theory and art of Education. His contribution may be taken as either
an introduction to or an application of the _Essay on Human
Understanding_. In the _Thoughts on Education_ imaginative sentiment
is never allowed to weigh against utility; information is subordinate
to the formation of useful character; the part which habit plays in
individuals is always kept in view; the dependence of intelligence and
character, which it is the purpose of education to improve, upon
health of body is steadily inculcated; to make children happy in
undergoing education is a favourite precept; accumulating facts
without exercising thought, and without accustoming the youthful mind
to look for evidence, is always referred to as a cardinal vice. Wisdom
more than much learning is what he requires in the teacher. In
instruction he gives the first place to "that which may direct us to
heaven," and the second to "the study of prudence, or discreet
conduct, and management of ourselves in the several occurrences of our
lives, which most assists our quiet prosperous passage through this
present life." The infinity of real existence, in contrast with the
necessary finitude of human understanding and experience, is always in
his thoughts. This "disproportionateness" between the human mind and
the universe of reality imposes deliberation in the selection of
studies, and disregard for those which lie out of the way of a wise
man. Knowledge of what other men have thought is perhaps of too little
account with Locke. "It is an idle and useless thing to make it one's
business to study what have been other men's sentiments in matters
where only reason is to be judge." In his _Conduct of the
Understanding_ the pupil is invited to occupy the point at which "a
full view of all that relates to a question" is to be had, and at
which alone a rational discernment of truth is possible. The
uneducated mass of mankind, he complains, either "seldom reason at
all," or "put passion in the place of reason," or "for want of large,
sound, round-about sense" they direct their minds only to one part of
the evidence, "converse with one sort of men, read but one sort of
books, and will not come in the hearing of but one sort of notions,
and so carve out to themselves a little Goshen in the intellectual
world, where light shines, and, as they conclude, day blesses them;
but the rest of the vast expansion they give up to night and darkness,
and avoid coming near it." Hasty judgment, bias, absence of an a
priori "indifference" to what the evidence may in the end require us
to conclude, undue regard for authority, excessive love for custom and
antiquity, indolence and sceptical despair are among the states of
mind marked by him as most apt to interfere with the formation of
beliefs in harmony with the Universal Reason that is active in the
universe.
IV. _Philosophy._--The _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ embodies
Locke's philosophy. It was the first attempt on a great scale, and in
the Baconian spirit, to estimate critically the certainty and the
adequacy of human knowledge, when confronted with God and the
universe.
The "Introduction" to the _Essay_ is the keynote to the whole. The
ill-fortune of men in their past endeavours to comprehend themselves
and their environment is attributed in a great measure to their
disposition to extend their inquiries into matters beyond the reach of
human understanding. To inquire with critical care into "the original,
certainty and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and
degrees of belief, opinion and assent," is accordingly Locke's design
in this _Essay_. Excluding from his enquiry "the physical
consideration of the mind," he sought to make a faithful report, based
on an introspective study of consciousness, as to how far a human
understanding of the universe can reach. Although his report might
show that our knowledge at its highest must be far short of a
"universal or perfect comprehension of whatsoever is," it might still
be "sufficient" for us, because "suited to our individual state." The
"light of reason," the "candle of the Lord," that is set up in us may
be found to shine bright enough for all _our_ purposes. If human
understanding cannot fully solve the infinite problem of the universe,
man may at least see that at no stage of his finite experience is he
necessarily the sport of chance, and that he can practically secure
his own wellbeing.
The last book of the _Essay_, which treats of Knowledge and
Probability, is concerned more directly than the three preceding ones
with Locke's professed design. It has been suggested that Locke may
have begun with this book. It contains few references to the foregoing
parts of the _Essay_, and it might have appeared separately without
being much less intelligible than it is. The other books, concerned
chiefly with ideas and words, are more abstract, and may have opened
gradually on his mind as he studied more closely the subject treated
in the fourth book. For Locke saw that the ultimate questions about
our knowledge and its extent _presuppose_ questions about ideas.
