PHILOSOPHY.
From the criticism of books we pass, by no violent transition, to the
criticism of principles--moral science. The latter half of the
seventeenth century is a distinguished period in the history of English
philosophy, for in it the most distinctively national of all systems
which have obtained currency in this country was fully formulated. It is
remarkable that while both empirical and transcendental views in
philosophy found supporters, the champions of the latter comprised
several illustrious names, and that of the former only one, while
nevertheless empiricism obtained as complete a triumph as has ever been
recorded in the history of opinion. The principal reason, no doubt, is
the natural attractiveness to the solid homely understanding of the
Englishman of conclusions based on experience and common sense;[9] but
partly also to the fact that the illustrious man by whom the empirical
philosophy was mainly upheld carried his speculations into practical
life, and became foremost among the defenders of civil and religious
liberty. If Locke, like his forerunner Hobbes, had employed his
acuteness in defence of absolute power, he would, like Hobbes, have
been caressed by the court, but his doctrines would have been slighted
by the nation.
[Sidenote: John Locke (1632-1704).]
John Locke was born at Wrington in the north of Somerset, August 29
(N.S.), 1632, the same year that gave birth to Spinoza. His father, an
attorney, was a man of independent character and strong principle, which
he proved by accepting a commission in a Parliamentary regiment. Locke
was elected to a foundation scholarship at Westminster in 1647, and to a
studentship at Christ Church in 1652. He became M.A. in June, 1658, was
appointed Greek Lecturer in 1660, and held other college offices. He
wrote about this time two treatises as yet unpublished, one upon the
Roman commonwealth, the other on the right of the civil magistrate to
regulate indifferent matters touching the exercise of religion, which,
under the influence of the hopes which moderate men entertained of the
Restoration government, he was at the time inclined to allow. Having
determined to study medicine, he obtained in 1666 a dispensation to
enable him to hold his studentship, and in the same year the decisive
bias was given to his life by his acquaintance with Shaftesbury, of
whose family he became virtually a member in the following year.
Shaftesbury was as yet neither the Shaftesbury of the Cabal nor the
Shaftesbury of the Popish Plot, and there was no reason why Locke should
hesitate in attaching himself to a statesman, who, whatever his
astuteness and versatility, possessed by far the most enlightened and
comprehensive mind of any public man of his day. The main bond which
united the two was their agreement on the principle of toleration, for
which Chillingworth had been denounced and Roger Williams persecuted,
and which scarcely any one would then have subscribed as an abstract
proposition, though Cromwell had gone a long way towards reducing it to
practice. Influenced probably by Shaftesbury, Locke drew up in 1667 an
_Essay on Toleration_, the first draft of his subsequent celebrated
work, and which has itself been retrieved from oblivion by Mr. Fox
Bourne. Considering the circumstances of the times, it can excite
neither surprise nor censure that he should have argued in favour of
denying the privileges of toleration to those who denied them to others,
_i.e._, to Roman Catholics. Two years later he drew up, at Shaftesbury's
instance, a constitution for the colony of Carolina, in which
Shaftesbury was largely interested. His medical skill was exerted in
relieving Shaftesbury from the effects of a serious complaint; and he
acquitted himself successfully in a yet more delicate undertaking, the
choosing a wife for his son. He also attended professionally at the
birth of Shaftesbury's grandson, the future author of _Characteristics_.
These services were fitly recompensed by secretaryships, both at the
Great Seal and at the Board of Trade, but there is not the slightest
proof of his having participated in any of his patron's plots; while it
is not too much to say that the steady regard entertained for
Shaftesbury by a man like Locke affords the strongest of all
presumptions that this enigmatical personage was, after all, a patriot.
During three and a half stormy years Locke was in France for the benefit
of his health, making observations on the culture of the vine and olive,
and noting, under the external splendour of Louis XIV.'s reign, symptoms
of that distress among the industrial classes which was to issue in the
Revolution. Returning, he found his patron just liberated from the
Tower, and their intimate relations continued until Shaftesbury's flight
to Holland in November, 1682, followed by his death in the succeeding
January. Locke was thus a mark for the suspicions and animosities of the
triumphant Court party. His usual place of residence was now Oxford,
where he still enjoyed his Christ Church studentship, and curious
letters are extant from Dean Prideaux, avowing practices akin to
espionage, but admitting that John Locke is so close a man, and his
servant such a phoenix of discretion, that nothing can be made out.
