Chapter IV: PHILOSOPHY.--(1) An Essay concerning Human Understanding, in (1)

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others are preserved, many of them unpublished, most of them in the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.

III. _Education._--Locke has his place among classic writers on the
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.

Locke's report about human knowledge and its narrow extent forms the
first thirteen chapters of the fourth book. The remainder of the book
is concerned for the most part with the probabilities on which human
life practically turns, as he and Butler are fond of reminding us. As
regards kinds of knowledge, he finds that "all knowledge we are
capable of" must be assertion or denial of some one of three sorts of
relation among our ideas themselves, or else of relations between our
ideas and reality that exists independently of us and our ideas.
Accordingly, knowledge is concerned either with (a) relations of
identity and difference among ideas, as when we say that "blue is not
yellow"; or (b) with mathematical relations, as that "two triangles
upon equal bases between two parallels must be equal"; or (c) in
assertions that one quality does or does not coexist with another in
the same substance, as that "iron is susceptible of magnetical
impressions, or that ice is not hot"; or (d) with ontological reality,
independent of our perceptions, as that "God exists" or "I exist" or
"the universe exists." The first sort is analytical; mathematical and
ethical knowledge represents the second; physical science forms the
third; real knowledge of self, God and the world constitutes the
fourth.

Intuition and demonstration.

Locke found important differences in the way in which knowledge of any
sort is reached. In some instances the known relation is self-evident,
as when we judge intuitively that a circle cannot be a triangle, or
that three must be more than two. In other cases the known relation is
perceived to be intellectually necessary through the medium of
premisses, as in a mathematical demonstration. All that is strictly
knowledge is reached in these two ways. But there is a third sort,
namely sense-perception, which hardly deserves the name. For "our
perceptions of the particular existence of finite beings without us"
go beyond mere probability, yet they are not purely rational. There is
nothing self-contradictory in the supposition that our perceptions of
things external are illusions, although we are somehow unable to doubt
them. We find ourselves inevitably "conscious of a different sort of
perception," when we actually see the sun by day and when we only
imagine the sun at night.

Locke next inquired to what extent knowledge--in the way either of
intuitive certainty, demonstrative certainty, or sense perception--is
possible, in regard to each of the four (already mentioned) sorts of
knowable relation. There is only one of the four in which our
knowledge is co-extensive with our ideas. It is that of "identity and
diversity": we cannot be conscious at all without distinguishing, and
every affirmation necessarily implies negation. The second sort of
knowable relation is sometimes intuitively and sometimes demonstrably
discernible. Morality, Locke thinks, as well as mathematical quantity,
is capable of being demonstrated. "Where there is no property there is
no injustice," is an example of a proposition "as certain as any
demonstration in Euclid." Only we are more apt to be biassed, and thus
to leave reason in abeyance, in dealing with questions of morality
than in dealing with problems in mathematics.

Turning from abstract mathematical and moral relations to concrete
relations of coexistence and succession among phenomena--the third
sort of knowable relation--Locke finds the light of pure reason
disappear; although these relations form "the greatest and most
important part of what we desire to know." Of these, including as they
do all inductive science, he reports that demonstrable knowledge "is
very short, if indeed we have any at all"; and are not thrown wholly
on presumptions of probability, or else left in ignorance. Man cannot
attain perfect and infallible science of bodies. For natural science
depends, he thinks, on knowledge of the relations between their
secondary qualities on the one hand, and the mathematical qualities of
their atoms on the other, or else "on something yet more remote from
our comprehension." Now, as perception of these atoms and their
relations is beyond us, we must be satisfied with inductive
presumptions, for which "experimental verification" affords, after
all, only conclusions that wider experience may prove to be
inadequate. But this moral venture Locke accepts as "sufficient for
our purposes."

Real existence.

Our knowledge under Locke's fourth category of relations--real
existence--includes (a) intuitive perceptions of our own existence;
(b) demonstrable certainty of the existence of God; and (c) actual
perception of the existence of surrounding things, as long as, but
only as long as the things are present to sense. "If I doubt all other
things, that very doubt makes me perceive my own existence, and will
not suffer me to doubt of that" (iv. 9. 3). Faith in the existence of
God is virtually with Locke an expression of faith in the principle of
active causality in its ultimate universality. Each person knows that
he now exists, and is convinced that he had a beginning; with not less
intuitive certainty he knows that "_nothing_ can no more produce any
real being than it can be equal to two right angles." His final
conclusion is that there must be eternally "a most powerful and most
knowing Being, in which, as the origin of all, must be contained all
the perfections that can ever after exist," and out of which can come
only what it has already in itself; so that as the cause of my mind,
it must be Mind. There is thus causal necessity for Eternal Mind, or
what we call "God." This is cautiously qualified thus in a letter to
Anthony Collins, written by Locke a few months before he died: "Though
I call the thinking faculty in me 'mind,' yet I cannot, because of
that name, equal it in anything to that infinite and incomprehensible
Being, which, for want of right and distinct conceptions, is called
'Mind' also." But the immanence of God in the things and persons that
compose the universal order, with what this implies, is a conception
foreign to Locke, whose habitual conception was of an extra-mundane
deity, the dominant conception in the 18th century.