Without ideas knowledge is impossible. "Idea" is thus a leading term
in the _Essay_. It is used in a way peculiar to himself--"the term
which, I think, stands best for whatsoever is the object of the
understanding when a man thinks" or "whatever it is which the mind can
be employed about." But ideas themselves are, he reminds us, "neither
true nor false, being nothing but bare appearances," phenomena as we
might call them. Truth and falsehood belong only to assertions or
denials concerning ideas, that is, to our interpretations of our ideas
according to their mutual relations.
Innate ideas.
That none of our ideas are "innate" is the argument contained in the
first book. This means that the human mind, before any ideas are
present to it, is a _tabula rasa_: it needs the quickening of ideas to
become intellectually alive. The inward purpose of this famous
argument is apt to be overlooked. It has been criticized as if it was
a speculative controversy between empiricism and intellectualism. For
this Locke himself is partly to blame. It is not easy to determine the
antagonist he had in view. Lord Herbert is referred to as a defender
of innateness. Locke was perhaps too little read in the literature of
philosophy to do full justice to those more subtle thinkers who, from
Plato downwards, have recognized the need for categories of the
understanding and presuppositions of reason in the constitution of
knowledge. "Innate," Lord Shaftesbury says, "is a word Mr Locke poorly
plays on." For the real question is not about the _time_ when ideas
entered the mind, but "whether the constitution of man be such that,
being adult and grown up, the ideas of order and administration of a
God will not infallibly and necessarily spring up in him." This Locke
himself sometimes seems to allow. "That there are certain
propositions," we find him saying, "which, though the soul from the
beginning, or when a man is born, does not know, yet, by assistance
from the outward senses, and the help of some previous cultivation, it
may afterwards come certainly to know the truth of, is no more than
what I have affirmed in my first book" ("Epistle to Reader," in second
edition). And much of our knowledge, as he shows in the fourth book,
is rational insight, immediate or else demonstrable, and thus
intellectually necessary in its constitution.
What Locke really objects to is, that any of our supposed knowledge
should claim immunity from free criticism. He argues in the first book
against the innateness of our knowledge of God and of morality; yet in
the fourth book he finds that the existence of God is demonstrable,
being supported by causal necessity, without which there can be no
knowledge; and he also maintains that morality is as demonstrable as
pure mathematics. The positions are not inconsistent. The demonstrable
rational necessity, instead of being innate, or conscious from our
birth, may lie latent or subconscious in the individual mind; but for
all that, when we gradually become more awake intellectually, such
truths are seen to "carry their own evidence along with them." Even in
the first book he appeals to the common reason, which he calls "common
sense." "He would be thought void of common sense who asked, on the
one side, or, on the other, went to give a reason, _why_ 'it is
impossible for the same thing to be and not to be.' It carries its own
light and evidence with it, and needs no other proof: he that
understands the terms assents to it for its own sake, or else nothing
else will ever be able to prevail with him to do it" (bk. i. chap. 3,
§ 4).
The truth is that neither Locke, on the one hand, nor the
intellectualists of the 17th century, on the other, expressed their
meaning with enough of precision; if they had, Locke's argument would
probably have taken a form less open to the charge of mere empiricism.
Locke believed that in attacking "innate principles" he was pleading
for universal reasonableness instead of blind reliance on authority,
and was thus, as he says, not "pulling up the foundations of
knowledge," but "laying those foundations surer." When men heard that
there were propositions that could not be doubted, it was a short and
easy way to assume that what are only arbitrary prejudices are
"innate" certainties, and therefore must be accepted unconditionally.
This "eased the lazy from the pains of search, stopped the inquiry of
the doubtful, concerning all that was once styled innate. It was no
small advantage to those who affected to be masters and teachers to
make this the principle of principles--that principles must not be
questioned." The assumption that they were "innate" was enough "to
take men off the use of their own reason and judgment, and to put them
upon believing and taking upon trust without further examination....
Nor is it a small power it gives one man over another to have the
authority to make a man swallow that for an innate principle which may
serve his purpose who teacheth them" (bk. i. chap. 4, § 24).
Genesis of ideas.
