Life and Work
Why should we today be at all interested in the life and philosophical works of John Locke, when the writings of so many of his long-forgotten contemporaries now gather dust on library shelves and seventeenth-century English history has been reduced in the public imagination to a few glamorous or bloody incidents? One very good reason is that, despite his relatively obscure beginnings, Locke’s influence on his own and later generations of thinkers has been immense and is particularly strong today – so much so, in fact, that many current philosophical disputes cannot be properly understood except in the light of his work and its impact. Another is that Locke’s solutions to a number of important philosophical problems are still, very arguably, amongst the best that we possess. These are claims that I shall try to substantiate in the later chapters of this book. But in the present chapter I shall focus on Locke’s life and times, setting his work in its historical context.
Locke led a remarkably full and interesting life. For, despite his relatively humble origins, he had the good fortune not only to live through some of the most momentous episodes and developments of English political and intellectual history but also to make significant contributions to many of them. Undoubtedly, his intelligence, curiosity, perspicacity, ambition, sense of duty and strength of character equipped him unusually well for such a role. But good luck also inevitably had a hand in his success, for the times in which he lived and the circles in which he moved were perilous ones, continually beset by the dangers of war, disease, religious strife and political intrigue. That he found time to write so much of lasting philosophical value is remarkable and it is our own good fortune that so much of what he did write has been preserved, including a great deal of his extensive correspondence, much of it with some of the leading intellectual and political figures of his day. I shall say more about the scope and contemporary impact of Locke’s literary output in due course, but first I shall outline the major events and circumstances of his life.
John Locke was born in the south-west of England in 1632, in the small village of Wrington in the county of Somerset. His parents were John (1606–61) and Agnes (1597–1654). The small house in which he was born was the home of his maternal grandmother and no longer exists, having been demolished towards the end of the nineteenth century. However, the house in which he grew up, some miles away from his birthplace, was larger and set in its own grounds. His father was a person of moderately comfortable means, being an attorney and minor landowner. The family lands brought in rents which helped Locke in later times to maintain a private source of income, but which never made him wealthy, even when supplemented by his other earnings. Locke was careful with money all his life, not because he was miserly but because he valued the freedom conferred by independent means.
At the time of Locke’s birth, Charles I (1600–49) of the House of Stuart was King of England – as well as of Scotland, the two thrones having been united in the person of Charles’s father, James I (1566–1625) – and English politics was entering a turbulent period which would not be brought to a close until shortly before Locke’s death in 1704. In due course, Locke himself was to play an important role in political developments, as we shall soon see. But this could scarcely have been predicted when, supported by the patronage of a powerful ally of his father, Locke secured a place at Westminster School, then the foremost school in the country. Locke was at Westminster School when, in 1649, Charles I was beheaded in nearby Whitehall – an event which the pupils were, however, forbidden from attending. Locke’s education at Westminster was rigorous but narrow, consisting mainly in the intensive study of Latin and Greek. The regime was harsh and punishments were severe, including regular beatings. But Locke was an assiduous pupil and secured a scholarship at Christ Church, Oxford, becoming a Student of that college. Locke was to retain this status – equivalent to that of a Fellow at other colleges – and an entitlement to rooms and board in Christ Church until his explusion in 1684 at the behest of Charles II (1630–85).
Throughout this period of English history, politics and religion were inextricably intertwined as a consequence of the upheavals engendered by the Reformation in the previous century and the fragile hold of the Stuarts on the English throne. Locke inherited from his parents a strong Protestant faith, which was to exercise a large influence on his future intellectual development and political allegiances. It was these allegiances that were to cost him his Studentship at Christ Church and to result in his exile from the country between 1683 and 1689. But it was also this period of exile that was most productive for Locke as a philosopher, culminating as it did in the publication of his three greatest works, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the Second Treatise of Government and A Letter on Toleration, all of which made their first appearance in print in 1689.
