1

L’Opinion de Locke sur la ‘matière pensante’

(English translation, in Peter Anstey ed. John Locke, Critical

Assessments, vol. III (Metaphysics), Routledge, 2007)

Philippe Hamou

Source: Methodos 4, Villeuneuve d’Ascq 2004 / http://methodos.revues.org/123

The aim of this study1

is to reconsider the stakes surrounding the notorious

passage in Essay 4. 3. 6 stating that, for all we know, it is possible that ‘certain

systems of matter fitly disposed’ be endowed with the power of thinking. In

particular, I want to consider what I shall call the doxastic import of this

statement: the extent to which Locke’s metaphysical beliefs and inclinations are

involved or revealed in the thinking matter conjecture. The standard account2

of

Locke’s view on thinking matter runs as follows:

a) Locke offers his consideration on matter and thinking as a mere epistemic

consideration. His aim is to show limitations of human knowledge through a

telling example. He does not say that it is ontologically possible that thinking

could be an attribute of matter, but only that we do not know, and probably shall

never be able to know whether it is so: thus, thinking matter is no more than an

‘epistemic possibility’.3

b) Although Locke vindicates pure agnosticism on the topic as far as

knowledge and certainty are concerned, at the level of probability and belief he

rather favors the immateriality of the (human) thinking thing. This can be

evinced from several passages in the Essay and outside the Essay, the most

explicit being a repeated statement in the letters to Stillingfleet, according to

which it is ‘in the highest degree probable’ that the thinking thing in us be

immaterial.

c) Consequently, Locke’s talk of thinking matter in chapter three of book four

should not be taken too seriously. Locke is not hiding here any materialist

agenda, as some of his first readers tended to believe. His most profound views

on the relation of matter and thinking are to be found in chapter ten of book four,

where he offers the demonstration that God, the first being thinking is

necessarily an immaterial being, and affirms that matter as such is

‘incogitative’.4

Such an account makes Locke what I would call a ‘reluctant Cartesian’— or

at least it does so, if we consider as prominently Cartesian ‘the dualist system of

thought’ which, as Michael Ayers puts it, ‘Locke a little hesitantly shares with

Descartes’.5

Although opposed to Descartes in many ways, Locke would have

believed that substance dualism was still the better doctrine to account for the

way this created world is furnished. He would have had the created things

divided into two sorts, radically heterogeneous, one part thinking immaterial, the

other incogitative material. This belief would be rarely or reluctantly expressed

in Locke’s writings, considering the relentless opposition to Descartes on other

topics and the fact that no claim to demonstrative knowledge or certainty can be

made on this score, as the passage on thinking matter happens to show.

Nevertheless, the dualist belief would be a pervasive one, surfacing in many

places of the Essay, and congruent with other important Lockean doctrines. In

particular, it may be argued that a strict dualism of substances is requisite to

accommodate for a strict (Boylean) mechanical conception of matter, a

conception that Locke was considering as the only intelligible way to explain the

properties and actions of bodies. As it appears, this was already Leibniz’s view

on the issue. In the Preface to the Nouveaux Essais, Leibniz judges the thinking

matter suggestion contrary to the very conception of matter (and nature) of

which Locke is supposed to be the champion. Leibniz argues that thinking

cannot be a natural modification of matter construed as ‘solid homogeneous

mass’, because there is no possible derivation (through limitations or variations)

of the former from the latter. So thinking matter should only be, on Locke’s own

premises, the result of a miracle, something utterly unnatural, and, as Leibniz is

prone to add, a conjecture unworthy a philosopher.6

In an important paper,7

Margaret Wilson shares to some extent this Leibnizian

interpretation: had Locke have been a consistent mechanist, reducing matter to

mere extended and solid particles, he should have found impossible the

ascription of thinking to matter, even as a mere epistemic possibility—only a

miracle would have been able to do the job of making matter think. But, and

here Wilson parts company with Leibniz, Locke, she argues, was not at all

convinced that the mechanico-corpuscular view is the ultimate and only truth on

matter. Locke, according to Wilson, acknowledged the ‘limits of mechanism’,

and this is why he had to consider thinking matter as something that was

2

possible within the realm of nature, although, perhaps, improbable.

To my knowledge, Margaret Wilson was the first modern commentator who

suggested that the thinking matter conjecture is not a mere jeu d’esprit, nor a

philosophical blunder but a most serious conjecture, whose consistency with

other parts of the Essay must be inquired into, and a conjecture that may reveal

some of the deepest aspects of Lockean ontology. Since Wilson’s paper, other

commentators have followed her path, examining the thinking matter conjecture

in the light of their own understanding of Lockean mechanism, divine

superaddition, conception of matter and substance, ontology of attribution and

so on.8

Although a great deal of disagreement remains, the discussion thus

opened has shown how far our understanding of Locke’s Essay as a whole could

be enhanced in considering how the carefully phrased statements of 4. 3. 6 agree

or disagree with the basic features of Lockean metaphysics and ontology. In

view of these recent developments, it may seem strange that what I have called

the ‘standard account’ of Locke’s doxastic attitude towards thinking matter is

still prevalent, and has not been the object of a thorough examination and

criticism. To be sure, some of the contributors to the debate have expressed their

dissatisfaction with this common view.9

They acknowledge that a belief in a

material soul is far from being inconsistent with many important themes of the

Essay. As an example, Locke’s very peculiar conceptions of immortality and

personal identity are not only compatible with it, but seem to have been

accommodated to allow for its possibility. Moreover, the deflationary approach

that is prevalent seems at odds with the care and pains Locke took in

expounding the hypothesis, and defending it against opposition in the later years

of his life. Strangely enough, it is in the same set of letters to Stillingfleet that

crudely affirms the high probability of the immateriality of the soul, that can be

found a fully-fledged defence of the thinking matter conjecture, with a host of

new arguments in its favor. In view of such developments it seems at least that

the question of Locke’s opinions on the topic is more complex than the standard

account would have it. Still, the issue is generally considered as a minor one.

Locke, it is agreed by all, in the Essay was primarily interested in making a point

about knowledge, to show how little we know on these metaphysical questions.

This in turn suggests that the question of Locke’s opinions or beliefs, perplexing

as it is, should only be considered as a side issue, which, even in Locke’s eyes,

was of no real import and of no relevance to the content and project of the

Essay. My own position on this state of affairs is, on the contrary, that the issue of

what Locke believed or thought probable (as opposed to what he considered as

true philosophical knowledge) is worth the inquiry and should not be discarded

as irrelevant to the overall interpretation of the Essay’s meaning and scope. Of

course, this methodological stance requires some justifications and I will try in

the first part of this essay to present, as least in a rough form, what I think could

be said in its defence. My main concern here, however, is with the truth or

falsehood of the standard account. I want to argue that the common view of

Locke as a philosopher leaning toward substance dualism is mistaken. For one

thing, the proof texts mentioned above favoring immateriality of the thinking

thing are not the clear cut pronouncements they are supposed to be: the ones

taken from the Essay are ambiguous or inconclusive, and those from the Letters

to Stillingfleet must be interpreted carefully, taking into account the polemical

context of the letters and comparing them with other Lockean statements in

private texts from the same period. Now, as for what Locke’s true opinion was, I

want to argue first, that published and unpublished materials provide us with

sufficient elements to accept the conclusion that Locke thought the matter of the

nature of the soul worth the inquiry, and that he did actually inquire into it;

secondly that the grounds of probability, as he presents them in those materials,

rather than fostering the belief in immateriality, or even suspension of judgment,

weigh rather on the side of the materiality of the human thinking substance.

1. Some methodological premises

From the beginning of the Essay, Locke indicates his decision to consider

throughout the book the mind and its ideas according to a ‘plain, historical

method’, thereby putting aside hypotheses and speculations into the physical

nature of what ideas represent, or of what sort of entities the human mind and

the ideas themselves are. Thus, he writes in the Introduction:

I shall not at present meddle with the Physical Consideration of the

Mind; or trouble myself to examine, wherein its Essence consists, or by

what Motion of our Spirits, or Alterations of our Bodies, we come to

have any Sensation by our Organs, or any Ideas in our Understandings,

and whether those Ideas do in their Formation, any, or all of them,

depend on Matter or no. (1. 1. 2)

Such a methodological commitment seems to imply that Locke’s opinions on

physical or metaphysical issues, proved to be beyond the reach of certain

knowledge, are simply irrelevant to the Essay and its interpretation. Certainly,

the decision is related to the experimentalist injunction, enacted at the Royal

Society, that requires one to be content with pure matter of fact and proscribes

3

the use of hypotheses about the invisible constitution of things. Somehow it is

also related to a Latitudinarian commitment, which demands that one

pronounces only on those points of dogma to which all can assent. Thus the

proclaimed method of the Essay is a descriptive, immanent, deliberately

restrained method, a method aiming at consensus, rather than a speculative,

hypothetical and polemical one, giving voice and authority to beliefs and

probabilities.

But there remains the question of why Locke elicited such method. Some

commentators seem have implied following response: Locke would not have

pronounced on physical or ‘physiological’ questions in the broader sense

because he thought that true philosophy should exclude from its realm those

aspects of human reasoning that fall under the domain of opinion and

probability. Such questions could only give rise to equivocations, nonsense, or

irresolvable contradictions. This response privileges a ‘decontextualized’

reading of the Essay, which, until recent years, has been quite fashionable in

Locke scholarship. If opinions—even those of John Locke himself—are

excluded from the field of philosophy as the author of the Essay defined it, then

there would be little to gain by coming to terms with this work as a case study of

the ideological climate in which Locke elaborated his thought on questions as

crucial as those concerning the nature of the human mind or the essential

composition of bodies. The manner in which Locke informed himself of

contemporary debates on such questions, the positions he took, his doubts and

his shifts in opinion, remain of interest to the biographer and to the historian of

ideas—but not, in the end, to a commentator on the Essay. I believe that this

tacit hermeneutic stance is (or was) fairly widespread, and that it dangerously

distorts our understanding of the Essay.

First, it proceeds from a mistaken notion not only of the epistemological

status that Locke assigned to ‘judgment’ and ‘probability’, but also of the true

meaning of his ‘philosophical Latitudinarianism’, if I may so speak. It was never

Locke’s intention to exclude from the domain of rationality matters of opinion

or questions that cannot form the basis for certain knowledge. On the contrary,

his philosophy aimed to assign rational status to ‘doxastic’ inquiries. It showed

that even when knowledge (i.e. certainty) is impossible to attain, as it is the case

in large portions of physics and metaphysics, judgment nevertheless can and

must be exercised in a legitimate fashion.

An account of the distinction between knowledge and belief10

is probably the

main achievement of the Essay. The whole book is constructed with the project

of tracing the line separating the two, as it appears in the introduction where

Locke states its general goal: ‘It is therefore worth while, to search out the

Bounds between Opinion and Knowledge; and examine by what Measures, in

things, whereof we have no certain Knowledge, we ought to regulate our Assent,

and moderate our Perswasions’ (1. 1. 3).

Such demarcation achieves two different ends. On the one hand, it shows that

no certainty can be gained in some subjects, and serves to denounce the endless

disputes occasioned by men’s blind attachment to cherished opinions. But on the

other hand, the same awareness of the limits of human knowledge has a cathartic

effect on whoever wants to make his mind up about the things that have been

shown to be unknowable. Freed from the vain quest for certainty, man can

regulate his assent in a rational way, proportionate it to the evidence, and be

satisfied here with mere probability. Locke is adamant in saying that, where

knowledge cannot be had, forming our beliefs with sincerity is the best thing we

can do, because here, ‘probability is sufficient to govern all our concernments’

(1. 1. 5). The fact that we cannot get any more than probable opinions should not

lead us to despise them or consider all opinions as equally dubious.11

Belief, or

judgment, ‘the faculty, which God has given Man to supply the want of clear

and certain Knowledge in Cases where that cannot be had’ (4. 14. 3) has an

intrinsic value, moral as well as epistemic. Its feeble and dim character should

not be lamented. It is suitable ‘to that State of Mediocrity and Probationership he

[God] has been pleased to place us in’ (4. 14. 2). We ought to accept this state of

affairs, and, instead of borrowing opinions from others, employ the talent God

has given us to find out by ourselves the most reasonable opinions, especially

when the question is of great human concern, involving our happiness or misery.

