FIVE
John Locke and the
Education of the Mind
Limits of reason, useful knowledge, and the duty to search for truth
In an essay entitled “Of Study,” written in 1677, during the period of his travels in France (1675–79), John Locke noted: “We are here in the state of mediocrity—finite creatures, furnished with powers and faculties very well fitted to some purposes, but very disproportionate to the vast and unlimited extent of things.” To try and identify in detail the extent and the limits of the reach of our faculties would therefore be an endeavor “of great service,” but one that can deliver accurate results only “after a long and diligent research.”1 It was such research that Locke had proposed to himself in 1671, when he drafted the first two variants of what was to become the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). At that point, the inquiry into the nature of the human understanding had been occasioned by a conversation on the subject of the principles of morality and revealed religion.2 Previously, in a couple of medical writings of the late 1660s—a decade during which he had joined Robert Boyle, Richard Lower, and subsequently Thomas Sydenham in their experimental researches, mainly (iatro)chemical and medical—Locke had also touched upon the question of the powers of the human faculties and the consequent need of delimiting the territory of their rightful use.3 In the 1677 essay, he wrote that the topic needed further mature consideration, so that for the moment he would “suspend” his previous reflections. But he also added a “Memorandum” to himself, sketching two issues: the areas of knowledge outside human ken and those where the pursuit of knowledge is both possible and useful. Among the former he listed “things infinite,” the “essences . . . of substantial beings,” and the manner “nature in this great machine of the world produces the several phenomena, and continues the species of things in a successive generation.” As for the latter issue, he wrote:
That which seems to me to be suited to the end of man, and lie level to his understanding, is the improvement of natural experiments for the conveniences of this life, and the way of ordering himself so as to attain happiness in the other, i.e. moral philosophy, which in my sense comprehends religion too, or a man’s whole duty.4
Locke’s transparent reference to the tract The Whole Duty of Man—the extremely popular primer of the moral religion promoted by the Restoration Church of England—indicates his favorable view of that practical line of divinity and his similar conception of useful knowledge pursuits, which could ensure both provision for this life and the ordering of man’s soul in view of the afterlife. Such pursuit was opposed both to the “art of disputing” and to “useless speculations,” and looked to the discovery and remedy of men’s interests, prejudices, unruly desires and passions, vanity and ignorance.5 It also involved, of course, a careful assessment of the limits and possibilities of our faculties; the conclusions of Locke’s “long and diligent research” therein (of over two decades) would receive fully rounded expression in the several published editions of the Essay.
The limits-of-reason theme, aligned with the epistemic modesty and the charts of certain and probable knowledge that Locke shared with the English virtuosi, is a well-known feature of the Essay.6 Less popular, though, is, in Richard Yeo’s words, Locke’s commitment to the “pursuit of knowledge as a moral duty.”7 I would like to argue here not only that the duty to search for truth is indeed central to Locke’s epistemology, but also that this theme is correlated in his thought with the “usefulness” of knowledge pursuits, in particular with the dimension of “usefulness” I have highlighted so far, as bearing on the task of diagnosing and educating the human mind. As in Boyle’s case, we can recognize the dynamic element in Locke’s approach to reason, knowledge, and mind if we look at it from the early modern cultura animi perspective. The focus on the limits of reason and on the degrees of certainty and probability seems to have the effect of painting a static picture of the two philosophers’ views on these questions. Highlighting the theme of the education of the mind that I claim accompanies that of the limits of reason will bring to the fore the dynamic dimension of these views; it will also point to new aspects of the closeness of Boyle’s and Locke’s conceptions, the fruit of a long collaboration and friendship.8
In the Essay, Locke notoriously places radical strictures on the domain of certain knowledge: we have “intuitive knowledge” of the existence of thinking in us and of the existence and identity of ideas in our minds; “demonstrative knowledge” of the existence of God, of mathematics, and possibly of morality; and “sensitive knowledge” of the existence of finite things. Everything else falls in the domain of “judgment” or probable opinion.9 The essences, hidden causes, and inner workings of created things are bound to remain outside the scope of human knowledge in the strict sense. Like Glanvill and Boyle, Locke goes through a list of “inexplicable” things in his account of ideas in book II of the Essay, under the rubric of the “complex ideas of substances.” We have no way of grasping the “necessary connections” among the qualities and powers of bodies, such as “the coherence and continuity of the parts of Matter; the production of Sensation in us of Colours and Sounds, etc. by impulse and motion; nay, the original Rules and Communication of Motion” themselves—which are as inexplicable as “the Resurrection of the dead, the future state of this Globe of Earth, and such other Things.”10
But Locke shares with Glanvill and Boyle not only the list of “inexplicable” things, which has the role of curbing presumption and dogmatism and of cultivating epistemic modesty, but also the notion that self-knowledge, understood as a fair and continued assessment of the capacities of the human faculties, is central to the task of useful knowledge pursuits. This task is at the core of man’s relation with his Creator. As narrow as the human understanding may be, it is nevertheless furnished with capacities fit for fulfilling its tasks, i.e., knowledge of the Creator and a good conduct of our lives, of which a crucial part is the good conduct of our understanding: “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct. If we can find out those Measures, whereby a rational Creature put in that State, which Man is in, in this World, may, and ought to govern his Opinions and Actions depending thereon, we need not be troubled, that some other things escape our Knowledge.”11 Moreover, the very existence of the epistemological domains of the certain and the probable is interpreted by Locke, as it was by Boyle, in terms of the creaturely task relative to the pursuit of truth and the “perfection” of man’s mind. In his chapter “Of Judgment” in the Essay, Locke says that the little certain knowledge we have may have been given us “as a Taste of what intellectual Creatures [i.e., angels] are capable of” in order to “excite in us a Desire and Endeavour after a better State.” Certainty, then, is not only an epistemological category but an image of the perfection that is above us and an incentive to seek that perfection. Equally, probability is not only an epistemological division but also a field of struggle for a creature in a state of “mediocrity”: the struggle with the “twilight” of probability is meant to test us (we are in a state of “probationership”), to curb our presumption (by making us “sensible of our short-sightedness and liableness to Error”), but also to prompt us to seek “with Industry and Care” the way to “a State of greater Perfection.”12 Thus, for Locke, the question of the boundaries of human knowledge and the notion of a proper conduct and perfecting of the intellect are closely linked: the counterpart of human ignorance is the recognition of those provinces where the employment of the intellect is not only possible but useful and the recognition of a duty to use one’s mind well.
Locke’s reflections on the relation between our epistemic duties and self-knowledge form the context not only for the theme of the limits of reason and of the degrees of certainty and probability, but also for that of the corruptions of the mind. The rightful conduct of the understanding for him involves both the careful assessment of the reach of the faculties and of their domains of application, and a regimen for curing the infirmities and cultivating the strengths of the mind. In “Of Study,” Locke wrote:
It will be no hindrance at all to our studies if we sometimes study ourselves, i.e. our own abilities and defects. There are peculiar endowments and natural fitnesses, as well as defects and weaknesses, almost in every man’s mind. When we have considered and made ourselves acquainted with them, we shall not only be the better enabled to find out remedies for the infirmities, but we shall know the better how to turn ourselves to those things which we are best fitted to deal with, and so to apply ourselves in the course of our studies as we may be able to make the greatest advantage.13
Our pursuit of knowledge needs to be built on and directed by what we learn by looking into ourselves. The kind of self-study Locke recommends has all the colors of the care of the mind developed by the medicina-cultura animi literature. It is to become acquainted with the “infirmities” of the mind and try to figure out the best “remedies.” It is also to understand its powers and try to orient them toward what they are fit to accomplish. That orientation, which involves the choice of some course of study, is equally a course of training for the capacities of the mind: the pursuit of knowledge is thus premised on a program meant to tend and nurture the human mind. The knowledge sought after, Locke adds, is of a kind that should be appraised by features like “fitness” and “usefulness”: it needs to be knowledge for which the capacities of the human mind are fit, so that it becomes knowledge that is capable of training and enhancing those capacities, and thus that it proves “advantageous” to man’s mind and by extension to his life.