Locke was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Arts by the University of Oxford in 1656, following a traditional course of study centring once more on the ancient languages and their literature. Remaining in Oxford, Locke then became more deeply engaged in philosophical and theological studies, when not carrying out teaching and administrative duties for his college. At this time, his political views were still markedly more conservative and less liberal than they were later to be. Gradually, his intellectual interests broadened to include medicine, his fascination with which was later deepened by his association with the eminent physician, Thomas Sydenham (1624–89). Oxford was then becoming a centre of scientific innovation, inspired by the empirical methods and discoveries of continental astronomers and physicists, such as the Italian Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens (1629–93). This was despite, rather than thanks to, the attitude of the university authorities at the time, who were firmly traditional in their conception of the proper concerns of academic life and higher education. The chemist Robert Boyle (1627–91) and the microscopist and polymath Robert Hooke (1635–1703) were amongst the scientists based in Oxford, and Boyle in particular became a close associate of Locke. Boyle and Hooke were members of the Royal Society of London, instituted to foster innovative work in experimental science. Locke himself became a member in 1668, taking a close concern in its proceedings for the rest of his life. By these means, he became a good friend of the greatest scientist of the age, Isaac Newton (1642–1727), Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Although Locke’s own scientific interests lay chiefly in medicine and he had little knowledge of mathematics, he was evidently fascinated by scientific discoveries of all kinds, as well as by the reports of the many explorers who were then travelling to exotic parts of the world hitherto unknown to Western Europeans.
Locke long aspired to become a Doctor of Medicine but was not prepared to submit to the outdated requirements of the University of Oxford for the award of this degree. He was eventually awarded the lesser degree of Bachelor of Medicine in 1675. By that time, however, his knowledge of medicine had already led to a profound change in his circumstances and prospects. This came about as a result of his encountering, quite by chance, the leading Whig politician of the day, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621–83). They first met in 1666 – a time at which the parliamentary party division between Whigs and Tories, which was to dominate English political life for several generations to come, was coming into being. Lord Ashley, as he then was, was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, a man of considerable intelligence and political guile who had risen to become one of the most powerful figures in the land. Lord Ashley, struck by Locke’s evident good sense and knowledgeability, invited him to become his medical adviser and to take up residence in his imposing London house. This Locke did in 1667, remaining there until 1675. In 1668 Locke was responsible for overseeing a serious liver operation on Lord Ashley. This involved the insertion of a silver tube in the patient’s abdomen to drain an abscess – a potentially hazardous intervention before the modern age of antiseptic medicine. Fortunately for Locke, Lord Ashley made an excellent recovery and thereafter regarded Locke as one of his closest friends and confidants.
Locke’s association with Lord Ashley – soon to become, in 1672, the first Earl of Shaftesbury – was undoubtedly the most momentous development in his career. Shaftesbury’s influence at the court of Charles II was very great until the king dismissed him in 1673, although he was briefly to return to public office in 1679. From this time onwards English politics were greatly disturbed by the problem of the succession to the throne. For Charles II had no legitimate child and his brother and heir, James II (1633–1707), was notorious for his openly admitted allegiance to Roman Catholicism. Whig politicians like Shaftesbury and his circle, which included Locke in a minor capacity, wanted an Act to be passed by Parliament excluding James from succession to the throne – a move very much opposed by Charles II and his court, concerned to perpetuate the Stuart line and the independence of the throne from Parliament. At this time royal power was still very considerable and opposition like Shaftesbury’s extremely dangerous. Shaftesbury himself escaped to the Netherlands in 1682 after a charge of treason had been levelled against him, but died soon after his arrival, early in 1683.
At this time Locke, who had been travelling abroad in France during 1675–9 and had not resumed his membership of Shaftesbury’s household upon his return, was nevertheless still closely associated with Shaftesbury’s circle and hence in considerable personal danger himself. Government spies kept a close watch on his activities, particularly looking for any evidence of compromising letters or seditious writings. Locke, however, was very careful to cover his tracks. In the summer of 1683 matters came to a head with the Rye House plot, when leading members of Shaftesbury’s circle – Algernon Sidney (or Sydney, 1622–83), Lord William Russell (1639–83) and the Earl of Essex (1631–83) – were implicated in an attempt to kidnap and assassinate Charles II and his brother and were all three arrested for treason, two of them subsequently being executed. Algernon Sidney was convicted and executed partly on the strength of a political treatise that he had secretly written, questioning the divine right of kings to rule over their subjects – a theme on which Locke himself had been working at this very time, leading eventually to the publication of his two Treatises of Government in 1689. Locke, although not directly involved in the Rye House plot, was now even more under suspicion and escaped to the Netherlands in September 1683. From there he did not return to England until 1689, but he managed to spend his period of exile usefully and, it seems, relatively happily, engaged in his philosophical projects when not travelling about the country, writing letters, or conversing with fellow intellectuals. Following the Revolutionary Settlement of 1688, which removed James II from the throne after a disastrous reign of three years, the throne passed jointly to the Dutch Prince of Orange, William (1650–1702) – a grandson of Charles I – and his wife Mary (1662–94), James II’s elder daughter. With the reign of the Protestant William and Mary began the long period of Whig ascendancy in English politics, a regime very much in line with Locke’s own political and religious convictions.