Such research, inspired by a sincere love of truth, is somehow a duty that each

man owes to himself as rational creature, a duty that Locke not only

acknowledged in the last chapters of the Essay, but also obviously put into

practice during his life.12

Thus, if Locke deliberately restrained the expression of his beliefs in the

Essay, and particularly of his beliefs concerning topics of great concern to us

(such as the nature and destination of the human soul) it was not because he

thought that the task of weighing probabilities and regulating assent on such

topics was a futile task, contradictory or devoid of sense. Rather, he thought that

this was the most important of all tasks. It is each person’s duty to undertake it

in an appropriate state of mind (which requires a prior cognizance of the limits

of human understanding) both in seeking the truth for itself and in accepting

with tolerance the fact that others may pursue the truth by means different from

one’s own.13

The very manner in which Locke conceived of doxastic rationality

imposed this type of epistemological pluralism and tolerance. At the same time,

4

it carried significant implications for the manner in which he saw fit to give

public expression to convictions acquired beyond the bounds of certain

knowledge. Philosophical Latitudinarianism, as I understand it in Locke,

imposes a sort of methodological restraint in making public declarations of one’s

own convictions. This is especially so when one’s opinions are likely to appear

heterodox or objection-able to others, thereby opening the possibility for vain

disputes, persecution, and intolerance. For that reason, the Essay, which is a

book whose goal is to engage men to set themselves sincerely on the quest of

truth and probability, is almost silent on Locke’s own doxastic quest and on its

results.

There is no question, however, that the author of the Essay was a man of

strong beliefs. He made intensely personal, patient, and rational inquiries into

what constituted the essence of man and into what linked him to the order of

creation and granted him life, death, and destiny. Locke’s journals and

notebooks, full of medical entries, anthropological accounts, beliefs and customs

of other nations and confessions as well as heterodox religious opinions, bear

witness to a life devoted to seeking the most sound beliefs concerning

humankind and human nature. For Locke, these beliefs were not those received

through birth, cultural environment, or education, but those acquired for oneself,

through study and a careful consideration of evidence and probability.

Resituated in the actual intellectual context of Locke’s life and researches, the

Essay concerning Human Understanding assumes a paradoxical character. On

the surface, the book complies with the ‘plain, historical method’: it is a natural

history of the mind, dealing with signs, ideas and words, rather than things,

avoiding hypothesis or probable reasoning. But, at the same time, Locke, the

man of strong beliefs, cannot but be present in the work. This presence manifests

itself in this very special way that makes the book a masterpiece in the art of

paralipsis, meandering and indirect statements. Personal opinions on physical

subjects are in principle excluded, but throughout the Essay a large number of

them are nevertheless expressed or hinted at through interpolated clauses,

digressions, puzzling examples, appeals to the reader. I do not think that these

striking features of Locke’s text should be treated as residual idiosyncratic

manifestations of Locke’s avowed laziness or carelessness in writing the Essay.

I am rather inclined to think that most of what is written in the Essay, including

such departures from the authorized method, has been carefully weighed, and

has a role to play in a complete understanding of Locke’s intent. No reader of

the Essay can miss the fact that the discoveries of the descriptive and empirical

method are very often highly ambiguous.14

This is especially apparent

concerning the question of ideas: one cannot aim to understand the Essay and

then decide merely to stay agnostic regarding their mode of production and the

way they are related to external things. Locke himself acknowledges the fact that

he has to provisionally abandon the ‘historical method’ and formulate a physical

hypothesis on the corpuscular constitution of bodies and on the manner in which

it affects our senses in the production of ideas.15

I am convinced that on many

other occasions in the Essay, the need arises for similar forays into fields related

to physics, physiology, theology—all sciences constructed mainly on doxastic

grounds. Here and there, Locke is giving slight hints at what is probably true of

the Minds of Children in the Womb, motions of animal spirits, mechanism

governing the train of ideas, faculties of beasts, angels and other intelligences,

ways of creating matter and spirits16

... and one should not overlook such

suggestions when attempting to better understand what he has to say on the

origins of ideas, on the operations of the mind such as memory and association,

on men as rational creatures, or on God as Creator of matter and spirits. In either

case, the better intelligibility of the results generated by the ‘plain, historical’

investigation requires from both author and reader alike a certain ‘doxastic’

orientation—that is, a more or less stated preference for certain physical or

metaphysical options. Thus, all this comes about as if Locke had disclosed in the

Essay, whether unintentionally or in a deliberately esoteric17

manner, slight hints

at his central convictions, the probable beliefs on bodies and minds toward

which his studies and his life experiences had led him. Among these hints,

perhaps the most recurrent one is the idea that the relation of mind to matter is

narrower than what is usually expected, or ordinarily conceived. In light of such

a suggestion, lightly but consistently sketched, all along the Essay, the ‘thinking

matter’ conjecture is apt to assume new colors. Although its epistemic function

suffices to justify its presence in the Essay and is perfectly compatible with

complete agnosticism, or even dualist leanings on behalf of Locke, one is

tempted to ask whether such a conjecture is likely to convey other doxastic

implications, of a less orthodox nature.

2. ‘I am not here speaking of Probability’: doxastic implications of

Essay4.3.6

There is no question that the ‘thinking matter’ conjecture was introduced in

Essay 4. 3. 6 for epistemic reasons, as an illustration of the bounds of

knowledge. Although the chapter, as the title says, considers ‘the extent’ of our

knowledge, it is, in fact, mainly concerned with its limits or boundaries. As

Locke defines it, knowledge is the perception of how our ideas relate one to the

5

other, of whether they are in ‘agreement’ or not. One important aspect of the

limitations of human knowledge is the fact that we are not always able to see

whether such or such relation holds between ideas we have. We certainly have

the ideas of matter and thinking. Thinking is a simple idea of reflection and as

such is directly meaningful and needs no explanation; matter is an abstract idea

of sensation, one of the most general. It refers to any extended and solid

substance. Although both ideas are quite clear and determinate ones, we might

never know how they relate to one another. This means in particular (and this is

clearly an anti-Cartesian stance) that we might never be able to perceive or

demonstrate that the ideas of thinking and matter disagree in a sense that rules

out the possibility of a mere material being thinking. Locke is actually positive

in asserting that we naturally (without revelation) cannot have such knowledge:

It being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas,

without revelation, to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to

some Systems of Matter fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think,

or else joined and fixed to Matter so disposed, a thinking immaterial

Substance.18

Although Locke is, in this first statement of the famous hypothesis, only

considering the abstract possibility of thinking matter, without mentioning any

actual being, the way he pursues the issue in the following page clearly shows

that he also has in mind a much more specific question, I mean the question of

the nature of created souls, either bestial or human, and of whether they can be

proved material or immaterial. This was the focus of fierce debates in Locke’s

times, involving metaphysicians, theologians, physicians and physiologists.

Locke is certainly aware of those debates, and in some sense willing to offer his

own contribution. But his contribution in the Essay seems to be a rather

deceptive one: roughly, it states that, given the nature of our mental equipment,

the question cannot be solved satisfactorily one way, or the other. Either created

(human) souls are immaterial thinking substances that God has united to bodies,

and made capable of interacting with them in a manner that we cannot

comprehend; or they simply are certain ‘systems of matter fitly disposed’ to

which the power to perceive and think has been divinely, but incomprehensibly,

‘superadded’. Both options oblige us to accept something that we cannot

conceive. The first option is clearly Cartesian and refers implicitly to the noted

inconceivability of the so called ‘union de l’âme et du corps’. The second

option, which is strongly reminiscent of Thomas Willis’s description of bestial

soul,19

seems to be for Locke the unique plausible alternative to the Cartesian

doctrine. Although it makes more sense of the body-soul interaction (being both

material, it is understandable that they can act one on the other) it has also its

share of difficulties, the attribution of a mere power of thinking to matter,

however disposed, being to us utterly incomprehensible. It is to be noted that the

two options are strict contradictories, the soul being either a material being or a

non-material being. It is necessary that one is true and the other false. But

whoever thinks he can decide the question in favor of one thesis in showing the

inconceivability of the other actually fails to see that his own side is perplexed

with equal difficulties. Inconceivability accounts only for our own limitations;

and should not be construed as revealing impossibilities in the nature of the

things, nor limitations in the power of God.

So what comes out from the discussion in 4. 3. 6 is the conclusion that the

issue of the metaphysical nature of the soul is intractable at the level of

knowledge and certainty, and that we are forced, at this level, to entertain some

sort of agnosticism. But there remains the question of the doxastic implications

of such considerations. At first sight, it might seem that Locke is defending some

sort of suspension of judgment at this level as well. This seems to be particularly

so in the passage where he affirms the antinomic character of the inquiry:

He that considers how hardly Sensation is, in our Thoughts, recon-

cilable to extended Matter; or existence to anything that has no

Extension at all, will confess that he is very far from certainly knowing

what his Soul is. ’Tis a Point, which seems to me, to be put out of the

reach of our Knowledge: And he who will give himself leave to

consider freely, and look into the dark and intricate part of each

Hypothesis, will scarce find his reason able to determine him fixedly

for or against the Soul’s Materiality. Since, on which side soever he

views it, either as an unextended Substance, or as a thinking extended

Matter, the difficulty to conceive either, will, whilst either alone is in

his Thoughts, still drive him to the contrary side. An unfair way which

some men take with themselves: who, because of the

unconceivableness of something they find in one, throw themselves

violently into the contrary Hypothesis, though altogether as

unintelligible to an unbiassed Understanding.

This text could be read as an invitation to renounce reason not only to

determine certain knowledge, but also any reasonable belief on the question of

the nature of the soul. What may suggest this is the way the antinomy is

presented: arguments for or against immateriality seem to be put on a balance so

6

as to weigh one against the other. The antinomy results from the fact that the

mere consideration of the difficulty on one side has an unbalancing effect. It

drives the mind to the contrary side. Mechanical metaphors of this kind are

typically of the type Locke uses to characterize the resulting effects of doxastic

reasoning, which he conceives as some sort of dialectic between contradictory

evidences, which, once completed, determine the assent almost mechanically.

But one should note that Locke is not saying here that doxastic evidence for or

against immateriality are in a strict equilibrium and therefore should conduce

any reasonable man to suspend his judgment. Locke is not concerned here with

the neutralization of the grounds of credibility (an issue that he does not really

consider), but with the strict reciprocity and therefore nullification of the

attempts made to demonstrate the actual truth of one of the two opposite theses,

by showing the inconceivability of the other. Both attempts are doomed to

failure because they are aimed at certainty when only probability can be had.

Both are blind and grounded on the false presumption that our capacity to

understand is the norm and measure of what can exist in this world.

As a matter of fact, Locke had made clear a little earlier that his claim to

agnosticism in regard to knowledge is of no consequence when belief or

probability is at stake. Anticipating the objection that such proclaimed

agnosticism would undermine our belief of the immateriality and immortality of

the soul, he answered:

I say not this, that I would any way lessen the belief of the Soul’s

Immateriality; I am not here speaking of Probability, but Knowledge;

and I think not only that it becomes the modesty of Philosophy not to

pronounce Magisterially, where we want that Evidence that can

produce Knowledge; but also, that it is of use to us to discern how far

our Knowledge does reach; for the state we are at present in, not being

that of Vision, we must in many things content our selves with Faith

and Probability.

So the question of the soul’s materiality or immateriality is one with respect to

which we must content ourselves with faith and probability. This means in

particular that, whatever belief we have, we shall entertain it with the modesty

and discretion that suit that kind of assent, and shall not try to impose it on

others. Understandably given these premises, Locke does not state here his own

opinion on the matter. Invoking the ‘belief of the soul’s immateriality’ in the

passage just quoted, he does not actually say that this common belief is also his

own; but simply that what he has to say on the score of knowledge will not

lessen (nor strengthen, one might add) such a belief in other men’s minds. The

reason why Locke would not ‘any way lessen the belief of the soul’s

immateriality’ could be the fact that he actually shares himself such a belief and

values it as reasonable, but it could also be that Locke, although of dissenting

opinion, is simply not willing to argue against a view that has recently received

the seal of orthodoxy. Such ambiguity is not resolved in the following lines.