Knowledge of the external world.

Turning from our knowledge of Spirit to our knowledge of Matter,
nearly all that one can affirm or deny about "things external is,"
according to Locke, not knowledge but venture or presumptive trust. We
have, strictly speaking, no "knowledge" of real beings beyond our own
self-conscious existence, the existence of God, and the existence of
objects of sense as long as they are actually present to sense. "When
I see an external object at a distance, a man for instance, I cannot
but be satisfied of his existence while I am looking at him. (Locke
might have added that when one only 'sees a man' it is merely his
_visible_ qualities that are perceived; his other qualities are as
little 'actual present sensations' as if he were out of the range of
sense.) But when the man leaves me alone, I cannot be certain that he
still exists." "There is no necessary connexion between his existence
a minute since (when he was present to any sense of sight) and his
existence now (when he is absent from all my senses); by a thousand
ways he may have ceased to be. I have not that certainty of his
continued existence which we call knowledge; though the great
likelihood of it puts it past doubt. But this is but probability and
not knowledge" (chap. 11, § 9). Accordingly, purely rational science
of external Nature is, according to Locke, impossible. All our
"interpretations of nature" are inadequate; only reasonable
probabilities, not final rational certainties. This boundless region
affords at the best probabilities, ultimately grounded on moral faith,
all beyond lies within the veil. Such is Locke's "plain,
matter-of-fact" account of the knowledge of the Real that is open to
man.

The rationale of probability.

We learn little from Locke as to the rationale of the probabilities on
which man thus depends when he deals with the past, the distant or the
future. The concluding chapters of the fourth book contain wise advice
to those whose lives are passed in an ever-changing environment, for
avoiding the frequent risk of error in their conclusions, with or
without the help of syllogism, the office of which, as a means of
discovery, is here critically considered.

Locke and Hume.

Investigation of the foundation of inductive inference was resumed by
Hume where Locke left it. With a still humbler view of human reason
than Locke's, Hume proposed as "a subject worthy of curiosity," to
inquire into "the nature of that evidence which assures us of any real
existence and matter of fact, _beyond_ the present testimony of our
senses and the records of our memory; a part of philosophy that has
been little cultivated either by the ancients or the moderns." Hume
argues that custom is a sufficient practical explanation of this
gradual enlargement of our objective experience, and that no deeper
explanation is open to man. All beyond each present transitory
"impression" and the stores of memory is therefore reached blindly,
through custom or habitual association. Associative tendency,
individual or inherited, has since been the favourite constructive
factor of human experience in Empirical Philosophy. This factor is not
prominent in Locke's _Essay_. A short chapter on "association of
ideas" was added to the second book in the fourth edition. And the
tendency to associate is there presented, not as the fundamental
factor of human knowledge, but as a chief cause of human error.

Locke and Kant.

Kant's critical analysis of pure reason is more foreign to Locke than
the attempts of 18th- and 19th-century associationists and
evolutionists to explain experience and science. Kant's aim was to
show the necessary rational constitution of experience. Locke's design
was less profound. It was his distinction to present to the modern
world, in his own "historical plain method," perhaps the largest
assortment ever made by any individual of facts characteristic of
human understanding. Criticism of the presuppositions implied in those
facts--by Kant and his successors, and in Britain more unpretentiously
by Reid, all under the stimulus of Hume's sceptical criticism--has
employed philosophers since the author of the _Essay on Human
Understanding_ collected materials that raised deeper philosophical
problems than he tried to solve. Locke's mission was to initiate
modern criticism of the foundation and limits of our knowledge. Hume
negatively, and the German and Scottish schools constructively,
continued what it was Locke's glory to have begun.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The _Essay concerning Human Understanding_ has passed
through more editions than any classic in modern philosophical
literature. Before the middle of the 18th century it had reached
thirteen, and it has now passed through some forty editions, besides
being translated into Latin, French, Dutch, German and modern Greek.
There are also several abridgments. In addition to those criticisms
which appeared when Locke was alive, among the most important are
Leibnitz's _Nouveaux Essais sur l'entendement humain_--written about
1700 and published in 1765, in which each chapter of the _Essay_ of
Locke is examined in a corresponding chapter by Leibnitz; Cousin's
"École sensualiste: système de Locke," in his _Histoire de la
philosophie au XVIII^e siècle_ (1829); and the criticisms in T. H.
Green's Introduction to the _Philosophical Works of Hume_ (1874). The
_Essay, with Prolegomena, biographical, critical and historical_,
edited by Professor Campbell Fraser and published by the Oxford
Clarendon Press in 1894, is the only annotated edition, unless the
_Nouveaux Essais_ of Leibnitz may be reduced to this category.