During his last years, from his return to England in 1689 until his death in 1704, Locke enjoyed much public esteem and royal favour, in addition to great intellectual fame as the author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which was published late in 1689. He performed a number of official duties, notably as a Commissioner of the Board of Trade, in which capacity he was responsible for affairs in the American colonies and contributed significantly to economic and monetary reform. However, the need to attend meetings in Westminster took a toll on his health, as he suffered from chronic asthma which was severely aggravated by the polluted air and winter fogs of seventeenth-century London. Besides, flattered though he was by the distinction of public office and pleased by the substantial salary attached to it, his greatest desire in the closing years of his life was to pursue his scholarly and intellectual interests. His international fame also brought him an ever-growing burden of correspondence.
Eventually Locke retired permanently to Oates, the Essex home of his friends Sir Francis and Lady Masham, who in 1692 offered him accommodation in a part of the country with a more salubrious climate than London’s, but still within a day’s coach-ride from the capital. Lady Masham (1658–1708) was born Damaris Cudworth, daughter of the eminent Cambridge philosopher Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), and was someone who could engage with Locke on terms of intellectual parity as well as friendship, being the author of a number of published works herself. After some years of progressively failing health and at the age of seventy-two, Locke died with great composure of mind, in his room at Oates in 1704. He is buried at a local church, where his epitaph bears a modest inscription in Latin, composed by himself. The house where he died was long ago demolished.
Locke never married, although he had many female friends like Damaris Cudworth and had an esteem for the intellectual qualities of women which was unusual in men of the time. Without children of his own, he was nonetheless very fond of them and was influential in promoting more humane and rational attitudes towards their upbringing and education – never forgetting, it seems, the severe treatment that he had experienced at Westminster School. In character he was a little introverted and hypochondriacal, but he by no means disliked company. He enjoyed good conversation but was abstemious in his habits of eating and drinking. He was a prolific correspondent and had a great many friends and acquaintances, on the continent of Europe as well as in Britain and Ireland. If there was a particular fault in his character, it was a slight tetchiness in response to criticism of his writings, even when that criticism was intended to be constructive. Although academic in his cast of mind, Locke was strongly moved by his political and religious convictions – especially by his concern for liberty and toleration – and had the good fortune to live at a time when there was no great divide between the academic pursuit of philosophical interests and the public discussion and application of political and religious principles. He thus happily lived to see some of his strongest convictions realized in public policy, partly as a consequence of his own writings and involvement in public affairs.
Locke’s greatest intellectual achievement was undoubtedly An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It was first published in full in December 1689, although the title page of the first edition bears the date 1690. Locke worked on the manuscripts on which it was based from the early 1670s onwards, but most intensively during his period of exile in the Netherlands between 1683 and 1689. He continued to revise the Essay after its first appearance, supervising three further editions of it before his death. The fourth edition of 1700 accordingly represents his final view and is the version most closely studied today.
The Essay is chiefly concerned with issues in what would today be called epistemology or the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. As its title implies, the book’s purpose is to discover, from an examination of the workings of the human mind, just what we are capable of understanding about the universe in which we live. Locke’s contention is that all of the ‘materials’ of human knowledge arise from experience – that is, from what he calls our ideas of sensation and reflection. Sensation provides us with ideas of external things and their qualities, while reflection – nowadays more often called introspection – provides us with ideas of our own mental activities. These ideas, Locke thinks, are then worked upon by our powers of abstraction and reason to produce such real knowledge as we can hope to attain. Beyond that, he allows, we have other sources of belief – for instance, the testimony of other people and, perhaps, divine revelation – but beliefs of these kinds he regards as having only some degree of probability, which falls short of the certainty that he takes to be necessary for genuine knowledge.