Locke is content to say that the proof of immateriality is not necessary to

‘secure’ the ends of morality and religion:

. . . and in the present Question, about the immateriality of the Soul, if

our Faculties cannot arrive at demonstrative Certainty, we need not

think it strange. All the great Ends of Morality and Religion, are well

enough secured, without philosophical Proofs of the Soul’s

immateriality; since it is evident, that he who made us at first begin to

subsist here, sensible intelligent Beings, and for several years continued

us in such a state, can and will restore us to the like state of Sensibility

in another World, and make us capable there to receive the Retribution

he has designed to Men, according to their doings in this Life. And

therefore ‘tis not of such mighty necessity to determine one way or

t’other, as some, over zealous for or against the Immateriality of the

Soul, have been forward to make the World believe.

Once again these sentences should not be interpreted as stating that reasonable

opinions on the nature of the soul are not to be searched for, or that we should

feel totally unconcerned by the issue. The point is rather that whatever the

opinion is to be entertained, belief in after-life retribution, the basis on which all

morality and religion is built, will remain unaffected— such belief being

grounded on the sole consideration of God’s power, his aptitude to make us

subsist as identical persons through the accidents of life and death. Somehow,

the argument is to be understood as an argument for freedom of research.

Whatever the results of the doxastic inquiry will be, we know in advance that

they will not be a threat to morality and religion. Such foreknowledge is

certainly of great help to put the mind in the state of ‘indifference’ that is

requested when ‘one seriously set upon the search of Truth’ (4. 19. 1).

The conclusion to be drawn from the preceding analysis is that Essay 4. 3. 6

does not really contain any indications of Locke’s doxastic inclinations. This

should not be interpreted as if the chapter was suggesting that the quest for a

reasonable opinion were vain or unworthy for a philosopher. On the contrary,

the chapter suggests that a probable opinion on the topic is apt to be gained. But,

7

as far as Locke’s own beliefs are concerned, the chapter is silent. This, of course,

should not be a surprise. It is nevertheless noteworthy. Dualist leanings, if they

exist, are to be deduced from other parts of the Essay, or texts other than the

Essay.

3. ‘Our Notion of immaterial Spirit’, Essay 2. 23

The first natural place to look when inquiring on Locke’s conception of thinking

things, is chapter 23 of book II, dealing with our ideas of individual substances.

The chapter, no doubt, contains assertions that bear a ‘dualist’ look. One

important aim of the chapter is to show, against an unnamed Hobbesian

argument, that our idea of material substance is no clearer, nor more intelligible

than our idea of immaterial spirit. Cohesion, divisibility, power to move bodies

by impulse—all properties we clearly see belonging to bodies—are, when duly

considered, unintelligible to us. There is no more clarity in matter than in

immaterial spirit and whoever wants to repudiate immaterial beings on account

of the obscurity of their idea is making no point at all in favor of materialism.

Material beings could be repudiated on the very same ground. And this is why

‘we have as much reason to be satisfied with our Notion of immaterial Spirit, as

with our notion of body; and the Existence of the one as well as the other’ (2. 23.

32).20

There are a couple of things to say about this ‘defence’ of immateriality. First,

one should note that the chapter, in its mentioning of immaterial spirits, is not

only considering created souls, but God himself, a being who, according to

Essay 4. 10, could be demonstratively shown immaterial. Thus, it might be

legitimate to think that the argument of 2. 23, rather than offering a clear cut

defense of Cartesian dualism, stating that created spirits are necessarily

immaterial, is only preparing the ground for the later demonstration of God’s

immateriality, showing the weaknesses of the strongest stripe of materialism, the

one which argues against the mere possibility of immaterial beings and makes

God himself material. Second, one may note that the argument in 2. 23 on

immaterial spirits is strictly paralleled by the argument in 4. 3. 6 on thinking

matter. In both cases, Locke argues against the same dogmatic attitude that

considers that existence should be denied to what is not fully intelligible. The

seemingly different conclusions arise from differences in the rhetorical or

polemical perspective of each text. The passage on thinking matter is

rhetorically aimed against the Cartesians, who hold that the nature of the

immaterial thinking substance is clearly and distinctly perceived and ‘better

known’ (notior) than the nature of bodies; whereas a large portion of 2. 23 is

anti-Hobbesian in spirit, and has almost Cartesian accents in its attack against

‘that people whose Thoughts are immersed in Matter’ (2. 23. 22), reckoning no

existence unless sensible and material. Those rhetorical overtones put aside, it

seems to me that 2. 23 is not making a case for the actual immateriality of

created spirits, no more than 4. 3. 6 will be making a case for their actual

materiality. Taken literally, both arguments are about epistemic possibility.

What Locke says in 2. 23 is that there is no more epistemic inconsistency in the

existence of‘a thinking thing without solidity, i.e. immaterial’ than in the

existence of ‘a solid thing without thinking, i.e. Matter.’ And, in a strict parallel

to 4. 3. 6, he uses the argument that ‘it is no harder to conceive how Thinking

should exist without Matter than how Matter should think’ (2. 23. 32). Those

preliminary remarks may help us to understand the meaning of 2. 23. 15, where

Locke is introducing for the first time the ‘complex idea of an immaterial

substance’:

And thus by putting together the Ideas of Thinking, Perceiving, Liberty

and Power of moving themselves and other things, we have as clear a

perception, and notion of immaterial Substances, as we have of

material. For putting together the Ideas of Thinking and Willing, or the

Power of moving or quieting corporeal Motion, joined to Substance, of

which we have no distinct Idea, we have the Idea of an immaterial

Spirit; and by putting together the Ideas of coherent solid parts, and a

power of being moved, joined with Substance, of which likewise we

have no positive Idea, we have the Idea of Matter. The one is as clear

and distinct an Idea as the other: The Idea of Thinking, and moving a

Body being as clear and distinct Ideas, as the Ideas of Extension,

Solidity and being moved. For our Idea of substance, is equally

obscure, or not at all, in both; it is but a supposed, I know not what, to

support those Ideas, we call Accidents.

One should notice that the notion of immateriality (non-solidity) of the

thinking substance is not given here as an idea of reflection: it is not included in

the list of properties discovered through reflection on one’s own mind (thinking,

perceiving, power of moving, etc.), neither is it implied by one or several of

those properties, and, one should add, it is not implied either by the mere

supposition of a substratum, an idea whose obscurity and emptiness is

repeatedly pointed out by Locke in the chapter. The only reason why

8

immateriality may be prefixed to our idea of a spirit is a purely negative one: in

making the supposition of a substratum for mental qualities, we do not need to

consider it as possessing corporeal qualities such as extension and solidity.

Somehow, the choice of a term such as ‘immaterial’ for referring to spirits is a

simple matter of convention and custom. The adjective is used to nominally

circumscribe a kind of substance whose properties are apprehended as logically

independent from solidity and extension, but it is clear that it does not refer to

the actual ‘seeing’ of non-solidity. This point is subtly confirmed in the last part

of 2. 23. 15, when Locke answers those who think that matter is the only object

revealed by sensation:

Every act of sensation, when duly considered, gives us an equal view of

both parts of nature, the Corporeal and Spiritual. For whilst I know, by

seeing or hearing, etc. that there is some Corporeal Being without me,

the Object of that sensation, I do more certainly know, that there is

some Spiritual Being within me, that sees and hears. This I must be

convinced cannot be the action of bare insensible matter; nor ever could

be without an immaterial thinking Being.

Thus, there are two parts in nature: one corporeal and one spiritual,

responding to the existence of two faculties in man, sensation and reflection.

Such duality is apparent for us as an effect of our mental constitution. But this

phenomenological fact does not mean that it exists as an ontological counterpart,

and that nature is actually divided into two realms, one material and the other

immaterial. The last sentence should not be understood as saying that the

‘spiritual’ being within me is necessarily immaterial, but only that his action

cannot be ‘without an immaterial thinking Being’. In other words, an immaterial

being is requisite for accounting for the actions of one’s mind, but one may still

ask whether this immaterial being is the finite mind under consideration, or a

being external to it—e.g. an infinite thinking being who would be able to give to

that finite mind the power to think. Here again, it seems to me that Locke is

quite deliberate in choosing words that, at least, do not exclude this last

construal. The mention of ‘bare insensible matter’ is another element pointing in

the same direction: the qualification (‘bare’) could suggest that matter otherwise

qualified (say, insensible matter fitly disposed and divinely operated) might be a

much better candidate than bare insensible matter, to account for the operations

of the mind.

4. Consciousness and the soul’s immateriality. Essay 2. 27

The discussion on personal identity in chapter 27 of book II is another important

locus for the question of the nature of the soul. Paragraph 25 has a sentence that

is often and, in my view, erroneously offered as evidence of Locke’s leaning

towards immateriality of the human soul. After having submitted to his reader a

certain number of puzzling cases on identity, where the same consciousness is

successively ascribed to different immaterial substances, and the same substance

to different consciousnesses, Locke makes the following statement:

I agree the more probable opinion is that this consciousness is annexed to,

and the affection of one individual immaterial.

Again, to understand the meaning of such a statement, the exact context of the

discussion must be taken into consideration. As we shall see, from paragraph 12

on, Locke has been considering the question of personal identity from the point

of view of those who assign thinking to an immaterial substance, and under the

supposition21

that they are right to do so. Thus, paragraph 25 is not stating that

immateriality of the soul is intrinsically probable, but only that, granting that the

soul is immaterial, it is probable that the same individual immaterial substance is

always annexed to the same individual consciousness and vice versa. In other

words, the sentence just quoted states that the puzzling cases discussed at length

in the preceding paragraphs, although speculatively possible, are nevertheless

implausible.

In my view, the chapter on personal identity does not provide evidence

favoring the soul’s immateriality. It might be argued on the contrary that, taken

as a whole, the chapter offers one single powerful argument against a kind of

metaphysical dualism that is distinctively Cartesian and requires immateriality

as a necessary feature of the soul. Locke’s main thesis, as is well known, is that

personal identity does not consist in the identity through time of one and the

same substance but consists solely in the identity through time of one and the

same consciousness. Sameness of consciousness is apprehended through the

feeling we have of the ownership of our past and present thoughts and actions;

and what makes us feel that such actions and thoughts are our own is the

concern that is attached to them, the happiness and misery that may be presently

expected from them or, in retrospect, attributed to them. Such a feeling almost

always accompanies our thoughts when we have them, but as thoughts

themselves are, it is accidental and intermittent. It may be interrupted by gaps of

sound sleep, affected by loss of memory, fainting fits and so on. It is certainly

9

related to and dependent on (substantial) thinking things, but as it stands, it

cannot account for the permanency, or singleness of spatio-temporal history, that

makes such things individual substances. As a result, there is no reason to

consider that it gives us a privileged access to what makes the essence of the

thinking thing.

However difficult and rife with controversy are Locke’s statements on

personal identity, I think that the characterizations we have given are rather

uncontroversial. No more controversial, but perhaps less noted, is the fact that

such characterizations reveal strong anti-Cartesian leanings. Descartes’

Meditations métaphysiques, in total contrast with Locke’s chapter on personal

identity, contrived a powerful argument to show that consciousness, the

reflective experience of our own thoughts, gives us the intuitive certainty of the

existence of a substantial self, an immaterial being, intrinsically distinct from the

extended and changing body that we wrongly consider as ‘ourselves’. The

existence of our body can be doubted and even negated, although our thinking-

self cannot. With this Cartesian argument in mind, one cannot fail to see that

there is a strong polemical strand in Locke’s chapter on personal identity. What

Locke is up to here is to show that there is a fallacy in the kind of argument

Descartes displayed in the first two Meditations, using the reflective experience

of oneself as a metaphysical tool in order to establish the ‘real distinction of

body and soul’, together with the true nature of the thinking thing. Indeed,

Locke’s main line of argument is to show that the issue of consciousness is

utterly independent from the issue of the metaphysical nature of the soul, and

should be raised in exactly the same terms, whatever position we have on such

questions. In other words, Locke’s conception of personal identity allows for a

material soul, as well as for an immaterial.