The “infirmities” and “defects” of the mind represent a topic on which Locke pursued as continued reflection as he did on that of the limits and proper use of the human faculties. The sketchy observations on the topic in his letters, Journal fragments, or the first draft of the Essay prepared the discussion of the nature and causes of error that forms the subject matter of several chapters in the Essay: most notably IV.xx (on error), but also I.iv.22–24 (the conclusion of his attack on innatism, showing that lazy credulity is the effect of that doctrine); II.xxix–xxxii (on obscure, confused, fantastical, inadequate, and false ideas); III.x–xi (on the abuse of words); IV.vii (on the ill use of maxims); and the two chapters added to the fourth edition of the Essay (1700), II.xxxiii (on the association of ideas) and IV.xix (on enthusiasm).14 Another planned addition to the fourth edition, completed by 1697 but published only posthumously and separately in 1706, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, is Locke’s most extensive reflection on the subject. In this text, the mind is said to be plagued by all sorts of “Weaknesses and Defects,” comparable to the “Diseases of the Body,” the full picture of which would be gathered “if the Mind were thoroughly study’d.”15 Indeed, the Conduct is largely an inventory of these defects, with an explicit Baconian opening,16 as part of a natural history of the mind yet to be completed.
Locke’s approach to the limits and corruptions of the mind is shaped by a Christian-philosophical conception of man’s task of governing and educating the powers of his mind as a God-assigned duty. This conception is naturally aligned with the developments in the early modern cultura animi tradition. The anthropology characteristic of this tradition is one that Locke shared: human nature is corrupted in a variety of ways, but its depravity is not insurmountable except through divine grace; human concourse is required for salvation, and man’s care of his own soul is assumed as a Christian task and expressed in a program of religious-philosophical regimens. Reason is man’s principal instrument in this task. For Locke, reason is a “dim candle” incapable of the full light of knowledge (reserved, in his scheme of things, for angels and just men made perfect).17 The work of reason is also regularly thwarted by the infirmities of the mind. At the same time, though, the faculties and powers we are born with are “capable of almost any thing,” provided we exercise them to the full.18 The mind is still a “candle of the Lord,” even if a “dim” one: its light is enough to do its proper work, but the labor will have to be patient, wearisome, and severe.19
Locke’s view of reason encompasses the territory of the possible states of the human mind as circumscribed by a conception of its limits and corruptions, its progress and education, and its full-blown, healthy activity, exercised in conformity with its rightly acknowledged capacities and proper use. This view is in tune with the similar conception in the cultura animi line of thought, which measures the distance between, e.g., Bacon’s distorted mirror and clear mirror of the mind, Reynolds’s corruptions and dignities of the human intellect, or Boyle’s flawed reasoning and right reason. This conception is uneasily interpreted either as an advocacy of Enlightened triumphalist reason or as a hard-line Augustinian condemnation of depraved human nature.20 Such contrasting interpretations are due to an unbalanced stress on either the “optimistic” or the “pessimistic” assessments of the human powers, which are actually made to cohere in Locke’s, as in the cultura animi, conception that takes the human mind as an object of cure, training, and cultivation.
A natural history of the distempered mind
Description and regulation
The undertaking of the Essay, as Locke explains in his introductory chapter (I.i), is to use the “Historical, plain Method” in considering the “discerning Faculties of a Man, as they are employ’d about the Objects, which they have to do with.”21 An exposition of the operations of the understanding guided by this descriptive experimental method is indeed pursued through the Essay, especially in the second book’s account of sensation and reflection, of perception and volition, of retention and the “discerning” operations of comparing, compounding, naming, and abstraction; and in the fourth book’s account of the mechanism of “sagacity” (whereby reason “finds out” ideas) and “illation” or inference (which is reason’s act of ordering intermediate ideas and discovering the connections between ideas along the inferential chain).22 But the description of the operations does not exhaust the scope of Locke’s natural-historical investigation of the intellect. That investigation also includes the discovery of both the limits and the weaknesses of the mind (a misrepresentation of the limits is in fact, for Locke, one instance of the weaknesses). The mismanagement of the operations of the understanding is as important to Locke as their nature, and, as I will show below, his charts of the former are consonant with the types of anatomy of the distempered mind characteristic of texts in the early modern cultura animi tradition. It is significant in this sense that Locke’s Essay was heralded by his contemporaries as a new logic,23 but his treatment of the mind’s frailties and their remedies is in fact germane to a wider context, of which logic is only a member, and which I have described as the common ground of the cultura animi genres.
The natural history of the distempered mind introduces a normative dimension into the descriptive tenor of the general natural history of the operations of the understanding. This dimension is signaled by Locke from the start, in the introductory chapter of the Essay. Immediately after the definition of his “Historical, plain Method,” he goes on to say that his inquiry will serve to show how “we ought to regulate our Assent, and moderate our Perswasions” (emphasis mine).24 This statement is placed in the context of a preliminary picture of mankind’s ill use of their understandings, resulting in dogmatism, sectarian disputes, or skepticism, which will be detailed in his discussions of error. Locke reinforces the normative dimension by signaling a specific understanding of human nature: the Essay will inquire into “those Measures, whereby a rational Creature put in that State, which Man is in, in this World, may, and ought to govern his Opinions, and Actions depending thereon” (emphasis mine).25 The normative load attached to the notion of “rational creature” is implicit in the Essay, as for instance when he notes, in his discussion of how assent “ought to be regulated,” that he is referring to “the Mind which searches after Truth, and endeavours to judge right,” which is a disposition that is not given but acquired.26 It becomes explicit in the Conduct, in a passage echoing the Ciceronian idea of the “seeds” of reason that need to be cultivated by philosophical exercise: “for though we all call our selves so [i.e., ‘reasonable creatures’], because we are born to it if we please, yet we may truly say Nature gives us but the Seeds of it; we are born to be, if we please, rational Creatures, but ’tis Use and Exercise only that makes us so, and we are indeed so no farther than industry and application has carried us.”27 The description of the operations of the understanding has as a counterpart the notion that man has the capacity to become a fully rational creature through the education of its powers; the “historical, plain Method” of the Essay stands side by side with the regulative prescriptions for the rightful conduct of the mind in both the Essay and the Conduct.28
In the first three chapters I noted that the cultura animi charts of the distempers of the mind (e.g., those in Bacon, Wright, Reynolds, Glanvill, and Hooke) seem to be offered less as a theoretical doctrine than as general instruments for a (lifelong) practice of self-scrutiny and self-regulation. In a perfectly similar move, Locke offers what he says are only the first steps toward a history of the distempers of the mind in his Conduct in order to “excite Men, especially those who make Knowledge their business, to look into themselves.”29 The counterpart of this history, for Locke, as for the other authors investigated here, is a practical doctrine about a regimen of the mind, mainly centered on a discipline of judgment, devised as an exercise of examination and of the regulation of assent. In the remainder of this section I will look at Locke’s cartography of the distempered mind and will note the complex interrelations of its cognitive, conative, and moral dimensions, of the kind encountered in the Augustinian-Socratic charts of the mind. The next section will be devoted to his conception of the remedial powers of examination and the regulation of assent, which, I will argue, is the important practical side of his theory of knowledge and judgment.