The second book proposes a hypothesis regarding the genesis of our
ideas and closes after an elaborate endeavour to verify it. The
hypothesis is, that all human ideas, even the most complex and
abstract and sublime, ultimately depend upon "experience." Otherwise,
what we take to be ideas are only empty words. Here the important
point is what human "experience" involves. Locke says that our "ideas"
all come, either from the five senses or from reflective
consciousness; and he proposes to show that even those concerned with
the Infinite depend at last on one or other of these two sources: our
"complex ideas" are all made up of "simple ideas," either from without
or from within. The "verification" of this hypothesis, offered in the
thirteenth and following chapters of the second book, goes to show in
detail that even those ideas which are "most abstruse," how remote
soever they may seem from original data of outward sense, or of inner
consciousness, "are only such as the understanding frames to itself by
repeating and joining together simple ideas that it had at first,
either from perceiving objects of sense, or from reflection upon its
own operations."
To prove this, our thoughts of space, time, infinity, power,
substance, personal identity, causality, and others which "seem most
remote from the supposed original" are examined in a "plain historical
method," and shown to depend either on (a) perception of things
external, through the five senses, or on (b) reflection upon
operations of the mind within. Reflection, "though it be not sense, as
having nothing to do with external objects," is yet, he says, "very
like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense." But the
suggestion that "sense" might designate _both_ the springs of
experience is misleading, when we find in the sequel how much Locke
tacitly credits "reflection" with. The ambiguity of his language makes
opposite interpretations of this cardinal part of the Essay possible;
the best we can do is to compare one part with another, and in
doubtful cases to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Although the second book is a sort of inventory of our ideas, as
distinguished from the certainty and boundaries of our knowledge,
Locke even here makes the assumption that the "simple ideas" of the
five senses are practically qualities of things which exist without
us, and that the mental "operations" discovered by "reflection" are
those of a person continuously existing. He thus relieves himself of
the difficulty of having at the outset to explain _how_ the immediate
data of outward sense and reflection are accepted as "qualities" of
things and persons. He takes this as a fact.
Such, according to Locke, are the only simple ideas which can appear
even in the sublimest human speculations. But the mind, in becoming
gradually stored with its "simple ideas" is able to elaborate them in
numberless modes and relations; although it is not in the power of the
most exalted wit or enlarged understanding to invent or frame any new
simple idea, not taken in in one or the other of these two ways. All
that man can imagine about the universe or about God is necessarily
confined to them. For proof of this Locke would have any one try to
fancy a taste which had never affected his palate, or to frame the
idea of a scent he had never felt, or an operation of mind, divine or
human, foreign to all human consciousness.
Qualities of matter.
The contrast and correlation of these two data of experience is
suggested in the chapter on the "qualities of matter" in which we are
introduced to a noteworthy vein of speculation (bk. ii. chap. 8). This
chapter, on "things and their qualities," looks like an interpolation
in an analysis of mere "ideas." Locke here treats simple ideas of the
five senses as qualities of outward things. And the sense data are, he
finds, partly (a) revelations of external things themselves in their
mathematical relations, and partly (b) sensations, boundless in
variety, which are somehow awakened in us through contact and
collision with things relatively to their mathematical relations.
Locke calls the former sort "primary, original or essential qualities
of matter," and the others "secondary or derived qualities." The
primary, which are quantities rather than qualities, are inseparable
from matter, and virtually identical with the ideas we have of them.
On the other hand, there is nothing perceived in the mathematical
relations of bodies which in the least resembles their secondary
qualities. If there were no sentient beings in existence, the
secondary qualities would cease to exist, "except perhaps as unknown
modes of the primary, or, if not, as something still more obscure." On
the other hand, "solidity, extension, figure and motion would," he
assumes, "be really in the world as they are, whether there were any
sensible being to perceive them or not."
Matter.
Thus far the outcome of what Locke teaches about matter is, that it is
Something capable of being expressed in terms of mathematical
quantity, and also in terms of our own sensations. A further step was
to suggest the ultimate dependence of the secondary qualities of
bodies upon "the bulk, figures, number, situation and motions of the
solid parts of which the bodies consist," these mathematical or
primary qualities "existing as we think of them whether or not they
are perceived." This Locke proposes in a hesitating way. For we, "not
knowing what particular size, figure and texture of parts they are on
which depend, and from which result, those qualities which make our
complex idea, for example, of gold, it is impossible we should know
what other qualities result from, or are incompatible with, the same
constitution of the insensible parts of gold; and so consequently must
always coexist with that complex idea we have of it, or else are
inconsistent with it."
