last into his philosophical view of the foundation and limits of human
knowledge.
II. _The Reasonableness of Christianity._--The principles that
governed Locke's social polity largely determined his attitude to
Christianity. His "latitudinarianism" was the result of extraordinary
reverence for truth, and a perception that knowledge may be sufficient
for the purposes of human life while it falls infinitely short of
speculative completeness. He never loses sight of essential
reasonableness as the only ground on which Christian faith can
ultimately rest. But Locke accepted Holy Scripture as infallible with
the reverence of a Puritan. "It has God for its author, salvation for
its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter." Yet
he did not, like many Puritans, mean Scripture as interpreted by
himself or by his sect. And faith in its infallibility was combined in
Locke with deep distrust in "enthusiasm." This predisposed him to
regard physical miracles as the solid criterion for distinguishing
reasonable religious conviction from "inclinations, fancies and strong
assurances." Assent in religion as in everything else he could justify
only on the ground of its harmony with reason; professed "illumination
without search, and certainty without proof" was to him a sign of
absence of the divine spirit in the professor. Confidence that we are
right, he would say, is in itself no proof that we are right: when God
asks assent to the truth of a proposition in religion, he either shows
us its intrinsic rationality by ordinary means, or he offers
miraculous proof of the reality of which we need reasonable evidence.
But we must know what we mean by miracle. Reasonableness, in short,
must always at last be our guide. His own faith in Christianity rested
on its moral excellence when it is received in its primitive
simplicity, combined with the miracles which accompanied its original
promulgation. But "even for those books which have the attestation of
miracles to confirm their being from God, the miracles," he says, "are
to be judged by the doctrine, and not the doctrine by the miracles."
Miracles alone cannot vindicate the divinity of immoral doctrine.
Locke's _Reasonableness of Christianity_ was an attempt to recall
religion from the crude speculations of theological sects, destructive
of peace among Christians, to its original simplicity; but this is apt
to conceal its transcendent mystery. Those who practically acknowledge
the supremacy of Jesus as Messiah accept all that is essential to the
Christianity of Locke. His own Christian belief, sincere and earnest,
was more the outcome of the common sense which, largely through him,
moulded the prudential theology of England in the 18th century, than
of the nobler elements present in More, Cudworth and other religious
thinkers of the preceding age, or afterwards in Law and Berkeley,
Coleridge and Schleiermacher.