Defects and weaknesses
Reason’s exercise, Locke tells us in his Essay chapter “Of Reason,” consists in the discovery of ideas (“sagacity”) and in ordering them so that their “agreement” or “disagreement” is grasped and right conclusions are drawn (“illation” or inference). This is, he maintains, a natural mechanism of the mind (a “native faculty”) that is more fruitfully observed in the “enlargement of our Knowledge, and regulating our Assent” than the artificial rules of scholastic syllogism.30 In intuitive knowledge, the agreement or disagreement of ideas is perceived immediately; in demonstration, it is perceived via intermediary ideas that are indubitably seen to cohere or not; in judgment, it is “taken” to be so, again via intermediate ideas that are judged probable or improbable on the basis of testimony.31 Reason fails us in several ways, corresponding to the stages in this process. It may lack ideas or it may work with obscure and confused ideas; it may not see their connections or it may fail to order them correctly; and it can do so because it proceeds upon “false principles” or because it relies on “dubious words.”32 Locke’s account of error builds on this analysis of the reasoning faculty and its mechanism. But that account extends the explication of this core mechanism of flawed reasoning into a variegated cartography of both the external conditions of knowledge and the inner workings of the mind that has no match in Descartes, for instance, but that is congruent with those in Bacon, Reynolds, or Glanvill.
The lack of ideas (or “proofs” for reasoning) may be attributable to external conditions outside the person’s control—a topic that points to Locke’s sensitivity to the social dimensions of the question of the pursuit of knowledge. Those lacking the material means to enable the gathering of information cannot be expected to advance too much in “learned and laborious Enquiries.” Nevertheless, Locke thinks that neither lack of means nor lack of time can prevent anyone from engaging in the basic duty of thinking about his own soul and becoming sufficiently informed in matters of religion.33 The truly disabling situation is that of men coerced by the “Laws of their Countries” to become “enslaved” in their understandings and to “swallow down” the official (especially religious) doctrines of their land.34 Locke’s writings on the question of religious toleration from the late 1680s on develop his belief in the necessity of political freedom for what he increasingly considered to be every person’s duty to educate the freedom of her own mind.35
But apart from these external disabling situations, and from the case of those born with a naturally poor reason, the lack of ideas required for right reasoning is imputable to men’s own failures. This category of error is similar to that of Reynolds’s “voluntary error”: blindness to the relevant proofs is in this case due to the “want of will” to see them, which, Locke says, is a result of laziness, aversion for study, or fear of having prejudices refuted. Such people resist the labor of finding and examining proofs owing to this general flawed disposition, and they “take upon trust” the convenient or fashionable opinion.36 The same holds for what Locke classifies as the last case of the “wrong measures of probability” in the Essay, which includes errors due to a voluntary self-enslavement to the authority of “common received Opinions”: one believes what the authoritative figures around one believe (friends, parties, sects, leaders), often because of one’s interest or passions.37 The authority-induced belief is also largely one of “no Opinion at all,” as in the case of those who cannot even be said to reason at all, who hold opinions without really understanding what they hold or why.38 The force of authority is also involved in Locke’s first item in the list of “wrong measures of probability”: doubtful or false propositions taken up for principles. His examples include the principles cemented by the doctrine of innate ideas, which he refutes in book I of the Essay; the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation; and the Enthusiastic doctrine of the direct communication of the divine spirit, which he attacks in chapter xix of book IV. For Locke, these are examples of unexamined principles “imbibed” early in one’s education, “swallowed” unthinkingly out of reverence for some authority, and subsequently maintained with “obstinacy” and often imposed on others.39 Locke’s (Socratic) attack on the human tendency to suit beliefs to the requirements of interest and parties, and thus to form beliefs with blind assent or implicit faith and to maintain them with obstinacy, is relentless in both the Essay and the Conduct.40 Besides imbibed principles and reverence for authority, the “wrong measures of probability” include two other cases of blocking the examination of evidence: the molding of one’s understanding “to the size of a received Hypothesis,” whereby someone who has long held an opinion and possibly built a reputation on it cannot find it in himself to undo it all on the receipt of new information that disproves it (the case of the “learned Professor”); and the coloring of one’s beliefs by one’s appetites and passions, which makes one incapable of “yielding” to new evidence that might overturn his passionately embraced beliefs (the cases of the “covetous Man” or of the “Man passionately in love,” where Locke quotes the Latin tag similarly used by Reynolds and Glanvill: “quod volumus facile credimus; what suits our Wishes, is forwardly believed”).41
If the passions are explicitly classified here only in this latter category, Locke indicates nevertheless that he sees their work involved in several of his categories of error. We have seen that the voluntary ignoring of proofs is associated with “fear” of being destabilized in one’s prejudices; pliancy to authority often matches one’s own passions; and, as he puts it in the Conduct, the passions make people believe what suits their (personal) “humour” as well as their “party,”42 so that they are inextricably involved both in the “abuse of principles” and in the “received hypotheses” categories of the wrong measures of assent. Similarly, a more general reference to one’s “Temper and Inclination,” coupled with “Laziness, Ignorance, and Vanity,” is involved in the explanation of the “strong conceit” of enthusiasm in the chapter devoted to this “corruption of our Judgments.”43 Moreover, even the work of reason in demonstration can be blocked by “Vices, Passions, and domineering Interest.”44 The very reliance on confused “complex ideas”—which result when the simple ideas going into their composition are too few, jumbled together, or undetermined—is often due to “Men’s ease or vanity”;45 and it is precisely the lack of clear, distinct, and complete ideas, with “constant names” added to them, that allows free rein to men’s tendency “blindly, and with an implicit Faith, to receive and swallow Principles.”46
“Implicit faith” also features in Locke’s explanation of the mechanism of the association of ideas—one of the most insidious defects of the mind, “a Taint which so universally infects Mankind” that special attention needs to be reserved for its prevention and cure.47 Association of ideas is especially pernicious as it affects the core mechanism of reasoning, which to Locke is the correct identification of the agreement or disagreement of ideas. Locke’s premise is that there is a natural correspondence among ideas “founded in their peculiar Beings.”48 The neglect of that natural correspondence and its replacement in reasoning by nonnatural connections is the very mechanism of the association of ideas. This mechanism is enabled by chance, passions, faulty education, or uncritical reverence to authority, and it may become devastating, i.e., blinding to the point of becoming second nature, through habit.49 Implicit faith is involved in the cementing of some of the cases of the association of ideas: the notion of Catholic infallibility joined to that of transubstantiation, or the notion of God as a material being. These are examples of assent given without inquiry, which for Locke is the worst behavior of the mind, which “hinders Men from seeing and examining.”50