The _Letters on Toleration_, _Thoughts on Education_ and _The_
_Reasonableness of Christianity_ have also gone through many editions,
and been translated into different languages.

The first collected edition of Locke's _Works_ was in 1714, in three
folio volumes. The best is that by Bishop Law, in four quartos (1777).
The one most commonly known is in ten volumes (1812).

The _Éloge_ of Jean le Clerc (_Bibliothèque choisie_, 1705) has been
the basis of the memoirs of Locke prefixed to the successive editions
of his _Works_, or contained in biographical dictionaries. In 1829 a
_Life of Locke_ (2nd ed. in two volumes, with considerable additions,
1830), was produced by Peter, 7th Baron King, a descendant of Locke's
cousin, Anne Locke. This adds a good deal to what was previously
known, as Lord King was able to draw from the mass of correspondence,
journals and commonplace books of Locke in his possession. In the same
year Dr Thomas Foster published some interesting letters from Locke to
Benjamin Furly. The most copious account of the life is contained in
the two volumes by H. R. Fox-Bourne (1876), the results of laborious
research among the Shaftesbury Papers, Locke MSS. in the British
Museum, the Public Record Office, the Lambeth, Christ Church and
Bodleian libraries, and in the Remonstrants' library at Amsterdam.
Monographs on Locke by T. H. Fowler in 1880, in "English Men of
Letters," and by Fraser, in 1890, in Blackwood's "Philosophical
Classics" may be mentioned; also addresses by Sir F. Pollock and
Fraser at the bicentenary commemoration by the British Academy of
Locke's death, published in the _Proceedings_ of the Academy (1904).
See also C. Bastide, _John Locke; ses théories politiques et leur
influence en Angleterre_ (Paris, 1907); H. Ollion, _La Philosophie
générale de J. L._ (1909). (A. C. F.)

LOCKE, MATTHEW (c. 1630-1677), English musician, perhaps the earliest English writer for the stage, was born at Exeter, where he became a chorister in the cathedral. His music, written with Christopher Gibbons (son of Orlando Gibbons), for Shirley's masque _Cupid and Death_, was performed in London in 1653. He wrote some music for Davenant's _Siege of Rhodes_ in 1656; and in 1661 was appointed composer in ordinary to Charles II. During the following years he wrote a number of anthems for the Chapel Royal, and excited some criticism on the score of novelty, to which he replied with considerable heat (_Modern Church Music; pre-accused, censured and obstructed in its Performance before His Majesty, April 1st, 1666, &c._; copies in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the Royal College of Music). A good deal of music for the theatre followed, the most important being for Davenant's productions of _The Tempest_ (1667) and of _Macbeth_ (1672), but some doubt as to this latter has arisen, Purcell, Eccles or Leveridge, being also credited with it. He also composed various songs and instrumental pieces, and published some curious works on musical theory. He died in August 1677, an elegy being written by Purcell.

LOCKERBIE, a municipal and police burgh of Dumfriesshire, Scotland, in the district of Annandale, 14½ m. E.N.E. of Dumfries by the Caledonian railway. Pop. (1901) 2358. It has long been famous for its cattle and sheep sales, but more particularly for the great August lamb fair, the largest in Scotland, at which as many as 126,000 lambs have been sold. The town hall and Easton institute are in the Scottish Baronial style. The police station is partly accommodated in an ancient square tower, once the stronghold of the Johnstones, for a long period the ruling family under whose protection the town gradually grew up. At Dryfe Sands, about 2 m. to the W., a bloody encounter took place in 1593 between the Johnstones and Maxwells. The Maxwells were pursued into Lockerbie and almost exterminated; hence "Lockerbie Lick" became a proverbial expression, signifying an overwhelming defeat.