The disjunctive structure of the discussion is clearly established in paragraph

12. Locke has just shown that personal identity is somehow independent of

changes that could affect the figure of the body we consider at one moment as

‘ours’. A person may lose a hand or a limb: this does not affect his identity as a

person. The argument is offered as ‘some kind of evidence’ taken from ‘our very

bodies’ in favor of the thesis that personal identity does not logically entail

substantial identity. Here the same ‘self ’ is applied to a living body whose limits

and constituents are changing through time. But, as we just said, the

continuation of the one and same person in a fleeting body is not something with

which a Cartesian would have any qualms. The real stakes are on the question as

to whether personal identity entails identity of the same thinking thing. It is with

this specific question that Locke deals in the long stretch of paragraphs that

extends from

2. 27. 12 to 2. 27. 25, and it is this question that requires a disjunctiveanswer, in

consideration of the two leading theses on the nature of the soul:

But the question is, Whether if the same Substance, which thinks, be

changed, it can be the same Person; or, remaining the same, it can be

different Persons?

And to this I answer first, this can be no Question at all to those who

place Thought in a purely material, animal, Constitution, void of an

immaterial Substance. For, whether their supposition be true or no, ’tis

plain they conceive personal Identity preserved in something else than

Identity of Substance; as animal Identity is preserved in Identity of

Life, and not of Substance. And therefore those, who place thinking in

an immaterial Substance only, before they can come to deal with these

Men, must shew why personal Identity cannot be preserved in the

change of immaterial Substances, or variety of particular immaterial

Substances, as well as animal Identity is preserved in the change of

material Substances, or variety of particular Bodies: Unless they will

say, ’tis one immaterial Spirit that makes the same Life in Brutes; as it

is one immaterial Spirit that makes the same Person in men, which the

Cartesians at least will not admit, for fear of making Brutes thinking

things too. (2. 27. 12)

So what we have got here are two positions: there are ‘those who place

thought in a purely animal constitution, void of an immaterial substance’ and

‘those who place thinking in immaterial substance only’. As these two stances

are presented here, it seems that there is some room left for a third position, one

that considers that thinking requires both an animal constitution and an

immaterial substance. We shall return to this consideration later. The pure

materialist view is dealt with very briefly: those who hold it are not to be

converted to the truth of Locke’s thesis on personal identity, because they have

to be already convinced of it, from their own premises. In the constant fleeting

succession of animal spirits, it is obvious that there is no material part in the

brain or elsewhere in the body that could count as a stable and permanent holder

of personal identity. So materialists, whether they are aware of it or not, are

compelled to consider that personal identity is preserved ‘in something else than

identity of substance’, which means that they have either to accept something

akin to Locke’s account of personal identity, or simply to renounce materialism.

So here the ones to be convinced of Locke’s doctrine are only those who hold

that personal identity entails the identity through time of an immaterial

10

substance; those men think that the only way to preserve identity of the same

self is to preserve it in a special kind of substance, a non-material substance that

is not affected by constant changes and cannot be divided or exchanged. Such

view of the thinking thing appears to them as the only way to protect the identity

of the self, and this, incidentally, provides them with a demonstration that the

soul cannot be material.

Locke’s point here is to indicate a major flaw in this line of argument. An

immaterial soul is no bastion against the possible ascription of the same self to

various thinking substances or of the same thinking substance to various selves.

The argument is well known. On the one hand, God can give to any creature a

consciousness of actions accomplished by another creature. Consciousness being

an act of awareness attached to the present representation, and not to the object

represented in the past, consciousness of memory could be as illusory as dreams.

To one who tried to evade such argument in saying that the Goodness of God

forbids that a man shall be punished or rewarded for the consciousness of

actions not done by him, Locke, rather enigmatically, answers: ‘How far this

may be an argument against those who would place Thinking in a system of

fleeting animal spirits, I leave to be considered’ (2. 27. 13). I do not think that

Locke means here that recourse to God’s goodness is illegitimate as such, or that

such recourse would be simply scorned by a crude materialist—although this

last could be a plausible interpretation. I rather think that Locke is suggesting

that the argument cannot be opposed to those, who, supporting a material soul

consisting in a ‘system of fleeting animal spirits’, are, as a matter of fact, forced

to admit that unity of human consciousness cannot have any other guarantee

than God’s good will and God’s continuous action, through which the same

consciousness is constantly tied to itself, beyond the gaps occasioned by sound

sleep, forgetfulness, diseases . . .

On the other hand, the famous puzzle cases on Nestor and Thersites, Socrates

and the Mayor of Quinborough, the prince and the cobbler are meant as a

demonstration that, with Cartesian or Cartesian-like premises, one cannot prove

that it is necessary that the same self is always associated with the same

immaterial substance. It is to be noted that these cases are explicitly constructed

with an ad hominem reference to the Cartesian affirmation that Souls are, as

such, ‘indifferent to any parcel of matter’

(2. 27. 14). Locke takes advantage of that description to make the soulsmigrate

from one man to another, changing their thinking places and, with them, their

memory and concerns. However implausible, hypotheses of that kind cannot be

declared impossible by a supporter of an immaterial soul.

Two conclusions can be drawn from the preceding analysis, the second being

somewhat stronger. First, it appears that Locke’s doctrine of personal identity is

fully compatible with the thinking matter hypothesis. As a large part of the

chapter shows, reflexive consciousness cannot demonstrate the immateriality of

the thinking thing. Because continuity of consciousness is independent of

substantial continuity, a material soul would allow the continuous existence of

one and the same person, responsible for his actions and thoughts, and apt to be

rewarded or punished by the Creator after bodily dissolution, in any other

material configuration God will find proper to give him.

The second conclusion concerns the doxastic implications of 2. 27. Is there

anything said in the chapter that may affect the weight of probability on the

nature of the thinking thing? In my opinion, the answer is yes. The chapter as a

whole is a polemic against the Cartesian conception of the soul. In paragraph 27,

Locke acknowledges that some suppositions made in the chapter may ‘look

strange to some Readers’. But he explains that they are pardonable in

consideration of ‘this ignorance we are in of the Nature of that thinking thing,

that is in us, and which we look on as ourselves’:

Did we know what it was, or how it was tied to a certain System of

fleeting Animal Spirits; or whether it could, or could not perform its

Operations of Thinking and Memory out of a Body organized as ours

is; and whether it has pleased God that no one such Spirit shall ever be

united to any but one such Body, upon the right constitution of whose

Organs its Memory should depend; we might see the Absurdity of some

of those suppositions I have made. But taking, as we ordinarily now do,

(in the dark concerning these matters) the Soul of a Man for an

immaterial Substance, independent from matter, and indifferent alike to

it all; there can from the nature of things, be no absurdity at all to

suppose that the same Soul may at different times be united to different

Bodies, and with them make up for that time, one Man; As well as we

suppose a part of a Sheep’s Body yesterday should be a part of a Man’s

Body to-morrow, and in that union make a vital part of Meliboeus

himself, as well as it did of his Ram.

The passage is a good example of the subtlety of Locke’s way of writing.

Although he is saying that we are completely in the dark on the matter, he is

nevertheless giving quite a precise picture of the diverse options that might

account for the metaphysical nature of the soul. He is also subtly suggesting that,

as far as verisimilitude is concerned, these options are not on the same footing.

On the one hand, if we were to accept that thinking and memory are tied to a

11

system of animal spirits and united to an organized body in an almost

indissoluble way, we could discard as simply impossible the various strange

suppositions on memory transfers and soul transmigrations that Locke had put

forward to make his point on personal identity against the Cartesians. On the

other hand, if the soul is taken for an immaterial substance, independent from

matter and indifferent to it, as it is ordinary to suppose now (namely in those

Cartesian times), we are forced to consider these strange suppositions as stating

possible matters of fact. The way the alternative is put is, in my view, a clear

hint at the opinion for which Locke has a preference. The paragraph is to be

compared with the argument developed in the first chapter of book II. There,

Locke was already making use of the same sort of puzzle cases in order to show

the absurd consequences which follow from the Cartesian thesis that the soul

always thinks. The reader’s reluctance toward these suppositions, such as

making two persons of one man, was there used as an indirect argument against

the thesis allowing them as possible matters of fact. On this occasion Locke had

already expressed that a soul who would be so separated from matter that it

would be able to think apart from the body, in a total indifference to its

happiness or misery, with no memory nor trace of its thinking, and no possibility

to make use of it for life, would be as idle and base as a pure Epicurean soul

made with nothing but the ‘subtilest parts of matter’:22

They who make the Soul a thinking Thing, at this rate, will not make it

a much more noble Being than those do, whom they condemn, for

allowing it to be nothing but the subtilest parts of Matter. Characters

drawn on Dust, that the first breath of wind effaces; or Impressions

made on a heap of Atoms, or animal Spirits, are altogether as useful,

and render the Subject as noble, as the Thoughts of a soul that perish in

thinking; that, once out of sight, are gone forever, and leave no memory

of themselves behind them. (2. 1. 15)

Clearly discarded here is the belief in immateriality in the sense of an

ontological character conceived as a necessary condition for the existence of a

disincarnated soul, independent from and indifferent to the body it is dwelling

in. Of course these texts are not suggesting that a material soul is as such more

probable than an immaterial one. It could still be that the soul is an immaterial

being, but it must nevertheless be of such a nature that it is tied to the body in a

way that makes it dependent on it for its thinking to be simply possible. In both

chapters 1 and 27, Locke has carefully constructed his argument to show that it

is not its supposedly superior ontological nature that makes a thinking thing

worthwhile and noble, but its aptitude to persist through time, and thus to be

accountable for its thinking. It seems clear that, in Locke’s view, such persistent

action requires not so much an immaterial substance, but rather some organized

matter apt to receive memory traces, together with the Supreme being who alone

has the power to insure continuity of existence and assign the same self-

consciousness to the same thinking thing.

5. Immateriality ‘in the highest degree probable’. Context and

arguments in the Stillingfleet controversy

So far so good: although sometimes tortuous in its formulations, the Essay does

not contain any clear indication of the doxastic superiority of substance dualism.

It must be acknowledged however that, in the later controversy with Stillingfleet,

Locke quite unambiguously affirms that the exact contrary is the case. Here, not

only once but several times, he asserts that some passages in the Essay had

proved ‘highly probable that the soul is immaterial’.23

I want to argue that such

an assertion, which certainly reveals important aspects of Locke’s strategy in the

controversy, is not expressive of Locke’s most sincere and deep beliefs. I

concede that the argument from insincerity or dissimulation is always a harsh

hermeneutical tool, which must be used only in the last resort, but I think that in

the present case, the argument can be justified both on contextual and systematic

grounds.

Let us start with context, which once again is crucial here. After the pub-

lication, in 1694, of the Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke was facing new

and fierce opponents, accusing him of religious heterodoxy and Socinian

sympathies. As Locke himself sorely acknowledged,24

these accusations had a

deleterious effect on the reading of the Essay itself: after a few years of pacific

reception and general approbation, the book was now taken to task, with

growing suspicion that it contained some kind of Trojan horse, and favored,

under an apparent neutrality of method and style, dangerous metaphysical

conceptions, prejudicial to the interests of true religion and orthodoxy. A

striking illustration of this new attitude towards the Essay is to be found in

Stillingfleet’s Vindication of the Trinity published in 1696. In the book, the

Bishop of Worcester made a blatant case against the Essay: Locke’s book on

understanding is a threat to Christianity, a vehicle for skepticism; insinuating

doubts on the very existence of substances, persons, immaterial and immortal

souls, it is an insidious attack at the metaphysical core on which the doctrine of

Christianity is built.