It may help at this point if I briefly sketch the structure of the Essay. The whole work is made up of four books, each containing many chapters which are subdivided into numbered sections, so that it has become a standard practice to locate passages in the work in terms of the book, chapter and section in which they appear – for example, ‘Book II, Chapter VIII, section 6’ or, more briefly, ‘II, VIII, 6’ – and this is the method that I shall adopt. Book I, ‘Of Innate Notions’, is devoted to an attack on the doctrine of innate ideas, which implies – contrary to Locke’s own view – that much of our knowledge is independent of and prior to experience. In Book II, ‘Of Ideas’, Locke attempts to explain in detail how sensation and reflection can in fact provide all of the materials of our understanding, including even such seemingly abstruse ideas as those of substance, identity, and causality, which many of Locke’s opponents took to be self-evidently innate. In Book III, ‘Of Words’, Locke develops an account of how language, as he sees it, both helps and hinders us in the communication of our ideas. Finally, in Book IV, ‘Of Knowledge and Opinion’, Locke proposes ways in which processes of abstraction and reason operate upon our ideas to produce genuine knowledge and explains why, in his view, such knowledge differs from mere probable opinion. At the same time he tries to locate the proper boundary between the province of reason and experience on the one hand and that of revelation and faith on the other.
Locke’s view of our intellectual capacities is clearly a modest one. At the same time, he held a firm personal faith in the truth of Christian religious principles. This may seem to conflict with the mildly sceptical air of some of his epistemological doctrines. In fact, he himself perceived no conflict here – unlike some of his contemporary religious critics – although he did regard the modest extent of our intellectual capacities as providing a strong ground for religious toleration. Reason, he thought, does not in general conflict with religious faith, but when religious questions arise to which reason supplies no definitive answer he considers it both irrational and immoral to enforce conformity of belief by means of legal or political power. Interestingly enough, indeed, it appears that what originally motivated Locke to pursue the inquiries that were to culminate in his writing the Essay was precisely a concern to settle how far reason and experience could take us in establishing moral and religious truths. His considered answer is that they cannot take us very far where religious truths are concerned, for although he thinks that we can know – in fact, that we can prove – that God exists, he does not think that we can in the same way know where truth lies in disputes between the advocates of different monotheistic religions and creeds. On the other hand, Locke believes that moral truths are as demonstrable as truths of mathematics.
Locke’s concern with morality and religion, both intimately bound up with questions of political philosophy in the seventeenth century, was one which dominated his thinking throughout his intellectual and public career – although he published no substantial work exclusively devoted to morality in the way that many other major philosophers have done, so that his mature views on this subject must be gleaned from writings whose chief focus may seem to lie elsewhere. His earliest works, unpublished in his own lifetime, were the Two Tracts on Government (1660 and 1661) and the Essays on the Law of Nature (1664), all but the first of the Two Tracts being written in Latin, although now available in English translation. The position on issues of political liberty and religious toleration which Locke adopted in those early works was, however, considerably more conservative than the one that he was later to espouse, following his association with Shaftesbury. This was to find expression in A Letter on Toleration and Two Treatises of Government – both published anonymously in 1689, the former in both Latin and English and the latter in English. The Second Treatise explicitly recognizes the right of subjects to overthrow even a legitimately appointed ruler who has abused his trust and tyrannizes over his people – a doctrine which would almost certainly have led to an accusation of sedition had the manuscript been discovered by government spies. The First Treatise was an extended attack upon an ultra-royalist tract written by Sir Robert Filmer (d. 1653), entitled Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings Asserted and published in 1680, in which the divine right of kings was defended as proceeding from the dominion first granted by God to Adam. Algernon Sidney, one of the Rye House plot conspirators, had been convicted of sedition partly on the strength of a manuscript he had written attacking Filmer’s work, so one can well understand Locke’s secrecy and caution in the years immediately preceding his flight to the Netherlands.
