Locke, John

Locke, John

(b. Wrington, Somersetshire, England, 29 August 1632;d. Oates, Essex, England, 28 October 1704)

philosophy.

John Locke was the most important British philosopher of the Age of Reason, If the modern Western world has been shaped by scientists, merchants, statesmen, and industrialists, Locke was the first philosopher to expound their view of life, articulate their aspirations, and justify their deeds. No philosopher has exercised a greater influence. Yet it could be said that Locke was not a philosopher at all; he was certainly not a metaphysician in the same sense as his contemporaries Leibniz or Spinoza. Locke offered no all-embracing system to explain the nature of the universe. On the contrary, he tried to show that human understanding is so limited that such comprehensive knowledge is beyond man’s reach. Although he did not have the answers to the philosophical problems he formulated, Locke was able to establish the importance of science as an object of philosophical analysis.

Two powerful streams in seventeenth-century thought, the semiskeptical rational theorizing of Descartes and the ad hoc scientific experimentation of Bacon and the Royal Society, merged in Locke. Because the streams were so different, their union was imperfect, but his mind was the meeting point that marked a new beginning, not only in theoretical philosophy, but in man’s approach to the problems of practical life. Locke, one might almost say, had the first modern mind. Descartes was still in many ways a medieval thinker, with his philosophy bound to theology; and even Gassendi, who anticipated much of Locke, did not free himself completely from its hold. By divorcing philosophy from theology, Locke placed the study of philosophy within the boundaries of man’s experience: “Our portion,” he wrote, “lies only here in this little spot of earth, where we and all our concernments are shut up.”

Yet Locke was not an atheist, and in his capacity as theologian he expounded his own thoughts about God. He quarreled with bishops and with the orthodox of most denominations. He maintained that a Christian need believe no more than the single proposition “that Christ is the Messiah”; but to that minimal creed he clung with the firmest assurance. He had a quiet and steady faith in the immortality of the soul and in the prospect of happiness in the life to come. He had no belief in miracles and no patience with people who had mystical experiences or visions of God. He detested religious enthusiasm, but in an unemotional way he was, like Newton, a deeply religious man.

Locke was born at Wrington, Somersetshire, in western England. His grandfather, Nicholas Locke, was a successful clothier in that county. His father, also named John Locke, was a less prosperous lawyer and clerk to the local magistrates. Baptized by Samuel Crook, a leading Calvinist intellectual, Locke was brought up in an atmosphere of austerity and discipline. He was ten when the Civil War broke out, and his father was mounted as a captain of Parliamentary horse by Alexander Popham, a rich local magistrate-turned-colonel. Apart from demolishing some images in Wells Cathedral, the two officers saw little action, but a grateful Popham became the patron of his captain’s eldest son. A few years later, when Westminster School was taken over by the Parliament, Popham found a place for his protégé in what was then the best boarding school in the country.

At Westminster, Locke came under the influence of the Royalist headmaster Richard Busby, whom the Parliamentary governors had imprudently allowed to remain in charge of the school. Locke left Westminster in 1652 to become an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, where he once again came under Puritan influence. Although he did not wholly enjoy the university, he received the M.A. degree and was appointed to a teaching position, lecturing on such subjects as natural law, although he was more interested in medicine.

In the summer of 1666 Locke became friends with Anthony Ashley Cooper, then Lord Ashley and later the first earl of Shaftesbury. Although not yet the leader of a party, Shaftesbury was already the outstanding politician of liberalism and the most forceful champion of religious toleration. In 1667, at the age of thirty-four, Locke went to live at Shaftesbury’s house in London. His Oxford career had not been particularly distinguished: he had been a temporary lecturer and a censor at Christ Church; he had become friends with Robert Boyle, one of the founders of the Royal Society, and helped him by collecting scientific data; and he had studied medicine. But he had done no important laboratory work and had failed to get a medical degree. Even so, it was as a domestic physician that Locke entered Shaftesbury’s household, and he soon proved himself an able doctor by saving his patron’s life (as Shaftesbury believed) when it was threatened by a suppurating cyst of the liver. Convinced that Locke was far too great a genius to be spending his time on medicine alone, Shaftesbury encouraged other pursuits, and under his patronage Locke discovered his own capabilities.