Some of the most remarkable chapters in the second book concern what
may be called "crucial instances" in verification of its fundamental
hypothesis of the dependence of human knowledge upon the simple ideas
presented in our dual experience (bk. ii. ch. 13-28). They carry us
towards the ultimate mysteries which attract meditative minds. The
hypothesis, that even our most profound and sublime speculations are
all limited to data of the senses and of reflection, is crucially
tested by the "modes" and "substances" and "relations" under which, in
various degrees of complexity, we somehow find ourselves obliged to
conceive those simple phenomena. Such are modes of quantity in space,
and time and number, under which Locke reports that we find ourselves
mentally impelled towards immensity, eternity and the innumerable--in
a word, towards Infinity which seems to transcend quantity; then there
is the complex thought of Substance, to which we find ourselves
mysteriously impelled, when the simple phenomena of the senses come to
be regarded as qualities of "something"; again there is the obscure
idea of the identity of persons, notwithstanding their constant
changes of state; and there is, above all, the inevitable tendency we
somehow have to refund a change into what we call its "Cause," with
the associated idea of active power. Locke begins with our complex
ideas of Space, Succession or Time, and Number.
Immensity and endlessness and infinity.
Space, he says, appears when we use our senses of sight and touch;
succession he finds "suggested" by all the changing phenomena of
sense, and by "what passes in our minds"; number is "suggested by
every object of our senses, and every thought of our minds, by
everything that either doth exist or can be imagined." The
modifications of which these are susceptible he reports to be
"inexhaustible and truly infinite, extension alone affording a
boundless field to the mathematicians." But the mystery latent in our
ideas of space and time is, that "something in the mind" irresistibly
hinders us from allowing the possibility of any limit to either. We
find ourselves, when we try, compelled to lose our positive ideas of
finite spaces in the negative idea of Immensity or Boundlessness, and
our positive ideas of finite times in the negative thought of
Endlessness. We have never seen, and we cannot imagine, an object
whose extent is boundless. Yet we find when we reflect that something
forces us to think that space and time must be unlimited. Thus Locke
seems by implication to acknowledge something added by the mind to the
original "simple ideas" of extension and succession; though he finds
that what is added is not positively conceivable. When we reflect on
immensity and eternity, we find them negations of all that is
imaginable; and that whether we try infinite addition or infinite
subdivision. He accepts this fact; he does not inquire why mind finds
itself obliged to add without limit and to divide without limit. He
simply reports that immensity and eternity are inevitable negative
ideas, and also that every endeavour to realize them in positive
images must be an attempt to represent as quantity what is beyond
quantity. After all our additions we are as far from the infinite idea
as we were at the beginning.
Substance and personality.
Locke is too faithful to facts to overlook the ultimate mysteries in
human experience. This is further illustrated in his acknowledgment of
the inconceivable that is at the root of our idea of Substance. He
tries to phenomenalize it, and thus resolve it into simple ideas; but
he finds that it cannot be phenomenalized, and yet that we cannot
dispense with it. An unsubstantiated succession of phenomena, without
a centre of unity to which they are referable as qualities, is
unintelligible: we cannot have a language of adjectives without nouns.
Locke had some apprehension of this transcendent intellectual
obligation. According to his report, "the mind" always obliges us to
suppose Something beyond positive phenomena to which the phenomena
must be attributed; but he was perplexed by this "confused negative"
idea. So for him the word substance means "only an uncertain
supposition of we know not what." If one were to ask him what the
substance is in which this colour and that taste or smell inhere, "he
would find himself in a difficulty like that of the Indian, who, after
saying that the world rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a
broad-backed tortoise, could only suppose the tortoise to rest on
'Something, I know not what.'" The attempt to conceive it is like the
attempt positively to conceive immensity or eternity: we are involved
in an endless, ultimately incomprehensible, regress. We fail when we
try either positively to phenomenalize substance or to dispense with
the superphenomenal abstraction. Our only positive idea is of an
aggregate of phenomena. And it is only thus, he says, that we can
approach a positive conception of God, namely by "enlarging
indefinitely some of the simple ideas we received from reflection."