In addition to the works already mentioned, Locke published a good many other writings, notably on religious and educational topics. Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) was the product of advice he had offered in correspondence, over a number of years, to his friends Edward and Mary Clarke, concerning the upbringing of their children. This work went into many editions, proving to be very popular and influential with more enlightened parents for a long time to come. Locke’s interest in the intellectual development of children is also plain to see in the Essay itself, where it has a direct relevance to his empiricist principles of learning and conceptformation. Some Thoughts Concerning Education is a classic work on the subject, giving Locke a prominent position in a tradition of enlightened thinkers about the upbringing of children which includes Michel Montaigne (1533–92) before him and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) after him. Even so, some of Locke’s remarks in this work have a quaint and mildly alarming ring to those who read it today, as when he asserts that ‘The first Thing to be taken care of, is, that Children be not too warmly clad or cover’d, Winter or Summer … ’Tis Use alone hardens [the body], and makes it more able to endure the Cold’ (section 5). Humane though he was by the standards of his time, Locke was strongly opposed to overindulging the young. That he was concerned primarily with the education of ‘young Gentlemen’, though perfectly understandable in the historical context, also distances him somewhat from our currently more egalitarian outlook on matters educational.
Locke’s explicitly religious writings include The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) and the Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul (published posthumously, 1705–7). The former was published anonymously – like a good many of Locke’s other writings – and encountered hostility from conservatively minded critics, to some of whom Locke responded in print. He also wrote on economic and monetary issues connected with his various involvements in public and political affairs, notably concerning the harmful effects on trade of restrictions on the rate of interest and concerning measures to rectify the debasement of the coinage. Amongst his lesser-known philosophical works is a critique of the views of the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) – a proponent of the doctrine of occasionalism, according to which all created things possess no real causal powers of their own and God alone is the immediate cause of their behaviour and of our knowledge of them. This work of Locke’s is entitled An Examination of Pere Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things in God. Part of its interest lies in the fact that there are some affinities between Malebranche’s views and those of George Berkeley (1685–1753), who was later to be a major critic of Locke’s own system (see McCracken 1983). Other items included in Locke’s collected Works – which have run to many editions – are his lengthy replies to Edward Stillingfleet (1635–99), then the Bishop of Worcester, answering hostile criticisms raised by Stillingfleet against the view of substance defended by Locke in the Essay. The religious significance of this dispute was that Locke’s view was suspected of threatening the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. There is also amongst Locke’s collected Works a long piece entitled ‘Of the Conduct of the Understanding’, which was originally intended for inclusion in a later edition of the Essay.
From this brief survey of Locke’s writings, we can see that although his most important works were published during his fifties and sixties, within a comparatively short period beginning in 1689, his final views were the result of a very long process of maturation stretching back at least thirty years before that. At the same time, despite the breadth of Locke’s intellectual interests, it seems fair to say that the Essay was the cornerstone of all his work, providing the epistemological and methodological framework for almost everything else he wrote. Certainly, although editions of Locke’s collected Works run to many volumes and a remarkably extensive corpus of his original manuscripts and letters has survived, it is on the Essay that his reputation as the greatest English philosopher principally stands. Of all his other works, the only one which comes close to it in stature is his Second Treatise of Government, of which I should now say a little more.
As I mentioned earlier, the Two Treatises of Government were first published, anonymously, in 1689, very soon after Locke’s return from the Netherlands. Locke never openly admitted his authorship of the work in his lifetime, although there is no question that it is his, as a codicil to his will makes clear. It appears that these treatises were intended to be parts of a larger work, the rest of which was unfortunately lost. The First Treatise, attacking Filmer’s Patriarcha, may seem rather archaic today, because Filmer’s views now look absurdly antiquated. But we should remember that Filmer and Locke were writing at a time when educated opinion in Europe still embodied the unquestioned assumption that the entire world had been created by God only a few thousand years previously and that Adam was the first man, in accordance with the biblical account given in Genesis. We should also remember that the question of whether or not Christian monarchs had a divinely ordained right to exercise absolute rule over their subjects was then a political issue of the first importance.