Many of the examples cited above involve for Locke the mental phenomenon of vicious habituation, which in the literature on the culture of the mind was captured by the metaphor of the “tincture” of beliefs. He himself uses the image in various places: beliefs are said to give a tincture to the mind, as if changing the color of a substance. In “Of Study,” Locke says that whatever opinions are “planted” in the tender mind of the child grow “by continuation of time, as it were, into the very constitution of the mind, which afterwards very difficultly receives a different tincture.”51 A tincturing of the mind also occurs in the obstinate embracing of beliefs, principles, or doctrines, in conformity with the various “parties of men,” whereby the mind becomes “preoccupied” and “prepossessed.”52 In the analysis of the defects of study in the Conduct, he similarly writes that “the Mind will take such a tincture from a familiarity with [the preferred study], that every thing else, how remote soever, will be brought under the same view.”53 Echoing the idea of the “infecting” effect of the preferred study in Bacon, Glanvill, or Hooke, Locke says that by “conversing” with only one discipline, one will see everything through the partial lens of that narrow self-imposed stance: to the mathematician everything, including divinity or politics, will boil down to mathematical figures; the “speculative” minds will reduce natural philosophy to metaphysical or logical abstractions; and the “chymist” will treat even morality and religion “in terms of the Laboratory.”54
In his discussions of error, Locke refers generally to what may be called morally flawed dispositions of the mind in inquiry: the laziness or vanity of not looking for the relevant proofs, for instance, or, in the Conduct, the laziness and vanity of those who skip from one knowledge to another and are content to gather only a “smattering in everything”;55 equally, the “despondency” and laziness of those with too little trust in their faculties, or the “presumption” of those who believe everything can be known.56 While these may be characterized as moral-cum-intellectual vices relative to the general conditions of inquiry, Locke also charts a number of defects that have to do with the intimate workings of the mind, in particular with the movement of assent. “Laziness” is also used as a descriptor here, but no longer as a moral vice relevant to intellectual behavior, but rather in a more technical sense, as a particular sort of ungoverned working of the mind. Thus, for instance, prejudice is explained as a mechanism where “’tis not the evidence of Truth, but some lazy Anticipation, some beloved Presumption that he desires to rest undisturbed in.”57 The laziness of the mind’s anticipation (a Baconian term) is distinct from my laziness when I lack the energy to look for the evidence. It characterizes the mind’s flawed movement, which here, as in the cultura animi literature, is made part of an integrated cognitive-affective mechanism (the “beloved presumption,” the “desire”). What happens to a prejudiced mind is at once a flouting of evidence and a misplacement of affection: “He whose Assent goes beyond his Evidence, owes this Excess of his Adherence only to Prejudice . . . declaring thereby, that ’tis not Evidence he seeks, but the quiet Enjoyment of the Opinion he is fond of.”58
The same combination of self-satisfaction and mind “tincturing” is involved in Locke’s picture of the maladies of assent attributable to reliance on chance. One such malady is “stiffness”: “men give themselves to the first Anticipations of their Minds,” either because they naturally fall in love with their “first born” (idea), or because of “want of Vigour and Industry” to inquire, or else because they rest content with appearances rather than with truth. But whatever the cause, this is a vicious epistemic behavior: it is “a downright prostituting of the Mind to resign it thus, and put it under the power of the first Comer.”59 The other malady is “resignation,” whereby one gives in to the latest opinion, which is as degrading and as subject to chance as the first case: “Truth never sinks into these Mens Minds, nor gives any Tincture to them, but Camelion like, they take the Colour of what is laid before them, and as soon lose and resign it to the next that happens to come in their way.”60
Another term Locke uses to describe the inner workings of distempered assent is “precipitation,” with its cognates “haste,” “forwardness,” “rashness,” and “impatience,” which we have seen were at the core of the similar anatomies in the literature surveyed so far. In the Essay, Locke introduces it in the explanation of the failure of rightly conducted inference: “the Mind, either very desirous to inlarge its Knowledge, or very apt to favour the Sentiments it has once imbibed, is very forward to make Inferences, and therefore often makes too much hast, before it perceives the connexion of the Ideas that must hold the Extremes together.”61 The observation comes in the context of Locke’s critique of syllogistic reasoning, and we recall that Bacon pursued a similar critique precisely in terms of the mind’s flawed movements. For both Bacon and Locke, let us add, these are movements of cognition and of desire at once. The same idea is rehearsed in the Conduct, where Locke speaks of the “eagerness and strong bent of the Mind after Knowledge” and of the fact that the understanding is “naturally forward”—a propensity that, unless regulated, issues in its “running too fast into general Observations and Conclusions” and hinders rather than aids the understanding.62
One defect of judgment in inquiry Locke repeatedly comes back to is not tracing “the Arguments to their true Foundation”—a jumping to conclusions that is a sure path to “opiniatrity”—owing to the “Haste and Impatience of the Mind.”63 This phenomenon, which lies behind the uncritical embracing of principles, is explained in the same terms of a desirative impatience of the mind as we have encountered in Galen, Bacon, or Glanvill: “True or False, Solid or Sandy, the Mind must have some Foundation to rest it self upon, and . . . it no sooner entertains any Proposition, but it presently hastens to some Hypothesis to bottom it on, ’till then it is unquiet and unsettled.”64 Locke adds that this is a potentially healthy “temper” of the mind, which indicates the rightful course of its operation (the establishment of “foundations” for reasoning, which is needed to counter perpetual “wavering and uncertainty,” especially in matters of great moment for one’s life, such as those pertaining to religion). What is needed is a regulation of this natural propensity, so that by “Use and Exercise” the mind forms a habit of right inference and becomes “accustomed to strict Reasoning, and to trace the dependence of any Truth in a long train of Consequences to its remote Principles, and to observe its Connection.”65
The mind can thus itself be characterized as “lazy,” “idle,” or “resty,” which accounts for the difficulty of governing both its thoughts and its passions.66 The mind’s laziness, haste, and impatience are explicitly associated with the failures of inquiry charted in the Conduct: the mismanagement of facts (some people amass undigested particulars, others draw axioms from every particular, incapable of detecting the “useful hints” and of using “wary induction”; these are “slow and sluggish” or otherwise “busy” men);67 and the mismanagement of proofs (reliance on testimony where scientific instruction is required and use of “probable topicks” where demonstration is required, or, conversely, reliance on one argument, as if in demonstration, where trial of probabilities is required; this is the result of “Laziness, Impatience, Custom, and want of Use and Attention.”)68 Equally harmful is the mismanagement of arguments in dispute: when arguments are sought in order to prove one side of the matter, or when someone is used to “talk copiously on either side” of a question, arguments “float” in the memory, and the mind is only “amused,” incapable of “possessing” itself of the truth. It has the tendency, and may easily fall into the habit, of “reasoning in a lump,” which is to remain content with what appears probable upon a “summary and confused view” or upon partial consideration. This is, again, the effect of the mind’s laziness or precipitation and an instance of its self-serving vanity or presumption.69
In sum, the failures of the mind in reasoning are described in terms of its movements and desires, as well as of a “vanity” that is associated here, as was “self-love” in the cultura animi texts, with the very irregularity of assent. In response to this analysis of error, the rightful conduct of the understanding for Locke will take the form not of a prescription of formal rules of reasoning but of a remedial regimen of exercises for the mental powers, aimed at training the mind to curb its vanity, master its forwardness and its sluggishness, regulate its assent, and govern its desires.
The regulation of assent: A perfecting exercise
Dispositions and habits: incorporating the rule
On Locke’s view, the regulation of assent, understood as an exercise of the examination of ideas, opinions, and self, joined with the cultivation of a “love of truth,” is the fundamental guide to the conduct of our minds. I will suggest that it is to be understood, not in terms of an epistemological procedure for justifying belief, but rather as a regimen prescribed for repairing the defects and weaknesses of the mind, educating the mind’s powers, and orienting its activity. As such, it is also seen as the bedrock of our inner freedom, the route to a virtuous mind and to personal worth, as well as that by which we fulfill a fundamental duty toward our Creator.