Locke first became a philosopher. At Oxford he had been, like Hobbes before him, bored and dissatisfied with the medieval Aristotelian philosophy that was taught there. Through Descartes, Locke became acquainted with the “new philosophy,” and discussions with Shaftesbury and other London friends led him to write, in his fourth year under Shaftesbury’s roof, the earliest drafts of his masterpiece, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In London, Locke also met the physician Thomas Sydenham, who introduced him to the new clinical method that he had learned at Montpellier. Shaftesbury himself introduced Locke to the study of economics and gave him his earliest experience in political administration.

Locke stayed with Shaftesbury intermittently until the latter’s death in 1683. In those fifteen years Shaftesbury’s Protestant zeal carried him to the point of organizing a rebellion over the Catholic James’s legitimate right of succession. But the plot was nipped, and Shaftesbury withdrew to Holland, where he died a month later. Locke followed the example of Shaftesbury and fled to Holland, remaining in exile until William of Orange invaded England in 1688 and reclaimed the country for Protestantism and liberty. Locke returned to England in 1689 and devoted his remaining fifteen years to scholarship and public service.

While in Holland, Locke had completed An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and his first Letter for Toleration and may have done some work on his Civil Government. The Letter for Toleration was published in Locke’s original Latin at Gouda in 1689 and an English translation made by the Socinian William Popple—“without my privity” Locke later said—was published in London a few months later. The Essay and the Civil Government were also brought out by various London booksellers in the winter of 1689-1690. Only the Essay bore Locke’s name, but its success was so great that he became famous throughout Europe.

In the “Epistle to the Reader,” which begins the Essay, Locke says that in an age of such “master builders” as Boyle, Sydenham, Huygens, and “the incomparable Mr. Newton” it is, for him, “ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge.” Despite this modest explanation of purpose Locke provided, among other things, the first modern philosophy of science, in which the Cartesian “idea” was a recurrent theme, Locke says that we have ideas in our minds not only when we think but when we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel as well. The core of his epistemology is the notion that the objects of perception are not things but ideas derived in part from things in the external world and dependent, to some extent, on our own minds for their existence. Locke defines an “idea” as the “object of the understanding,” whether it is a notion, an entity, or an illusion; perception is for him a “species of understanding.”

Locke continues his Essay with an attack on the currently established opinion that certain ideas are innate. He claims that they have been considered innate only because people cannot remember first having learned them. Locke believed that we are born in total ignorance and that even our theoretical ideas of identity, quantity, and substance are derived from experience. He says that a child gets ideas of black and white, of sweet and bitter before he gets an idea of abstract principles such as identity or impossibility. “The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet….” The mind later abstracts these theoretical ideas and so “comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the materials about which to exercise the discursive faculty,” In the child’s development “the use of reason becomes daily more visible as these materials that give it employment increase.”

Locke had thus to defend the assumption that everything which he calls an idea is derived from sensation, although he admits that an idea may also be produced by reflection—“remembering, considering, reasoning.” He classifies ideas as simple (those which the mind receives passively) and complex (those produced by the exercise of the mind’s own powers). ln the chapters on simple ideas he sets out the main lines of his theory of perception. Most people, if asked what it is that they see, smell, hear, taste, or touch, would answer “things,” although they might add “but sometimes illusions, chimeras, mirages, which are not real things.” They would probably maintain that there are two elements in an act of perception: the observer and the object. Locke differs from this view in two respects. First, he claims that what we perceive is always an idea, as distinct from a thing; second, that there are not two but three elements in perception: the observer, the idea, and the object that the idea represents.

The reasoning that led Locke to this conclusion is not difficult to appreciate. We look at a penny. We are asked to describe it. It is round, brown, and of modest dimensions. But do we really see just this? We think again and realize that more often than not what we see is elliptical, not circular; in some lights it is golden, in others black; close to the eye it is large, seen from afar it is tiny. The actual penny, we are certain, cannot be both circular and elliptical, both golden all over and black all over. So we may be led to agree that there must be something which is the one and something which is the other, something which changes and something which does not change, the elliptical “penny” we see and the real circular penny, or, in Locke’s words, the “idea” in the mind of the observer and the material “body“itself.