12

Obviously, the safety line that Locke had traced around the doctrines of the

Essay in presenting them as the result of a pure empirical and descriptive

method was broken: the method itself (the famous ‘way of ideas’) was

represented by Stillingfleet and others as perverse and virtually skeptical. The

careful avoidance, in the Essay, of theological matters, and, in general, of

metaphysical questions apt to raise violent conflicts of opinions was perceived as

a dissimulation strategy. In other terms, it is what we have called Locke’s

philosophical Latitudinarianism (or neutrality) that is challenged or missed, and

I am convinced, that it is also what Locke, in answering Stillingfleet, tried

primarily to restore and vindicate.25

The lengthy replies he addressed to the

Bishop, and through him to the public, have this function only: to show that the

Essay is not a book for a sect or a party, that it should be read as innocently as it

has been written, and that the allegations that it is secretly conveying heterodox

doctrines are simply false. As a result, a striking feature of Locke’s replies is the

fact that they are almost entirely concerned with the question of how to interpret

what Locke has written in the Essay, rather than with the things themselves

under discussion, or the opinions Locke actually entertains about them. For

example, when taken to task on the subject of the Trinity, Locke is content in

saying that nowhere in the Essay this subject was alluded to, and he does not

condescend to say one word on his actual beliefs on the topic. It is to be noted

that even the assertion on the probable immateriality of the soul has this

exegetical turn: Locke does not say that he thinks immateriality probable but

rather says:

I presume, from what I have said about the supposition of a system of

matter thinking (which there demonstrates that God is immaterial)

(Book IV, chap. X, §16) will prove it in the highest degree probable,

that the thinking substance in us is immaterial. (First reply, p. 33)

I shall soon consider the ground that Locke gives here for this ‘presumption’,

but I first want briefly to comment on how the peculiar rhetorical character of

the replies to Stillingfleet is apt to affect our interpretation of Locke’s statement.

It seems clear to me that Locke, in choosing this defensive strategy, is

carefully avoiding a debate on ‘opinions’, either metaphysical or theological.

Stillingfleet had tried to draw him on that ground, but Locke knows that his

adversary is not prepared to impartially receive doxastic arguments based on

sincere and unprejudiced research. The Bishop on the contrary has proved a

dogmatic opponent, strongly inclined to abuse the authority conferred by his title

and to indulge in a pretense of some sort of infallibility, an attitude that Locke

denounces in terms reminiscent of the ones he will soon use to condemn

enthusiasm.26

For this reason Stillingfleet is certainly the last person to whom

Locke would confess heterodox opinions. This fact should be taken into

consideration, when interpreting the apparent orthodox concessions he is making

in the replies. Considering the character of the interlocutor, such concessions

might not be completely sincere. Or, to say it differently, Locke, whatever his

true opinions, is here ready to wear the mask of orthodoxy, because his main

objective is not really to confess his views, but to show the public, that,

notwithstanding Stillingfleet’s accusations, (religious) orthodoxy is not the least

threatened by the philosophical doctrines of the Essay: these doctrines could be

adopted by high-churchmen, as well as by dissenters.

Of course, such a contextual argument can only be a preliminary one: the

rhetorical status of the Stillingfleet controversy may allow a tinge of

dissimulation or insincerity. But was Locke actually insincere in stating that the

soul’s immateriality is highly probable? Belief for Locke is not oracle. It has to

be justified and its probability must be proportioned to the force of the reasons

afforded. In the present case, as far as reasons are concerned, Locke is rather

laconic. The longest consideration he has on this score is given in the Second

Reply:

He that will be at the pains to read that chapter of mine [scil. Chap. 23,

book II ] and consider it will find that my business there was to show,

that it was no harder to conceive an immaterial than a material

substance; and that from the ideas of thought, and a power of moving

of matter, which we experienced in ourselves, (ideas originally not

belonging to matter as matter), there was no more difficulty to conclude

there was an immaterial substance in us, than that we had material

parts. These ideas of thinking, and power of moving of matter, I in

another place showed, did demonstratively lead us to the certain

knowledge of an immaterial spirit, in whom we have the idea of a spirit

in the strictest sense; in which sense I also applied to the soul, in that

23d chapter of my Essay; the easily conceivable possibility, nay great

probability, that that thinking substance in us is immaterial, giving me

sufficient ground for it.

Urging his reader to carefully consider the complex articulation between

chapter 23 of book 2 and chapter 10 of book 4, Locke lightly slips from ‘the

easily conceivable possibility’ that the soul is immaterial, a possibility that can

be evinced from 2. 23, to the ‘great probability’ that it is so. But Locke does not

13

really explain the slip. Why then the probability should be great? In the passage

from the first letter, Locke has simply referred his reader to Essay 4. 10.16,

where he had proved that a mere configuration of material particle cannot think,

for, as he wrote there, ‘unthinking Particles of matter, however put together, can

have nothing thereby added to them but a new relation of position, which ’tis

impossible should give thought and knowledge to them’. The argument has

occurred in the wake of Locke’s complex demonstration of God’s immateriality.

The basis of the demonstration is the fact, given as undeniable, that at least some

parts of matter are ‘incogitative’. Thus thinking cannot be a property necessarily

and originally attached to matter as such—‘a property eternally inseparable from

Matter and every Particle of it’ (4. 10. 10). In consequence whoever wants to

consider God as a material substance, is forced to suppose that God’s thinking

has emerged spontaneously out of some contingent configurations or movements

of material particles. God would be conceived here according to the ‘ordinary

conceit [men] have of themselves’ as ‘some System of Matter duly put together’.

But, as Locke shows, an active operation such as thinking cannot arise from

mere static configurations. As for the movement, although Locke is not

positively excluding the possibility that matter put into movement, might acquire

some rudiment of thinking (or sensing),27

he is positive in asserting that

movement (blind impulse) ‘being unavoidably accidental and limited’, cannot

alone explain the attributes of intelligent thinking, and even less those of God

himself, an all-wise being, whose action must be regulated by reason and

wisdom.28

One should notice that the argument of 4. 10 for the immateriality of the

Intelligent Creator rests on the former demonstration of his existence and

eternity. It is because God has been shown to be the first architect, the necessary

and wise Cause of all things, that it is excluded that he could be made out of

incogitative matter. Thinking has to be attached eternally to the first thinking

being, otherwise God’s mind would have had to be derivative, accidental and

limited, unable to regulate itself, and as such ‘no better nor wiser than pure blind

matter’. I think that an important (but rather unnoticed) consequence of this

consideration is the fact that the argument for God’s immateriality does not fit,

even analogically, when applied to man. Thinking, Locke insists forcefully in

the Essay, is not a necessary attribute of the human thinking thing, but only its

contingent operation. Whereas God ‘never slumbers nor sleeps’, man is granted

with thinking only intermittently.29

His train of ideas may be interrupted at any

time by episodes of sound sleep, or simply stopped by death. Moreover, as

Locke suggests in various places, it is probable that man’s body plays an

important role in the vicissitudes and hazards of human thinking: memory rests

probably on the brain’s aptitude to conserve material traces; association of ideas

on cerebral effects due to the flow of animal spirits . . . As a result, one cannot

say that the demonstration of God’s immateriality reinforces in any measure the

belief that human souls are immaterial. As a matter of fact, one should note that

Locke is not saying anything of that sort anywhere in chapter 10. Of course the

arguments given in the paragraphs 16 and 17 make even clearer the fact that the

thinking matter conjecture requires a positive action of God as a necessary

ingredient. Intelligent thinking has to be added to matter, made contingent to it

through such action. It cannot rise spontaneously from any lump of matter left to

itself. But this is only indicative of the fact that Locke’s conjecture is not

standard materialism, it requires an intelligent God capable of qualifying his

creation in such or such manner. By no means, such consequence is making

more probable the immateriality of the human soul. The analogical argument,

suggested in the first letter, was based on the fact that both men and God appear

to possess an intelligent ‘spirit’, but the argument is rather weak in consideration

of the striking absence of analogy between the ontological implications of

eternity and necessity on the one hand, and those of finitude and contingency on

the other.

6. New arguments for the possibility of a material soul. The Second

Reply to Stillingfleet and its doxastic implications

Although Locke confessed ‘orthodox’ opinions on the question of the nature of

the soul to Stillingfleet, most of the discussion on the topic contained in the

replies is aimed at showing that what has been said in the Essay on the

possibility of thinking matter is still valid. Locke even takes delight in providing

his interlocutor with a complete set of new arguments30

showing that the

hypothesis is neither inconsistent, nor more inconceivable than its opposite, that

it does not contradict the Scriptures, or the common doxa, nor even the wisdom

of the Ancients. Of course, none of these new arguments is presented as a

ground for believing that the soul is material. Locke is offering them as mere

answers to different kinds of objections that Stillingfleet had levelled against

thinking matter. But it is striking that these arguments, based on analogical

reasoning and (biblical) testimony, are of the very same kind as those that

judgment (or reasoned faith) is making use of for determining assent when

knowledge is not to be had. One should add that some of these arguments are

also to be found in Locke’s manuscripts from the same period, written in a non-

polemical context, and for that reason, apt to indicate even more clearly the

14

direction Locke is taking in his own doxastic quest. With the knowledge we

have now of these manuscript sources, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that

the new arguments for the possibility of thinking matter, deployed on almost

fifty pages in the second reply, go far beyond a simple reassessment of the

‘epistemic’ argument of the Essay. They are also loaded with doxastic

implications, whose exact import I want here to assess.

The argument from analogy with living matter

The first kind of objection raised by the Bishop of Worcester concerns the mere

possibility of thinking matter. In Stillingfleet’s opinion, to say that a spirit is

made of matter or to say that matter can think is self-contradictory.

Isn’t it the case that the essential properties of matter forbid the attribution to it

of a thinking power? Would not such attribution, unless a miracle, destroy the

said essential properties? To answer this objection, which, as he notes, has a

Cartesian odor,31

Locke, interestingly enough, does not enter the field of deep

ontology, asking questions such as: what makes a property essential or

accidental? How does a substance relate to its attributes and modes?32

No, he is

content with a quite simple and disarming analogical argument, showing that the

very same ontological possibility over which his adversary pretends to take

issue, has already been acknowledged by him in many similar cases. Roughly

stated, the argument goes as follows: some parts of the created matter are

endowed with an activity that other parts do not have. Some parts are in

movement, while others are at rest. Some of the moving parts are living and

possessed with vegetative activity, while others are mineral or dead. Some of the

living parts are capable of sensation and spontaneous motion, while others are

not. It is agreed that these specifications of the created material world do not

affect the essential properties of matter (whatever these properties are). So, the

argument goes, why should these essential properties be affected if God, going

one step farther, had decided to give, or superadd to some of the living, animal,

parts of matter ‘thought, reason and volition as well as sense and spontaneous

motion’?33

The argument has an undeniable strength. It is implicitly grounded on both a

principle of analogy and a principle of continuity. There is a kind of gradation in

natural activities, which can all be placed on a hierarchical or continuous scale

going from brute passive motion to rational thought (the most sophisticated

amongst natural activities), and passing through each stage of chemical

reactions, vegetation, spontaneous movement, sensation . . . Dealing with such

natural scales, it seems legitimate to suppose that the differences between each

step are differences of degree rather than differences of nature. If we are to

accept that matter can naturally move, grow, sense and react, without being able

to explain how these operations are related to the essential properties of matter,

it seems legitimate to consider that matter can think as well, since we have no

positive reason to consider that the last step in the scale entails an ontological

jump, while it is acknowledged that the others do not.

