Chapter XVIII: Front Matter (18)

Locke's commonplace books throw welcome light on the history of his mind in early life. A paper on the "Roman Commonwealth" which belongs to this period, expresses convictions about religious liberty and the relations of religion to the state that were modified and deepened afterwards; objections to the sacerdotal conception of Christianity appear in another article; short work is made of ecclesiastical claims to infallibility in the interpretation of Scripture in a third; a scheme of utilitarian ethics, wider than that of Hobbes, is suggested in a fourth. The most significant of those early revelations is the _Essay concerning Toleration_ (1666), which anticipates conclusions more fully argued nearly thirty years later.

The Shaftesbury connexion must have helped to save Locke from those idols of the "Den" to which professional life and narrow experience is exposed. It brought him into contact with public men, the springs of political action and the duties of high office. The place he held as Shaftesbury's adviser is indeed the outstanding circumstance in his middle life. Exeter House afforded every opportunity for society. He became intimate among others with the illustrious Sydenham; he joined the Royal Society and served on its council. The foundation of the monumental work of his life was laid when he was at Exeter House. He was led to it in this way. It was his habit to encourage informal reunions of his intimates, to discuss debatable questions in science and theology. One of these, in the winter of 1670, is historically memorable. "Five or six friends," he says, met in his rooms and were discussing "principles of morality and religion. They found themselves quickly at a stand by the difficulties that arose on every side." Locke proposed some criticism of the necessary "limits of human understanding" as likely to open a way out of their difficulties. He undertook to attempt this, and fancied that what he had to say might find sufficient space on "one sheet of paper." What was thus "begun by chance, was continued by entreaty, written by incoherent parcels, and after long intervals of neglect resumed again as humour and occasions permitted." At the end of nearly twenty years the issue was given to the world as Locke's now famous _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_.

The fall of Shaftesbury in 1675 enabled Locke to escape from English politics. He found a retreat in France, where he could unite calm reflection upon the legitimate operations of "human understanding" with attention to his health. He spent three years partly at Montpellier and partly in Paris. His journals and commonplace books in these years show the _Essay_ in preparation. At Paris he met men of science and letters--Peter Guenellon, the well-known Amsterdam physician; Ole Römer, the Danish astronomer; Thoynard, the critic; Melchisédech Thévenot, the traveller; Henri Justel, the jurist; and François Bernier, the expositor of Gassendi. But there is no mention of Malebranche, whose _Recherche de la vérité_ had appeared three years before, nor of Arnauld, the illustrious rival of Malebranche.

Locke returned to London in 1679. Reaction against the court party had restored Shaftesbury to power. Locke resumed his old confidential relations, now at Thanet House in Aldersgate. A period of often interrupted leisure for study followed. It was a time of plots and counterplots, when England seemed on the brink of another civil war. In the end Shaftesbury was committed to the Tower, tried and acquitted. More insurrectionary plots followed in the summer of 1682, after which, suspected at home, the versatile statesman escaped to Holland, and died at Amsterdam in January 1683. In these two years Locke was much at Oxford and in Somerset, for the later movements of Shaftesbury did not commend themselves to him. Yet the government had their eyes upon him. "John Locke lives a very cunning unintelligible life here," Prideaux reported from Oxford in 1682. "I may confidently affirm," wrote John Fell, the dean of Christ Church, to Lord Sunderland, "there is not any one in the college who has heard him speak a word against, or so much as censuring, the government; and, although very frequently, both in public and private, discourses have been purposely introduced to the disparagement of his master, the earl of Shaftesbury, he could never be provoked to take any notice, or discover in word or look the least concern; so that I believe there is not in the world such a master of taciturnity and passion." Unpublished correspondence with his Somerset friend, Edward Clarke of Chipley, describes Locke's life in those troubled years. It also reveals the opening of his intimate intercourse with the Cudworth family, who were friends of the Clarkes, and connected by birth with Somerset. The letters allude to toleration in the state and comprehension in the church, while they show an indifference to theological dogma hardly consistent with an exclusive connexion with any sect.