Today Locke’s theory of perception is defended on the basis of the physicist’s description of the structure of the universe and the physiologist’s description of the mechanism of perception. To a child a penny is something that looks brown, feels warm, and tastes sharp; to the scientist it is a congeries of electrons and protons. The scientist speaks of certain light waves striking the retina of the observer’s eye while waves of other kinds strike different nerve terminals, producing those modifications of the nervous system that are called “seeing.” “feeling,” or “tasting” a penny. Neither the electrons nor the protons, neither the external waves nor the internal modifications are brown or warm or astringent. The scientist then, in a certain sense, differentiates what Locke called the secondary qualities—color, taste, sound—which Locke said depended on the observer’s mind for their existence, At the same time science seems to accept the objective existence of the qualities that Locke called primary and that he thought belonged to material bodies themselves—impenetrability, extension, figure, mobility, and number. Although the language of primary and secondary qualities was used by earlier theorists, it is Locke’s analysis of the distinction which makes it of significance both to science and to common sense. Most people would probably agree that they could imagine an object divested one by one of its qualities of taste, smell, and so forth; but they could not imagine a body divested of impenetrability, shape, size, or position in space. A body without primary qualities would not exist at all.

While there is much to be said for Locke’s epistemology, it is not without its faults. If we are aware in our perceptual experience only of ideas (which represent objects) and never of objects themselves, there can be no means of knowing what, if anything, is represented by those ideas. The human predicament, according to Locke’s account, is that of a man permanently imprisoned in a sort of diving bell, receiving some signals from without and some from within his apparatus but having no means of knowing which, if any, signals come from outside; hence he has no means of testing their authenticity. Man, therefore, cannot have any definite knowledge whatever of the external world.

In later chapters of the Essay Locke places an even heavier emphasis on human ignorance. Our knowledge, he says, “is not only limited to the paucity and imperfections of the ideas we have, and which we employ about it,” but is still more circumscribed. Our knowledge of identity and diversity in ideas extends only as far as our ideas themselves; our knowledge of their coexistence extends only a little way, because knowledge of any necessary connection between primary and secondary qualities is unattainable. However, with the area of certainty thus diminished, Locke does not deny the possibility of an assurance which falls short of perfect knowledge. We can have probable knowledge, even though we cannot have certain knowledge. Moreover, unlike most of his successors in empiricist philosophy, Locke admits the existence of substance, which he says is somehow present in all objects even though we do not see or feel it. What we see and feel are the primary and secondary qualities, which are propped up by substance. Beyond that the subject must necessarily remain a mystery:

It seems probable to me that the simple ideas we receive from sensation and reflection are the boundaries of our thoughts; beyond which the mind, whatever efforts it would make, is not able to advance one jot, nor can it make any discoveries, when it would pry into the nature and hidden causes of those ideas.

The tone of the Essay is at once moral and pragmatic. Its style is homely rather than elegant, its construction informal and even amateurish. The “pursuit of Truth,” Locke says, “is a duty we owe to God … and a duty we owe also to ourselves”; here utility is at one with piety. Truth, as Locke defines it, is the “proper riches and furniture of the mind” and he does not claim to have added to that stock, but rather to have shown the conditions under which the mind could acquire truth:

We have no reason to complain that we do not know the nature of the sun or the stars, that the consideration of light itself leaves us in the dark and a thousand other speculations in nature, since, if we knew them, they would be of no solid advantage, nor help to make our lives the happier, they being but the useless employment of idle or over-curious brains. …

Locke’s theory of knowledge has obvious implications for a theory of morals. The traditional view in Locke’s time was that some sort of moral knowledge was innate in the human person. Locke thought otherwise. What God or Nature had given man was a faculty of reason and a sentiment of self-love. Reason in combination with self-love produced morality and could discern the general principles of ethics, or natural law; and self-love should lead men to obey those principles.

For Locke, Christian ethics was natural ethics. The teaching of the New Testament was a means to an end, happiness in this life and in the life to come. Loving one’s neighbor and otherwise obeying the precepts of the Saviour was a way to that end. The reason for doing what Christ said was not simply that He had said it, but that by doing it one promoted one’s happiness. There was no need to ask why anyone should desire happiness, because all men were impelled by their natural self-love to desire it.