The strength of the argument however is balanced with the fact that it is partly

ad hominem. It presupposes that Stillingfleet will spontaneously share Locke’s

repugnancy towards a pure Cartesian view of the living bodies. Plants and

animals are material beings but they are not mere machines; they are endowed

with powers that transgress the bounds of mechanism. However material, the

bestial soul is capable of doing things that we are not able to deduce from the

ideas we have of a material being. Beasts have sense, and, some of them,

although they cannot reason, ‘have several Ideas distinct’.34

This view of

animals, however problematic, has to be put in balance with the two other

possible alternatives. The Cartesian one is utterly implausible, contradicted by

the common experience of animal behaviour and physiological processes. As for

the view that animals (and plants) have immaterial souls, it seems to be an

equally harsh doctrine, contradicted by Stillingfleet’s own religious premises, as

Locke maliciously remarks:

But here I take liberty to observe, that if your lordship allows brutes to

have sensation, it will follow, either that God can and doth give to some

parcels of matter a power of perception and thinking; or that all animals

have immaterial, and consequently, according to your lordship

immortal souls, as well as men, and to say that fleas and mites have

immortal souls as well as men, will possibly be looked on as going a

great way to serve an hypothesis . . . (Second Reply, p. 466)

The suggestion here is quite clear: as far as animal faculties are concerned, the

odds of probability are clearly on the side of ‘sensing matter’, or even (if

‘thinking’ is to be equated with the simple fact of having distinct ideas)

‘thinking matter’.

Thinking no more conceivable in immaterial substances

Another argument raised by the Bishop against thinking matter goes this way:

thinking matter should be excluded from the realm of nature because it is utterly

inconceivable how matter could think. As we saw, Locke had anticipated such

15

objection in the Essay. His answer had to do with his general conceptions of the

limits of human reason: what is conceivable to men is no measure of God’s

powers. As for the question of the nature of the soul, the two contradictory

hypotheses both contain incomprehensible elements, so that we can be sure that

there is actually something in the nature of the thinking thing, whatever the truth

about this nature be, that goes beyond reason.

Locke, in answering Stillingfleet, keeps the same line of argument, based on

epistemic humility (‘we are but of yesterday, and know nothing’, p. 464). But he

adds a new and important example, not hinted at in the Essay; and, above all, he

adopts a new way of presenting the equal inconceivability of the two opposite

theses.

The fact that God can, and does actually give properties to matter that we

cannot conceive how matter could possibly have is visible in the phenomenon of

attraction:

If God can give no power to any parts of matter, but what men

can account for from the essence of matter in general; if all such

qualities and properties must destroy the essence or change the

essential properties of matter, which are to our conception above it, and

we cannot conceive to be the natural consequence of that essence: it is

plain that the essence of matter is destroyed, and its essential properties

changed in most of the sensible parts of this our system. For it is

visible, that all the planets have revolution about certain remote centres,

which I would have anyone explain, or make conceivable by the bare

essence or natural powers depending on the essence of matter in

general without something added to that essence, which we cannot

conceive. (Second Reply, p. 461)

Unlike the properties already mentioned in the former discussion, such as

vegetation, spontaneous movement or sensation, attraction has to be attached to

matter as such, and not only to certain systems of matter, fitly organized. As

Newton showed in the Principia, there is a massive inductive evidence that

attraction is the result of a universal law affecting all matter whatsoever. But as

Newton himself recognized, the power to exert a centripetal force is not to be

reckoned among the ‘essential’ properties of matter, or as Locke says on the

similar topic of cohesion, it has no ‘natural or visibly necessary connexion with

solidity and extension’ (p. 464). So, the reason why all extended and solid

beings attract matter according to a certain law is unfathomable; attraction, for

us, is only contingently attached to matter—something that Locke translates in

saying that the ascription of such property to matter has to be considered as the

result of God’s good pleasure.

One should note that the argument from attraction is not exactly on the same

footing as the analogical arguments from movement, vegetation or sensation.

What is at stake here is not any more particular material substances, configured

in such or such manner, unknown to us, and receiving, on account of such

configurations or internal constitutions, new properties or activities, whose

relation to the essential properties of matter is unknown to us; but rather the

issue is about material substance as such, the extended and solid stuff in general.

Extension and solidity define the essence of matter for us, because their ideas are

given in any external thing affecting our senses, because we can abstract these

ideas and apply them to beings too small to affect our senses, and lastly because

there are some good grounds to think that the other sensible ideas we have of the

external things can be causally explained by the mere extension and solidity of

these smallest parts of matter. Still, and this is what the example of attraction (or

cohesion) is meant to show, this ‘essential’ concept of matter circumscribes but

a nominal essence. These attributes are not the only ones to be considered as

proper to matter as matter, nor necessarily the best to explain its properties. If

we have elicited them as essential properties, it is not on account of a per se

privilege, but only because such attributes are the ones that make matter

conspicuous to us, on account of our particular sensory equipment. As for the

real essence of the material substance, from which all properties and powers of

matter whatsoever could be deduced, it is, as any other real essence in Locke,

inscrutable.

The inscrutability of created substances becomes a major pattern of Locke’s

argument in the discussion that follows the example of attraction. Here, Locke

asks Stillingfleet to consider a thought experiment:

God has created a substance: let it be, for example, a solid extended

substance: is God bound to give it, besides being, a power of action?

That I think, nobody will say. He therefore may leave it in a state of

inactivity, and it will be nevertheless a substance; for action is not

necessary for the being of any substance, that God does create. God has

likewise created and made to exist, de novo, an immaterial substance,

which will not lose its being of a substance, though God should bestow

on it nothing more but this bare being, without giving it any activity at

all. Here are now two distinct substances, the one material, the other

16

immaterial, both in a state of perfect inactivity. Now I ask, what power

God can give to one of these substances (supposing them to retain the

same distinct natures, that they had as substances in their state of

inactivity) which he cannot give to the other? (Second Reply, p. 464)

The answer is of course that such discrimination is impossible for us, simply

because we do not know what will make an inactive substance, material or

immaterial, except the activities that may be, by God’s will, superadded to it.

We do not know how a solid substance would move itself or think, but we do

not know either how an immaterial substance does it. The lame escape, which

consists in saying that ‘there may be something in immaterial substances that

you do not know’ is answered straight away: ‘I grant it, and in a material too, for

example, gravitation of matter towards matter, and in the several proportions

observable, inevitably show that there is something in matter that we do not

understand’ (pp. 464–5). So the discrimination cannot be made on that ground:

inscrutability is not a privilege that becomes ‘un-solid’ substances and only

them, it is a general feature of created substances. This in turns allows Locke to

present his argument for the equal inconceivability in a new form, giving it a

sort of symmetry, which was not to be found in the Essay:

Both these substances may be made, and exist without thought; neither

of them has, or can have the power of thinking from itself: God may

give it to either of them, according to the good pleasure of his

omnipotency; and in which ever of them it is, it is equally beyond our

capacity to conceive, how either of those substances thinks. (p. 465)

Thus, we do not understand how a material substance thinks, but we do not

understand how an immaterial one does either. The inconceivability argument is

now strictly symmetrical. It was not exactly so in the Essay. There, Locke did

not say that we do not understand how a thinking immaterial substance thinks

(and somehow, he left open the presupposition that we do have such an

understanding). He rather said that, while we do not understand how matter can

think, we have trouble in understanding how an immaterial substance can exist

in space, and how it can interact with bodies in perception and voluntary motion.

These two arguments are in fact among the strongest that can be used against

substance dualism. How, indeed, could an immaterial soul exist without being

anywhere? And if we acknowledge that such a soul is ‘somewhere’ (ubi rather

than in loco35

) how can we plausibly account for the fact that it is somehow

attached to the body in which it thinks, and transported by it, without giving it

some solidity and extension? Furthermore, how are we to explain the fact that

this immaterial soul, being un-extended and un-solid can act on and be acted on

by extended solid substances, without renouncing any plausible account of

causality and laying down our arms before occasionalists?

Of course, these arguments should not be overstated: being grounded on our

inability to understand what actually is experienced in mind-body interaction,

they may reveal nothing more than our epistemic limitations. But it is

nevertheless interesting to note that these classical arguments against an

immaterial soul do not have any correspondent on the opposite side of the

conflict. Material souls, as a matter of fact, are much better candidates than

immaterial ones, when one is looking for a plausible picture of the mind-body

interaction or the spatio-temporal trajectory of the thinking thing. So what we

have at the end is somehow that the points made in the Essay against the

immaterial soul have gained some new doxastic strength. Once the true

symmetry of the first argument is restored, based on the fact that thinking

appears to us completely unrelated to the solid or non-solid nature of the thing

that thinks, it becomes clearer that the other arguments against immateriality

have no symmetrical counterparts. As far as the doxastic weighing of evidence is

concerned, this slight readjustment may have considerable import.

Immateriality not a point of faith

Theological motives were prominent in Stillingfleet’s attack against thinking

matter. To him the immortality of the soul is philosophically grounded on its

immateriality, because only immateriality can prevent the soul from being

destroyed in the dissolution of body following death. Thus, to say that the

human soul might be material results in ‘lessening the credibility’ of this

important article of faith.

To begin with, Locke contests the objection on methodological grounds: a

revelation, once its divine origin is established, is not rendered less credible for

lack of rational grounds of credibility. Admission of the contrary would be

rather a strange move on the part of someone who, like Stillingfleet, defends the

‘mystery’ of Christianity against the Socinian threat. As we have good reason to

think that it is indeed God’s words that are revealed in the promises of the

Gospel, and that we understand them, faith in immortality is required from us,

and it would be so, even though we had rational grounds to think that the

immortality of the soul is, as such, highly improbable.36

This methodological

stance has an important consequence for the way Locke’s theological arguments

are to be understood here. Locke is not interested in proving that immortality is

17

more or less credible on account of such or such philosophical hypotheses on the

nature of the soul. His point of departure, rather, is the unshakable faith we have

in the immortality of the soul. What may be of interest however is how this point

of faith is to affect the ideas we have of the nature of the human soul, or how it

might weigh on our opinions on that topic.

The remaining argument intertwines two considerations. One is linguistic and

historical: it may be shown that the Scriptures do not talk of the immateriality of

the soul, and, a fortiori, do not ask us to believe it. This requires a special

attention to the sense of the words (Hebrew and Greek) used in the Bible to

designate soul, body and spirit. The second argument is concerned with

conceptual analysis. Here Locke develops on what he has already alluded to in

the Essay: what is said in the Scriptures concerning death, immortality and

resurrection can be well understood, whether the soul is a material or an

immaterial being: ‘all the great ends of morality and religion are well enough

secured, without philosophical proofs of the soul’s immateriality’ (4. 3. 6).

Although both kinds of considerations appear in the reply to Stillingfleet, they

are less developed here than in a few other private texts, extracts from journals

or notebooks. These texts show that Locke’s personal reflection on the topic was

a long-standing one, it began at least eight years before the publication of the

Essay, and was revivified a few years before the controversy with Stillingfleet

started, at a time when Locke delved more and more into theological topics.

The earlier manuscript, a note from Locke’s journal dated from April 1682,37

is a discussion of the usual proof of the immortality of the soul, from

immateriality. Locke perceives in that pretended proof the source of the

contemporary dilemma on the bestial soul (a dilemma we already met in

considering Locke’s analogical argument for thinking matter):

The usual physical proof (if I may so call it) of the immortality of the

soul is this: matter cannot think, ergo, the soul is immaterial; nothing

can really destroy an immaterial thing, ergo, the soul is really immortal.

Those who oppose these men, press them very hard with the souls of

beasts for, say they, beasts feel and think, and therefore their souls are

immaterial, and consequently immortal. This has by some men been

judged so urgent, that they have rather thought fit to conclude all beasts

perfect machines, rather than allow their souls immortality or

annihilation. Both which seem harsh doctrines; the one being out of the

reach of nature, and so cannot be received as the natural state of beasts

after this life; the other equalling them, in a great measure, to the state

of man, if they shall be immortal as well as he.