Locke wisely withdrew to Holland about the autumn of 1683, and in
November, 1684, was arbitrarily ejected from his studentship by a royal
mandate. He employed his exile in forming friendships with Limborch, Le
Clerc, and other distinguished men, in composing his famous _Letter on
Toleration_, published anonymously in 1689, and in active communication
with William and Mary when the Deliverer's expedition was finally
determined upon. He came to England with Mary in 1689, and received the
most flattering offers of important diplomatic posts, which he declined
on account of the weakness of his health. He accepted, however, a small
appointment, but his principal public services were rendered as a
referee on the various important questions submitted to him by
Government; and as a man of letters, having nearly reached the age of
sixty without publishing anything of importance, he produced within ten
years the series of unadorned tracts which have made him, alike in the
regions of philosophy and of politics, the most conspicuous
representative of masculine, unimaginative, English common sense.
The _Letter on Toleration_, as already mentioned, had appeared
anonymously in Holland in 1689. In 1690 the _Essay on the Human
Understanding_ was published, and also the two _Treatises on
Government_; the first, a reply to Filmer, the advocate of divine right,
composed, in Professor Fowler's opinion, between 1680 and 1685; the
second written during the last years of Locke's residence in Holland.
The _Letter on Toleration_, the authorship of which was not acknowledged
during Locke's lifetime, was followed by three defences against
assailants, two of which appeared respectively in 1690 and 1692, the
third was posthumous. The _Essay on the Human Understanding_, adopted
from the first as a text-book at Trinity College, Dublin, but
ineffectually proscribed in the writer's own university, called forth
criticisms from Norris of Bemerton, to which Locke replied in two essays
allowed to remain unpublished during his life, 'for,' he said, 'I love
not controversy.' He could not, however, avoid a controversy with John
Edwards and Bishop Stillingfleet, on his _Reasonableness of
Christianity_ (1695). After writing five pamphlets, Locke ultimately
remained in possession of the field, the drift of opinion being entirely
in his favour, though few of the official ministers of religion ventured
to come forward openly in his defence. The _Treatise on Education_
(1693), written at the request of William Molyneux, excited
comparatively little controversy. Another very important class of the
productions of his affluent maturity were those on trade and finance, by
which he rendered the utmost service to the state. By his
_Considerations on the Value of Money_ (1691), and other tracts, he
contributed largely to the reform of the currency, the condition of
which had become intolerable, but was in great danger of being corrected
by remedies worse than the disease. Several other publications
contributed to disseminate enlightened views on trade, manufactures, and
the interest of money. He could not always be right; it is both painful
and ludicrous to find so wise and good a man obliged _ex officio_ as a
Commissioner of Trade to find reasons for discouraging the woollen
manufacture in Ireland; which Swift seems to ridicule in describing the
Laputan philosophers who had devised means to remove the wool from a
sheep's back, and hoped shortly to propagate the breed of naked sheep
over the kingdom. This, nevertheless, is but a slight inconsistency with
the general tenor of Locke's views on economical subjects, which, no
less than his political and religious convictions, tended irresistibly
towards unrestricted freedom. In 1700 he was released from public life,
and spent his few remaining years undisturbed by controversy, in the
society of the amiable family of Sir Francis Masham, of High Laver,
Essex, of whose house he had long been an inmate. Lady Masham,
singularly enough, was the daughter of Ralph Cudworth, the great English
champion of the ideal school of philosophy, and therefore as far removed
as possible from Locke in opinion. He died on October 28, 1704.
Locke's intellectual character must be considered along with his
writings; of his moral character it may justly be said, that no English
writer of equal eminence stands so high. Butler and Berkeley may have
been equally faultless, and the latter, no doubt, possessed more of the
spell of personal fascination; but neither was, like Locke, exposed to
the storms of a corrupt and factious age; neither was called upon to
encounter such perils and make such sacrifices; neither had the same
opportunity of exercising fortitude in adversity and moderation in
success. Whether as public patriot or private friend, Locke appears 'a
spirit without spot,' and his resolute temper, his intellectual ardour,
and his brilliant achievements, effectually preserve him from the
insipidity which so frequently mars the moral physiognomies of good men.
His countenance, indeed, is not illumined by the spirituality of a
Channing; but the robuster virtues stand forth in even bolder relief,
and his apparent exemption from the minor failings which beset even a
Newton, is the more remarkable as he wanted neither for enemies nor
biographers.