In his fifty-second year, in the gloomy autumn of 1683, Locke retired to Holland, then the asylum of eminent persons who were elsewhere denied liberty of thought. Descartes and Spinoza had speculated there; it had been the home of Erasmus and Grotius; it was now the refuge of Bayle. Locke spent more than five years there; but his (unpublished) letters show that exile sat heavily upon him. Amsterdam was his first Dutch home, where he lived in the house of Dr Keen, under the assumed name of Dr Van der Linden. For a time he was in danger of arrest at the instance of the English government. After months of concealment he escaped; but he was deprived of his studentship at Christ Church by order of the king, and Oxford was thus closed against him. Holland introduced him to new friends. The chief of these was Limborch, the successor of Episcopius as Remonstrant professor of theology, lucid, learned and tolerant, the friend of Cudworth, Whichcote and More. By Limborch he was introduced to Le Clerc, the youthful representative of letters and philosophy in Limborch's college, who had escaped from Geneva and Calvinism to the milder atmosphere of Holland and the Remonstrants. The _Bibliothèque universelle_ of Le Clerc was then the chief organ in Europe of men of letters. Locke contributed several articles. It was his first appearance as an author, although he was now fifty-four years of age. This tardiness in authorship is a significant fact in his life, in harmony with his tempered wisdom.

In the next fourteen years the world received through his books the thoughts which had been gradually forming, and were taking final shape while he was in Holland. The _Essay_ was finished there, and a French epitome appeared in 1688 in Le Clerc's journal, the forecast of the larger work. Locke was then at Rotterdam, where he lived for a year in the house of a Quaker friend, Benjamin Furley, or Furly, a wealthy merchant and lover of books. At Rotterdam he was a confidant of political exiles, including Burnet and the famous earl of Peterborough, and he became known to William, prince of Orange. William landed in England in November 1688; Locke followed in February 1689, in the ship which carried the princess Mary.

After his return to England in 1689 Locke emerged through authorship into European fame. Within a month after he reached London he had declined an offer of the embassy to Brandenburg, and accepted the modest office of commissioner of appeals. The two following years, during which he lived at Dorset Court in London, were memorable for the publication of his two chief works on social polity, and of the epoch-making book on modern philosophy which reveals the main principles of his life. The earliest of these to appear was his defence of religious liberty, in the _Epistola de Tolerantia_, addressed to Limborch, published at Gouda in the spring of 1689, and translated into English in autumn by William Popple, a Unitarian merchant in London. _Two Treatises on Government_, in defence of the right of ultimate sovereignty in the people, followed a few months later. The famous _Essay concerning Human Understanding_ saw the light in the spring of 1690. He received £30 for the copyright, nearly the same as Kant got in 1781 for his _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_. In the _Essay_ Locke was the critic of the empirical data of human experience: Kant, as the critic of the intellectual and moral presuppositions of experience, supplied the complement to the incomplete and ambiguous answer to its own leading question that was given in Locke's _Essay_. The _Essay_ was the first book in which its author's name appeared, for the _Epistola de Tolerantia_ and the _Treatises on Government_ were anonymous.

Locke's asthma was aggravated by the air of London; and the course of public affairs disappointed him, for the settlement at the Revolution fell short of his ideal. In spring, 1691, he took up his residence in the manor house of Otes in Essex, the country seat of Sir Francis Masham, between Ongar and Harlow. Lady Masham was the accomplished daughter of Ralph Cudworth, and was his friend before he went to Holland. She told Le Clerc that after Locke's return from exile, "by some considerably long visits, he had made trial of the air of Otes, which is some 20 m. from London, and he thought that none would be so suitable for him. His company," she adds, "could not but be very desirable for us, and he had all the assurances we could give him of being always welcome; but, to make him easy in living with us, it was necessary he should do so on his own terms, which Sir Francis at last assenting to, he then believed himself at home with us, and resolved, if it pleased God, here to end his days as he did." At Otes he enjoyed for fourteen years as much domestic peace and literary leisure as was consistent with broken health, and sometimes anxious visits to London on public affairs, in which he was still an active adviser. Otes was in every way his home. In his letters and otherwise we have pleasant pictures of its inmates and domestic life and the occasional visits of his friends, among others Lord Peterborough, Lord Shaftesbury of the _Characteristics_, Sir Isaac Newton, William Molyneux and Anthony Collins.

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.