Wrongdoing was thus for Locke a sign of ignorance. People did not always realize that long-term happiness could usually be bought only at the cost of short-term pleasures. Folly drove them to destroy their own well-being. If people were enlightened, if they used their own powers of reason, they would be good; if they were prudent, reflective, calculating, instead of moved by the transitory winds of impulse and emotion, they would have what they most desired. There is perhaps in this system of morals something rather naïve and commonplace; but Locke was in many ways a very ordinary thinker, inspired by a prophetic common sense,

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. See H. O. Christopherson, A Bibliographical Introduction to the Study of John Locke (Oslo, 1930). Collected editions and selections of Locke’s work are The Works, 3 vols. (London, 1714), repr. throughout the eighteenth century; The Works, Edmund Law, ed., 4 vols. (London, 1777), the best collected ed.; The Philosophical Works, J. A. St. John, ed. (1843); and Locke on Politics, Religion and Education, M. Cranston, ed. (1965).

Separate works include Epistola de tolerantia ad clarissinnun virrun… (Gouda, 1689), English trans. (London, 1689); Two Treatises of Government (London, 1690); P. Laslett, ed. (Cambridge, I960), a critical ed. with original text, intro., and commentary; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690), enl. (1694, 1700); A. C. Fraser, ed., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1894), prepared from a collation of 4 eds. published in Locke’s lifetime; John W. Yolton, ed. (London-New York, 1961), the best recent text; see also An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay, R.J. Aaron and J. Gibbs, eds. (Oxford, 1936), prepared from one of three surviving MSS; A Second Letter Concerning Toleration (London, 1690); Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money (London, 1692); A Third Letter For Toleration (London, 1692)—the letters on toleration have been reprinted together several times, see the eds. by A. Millar (London, 1765) and A. Murray (London, 1870); Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London, 1693), enl. (London, 1695); R. H. Quick, ed. (London, 1880); the most useful ed. is in James L. Ax tell, ed., Educational Writings (Cambridge, 1968); Locke’s Travels in France 1675–1679, J. Lough, ed. (Cambridge, 1953), Locke’s French travel diaries published for the first time; Essays on the Laws of Nature, W, von Leyden, ed, (Oxford, 1954), an early Latin text found among the Lovelace papers by the editor, who includes a trans, and an intro, of exceptional interest; and Two Tracts on Government, Philip Abrams, ed, (Cambridge, 1965), drawn from early MSS.

For Locke’s correspondence, see T. Forster, ed., Original Letters of John Locke, Algernon Sydney and Lord Shaftesbury (London, 1830); H. OIlion,ed., Lettres inédites de John Locke (The Hague, 1912); and B. Rand, ed., The Correspondence of John Locke and Edward Clarke (London, 1927). A definitive ed. of Locke’s letters is being prepared by E. S. De Beer.

II. Secondary Literature. Some bibliographical and critical studies (in chronological order) are Lord King, The Life of John Locke With Extracts From His Correspondence, Journals and Commonplace Books, 2 vols, (London, 1829); H. R. F. Bourne, The Life of John Locke, 2 vols. (London, 1876), a substantial Victorian work that has not lost its utility despite later discoveries; J. Gibson, Locke’s Theory of Knowledge (Cambridge, 1917), a useful guide to the Essay ; S. Lamprecht, The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Locke (London, 1918); A. I. Aaron, John Locke (Oxford, 1937), the best-known modern commentary on Locke’s philosophy; Willmoore Kendall, John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule (New Haven, 1941), which depicts Locke as a forerunner of modern progressive democratic ideas; J. W. Gough, John Locke’s Political Philosophy: Eight Studies (Oxford, 1952), a well-arranged commentary; M. Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London, 1957), largely based on the earl of Lovelace’s inherited collection of Locke’s MSS acquired by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in 1948; R. H. Cox, Locke on War and Peace (Oxford, 1961), a distinctive reinterpretation that stresses Locke’s affinity with Hobbes; C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Progressive Individualism (Oxford, 1962), a critique of Marxian inspiration; Martin Seliger, The Liberal Politics of John Locke (London, 1968), a defense of the liberal interpretation of Locke’s politics; and John W. Yolton, ed., John Locke: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge, 1969), a series of critical essays by English and American scholars.

Maurice Cranston