The governing of assent features in Locke’s account of both knowledge and judgment. In the case of demonstrations, even if assent is compelled by the perceived agreement or disagreement of ideas, a certain amount of work of the mind is required, since the evidence is not “so clear and bright” as in the case of intuitions, “nor the assent so ready.” In order to perform the work of demonstrative reasoning correctly, the mind needs “pains and attention” and a “steddy application and pursuit” in following the “Progression [of agreeing ideas] by steps and degrees.”70 Such “Attention, as is requisite in a long Train of Gradations” is not readily available, though, and a mind incapable of it, or else “impatient of delay,” may miss or consider lightly the relevant intermediate ideas in the demonstrative chain. Demonstration requires wary examination.71 The best exercise for developing the capacity and the habitual ease of examining ideas and their connections in demonstrations is, Locke proposes in the Conduct, provided by mathematics.72
In the case of judgment, the regulation of assent is of an equally momentous import. In the Essay Locke gives a theory of the nature and degrees of assent in probable judgment and formulates a rule for its government:
[T]he Mind if it will proceed rationally, ought to examine all the grounds of Probability, and see how they make more or less, for or against any probable Proposition, before it assents to or dissents from it, and upon a due balancing the whole, reject, or receive it, with a more or less firm assent, proportionably to the preponderancy of the greater grounds of Probability on one side or the other.73
To regulate assent means, then, to examine all the available grounds on which judgment will be passed and proportion the degree of assent to the degree of probability found in the evidence. There are two sorts of grounds: matters of fact about some particular existence, which are capable of human testimony (known either through direct experience or through the report of other observers), and things beyond our senses, not capable of human testimony (which include finite immaterial beings, material beings outside the scope of immediate sensory testimony, and the unobservable workings of nature).74 The degrees of assent, conforming to the degrees of probability, go from full “assurance” and “confidence” (these two bordering on certainty) all the way down to “conjecture,” “doubt,” and “distrust.”75 The work of examination is as crucial to the fair management of assent in probabilities as in demonstrations, and it similarly involves the attention and care of the mind. The inquirer needs to search into all the particulars that he thinks can throw light on the matter at hand, sift the information “with care and fairness,” and conduct “as full and exact an enquiry” as he can.76 Especially where testimonies contradict common experience or one another, the inquirer will need to use all his “Diligence, Attention, and Exactness . . . to form a right Judgment, and to proportion the Assent to the different Evidence and Probability of the thing.”77
Careful attention is thus signaled by Locke as the requisite state of the mind for right reasoning in both demonstration and judgment. The term is loaded for him, and he elaborates on it in his discussion of the “modes of thinking” in the Essay. There are several degrees of thinking, equivalent to degrees of attention, which everyone can observe in themselves: they range from the earnest contemplation, attentive consideration, or study of ideas and their “Relations and Circumstances,” through the bare observation of trains of ideas, without the mind’s pursuing them or following any direction in its cogitation, to the lack of any regard to the objects of thought, as in reverie, when ideas “float in our mind.”78 The “floating” of ideas in inattentive, lazy, and “amused” rather than studious minds is repeatedly mentioned by Locke in his discussions of the defects of the understanding. In contrast, attention of mind, as the power to direct the train of ideas and examine its constituents, is, as he says in the Conduct, a “remedy” countering the vicious “wandring of thoughts” and a quality that through exercise may become habitual.79 Such “mastery of thought,” which involves the capacity to direct and preserve attention in cogitation, is, Locke says, both crucial to the conduct of the understanding and one of the hardest things to achieve.80
If attention is thus a disposition of the mind that needs to be cultivated for right reasoning, Locke also mentions several qualities, which seem to describe dispositions with combined moral and intellectual value, and which are equally requisite in the rightful conduct of our minds. Especially in the context of his critique of the “tincturing” or “prepossession” of the mind by unquestioned beliefs and principles, he speaks of the force and sincerity, the candor and ingenuity, and the courage we need to muster in order to expose our beliefs, and implicitly our selves, to renewed scrutiny.81
It is precisely such scrutiny that Locke recommends in his Conduct under the title “examination.” There is a double thrust to this term: it encompasses both the examination of principles (so that none but those that are proven solid may be embraced)82 and the examination of oneself (of the “motions of the mind” involved in the various defects of the understanding, of the passions as they bear on the conduct of thinking, of the laziness or precipitation of one’s assent).83 The Conduct itself is just such an example of an examination of the multifarious distempers observed to hinder the rightful operation of the understanding. As such, this text also emphasizes the practical difficulty involved in the regulation of assent, of which the Essay offered a theoretical doctrine, together with general prescriptions for its good functioning:
In the whole Conduct of the Understanding, there is nothing of more moment than to know when and where, and how far to give Assent, and possibly there is nothing harder. ’Tis very easily said, and no body questions it, That giving and witholding our Assent, and the Degrees of it, should be regulated by the Evidence which things carry with them; and yet we see Men are not the better for this Rule; some firmly imbrace Doctrines upon slight grounds, some upon no grounds, and some contrary to appearance. Some admit of Certainty, and are not to be mov’d in what they hold: Others waver in every thing, and there want not those that reject all as uncertain.84
Locke rehearses here the rule for regulating assent formulated in the Essay but offers a new, practical perspective on it. It is a good rule, he thinks, that correctly represents the task of the understanding in judgment and that can serve as the general regulative principle of its conduct. But rules do not make people good (or good thinkers) by themselves. What is needed, Locke thinks with the whole cultura animi tradition, is an incorporation of the rules in the behavior and character (the ethos) of the person through exercise and practice: “Practice must settle the Habit of doing without reflecting on the Rule.”85
The operations of the mind required for right reasoning (“sagacity” and “illation”) are, Locke thinks, natural to the mind (a “native faculty”), and natural reason is a “touchstone” that can be relied upon to distinguish truth from falsity.86 There is also a natural affinity between mind and truth: the mind has a “natural Relish of real solid Truth,”87 “nothing being so beautiful to the Eye, as Truth is to the Mind.”88 But Locke often works with the two senses of “natural” characteristic of the doctrines of the cure and cultivation of the mind: the natural-healthy and the natural-distempered. The distance between the two, for him, is measured by the presence or absence of exercise. The mind’s powers are also naturally (in the second sense) “extinguished” by lack of exercise, which accounts for all its defects and miscarriages.89 They are “starved by disuse, and have lost that Reach and Strength which Nature fitted them to receive from Exercise.”90 It is thus only with constant practice that the mind is gradually fortified, made attentive and capable of “close thinking.”91 The outcomes of a rightly conducted practice of the mind are such as to fit Locke’s own description of the rational creature’s task and duty toward her Creator: the mind will be strengthened, the capacities enlarged, the faculties improved, and the whole effort “leads us towards Perfection.”92
The idea of the “incorporation” of rules through habituation receives support from the analogy between mind and body that served the same purpose for Bacon, Charron, or Boyle: Locke writes that “as it is in the Body, so it is in the Mind; Practice makes it what it is” and builds its “Excellencies.”93 Just as the body is trained into the appropriate habits in writing, painting, dancing, or fencing, so the mind’s reasoning needs to be exercised “in observing the Connection of Ideas and following them in train.”94 As we have seen, Locke insists that correct (“natural”) inference and attention become habitual through practice and exercise. To the same semantic area belongs the representation of reading and understanding as “digestion” or “rumination.” In thinking as in reading, one needs to trace arguments to their foundation, observe the coherence of the argumentation, and thus transform ideas into the matter of one’s own mind: “We are of the ruminating Kind, and ’tis not enough to cram our selves with a great load of Collections, unless we chew them over again, they will not give us Strength and Nourishment.”95 Locke’s pedagogical recommendations in Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) are also built on the principle of habituation. In the teaching of languages and sciences, Locke writes, the tutor’s business is to “form the Mind of his Scholars, and give that a right disposition.”96 The method suited to that end is the training of their understanding by degrees, so that advances in understanding ideas and their connections are made only once the matter at each step is fully grasped and absorbed.97 The education of the mind’s powers in early childhood has, for Locke, the virtue of a regimen for regulating assent; it “set[s] the Mind right, that on all Occasions it may be disposed to consent to nothing, but what may be suitable to the Dignity and Excellency of a rational Creature.”98 The exercise, cultivation, and improvement of the reasoning faculty, Locke believes, is “the highest Perfection, that a Man can attain to in this Life.”99 And it is the grooming of this faculty into a habitual right reasoning that builds both the self-mastery and the suppleness of the mind, and is thus the bedrock of its freedom.100