Locke's great work as a philosopher is the _Essay on the Human
Understanding_, 'the best chart of the human mind,' says Hallam, one of
the great representative books of the world. In Locke, as in his
predecessor Hobbes, were united two endowments rarely combined, the
sturdy prosaic common sense of the man of the world and the dexterity
and subtlety of the practised logician. In his utter antipathy to
everything in the slightest degree illumined, or, as he would have
thought, distorted, by the glamour of imagination or fancy, Locke was
the true representative of his age, and no subsequent change of mental
attitude, as the world sweeps on into new and more genial climates of
thought, can deprive his work of its representative historical
importance. Nor is this all. Locke's treatise was almost the first
investigation of the mind which took note of facts, and was not purely
metaphysical. It was also the first in which this study took a leading
place. 'The science which we now call Psychology, or the study of mind,'
says Dr. Fowler, 'had hitherto, amongst modern writers, been almost
exclusively subordinated to other branches of speculation. Locke was the
first of modern writers to attempt at once an independent and a complete
treatment of the phenomena of the human mind, of their mutual relations,
of their causes and limits. This task he undertakes, not in the dogmatic
spirit of his predecessors, but in the critical spirit which he may be
said almost to have inaugurated. And the effect of his candour on his
first readers must have been enhanced by the fact, not always favourable
to his precision, that, as far as he can, he throws aside the technical
terminology of the schools, and employs the language current in the
better kinds of ordinary literature and the well-bred society of his
time.' In fact, as was said of Socrates, he brought philosophy down from
heaven to earth; and this service, and the great influence which his
work produced upon the future development of philosophy, are perhaps
stronger claims to permanent distinction than the merits of a theory
which can never be overlooked, but can never again command the almost
universal assent which it received in its own day. For the application
of physiology to psychological research, implicitly, at all events,
advocated by Locke, has produced results of which neither he nor his
opponents dreamed. The central point of his philosophy is the denial of
innate ideas; the mind is to him a _tabula rasa_, a sheet of blank
paper, and all the ideas which have been thought inherent in it are the
result of experience. In a sense we now know this to be true; but we
also know this experience not to be the experience of the individual,
but of the race, or rather say of sentient existence for ages
inconceivably remote. It follows that although Locke may be abstractedly
right in denying the possibility of the acquisition of ideas except
through experience, yet practically everyone comes into the world with a
host of ideas derived from his ancestors, connate if not innate; and
that, so far from the human mind resembling a sheet of blank paper, it
is more like a palimpsest inscribed and reinscribed _ad infinitum_. It
also follows that the discrepancies of mankind respecting points of
morality do not, as Locke thought, disprove the existence of an ideal
rule of right, for everyone must necessarily be born with inherited
instincts by which such a rule is more or less deflected or obscured. In
fact, Locke and his adversaries were both partly right and partly
wrong--one party in denying intuition, the other in defining it. Neither
had found, or at that period could have found, the real key to the
difficulty; but it is to the immortal honour of Locke that all real
advance in psychology has been effected by working in his spirit of
observation and induction, rather than by the _a priori_ method of his
opponents. The third and fourth books of the essay, _On Words_ and _On
Knowledge_, contain but little controversial matter, and are chiefly
devoted to illustrating the imperfection of human faculties, especially
language, the necessity for clear and definite conceptions, and the
countless impediments in the way of truth.
Three others among Locke's writings are regarded as classical: _On the
Reasonableness of Christianity_, and _On Education_, and his _Letters on
Toleration_. _The Reasonableness of Christianity_ (1695) is from one
point of view an endeavour to render Christianity reasonable by
eliminating its corruptions; from another an attempt to establish it on
the basis of fulfilled prophecy and miracle. In both respects it was
admirably adapted to the prevalent sentiment of Locke's own day, and,
although warmly attacked by Stillingfleet, exerted a great influence
upon the theology of the eighteenth century. In our time the point of
view has shifted so far as to expose Locke to the full weight of Dr.
Martineau's terse criticism, 'The affidavit has become the brief.' Its
historical importance, however, can never be impaired, any more than
that of the admirable _Letters on Toleration_, which seem commonplace
because they are now esteemed irrefragable. It was otherwise in his own
time, and for long afterwards. Their principal literary defects are that
they are too polemical, and too long. Of all Locke's works, _Some
Thoughts concerning Education_ is perhaps the most universally approved,
and it is in truth a golden treatise, the very incarnation of good sense
and right feeling; and more useful in its own time than it can be now
that the errors which Locke especially assailed have become contrary,
instead of congenial, to the general spirit of the age. The prevailing
tone, the confidence in human nature rightly treated, the abhorrence of
the merely arbitrary and despotic, render the work an epoch in the
history of culture, and, compared with the coarse maxims of a Defoe, or
even the _Whole Duty of Man_'s exclusive reliance upon authority, show
how greatly Locke was beyond his contemporaries in enlightenment and the
genuine spirit of humanity. The insight and penetration into children's
characters are surprising in a man who had no children of his own, or
much direct concern with the education of the children of others. They
prove that Locke must have been a most careful and accurate observer. If
there is a fault in the treatise, it is that the range of view is not
always sufficiently wide, and that the author's precepts are too
exclusively propounded with reference to the individual, and too little
with a view to the general advantage of society. The disuse of Latin
composition, for example, would have done little personal harm to the
majority of the individual boys of whom Locke is thinking; but, in his
day at all events, would have lowered the standard of culture throughout
Europe. In general, however, Locke's remarks are characterized by the
soundest common sense; and there is perhaps no other production of the
age so thoroughly in harmony with its pervading spirit.