Because the Two Treatises appeared in 1689, shortly after the Revolutionary Settlement of 1688, it has sometimes been supposed that they were intended as a vindication of that event and of the institution of a constitutional monarchy, in which the power of the king was restricted by that of Parliament. However, it is now known that Locke was working on the manuscript much earlier in the 1680s, when political factions were in dispute over the suitability of Charles II’s Roman Catholic brother, James, to be heir to the throne. The Two Treatises should, then, be seen in that context and as a direct response to Filmer’s absolutist tract, which had been provocatively published in 1680 – many years after its author’s death – as a justification of the divine right of kings to rule by familial descent from Adam and with the supposedly unfettered authority of a father over his children.
Interesting though these historical points are, it remains the case that the Second Treatise is the one that has been of lasting philosophical significance. It is sometimes suggested that it has even exercised momentous political influence by providing the ultimate inspiration for the Constitution of the United States of America, which was framed nearly one hundred years later. However, it is difficult to substantiate this idea in detail, even if it is true to say that many of the views defended by Locke in the Second Treatise had by then become common currency amongst liberal-minded politicians and political theorists, many of whom were at least broadly familiar with its principal themes and doctrines. That Locke’s writings on government and toleration were cited by some leading figures during the American Revolution, in support of such principles as the separation of church and state and no taxation without representation, hardly suffices to show that Locke’s work directly inspired or influenced the thinking of such individuals (see Dunn 1969a). After all, politicians often seek to give added weight or authority to their views by selectively citing the works of illustrious thinkers – and by the end of the eighteenth century Locke certainly had that status, though more on account of the fame of the Essay than anything else. Certainly, it is far from clear that Locke himself would have considered the American Revolution justified on his own principles. However, these cautionary observations should not in any way be seen as belittling the importance of the Second Treatise as a contribution to liberal political philosophy, because similar observations might be made about almost any other classic work of political theory. The historical significance of such works rarely lies in any direct influence they have on the thoughts of individual politicians and statesmen, who are typically more concerned with practical issues of short-term political strategy and everyday decision-making than with lofty philosophical principles. Rather, it lies in the contribution they make to the formation of a general climate of opinion, in which political policies that are in tune with their ideas are able to gain some purchase with the people at large.
Locke’s Essay aroused widespread attention from the moment it first appeared. One reason for this was the excellent publicity that it received in the leading intellectual journals of the day – at a time when academic journals were still a comparatively recent phenomenon. By this stage of Locke’s career, he had built up a widespread network of important European connections during his lengthy stays in France and Holland, when he took the opportunity to travel extensively and meet some of the most eminent philosophers, scientists and theologians of the time. He kept up a regular correspondence with a number of these influential people and consequently had already acquired an international reputation as an important thinker before any of his views appeared in print.
An abridged version of the Essay, prepared by Locke himself, appeared in 1688 – a year before the full text was published – in an internationally renowned journal, the Bibliothèque Universelle. Many contemporary philosophers, including Leibniz, became acquainted with Locke’s work by this means. The first edition of the full text was published in London late in 1689, and soon received appreciative reviews in various widely read journals. Between 1689 and 1700, Locke was to prepare three further, extensively revised editions of the Essay. A French translation by Locke’s friend Pierre Coste (1668–1747) appeared in 1700, soon followed by a Latin translation, both of which were vitally important in disseminating Locke’s ideas amongst European intellectuals. It is clear, then, that from the very beginning the Essay was widely recognized as being a major work of philosophy.
In these early years, reaction to the Essay was divided, some critics praising it highly while others were deeply hostile. For a time, the hostility mounted, but later it subsided as broadly Lockean views in epistemology and metaphysics began to be more widely accepted. The initial hostility was largely directed at features of the Essay thought by some to be damaging to religion and, by implication, to morality – notably, its apparently sceptical air and its repudiation of the doctrine of innate ideas. Although Locke himself had a firm Protestant faith, he was suspected by some of favouring Socinianism, an unorthodox variety of Christian belief which involved a denial of the doctrine of the Trinity – the doctrine that God is three persons in one, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – and thereby a denial of the divinity of Jesus Christ. There seems to have been some substance to this charge, even though Locke never explicitly admitted its truth. Indeed, Locke’s theological views were taken to have some affinity with the deism that was later to become widespread amongst enlightened intellectuals in the eighteenth century. Deism was a rationalistic version of monotheism which attempted to eliminate all of the more mysterious and miraculous features of traditional Christian belief – and was itself to develop in due course into the wholly secular, atheistic world-view that is, for better or worse, apparently taken for granted in many Western intellectual circles today.