The formation of habits of right reasoning is closely allied, in Locke’s thought, not only with the general moral-cum-intellectual dispositions (the sincerity, candor, or courage mentioned above) and the training of attention, but also with the cultivation of the right emotions needed in inquiry. In his pedagogical reflections, for instance, he speaks of a love of knowledge that needs to be bred in the young child through the tutor’s efforts. Accustoming the child to using his own judgment will serve both the incorporation of rules (which will thus “go down the easier, and sink the deeper”) and the nurturing of a liking for study and instruction; the child will thus “begin to value Knowledge.”101 In commenting on the curriculum of arts and sciences he recommends, he concludes that the tutor’s business is “not so much to teach him [the child] all that is knowable, as to raise in him a love and esteem of Knowledge.”102 Elsewhere, Locke similarly speaks of the “preparation of the mind” with a love of truth. Such love, as he writes in the fourth edition of the Essay, breeds the commitment of pursuit and the concern about the outcome of the endeavor of a true inquirer: “He that would seriously set upon the search of Truth, ought in the first Place to prepare his Mind with a Love of it. For he that Loves it not, will not take much Pains to get it; nor be much concerned when he misses it.”103 A desire for truth is also, he writes in the earlier “Of Study” an orienting emotion involved in impartial inquiry: “Our first and great duty, then, is to bring to our studies, to our enquiries after knowledge, a mind covetous of truth, that seeks after nothing else, and after that impartially, and embraces it how poor, how contemptible, how unfashionable soever it may seem.”104
Locke’s love of truth is as loaded a term as his attention. It involves both a view about the affinity between mind and truth and a conception of the love of truth as a virtuous emotion of inquiry. He thinks that the mind has “a natural Relish for real solid Truth.” This “relish” is nevertheless lost with such practices as the scholastic custom of arguing on any side of a question, “even against our Persuasion,” and of maintaining “that side of the Question they have chosen, whether true or false, to the last extremity; even after Conviction.”105 This practice destroys right understanding, which he defines as “the discovery and adherence to Truth.”106 There is a direct connection between the “relish” for truth and the mind’s “adhering” to it in the right way: in his view, scholastic disputation is a corrupting practice that blocks that “adherence,” baffles the mind, and thus obliterates the love of truth. In contrast, it is implied, the cultivation of a love of truth maintains and strengthens the mind’s natural orientation toward truth and ensures its adherence to it in right judgment. Similarly, the love of truth appears as that which is flouted in irregular assent: the disproportion between assent and evidence, or the “surplusage of assurance is owing to some other Affection, and not to the Love of Truth.” Conversely, the very mark of a lover of truth is a regulated assent, or “the not entertaining any Proposition with greater assurance than the Proofs it is built upon will warrant.”107 Locke wrote these lines in the chapter on enthusiasm that he added to the fourth edition of the Essay in 1700, which is to say, after he had written both the account of error in the first edition (1690) and that in the Conduct (1697). I suppose therefore that he can safely be taken to mean “some other Affection” as a shortcut to the whole array of weaknesses and distempers of the mind charted in those accounts. The love of truth, which made a summary appearance in his earlier writings, becomes thus in his late thought a fully developed notion that stands for one of the virtues of rightful inquiry.
Although Locke never makes the connection explicit, I believe he can be implicitly taken to envisage a close link between the love of truth and attention. Attention is a passionate sort of activity of the mind. All human activity, of body, will, or understanding, Locke writes, is spurred by the two fundamental passions, pleasure and pain. Considered and attentive inquiry, for instance, is possible owing to a “perception of Delight” joined by God to our thoughts, which provides both energy and orientation (“direction or design”) to our cogitation. In its absence, man remains an “idle unactive Creature,” with ideas floating in his mind like “unregarded shadows.”108 Seen in light of his list of degrees of thinking, this comment suggests that for Locke the degrees of attention in thinking are also degrees of passionate activity in the mind. Consequently, the training of attention is a training of a mental mechanism that combines cogitation and passion. But if attention is activated by an orienting “perception of delight,” the love of truth may be seen as the orienting emotional disposition involved in the habitual mastery and direction of thought toward the right object. On the other hand, since all kinds of mental activity are spurred by the master passions, Locke may be taken to suggest that the “perception of delight” that puts the mind in motion is a neutral descriptor that in its actual manifestations takes either the form of mismanaged (untrained) activity, as in the distempered behavior of the mind (expressed in its precipitation), or the form of trained activity, as in the healthy or else fully “rational” behavior of the mind, capable of attention and oriented by the love of truth. Untrained activity is responsible for the distempers of the mind (as is, actually, laziness or idle passivity), while trained and rightly oriented activity is responsible for the health of the mind.109 Love of truth and attention name thus a virtuous disposition of the mind that is jointly cognitive and passionate, and their cultivation acts as a regulative instrument countering the similarly hybrid cognitive-passionate complexion of the distempered mind.
Love of truth and examination: the rule turned into a portrait
In the Conduct, we have seen, Locke reconsiders the Essay rule for regulating assent from a marked practical perspective and insists on the need to incorporate the rule into one’s life through exercise and habituation. There is a second rehearsal of the rule in the same text, which offers yet another vantage point on his approach to rightful inquiry. This second formulation adds the love of truth to the requirement of examination:
In these two things, viz. an equal Indifferency for all Truth; I mean the receiving it in the Love of it as Truth, but not loving it for any other reason before we know it to be true; and in the Examination of our Principles, and not receiving any for such, nor building on them ’till we are fully convinced, as rational Creatures, of their Solidity, Truth and Certainty, consists that Freedom of the Understanding which is necessary to a rational Creature, and without which it is not truly an Understanding.110
The call for the examination of principles is a variant of Locke’s rule for regulating assent. What he adds here is, first, a pointed reminder that the improvement of the reasoning faculty thus conducted goes into the making of a “rational creature,” and, second, an interpretation of examination as a work guided by “indifferency.” “Indifference” here has the same meaning of lack of enslavement to distempers as we have encountered before in the virtuosi’s texts. Locke reinforces the term by translating it as the very love of truth that, for him, counters the other “affections” of the mind: it is a disposition of seeking and receiving truth for the love of truth (rather than for some other love).111 All the miscarriages of the understanding—passions, inclinations, or weaknesses—are as many seductions to one’s mind, continuously alluring it to rest its course and take refuge in the “quiet Enjoyment of the Opinion he is fond of.”112 To be indifferent to them is to steer your quest for truth until it reaches truth rather than your own self. Locke’s regulation of assent takes the form of this very quest for truth, geared by “indifference”: it is under its guidance that we become able to “receive and imbrace [opinions] according as Evidence, and that alone gives the attestation of Truth.”113
Indifference thus understood is also the guiding virtue of study. Against the vanity and narrowness of a “little Mind,” which becomes “tinctured” with an individual’s own preferred study, Locke recommends a “universal tast of all the Sciences, with an indifferency before the Mind is possess’d with any one in particular, and grown into love and admiration of what is made its darling.”114 Locke’s advice on study is continuous with his precepts for the cultivation of judgment in general: protecting the mind from (“amorous”) possession (of ideas or of sciences), and pursuing knowledge in mind-regulating love of truth.