Why man must remain in this mental predicament, Locke did not inquire.
He only reported the fact. He likewise struggled bravely to be
faithful to fact in his report of the state in which we find ourselves
when we try to conceive continued personal identity. The paradoxes in
which he here gets involved illustrate this (bk. ii. ch. 27).
Causality.
Locke's thoughts about Causality and Active Power are especially
noteworthy, for he rests our knowledge of God and of the external
universe on those ultimate ideas. The intellectual demand for "the
cause" of an event is what we find we cannot help having; yet it is a
demand for what in the end the mind cannot fully grasp. Locke is
content to trace the idea of "cause and effect," as far as mere
natural science goes, to our "constant observation" that "qualities
and finite substances begin to exist, and receive their existence from
other beings which produce them." We find that this connexion is what
gives intelligibility to ceaseless and what seemed chaotic changes,
converting them into the divinely concatenated system which we call
"the universe." Locke seems hardly to realize all that is implied in
scientific prevision or expectation of change. Anything, as far as
"constant observation" tells us, might a priori have been the natural
cause of anything; and no finite number of "observed" sequences, _per
se_, can guarantee universality and necessity. The idea of power, or
_active_ causation, on the other hand, "is got," he acknowledges, not
through the senses, but "through our consciousness of our own
voluntary agency, and therefore through reflection" (bk. ii. ch. 21).
In bodies we observe no active agency, only a sustained natural order
in the succession of passive sensuous phenomena. The true source of
change in the material world must be analogous to what we are
conscious of when we exert volition. Locke here unconsciously
approaches the spiritual view of active power in the physical universe
afterwards taken by Berkeley, forming the constructive principle of
his philosophy.
Ideas and words.
Locke's book about Ideas leads naturally to his Third Book which is
concerned with Words, or the sensible signs of ideas. Here he analyses
"abstract ideas," and instructively illustrates the confusion apt to
be produced in them by the inevitable imperfection of words. He
unfolds the relations between verbal signs and the several sorts of
ideas; words being the means for enabling us to treat ideas as
typical, abstract and general. "Some parts of this third book,"
concerning Words, Locke tells his friend Molyneux, "though the
thoughts were easy and clear enough, yet cost me more pains to express
than all the rest of my _Essay_. And therefore I should not much
wonder, if there be in some places of it obscurity and doubtfulness."
Theory of knowledge.
The Fourth Book, about Knowledge proper and Probability, closes the
_Essay_. Knowledge, he says, is perception of relations among ideas;
it is expressed in our affirmations and negations; and real knowledge
is discernment of the relations of ideas to what is real. In the
foregoing part of the _Essay_ he had dealt with "ideas" and "simple
apprehension," here he is concerned with intuitive "judgment" and
demonstrative "reasoning," also with judgments and reasonings about
matters of fact. At the end of this patient search among our ideas, he
supposes the reader apt to complain that he has been "all this while
only building a castle in the air," and to ask what the purpose of all
this stir is, if we are not thereby carried beyond mere ideas. "If it
be true that knowledge lies only in the agreement or disagreement of
ideas, the visions of an enthusiast and the reasonings of a sober man
will be equally certain. It is no matter how things themselves are"
(bk. iv. 4). This gives the keynote to the fourth book. It does not,
however, carry him into a critical analysis of the rational
constitution of knowledge, like Kant. Hume had not yet shown the
sceptical objections against conclusions which Locke accepted without
criticism. The subtle agnostic, who doubted reason because reason
could not be supported in the end by empirical evidence, was less in
his view than persons blindly resting on authority or prejudice. Total
scepticism he would probably have regarded as unworthy of the serious
attention of a wise man. "Where we perceive the agreement or
disagreement of any of our ideas there is certain knowledge; and
wherever we are sure these ideas agree with the reality of things,
there is certain _real_ knowledge" (bk. iv. ch. 4).
Four sorts of knowable relations.