In sharp contrast to Locke and his school stand the small knot of
Cambridge Platonists and their allies--Cudworth, Henry More, Culverwell,
Cumberland, Glanvil, and Whichcote, which last may indeed be regarded as
a connecting link between the rival thinkers. His place is rather with
the divines, and Henry More (1614-1657) belongs more properly to the
period of Vaughan in virtue of his poetry, though continuing to write to
a late date. Culverwell and Cumberland scarcely rank in a literary
history; so that the school is chiefly represented by Ralph Cudworth
(1617-1688). Cudworth's life was uneventful. One of those moderate men
whom the excesses of party provoke to opposition, he sided mainly with
the Puritans during the Civil War, but was no Puritan himself, and
protested energetically against Puritan disparagement of sweetness and
light. He had no difficulty in conforming to the Restoration, and
accepting a living from Archbishop Sheldon, but his life was mainly
spent in his study, in the production of vast folios, where the ingots
of philosophy lay stored while Locke's current coin passed nimbly from
hand to hand. The contrast between the men and the systems is complete
at every point; and it is assuredly one of the strangest ironies of fate
that Cudworth's daughter should have become the good angel of Locke's
old age. Cudworth is no doubt by much the more attractive figure to
imaginative minds; but it must be conceded as an indisputable truth that
his way of thinking could not possibly have produced nearly so much
good, have so profoundly leavened men's ideas on legislation and
education, or have so contributed to build up the national character for
sound common sense. This admitted, Cudworth may be heartily praised as a
sublime and refined thinker, epithets inappropriate to Locke. His great
work is _The Intellectual System_, published in 1678, only the first
part of which ever appeared. A _Treatise on Immutable Morality_ remained
in manuscript until 1731. Cudworth's purpose may briefly be defined as
the expulsion of all materialistic and mechanical notions from theology,
metaphysics, and ethics. He wages war upon atheism, fatalism,
utilitarianism, whatsoever is opposed to elevating and poetical
conceptions of the order of things. His erudition is only too extensive,
and he is very candid. Dryden thought that he had stated the atheistic
objections more powerfully than he had answered them; and his doctrine
of plastic force in nature verges upon Pantheism, as indeed religious
philosophies usually do. He is finely analyzed in the _Types of Ethical
Theory_ of Dr. Martineau, who says of his philosophy:
'Embodied as it is in unfinished books, and buried in massive
erudition, it has been distantly respected rather than closely
studied; and has left upon few readers an adequate impression
of the depth of the author's penetration, the comprehensiveness
of his grasp, the subtlety of his analysis, and the happy
flashes of expression by which he flings light upon real though
unsuspected relations.'
[Sidenote: Joseph Glanvil (1636-1680).]
Joseph Glanvil, although an Oxford man, practically belonged to the
group of Cambridge Platonists, and was especially connected with Henry
More. He is the author of two very dissimilar books, _The Vanity of
Dogmatizing_ (1660), and _Saducismus Triumphatus_ (1681), published
after his death with additions by More, Horneck, and others. The former
book, though containing no evidence of original power of thought, is
remarkable as an evidence of the influence of Bacon in overthrowing the
authority of Aristotle; for its idolatry of Descartes; for its many
curious anticipations (not originating with Glanvil) of modern
discoveries; above all, for its testimony of the ardent scientific
curiosity then fermenting in England, and about to issue in the
establishment of the Royal Society. 'Methinks,' Glanvil says, 'this age
seems resolved to bequeath posterity something to remember it.' The
following is a remarkable passage to have been written six years before
Newton's great discovery: 'That heavy bodies descend by gravity, is no
better an account than we might expect from a rustic; and again, that
gravity is a quality whereby a heavy body descends, is an impertinent
circle, and teacheth nothing.' The other and much more celebrated work,
on the other hand, is a most melancholy example of superstitious
credulity, but full of striking stories of the supernatural. The
contrast between the styles of the two books is instructive; the earlier
might have been written in the days of James I.; the later, though still
antiquated, is much nearer modern English prose.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] Coleridge told Crabb Robinson that he 'considered Locke as having
led to the destruction of metaphysical science, by encouraging the
unlearned public to think that with mere common sense they might
dispense with disciplined study.'