With the coupling of examination and love of truth, Locke performs a significant transformation of his rule. The rule is in fact no longer a rule proper, but becomes a portrait of the rightful inquirer: the passage quoted above is the conclusion of a description, rather than definition, of what “examination” and “indifference” look like, which is introduced by the statement that this is what “he that would acquit himself in this Case as a Lover of Truth” should be expected to do.115 The portrait paints an exemplary figure that is shown, so to speak, in action: examination and search after truth for the love of it are what the lover of truth does. It is also, owing to the inscription of the exemplary figure in an anatomy of the distempered mind, a portrait of the exemplary temper or mental disposition that makes the truly rational creature: at the end of the section we are told that what has been described is the “right temper of the Mind,” which protects it from self-imposed slavery.116 Indeed, the point of the quoted passage is to tell us what the “Freedom of the Understanding,” seen as the temper of a rational creature worthy of the name, consists in.
Locke’s rule has thus taken on a significance that preserves little similarity with a rule for justifying belief. The justification-of-belief approach concentrates on the success or failure in assessing evidence and in accepting or rejecting propositions on that basis. It works with acts of belief as results of such assessments and with a notion of a logical relation between “evidence” and “justification.” It thus leaves out what is crucial to Locke’s account: the distempered or healthy state of the human mental powers, and the notion that healthy assent giving is the result of a program of educating those powers and of cultivating virtuous habits of mind. When the mind is corrupted by infirmities and starved by disuse, the degree of assent will go beyond evidence because the mind will embrace its “darlings” with an “Excess of Adherence.”117 But if the mind is free of distempers, the force of well-gathered and well-examined evidence will weigh naturally on the mind in the due degree.118 Here it is persuaded, there it is seduced. Locke is not interested in making his prescription more formal or rule-bound than this.
Right reasoning, for Locke, cannot be the result of the observation of rules. If right reasoning means, as it does for him, a natural operation of sagacity and illation that can come to function properly only if the weaknesses of the mind are overcome and certain mental dispositions cultivated, rules can do little for the task. Locke does formulate a rule for regulating assent, but his rule indicates, even in the theoretical formulation of the Essay, a summary of the work the mind has to perform, rather than prescribe a logical ratio between evidence and justification. The Conduct fleshes out that summary indication and reinforces the practical nature of the program for educating the mind’s powers. It also makes it clear that at stake in Locke’s recommendations for governing judgment are not belief and its justified status, but the thinker and his intellectual virtuous habits. These prescriptions are thus best digested in a portrait rather than in a rule.
The figure of the lover of truth is a discreet presence in the Essay, but its importance to Locke is signaled by his identification of himself as such a figure in the opening chapters.119 It becomes more prominent in the Conduct, where Locke develops the practical consequences of his theory of assent and its regulation. In highlighting the portrait of the lover of truth over and above epistemic rules, Locke moved firmly toward a conception of the character of the rightful knower, and of his personal epistemic excellence, rooted in virtuous habits of the mental powers, cognitive and affective alike. Locke’s views on the conduct of the understanding came thus to fall in the mold of a cultura animi program for nurturing the human mind, which answered well his need for a framework in which to articulate his persistent concern with the duty of a rational creature toward her Creator. The search for truth taken up as such a duty was the vision within the compass of which he gradually spelled out his notion of what it meant for a human being to be engaged in the search for truth. The project of the Essay is largely inscribed in this vision. It can thus be read with an eye to its sketch of what the virtuous knower does and is like, which becomes fully fledged in the Conduct.
Regulative epistemology and the ethics of belief
The preeminence of the figure of the knower and his virtuous dispositions in Locke’s thought argues for its alignment not only with the early modern cultura animi tradition but also with recent developments in what has been called virtue epistemology. In contrast with theories of rational belief that take belief itself as the object of evaluation, virtue-based epistemic theories, as Linda Zagzebski has put it, “shift the locus of evaluation from the act/belief to the virtue.”120 Virtues of the mind, or intellectual virtues, may be conceived on the model of the more established, traditional moral virtues, although, as she argues, the moral-intellectual dichotomy is hardly tenable on account of the fact that both involve cognitive as well as affective states; that both can be acquired by training; and that there are logical and causal connections between the two types of virtues in the actual performance of epistemic agents.121 The virtues of the mind are, just like the moral virtues, “excellences”: they are deep traits of character, acquired through training and habituation, and defining for who a person is.122
An even more pronounced emphasis on the person’s virtues and character has been proposed in Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood’s project for what the authors choose to call “regulative epistemology.” Theirs is a virtue epistemology that has swerved from analytical to regulative purposes. As such, it deals not with logical definitions that may build a theory of knowledge (even if a virtue-epistemic one), but with the more “messy . . . logic of concepts that govern the intellectual life,” which may guide epistemic practices.123 Significantly, the authors see their project as a return to what they call the seventeenth-century tradition of regulative epistemology, which “describes the personal dispositions of the agent rather than providing direct rules of epistemic action.”124 Descartes and especially Locke are highlighted as exponents of this tradition.
The notion of a Lockean regulative epistemology was first put forward by Nicolas Wolterstorff in his 1996 study of Locke’s “ethics of belief.” Wolterstorff rightly argues that Locke’s doctrine of the governance of belief in book IV of the Essay and in the Conduct was not about defining a criterion for entitled belief but about “proposals of reform of doxastic practices.”125 Nevertheless, in discussing Locke’s account of the “wrong measures of probability,” Wolterstorff does still largely work with a belief-based epistemological theory of justification, although he introduces a cogent discussion of Locke’s “wrong measures” of assent as “wounds of the mind.”126 Yet the ethics of belief discussed by Wolterstorff is still mainly about moral obligation concerning beliefs, not persons. The heart of the discussion is the question of the “voluntariness of belief,” on which doxastic responsibility is said to be premised.127 Concerning this question, it is surely the case that, as Michael Losonsky has very well argued, belief, or rather assent, is voluntary for Locke in the sense that it is shot through with desires, passions, and loves.128 But this does not mean that belief is voluntary in the sense that we have control over our beliefs or over the degrees of confidence with which we assent to propositions, in the manner of a determination by momentary, punctual acts of will (as suggested by the ethics-of-belief approach). The control Locke advocates is indeed, as Wolterstorff also admits, a control over our epistemic practices: the work on the mind is indeed in our power (although, Locke adds, few live up to the task). Praise or blame, and thus responsibility, on his account, are attached not to acts of belief but to the disposition of the mind acquired by means of a regimen of practices.