Locke cannot be held responsible for this gradual slide to atheism and there is no doubt at all about the sincerity of his own Christian faith, but his early critics may well have been right in seeing dangers to their conception of religion in the emphasis that Locke laid upon reason and experience in the foundations of human knowledge. Of this sort of critic, Edward Stillingfleet, the Bishop of Worcester, was perhaps the most formidable. He and Locke engaged in a series of lengthy published exchanges, about which I shall have more to say in Chapter 3.
It is perhaps hard for us today to see Locke as a particularly sceptical philosopher, especially when we compare him with David Hume (1711–76), whose Treatise of Human Nature of 1739 was quite self-consciously sceptical in its approach – and indeed sceptical about most of the claims central to Locke’s realism concerning the world of material objects. Locke was in fact not so much sceptical as anti-dogmatic, notably about religious claims based on revelation rather than on reason and experience. But to the religious dogmatists of his time, this would indeed have appeared dangerously sceptical. Locke’s attack on the doctrine of innate ideas undoubtedly added to these suspicions. Adherents of that doctrine held that the concept of God, together with certain moral and religious principles, were planted in our minds from birth by God himself, giving us no excuse for denying their veracity. To repudiate the doctrine therefore struck many as opening the floodgates to atheism and immorality. In fact, nothing could have been further from Locke’s intention. His motive for attacking the doctrine of innate ideas – quite apart from the fact that he thought it was simply false and unfounded – was that he saw it as a socially and intellectually pernicious buttress for all sorts of obscurantist and authoritarian views. In Locke’s opinion, God gave mankind sense organs and a power of reason in order to discover such knowledge – including moral knowledge – as we need to have, thus rendering innate ideas quite unnecessary. And in matters of faith which go beyond the reach of reason and experience, he thought, revelation is a ground only for private, individual religious belief, which it would be morally as well as intellectually wrong to make enforceable universally by the authority of church or state.
Amongst the contemporary philosophical – as opposed to religious – critics of the Essay, two deserve special mention: the Irishman George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, and the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Much of Berkeley’s philosophy, notably his Principles of Human Knowledge of 1713, can be seen as a reaction to Locke’s. Berkeley was like some other Christian critics of the Essay in attacking what he saw as its potential for scepticism, but unlike them he focused on what Locke himself would have regarded as the least sceptical aspect of his position – his realism concerning the world of material objects. Berkeley saw the real threat to religion in Locke’s position as lying in its advocacy of a material world existing independently of any mind – including, at least potentially, the mind of God. He also thought that to regard the ‘real’ world as being somehow divested of all the sensible qualities of colour, sound, taste and smell which characterize our immediate experience of things – apparently making it a lifeless realm of material atoms moving in the void – was just to invite doubts about the very existence of anything beyond our own private experience. Berkeley’s criticisms of Locke, although sometimes based on what appear to be mistaken or uncharitable interpretations of Locke’s views, do raise serious questions which are hard to answer – even if Berkeley’s own ‘idealist’ alternative may strike us as still harder to defend.
Leibniz, unlike Berkeley, criticized Locke’s views during Locke’s own lifetime, both in his own work and in correspondence with other philosophers. Locke was acquainted with some of these criticisms, but appears not to have been much impressed by them, despite Leibniz’s very considerable reputation in European intellectual circles at the time. Leibniz even wrote an extended work in dialogue form discussing the Essay chapter by chapter, entitled New Essays on Human Understanding – but he gave up plans to publish it upon learning of Locke’s death in 1704. In due course this important work was, however, published and it contains many insightful criticisms of Locke’s views, as well as clarifying Leibniz’s own opinions on many matters. Some of Leibniz’s most memorable criticisms are directed against Locke’s attack on innate ideas. Leibniz – like René Descartes (1591–1650) before him – did not defend the doctrine of innate ideas in any spirit of authoritarian dogmatism or obscurantism, but rather because he considered that certain fundamental components of human knowledge and understanding simply could not be acquired, as Locke believed, from sense experience. In answer to Locke’s challenge to explain in what sense knowledge of which an infant was apparently quite unaware could be said to be ‘in’ its mind, Leibniz was to adopt a strikingly modern conception of cognition as being in quite large measure a subconscious process – a view which, in our own post-Freudian age, may appear less contentious than it would have done to Locke’s contemporaries, many of whom were sympathetic to Descartes’s conception of the mind as being in every way transparent to itself.