To Locke, however, such a dilemma comes from a mistaken notion of

immortality:

But methinks, if I may be permitted to say so, neither of these speak to

the point in question, and perfectly mistake immortality; whereby is not

meant a state of bare substantial existence and duration, but a state of

sensibility. ( . . . ) Since, then, experience of what we find daily in

sleep, and very frequently in swooning and apoplexy, etc., puts it past

doubt that the soul may subsist in a state of insensibility, without

partaking in the least degree of happiness, misery or any perception

whatsoever (and whether death, which the scripture calls sleep, may not

put the souls of some men at least into such a condition, I leave those

who have well considered the story of Lazarus to conjecture), to

establish the existence of the soul will not prove its being in a state of

happiness and misery, since it is evident that perception is no more

necessary to its being than motion is to the being of body. Let,

therefore, spirit be in its own nature as durable as matter, so that no

power can destroy it, but that omnipotence that at first created it, they

may both lie dead and inactive, the one without thought, the other

without motion, a minute, an hour and to eternity, which wholly

depends upon the will and good pleasure of the first Author. And he

that will not live conformable to such a future state, out of the

undoubted certainty that God can—and the strong probability,

amounting almost to certainty, that he will—put the souls of men into a

state of life or perception after the dissolution of their bodies, will

hardly be brought to do it upon the force of positions which are, by

their own experience, daily contradicted, and will at best, if admitted

for true, make the souls of beasts immortal as well as theirs.

Immortality as a condition for future retribution, cannot be the mere indefinite

duration of an inactive substance (‘bare substantial duration and existence’). The

mere fact that an immaterial soul is not destroyed in the dissolution of body is no

proof of its immortality in the proper sense. Immortality has to be a continuation

of a state of consciousness or sensibility, that is to say an activity whose

persistence conditions are pretty much wholly in the hand of God, and therefore,

presumably independent of the substantial nature of the thinking thing.38

One striking feature of this remarkable text for whoever has read Locke’s

Second Reply to Stillingfleet, is how much of Locke’s future arguments for

thinking matter is contained and condensed in it. We actually find here the full

18

network: the bestial souls and what can plausibly be said about them; God’s

power in giving new activities to inert substances, material or immaterial, but

equally indifferent to them; immortality as logically independent from

immateriality. This might be an indication of the source of Locke’s interest for

the thinking matter conjecture: his awareness of how much muddle and

confusion has been thrown in philosophical arguments, since the Cartesian

dictum ‘matter cannot think’ has come to pass for intangible dogma.

Another interesting text, written in 1694 or shortly after, belongs to a

notebook untitled Adversaria theological 94. Here, on two separate pages,

Locke has listed several arguments for and against the materiality of the human

soul. The pages are headed respectively Anima humana immaterialis, anima

humana materialis. The arguments listed are either borrowed from various

authors or given as personal arguments (in that case, Locke signs with his

initials, J.L.). According to the recent editor of Locke’s writings on religion, the

term ‘adversaria’, meaning a notebook or account book, is used by Locke to

designate the results of his own practice of ‘commonplacing’, the arranging of

extracts or personal opinions under general headings.39

The importance Locke

attached to commonplacing is attested in the fact that he wrote and published in

French a small work on his own method for ordering topics in a notebook. As a

matter of fact, commonplacing is the very method of doxastic enquiry allowing

an overview of a full set of arguments, each of which might have been

encountered or thought of in a different place and time. Under the heading of a

commonplace book, the mind can scan the whole set and truly assess its doxastic

weight.

Of the two pages dealing with the nature of the human soul, the one

concerned with ‘immateriality’ is by far the longest. Locke quotes various

biblical passages where the corruptible body is clearly distinguished from the

spirit ‘that shall return unto God who gave it’ (Eccl. XII. 7). He writes down an

excerpt from the Remonstrant theologian Episcopius, according to which ‘if the

soul is a compound body that perishes completely when the body is dissolved,

then it is impossible that it should be raised after death as a same numerical

man.’40

Then he develops considerations of his own.

One point is a brief reminder of the argument of chapter 10 of book 4 (‘we

cannot conceive one material atom to think nor any system of Atoms or particles

to Think.’ The second and last is a thorough examination of the use made by the

Apostles of such terms as psukhé, soma psukhikon and soma pneumatikon:

Psukhé in many places of the New Testament signifies only the animal

life & thought in this present world without reference to any material or

immaterial being or substance wherein it resides. So Math. II. 20 VI.

25. XX. 28 Mar X. 45. Luc XIV. 26. Jean X. 11.

XII. 25. Act XXVII. 10. 22. Rom 11. 3. XVI. 4. 1 Cor XV. 44. 45. . .

Here the Apostle tells us of a spiritual body & an animal body, by

which it appears that matter is capable of animality & spirituality

wherein then lies the difference between body soul & spirit? And

maybe considered in three states 1st simply Body is insensible matter.

Sôma psukhikón that state of a thinkeing being in this life which

depending on nourishment & the assistance & supply of new matter is

corruptible. Spirit sôma pneumatikón such a state of a sensible

thinkeing being or body as has life & vigor durable in it self without

need of any supplie from without & soe not liable to corruption. This

the context in this XV Cor seems plainly to make out for speakeing of

the different state of a man before & after the ressurection he say the

one is a body animal corruptible & mortal the other is a body spiritual

incorruptible & immortal as appears to any one who diligently

considers what is said from vs 40 to vs 55. For the Apostle makes noe

distinction here of soule and body material & immaterial as if one died

& the other continued liveing the one was raised & the other not but he

speaks of the whole man as dying & the whole man as raised & this

was is he before the resurrection? . . . So That immortality is not at all

oweing or built on immateriality as in its own nature incorruptible. The

Apostle knew not that argument which is soe much insisted on but

quite the contrary and says this corruptible must be changed & puts on

incorruption & this mortal put on immortality . . .41

As it appears, the results of this scriptural exegesis, not only do not provide

arguments in favor of the immateriality of the psukhé, but, quite the contrary,

they tend to show that the Apostles conceived of the redeemed soul itself as

some special kind of body, made incorruptible by a divine operation. As a

consequence, the aforementioned arguments drawn from the quotations from the

Bible and the passage from Episcopius are simply nullified. The truth is that the

exegetical note would fit better on the other page, together with arguments for

materiality, as Locke himself comes to acknowledge, precisely on this other

page. Here he mentions a couple of passages from the Old Testament, stating

that ‘the live of the flesh is in the bloud’, and finally adds the following

statements:

1. We can conceive noe movable substance without extension, for

19

what is not extended is no where. i e is not JL From this & the

opposite we must conclude there is something in the nature of

Spirits or thinking beings which we cannot conceive JL

2. Vid. the other page.42

Point one is a reminder of the argument, already hinted at in the Essay, which

links existence and spatiality: anything that is has to be somewhere at some

time: ‘when and where are questions belonging to all finite existences’.43

Point 2,

is certainly pointing towards the scriptural argument given on the preceding

page, manifesting the fact that it is actually much more in favor of material

souls.

As far as doxastic weight is concerned, the scriptural arguments are crucial. If

it could be proved that God had revealed the soul’s immateriality together with

its immortality, this would be enough evidence to firmly believe the soul

immaterial, even though we had good reasons to think the contrary more

probable on pure rational grounds.44

But, Locke’s thorough researches have

proved nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it seems that the prophets and the

Apostles had always referred to the soul in a language that rather betrays a belief

in a material soul. Of course, philosophy can always deal with the seemingly un-

philosophical style of the Bible, by using the argument of ‘accommodation’.

Scriptures would be written ad captum vulgi, so that ordinary men, whose spirit

is stuck into matter, would understand it. Such an approach however is not the

one Locke is recommending to whoever wants to really understand the

Scriptures. His point is rather that we should try to understand the terms of the

Bible, as the inspired authors themselves understood them, and this because their

expressions were conformed to the ideas they had received from revelation. As

Locke says in the preface to the Paraphrase and notes of the Epistles of St. Paul:

. . . he that would understand Saint Paul right must understand his terms

in the sense he uses them and not as they are appropriated by each

man’s particular philosophy to conceptions that never entered the mind

of the apostle. For example he that shall bring the philosophy now

taught and received to the explaining of Spirit soul and body mentioned

in I Thess. 5b 23 will I fear hardly reach Saint Paul’s sense, or represent

to himself the notions Saint Paul then had in his mind.

On consideration of Locke’s patient researches on the scriptural meaning of

‘spirit, soul and body’, one is apt to think that the immaterial soul, or at least the

Cartesian immaterial soul, is indeed one of those ‘conceptions that never entered

the mind of the Apostle’.

7. Weighing up the probability

The first conclusion I would like to draw from the preceding analysis concerns

the pretended ‘high probability’ of the soul’s immateriality. Its assertion may

well help Locke to maintain a certain facade of orthodoxy, especially at a time

when he has to protect himself (and his philosophical freedom of inquiry) from

attacks built on gross misrepresentations; but in the end the assertion turns out to

be insufficiently grounded. The demonstrative knowledge we have of God’s

immateriality certainly makes ‘conceivable’ the immateriality of the human

soul, but it does not make it ‘highly probable’. The analogical argument that can

be drawn from the fact that both God’s and human minds partake of the nature

of spirit has to be put in balance with three other arguments, whose added

doxastic strength is quite impressive.

First, the analogy of ‘active’ matter (moving, vegetative, or sensitive) makes a

strong case for the probability of thinking matter. As it is well known, a

characteristic aspect of Lockean ontology in the Essay was to blur, or rule out as

purely artificial, the limits traced between alleged real species, such as man and

beast.45

This makes all the more probable the analogical reasoning proceeding

from the consideration of men’s affinities to beasts. As Locke himself said,

analogies, based on the consideration that there exists in the created world ‘a

gradual connexion’ of things one to another, give us a ‘sort of probability, which

is the best conduct of rational Experiments, and the rise of Hypothesis.’ (Essay

4. 16. 12).

Secondly, there is the argument that proceeds from the fact that we cannot

conceive how an un-extended and un-solid substance could be situated in space,

act on and suffer from extended and solid substances. As I understand it, the

doxastic strength of the argument comes from the fact that we need a

comprehensive theory of being and we want the soul to conform to the general

requisites that make existence and identity of any finite being whatsoever

intelligible to us. If the soul is something, it must be somewhere, occupying

some space, and be provided with a trajectory, whose singleness and incom-

municability to other beings of the same kind define its identity through time. If

the soul is able to act on bodies and be acted on by them, it has to be at their

contact, offering some resistance to them, according to a ‘presentist’ postulation,

which in seventeenth century governs almost all conceptions of causality. It is

difficult to understand how an immaterial being could answer such requisites.

20

Even God’s immateriality, as Locke construes it, preserves at least some of the

demands: God is not out of space, supramundaneus, but he is actually present

everywhere in space, and in that sense it can be said that he is extended,

although most certainly un-solid.46

Lastly, there is the argument from the Scripture which, as we have said, bears

on the presumption that the inspired author knew what they were talking of,

when they considered the nature and destination of the soul; and that the

distinction they made between body, soul and spirit did not rest on a distinction

of substance such as the one that exists between material and immaterial beings,

a distinction that was foreign to them.