The ethics-of-belief approach to Locke has also suggested that there is a tension between his “official vision”—a “luminous” conception of the unproblematic, mechanical determination of the rational faculties by the ultimately transparent force of the evidence—and a “dark” conception of the behavior of an irrational, wounded mind.129 On the former vision, belief would be passive and intellectual, but on the latter, it would be voluntary (under the will’s decision) and thus liable to moral praise or blame. Locke would have liked to maintain his (Enlightenment) view of reason, luminous and mechanical, yet he reluctantly had to “undermine,” “darken,” and really “deconstruct” his own vision by allowing other forces (passionate, irrational) to undermine reason’s dominion.130 The sections in the Essay that, on this account, are at the heart of the tension are IV.xx.15 (“What Probabilities determine the Assent”) and IV.xx.16 (“Where it is in our power to suspend it”). Locke’s discussion of the determination of assent by the greater probability seems to be inconsistent with his inventory of types of flawed assent-giving contrary to probability. But the “determination” of assent is premised in Locke’s discussion on the existence of serious, careful inquiry and examination, which, I believe, carries for him the load of the training regimen I have described.131 We might well fail in this task and consequently fall into error; but then error is seen not as the result of a punctual will-based decision, in turn due to irrational forces, but as the expression of a failed regimen, which is indeed in our power. At stake, thus, is not the question of whether we can choose to assent or not—which is actually, as Losonsky has shown, a question of the freedom rather than of the voluntariness of belief132 —but the question of the rightful or failed training of the mind’s powers. The “tension” in question is more properly seen therefore as the expression—within a unified and internally consistent doctrine—of the distance between the healthy and the distempered disposition of the mind, a distance that measures the territory of an educational effort.
For Locke, both distempers and health are “natural” possibilities of human reason, and both involve cognitive, conative, and moral aspects. He conceives of the passage from distempers to health as a course of training: a curative and cultivating regimen, geared by attention, sincerity, candor, courage, love of truth, and the habituation to examination and right reasoning, and whose purpose is a strengthening and good orientation of the (passionate) activity of the mind. This program of training is meant to educate man into becoming a rational creature, which Locke identifies as the Christian’s (and the Christian philosopher’s) duty. That duty traces the sphere of a moral obligation not for beliefs, but for believers.
The discourse with a friend
The advocacy of the duty to use one’s mind well and engage in the patient and severe work of the understanding has as a counterpart in Locke’s thought a recognition of human frailty and of the need of communal help: “we should do well to commiserate our mutual Ignorance, and en-deavour to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of Information.”133 The critique of dogmatism, which he shares with the other virtuosi, is extended into a defense of the toleration of other opinions based precisely on a conception of the difficult labor of the understanding required for a rightful regulation of assent. To try and impose your doctrines on others is to deny them that labor and expect a “blind resignation” to your authority; it is also most probably the result of a neglect of that labor on your own part, an “imposition” on your own mind. It would thus “become all Men to maintain Peace, and the common Offices of Humanity, and Friendship, in the diversity of Opinions.”134 The social dimension of Locke’s epistemological thought embraces thus both the negative attack on dogmatism and imposition and the positive defense of the benefits of friendship and humanity. John Marshall has brought to light the extent to which Locke’s moral and social thought was informed by the Ciceronian doctrine of offices: the Restoration gentlemen, of whom he was one, were bound by obligations of beneficence, gratitude, and liberality, and Locke self-consciously cultivated a Ciceronian amicitia in his personal friendships and correspondence.135 But friendship was also important to Locke’s conception of the labor and duty of the search for truth. The friend is someone who can wisely tolerate your opinions; but he is also, more significantly for this discussion, a key figure in the process of the education of your mind: he is the generous, if severe, monitoring instance who can assist your labor of understanding. He thus serves the same function as the “wise friend” in the cultura animi and virtuoso literature.
In “Of Study,” Locke advised a summoning of “all our force and all our sincerity” in disengaging ourselves from the “prepossessions” of our minds and submitting them to scrutiny. He added that this trial was best performed with “the assistance of a serious and sober friend who may help us sedately to examine these our received and beloved opinions.”136 The friend’s help is expected to make us aware of the very mechanism of the interpenetration of beliefs and self-serving loves (he will show you the “darlings of our minds” and their “defects”), and thus it completes the work of self-examination involved in the drawing of the history of our distempers. Locke is of a mind here with, e.g., Wright’s designation of “wise friends” as providing the best help against your self-love, or with Hooke’s commendation of the community of virtuosi as an aid in taking you out of the private cell of the idols of your mind. A “knowing judicious friend,” Locke wrote to William Molyneux, is in fact an image of the lover of truth: a model thinker whose conversation will “try” your ideas, since he “carries about him the true touch-stone, which is love of truth in a clear-thinking head.”137 The “discourse with a friend” can thus be represented as a practice of ordering the mind, even in the spatial sense of the term, which completes the solitary effort of reading and meditation:
Reading, methinks, is but collecting the rough materials, amongst which a great deal must be laid aside as useless. Meditation is, as it were, choosing and fitting the materials, framing the timber, squaring and laying the stones, and raising the building. And discourse with a friend (for wrangling in a dispute is of little use) is, as it were, surveying the structure, walking in the rooms, and observing the symmetry and agreement of the parts, taking notice of the solidity or defects of the work, and the best way to find out and correct what is amiss.138
The combination of solitary and conversational self-examination is also involved in the explorations and interrogations of the Essay itself. On the one hand, this work can be seen, in Rosalie Colie’s words, as the result of Locke’s “own lifelong assaying of himself and of the human understanding, the record of his own experiment in understanding.”139 The pursuit of knowledge is a process organized around the person of the knower, who appears both as the principal “experimenter” of this way of life and as the mirror in which the reader may recognize an image of life worth pursuing. On the other hand, the Essay is also largely framed as a conversation between author and reader, and thus as a framework for both the author’s and the reader’s effort of examination and discipline of thought. As Peter Walmsley has put it, the Essay is a work that casts the reader in the role of the interlocutor with which the speaking persona engages in an often resumed dialogue meant to interrogate and reformulate claims, thus “bringing the drama of the reader’s assent to the fore.”140
Another figure of the friend is the tutor in Locke’s pedagogical reflections. Just as in the case of the friend, this was an office that he fulfilled in his own life: he was an Oxford and subsequently a private tutor to several gentlemanly and noble families, and his advice was sought and praised. The education of a child, he tells us in his pedagogical essay, can hardly go right in the absence of “discreet” persons around him, among whom foremost are the father and the tutor. The tutor in particular is described by Locke as a paradigmatic model of wisdom and virtue (a “Discreet, Sober, nay, Wise Person” endowed with “great Sobriety, Temperance, Tenderness, Diligence, and Discretion,”)141 a careful observer of the child’s temper,142 an able guide of his developing sense of morality and reasoning powers, and a sincere companion in conversation.143 He will be able to detect the child’s “natural wrong Inclinations and Ignorance”144 and will manage, through his exercises and conversation, to turn them to “contrary Habits”145 and thus build the virtuous dispositions of the mind requisite for both civility and good judgment.
The friend and the tutor, in sum, share their office with that of the physician of the soul: for them, the husbandry of the soul is the main rule of philosophy and religion alike. They are variants of the Lover of Truth, who is Locke’s equivalent figure to Boyle’s Christian Virtuoso. Both are engaged in a search for truth, which is deemed capable of ordering the mind and shaping a Christian philosophical life. The domains of study in which this search for truth is expected to bear both cognitive and moral fruit will be the subject of the next two chapters.