In sum, we see that Locke’s Essay received close attention by the very best minds of his time and rapidly achieved a reputation which it has never since lost amongst the classics of Western philosophy. Despite initially being discouraged in Oxford University as dangerous material for students to read, it soon became a standard text and lost its early notoriety as a radical and even revolutionary work. As often happens with revolutionary writings once their tenets have been absorbed into the prevailing orthodoxy, the doctrines of the Essay eventually began to appear quite conservative and themselves became targets for later intellectual revolutionaries, such as Hume.
I have concentrated on the contemporary reception of Locke’s Essay both because of its timeless importance as a classic of Western philosophy and because the views that it contains will be the main focus of attention in the remaining chapters of this book. Furthermore, it was the Essay that secured Locke’s reputation in his own day as one of Europe’s leading thinkers. This is not to deny that in Locke’s own time many of his other writings achieved fame or notoriety, as objects of praise or as targets for criticism – though it is hard to believe that some of them would have done so had they not been known or supposed to have been written by the author of the Essay. The Two Treatises, whose authorship Locke kept secret until his death, received far less attention than the Essay in the years immediately following its publication and even for quite some time after that (see Dunn 1969). In any case, while writings such as the first Letter on Toleration and the Second Treatise of Government continue to be widely read as seminal texts in the history of philosophy, it is more difficult for present-day readers to understand the excitement and discussion stimulated at the time by the publication of a work such as Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity, or the speculation that it provoked as to the identity of its author. This is simply a reflection of the very different intellectual climate in which we now live, partly as a consequence of the changed conception we have of our cognitive capacities and the physical universe that we inhabit – a change which Locke’s Essay helped in no small measure to bring about. I shall be examining some of these longer-term effects of Locke’s views in the final chapter of this book.
How can one summarize a life so multi-faceted as Locke’s, or a literary output as varied and influential as his? It is scarcely possible to imagine a similar figure emerging in present-day Western society, where most politicians and philosophers are career professionals narrowly focused on their own spheres of activity, whether by choice or by economic and institutional necessity. From relatively humble beginnings, he rose to be one of the foremost European philosophers of his time and the close confidant and adviser of some of England’s leading politicians. His writings on epistemology, metaphysics and political theory have been of lasting significance, changing the course of European thought and justly earning him the title of England’s greatest philosopher. He was the first Western philosopher in modern times to focus his inquiries on the structure and formation of the human mind in order to gain insight into the objects and extent of human knowledge. The subsequent projects of David Hume in the Treatise of Human Nature and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in the Critique of Pure Reason would, very arguably, have been unthinkable without the precedent set by Locke’s great masterpiece, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Ayers, Michael 1991: Locke (London & New York: Routledge).
Chappell, Vere (ed.) 1994: The Cambridge Companion to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Chappell, Vere (ed.) 1998: Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Cranston, Maurice 1957: John Locke: A Biography (London: Longman).
Fuller, Gary, Stecker, Robert and Wright, John P. (eds) 2000: John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in Focus (London & New York: Routledge).
Hall, Roland (ed.) 1970–2000: The Locke Newsletter.
Hall, Roland (ed.), 2000–: Locke Studies.
Hall, Roland & Woolhouse, Roger 1983: Eighty Years of Locke Scholarship (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
Harris, Ian 1998: The Mind of John Locke, revised edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Jolley, Nicholas 1999: Locke: His Philosophical Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Lowe, E. J. 1995: Locke on Human Understanding (London & New York: Routledge).
Rogers, G. A. J. (ed.) 1994: Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Stewart, M. A. (ed.) 2000: English Philosophy in the Age of Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Yolton, John W. 1956: John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Yolton, John W. (ed.) 1969: John Locke: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).