So what we have in the end are three grounds of probability, all three well

attested in Locke’s writings, and each independent one from the other. It is

possible that none could alone suffice to raise the hypothesis of the material soul

above the threshold of probability, or to overbalance the counterargument taken

from the nature of God’s spirit; taken together, however, they form an

impressive body of evidence, which leaves almost no room for doubt concerning

the opinion that Locke, in conscience and after patient inquiry, had come to form

for himself.47

Notes

1 The present study is an anglicized and much revised version of my paper ‘L’opinion

de Locke sur la “matière pensante”’, published in Methodos, n°4, 2004. I wish to

thank several people for their encouragements and advice: Laurent Jaffro who gave

me the opportunity to present my ideas on Locke in his seminar on British Philosophy

held at the Sorbonne in 2002–2004, Laura Berchielli, Bernard Joly, Thomas Lennon

and Jean-Michel Vienne who made precious comments on the French paper; Peter

Anstey who solicited a translation for this volume and helped me to improve my text

in various ways. All references to An Essay concerning Human Understanding are to

the P. H. Nidditch edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

2 This account is standard in the sense that it has been endorsed or tacitly accepted by a

number of leading Locke scholars. It appears (in various forms) in recent

commentators such as John Yolton, John Marshall, Peter Alexander and, to a certain

extent, Michael Ayers. All insist on a deflationary approach to the conjecture. Yolton

argues that the concept of soul ‘was just not one that Locke needed in his analysis of

the topics in his Essay’ (A Locke Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, pp. 270–1); in

his recent Locke’s Two Intellectual Worlds, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004),

he strongly criticizes the commentators who have tried to recruit Locke on the side of

materialism. Also revealing is the fact that Yolton, who has written two important

books on the posterity of the ‘thinking matter’ conjecture in 18th

century, has very

little to say in these books concerning Locke himself and his reasons for meddling

with the scabrous conjecture (cf. Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-century

England, Oxford: Blackwell, 1984 and Locke and French Materialism, Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1991). M. Ayers first introduced the idea that the conjecture is

limited in scope, and suggests only an epistemic possibility. Although he recognized

Locke’s dualist leaning, his statements on the issue of Locke’s opinions are rather

balanced. In his Locke, he went so far as to say that Locke’s concession (in the

Stillingfleet letters) that immateriality of the human soul is highly probable might be a

way of ‘sugaring the pill of his agnosticism’ (see Locke, Epistemology and Ontology,

2 vols, London: Routledge, 1991, vol. 2, p. 46). See also, Peter Alexander: ‘Locke on

Substance-in-General’, Ratio, 22, 1980, 23 (1981); John Marshall, John Locke:

Resistance, Religion and Responsibility, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1994, esp. p. 349.

3 An apt characterization of this view has been given by John Marshall: ‘Locke’s point

was not that the soul was definitely material, nor even that it was clearly possible that

the soul was material. It was that men could not know from their ideas that thinking

substances and therefore the soul was definitely immaterial. Locke’s attitude has been

accurately characterized by Michael Ayers as the view that things which were not

observed to happen, but which could not be known to be actually impossible because

of what we did know, were to be regarded as within God’s power’ (‘Locke,

Socinianism, ‘Socinianism’, and Unitarianism’, English Philosophy in the Age of

Locke, ed. M. A. Stewart, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 158–159). For

the reference to M. Ayers, see Ayers’ Locke, vol. 2, p. 150.

4 As an example, see J. W. Yolton: ‘it is in this chapter that Locke conclusively shows

that he did not accept the notion that matter can think, a notion which he had briefly

entertained earlier in that work’ (A Locke Dictionary, article ‘Matter’,

p. 134).

5 M. Ayers, ‘The Ideas of power and substance in Locke’s philosophy’ Philosophical

Quarterly, 25, n°98, 1975, reprinted in Locke on Human Understanding, ed. I. C.

Tipton, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 91.

6 See Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, ed. J. Brunschwig, Paris: Garnier

Flammarion, 1969, préface, p. 49: ‘Cette distinction entre ce qui est naturel et

explicable et ce qui est inexplicable et miraculeux lève toutes les difficultés: et en la

rejetant, on soutiendrait quelque chose de pis que les qualités occultes et on renoncerait

en cela à la philosophie et à la raison, en ouvrant des asiles à l’ignorance et à la

paresse, par un système sourd qui admet non seulement qu’il y a des qualités que nous

n’entendons pas, dont il n’y en a que trop, mais aussi qu’il y en a que le plus grand

esprit, si Dieu lui donnait toute l’ouverture possible, ne pourrait pas comprendre, c’est-

à-dire qui seraient ou miraculeuses ou sans rime et sans raison; et cela même serait

sans rime et sans raison que Dieu fît des miracles ordinairement, de sorte que cette

hypothèse fainéante détruirait également notre philosophie, qui cherche des raisons, et

la divine sagesse, qui les fournit’.

7 ‘Superadded Properties: the Limits of Mechanism in Locke’, American Philosophical

Quarterly, 16 (2), 1979, pp. 143–150.

8 See in particular Michael R. Ayers: ‘Mechanism, superaddition and the proof of God’s

existence in Locke’s Essay’, Philosophical Review, 40 (2), 1981; Edwin McCann,

21

‘Lockean Mechanism’ in Philosophy, its History and Historiography, ed. A. J.

Holland, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985, pp. 209–231; Matthew Stuart: ‘Locke on

superaddition and mechanism’ British Journal of Philosophy, 6 (3), 1998, pp. 351–

379. Interesting considerations are also provided in Thomas M. Lennon’s The Battle of

the Gods and Giants, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, esp. pp. 320–333.

9 See M. R. Ayers, Locke, 2, pp. 180–2; Mathew Stuart, ‘Locke on superaddition and

mechanism’, pp. 362–3. The commentator who perhaps went the farthest in contesting

the standard account is Nicholas Jolley in his recent short book on Locke. Although

conceding that Locke had some residual sympathy for Descartes’s dualism, he argues

that ‘nowhere in the Essay is Locke unequivocally committed to the truth of substantial

dualism about the created world’ (cf. Jolley, Locke: His Philosophical Thought, New

York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 81). I think that he is right and part of this

paper will be devoted to substantiate this claim.

10 As Locke defines it in Essay 4. 2. 1, knowledge is ‘the perception the Mind has of the

Agreement, or Disagreement of any of its Ideas’. In other words, it is an awareness

act, through which different facts concerning our ideas are made available to us,

either directly, in intuitive or sensitive knowledge, or indirectly, in demonstrative

knowledge. The ‘perception’ through which knowledge is gained shows the relations

between ideas as proceeding from the ideas themselves, and, for that reason,

knowledge and only knowledge has a claim to certainty. On the other hand, belief,

opinion or judgment, are various names for a quite different faculty, which never

leads to certainty but only to probability. Judgment states that such or such ideas

agree or disagree, but here the agreement relation itself is not perceived but only

presumed on the basis of extrinsic grounds. ‘That which makes me believe is

something extraneous to the thing I believe’ (4. 15. 3). Such grounds are either ‘the

testimony of others’ or the ‘conformity with our own knowledge, observation and

experience’ (that is to say analogical reasoning). According to the number and value

of such grounds of belief, our assent is determined and the firmness of it

proportioned.

11 Cf. 1. 1. 5: ‘If we will disbelieve every thing because we cannot certainly know all

things; we shall do much-what as wisely as he, who would not use his Legs, but sit

still and perish, because he had no Wings to fly’.

12 Nicholas Wolterstorff had made this ‘alethic obligation’ (as he calls it) the cornerstone

of his remarkable study on Locke’s ‘ethics of belief’. As he convincingly argues,

Locke holds that there is an obligation to do his ‘epistemic best’ in believing, that is

to say to make one’s best to study important matters and get the better grounds of

probability about them, in order to give one’s assent to the propositions that are more

likely to be true. This obligation is, as Wolterstorff shows, situated: it might be that

the efforts needed to achieve one’s epistemic best on such or such proposition would

require neglecting other obligations, more important. In those cases, precedence must

be given to these other obligations. Nonetheless, many propositions are of such

concern to us that trying our best to believe right with respect to them is felt as an

almost unconditional imperative. Cf. N. Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of

Belief, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, esp. pp. 60–86. The practice of

doing one’s epistemic best is well characterized in this brief statement from the Essay

(4. 15.5) ‘the 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 ballancing 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’. The

importance of a thorough and balanced practice of ‘study’ was recognized by Locke

very early. There are lengthy notes on the topic in his early journals and notebooks.

13 Cf. Essay 4. 16. 4, ‘The necessity of believing without Knowledge, nay, often upon

very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of Action and Blindness we are in, should

make us more busy and careful to inform our selves, than constrain others. At least

those, who have not throughly examined to the bottom all their own Tenets, must

confess, they are unfit to prescribe to others; and are unreasonable in imposing that as

Truth on other Men’s Belief, which they themselves have not searched into, nor

weighed the Arguments of Probability, on which they should receive or reject it.

Those who have fairly and truly examined, and are thereby got past doubt in all the

Doctrines they profess, and govern themselves by, would have a juster pretence to

require others to follow them: but these are so few in number, and find so little reason

to be magisterial in their Opinions, that nothing insolent and imperious is to be

expected from them: and there is reason to think, that, if Men were better instructed

themselves, they would be less imposing on others’.

14 These ambiguities are certainly the reason for which Locke, more often than other

authors, is criticized for incoherence and contradictions. Furthermore, they are the

source of major conflicts of interpretation—most famously on the question of the

nature of ideas.

15 Essay 2. 8. 22: ‘I have in what just goes before, been engaged in Physical Enquiries a

little farther than perhaps I intended. But, it being necessary to make the Nature of

Sensation a little understood . . .’

16 See, among other references: 1. 3. 2; 2. 1. 21; 2. 8. 4; 2. 10. 5; 2. 14. 9; 2. 23. 13; 2. 33.

6; 4. 10. 18.

17 The idea that Locke was a subtle practitioner of the ‘art of writing’, and that the Essay

hides an esoteric content that only a few readers can decipher, was already entertained

by some of the first opponents (such as William Carroll, who represented Locke as an

hidden Spinozist). It has gained new strength in the sixties through the work of Leo

Strauss and some of his disciples, especially on the interpretation of Locke’s political

philosophy. Such readings have raised a certain amount of suspicion (to say the least)

on the part of Locke’s classical scholars. Thus Hans Aarsleff wrote: ‘even if caution

were detected, it doesn’t follow that Locke’s discourse was designed to be an

elaborate tissue of deliberate ambiguities, hidden meaning and cabbalistical

obscurities’ (‘Some observations on recent Locke’s scholarship’ in John Locke,

Problems and Perspectives, ed. J. W. Yolton, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1969, p. 267). Although I cannot but agree with Aarsleff’s sound remark, my

own position on the question of Locke’s esotericism is the following: such

esotericism, if it exists, cannot possibly be about the results of the empirical research

on ideas and words. These results are elements of certain knowledge; if true, a

consensus can be easily gained about them, and this is why they can be publicized at

22

no risk. Esotericism can only serve the purpose of concealing private opinions or

beliefs, gained through doxastic enquiries. Locke has made clear that the very

structure of doxastic rationality makes difficult the transmission of opinions. One

should not expect to be understood or followed, as easily as with elements of certain

knowledge. This in turn may urge us to choose more subtle strategies of

communication, using some art in concealing or disclosing opinions which might

appear as odious to some people, as they are appealing to other. In that sense, Locke’s

esotericism would be quite different from the one Leo Strauss found in Maimonides

or Spinoza. Here, a false allegiance to (common) opinions was used to hide or plaster

the true edifice of science; in Locke, dissimulation is never about the objects of

science, these on the contrary are put on the forefront; dissimulation, when it exists,

can only be concerned with the private realm of personal beliefs. For another

approach of Locke’s esotericism, see the interesting conclusion of Thomas Lennon’s

The Battle of the Gods and Giants, pp. 368 sq.

18 The alternative is carefully phrased. Locke makes clear that the possibility concerns

only ‘systems of matter fitly disposed’, and not matter in general or any parcel of

matter whatsoever. Moreover, one can see that in the thinking matter hypothesis, as

well as in its immaterial counterpart, God’s fiat—however understood—is needed in

order to add (‘superadd’) to a system of matter fitly disposed either a power to think

or a thinking immaterial substance. So the hypothesis is not made on a metaphysical

tabula rasa. Locke’s metaphysics and especially the demonstration given later in

book IV that matter by itself and originally cannot be a thinking substance, is

implicitly required for its formulation. On account of that, one should avoid

characterizing the thinking matter conjecture as a materialist conjecture. It is much

closer to what D. M. Armstrong defines as an ‘attribute theory of mind’ (cf. A

Materialist Theory of the Mind, London, Routledge, 2nd

edn, 1993, pp. 11–12 and 37–

48). In this theory, man is only one material substance but he possesses, on top of

ordinary physical properties, non-physical properties (properties not shared by

ordinary physical objects), such as thinking. In dealing with this ‘attribute theory’,

Armstrong explicitly mentions the Lockean ascendancy, hinting incidentally at what I

have called the ‘standard account’: ‘Locke’s case is an interesting one. A Cartesian

dualist, . . . he says that although dualism is true in fact the attribute theory of mind is

a logically possible one’.

19 Cf. Willis, De Anima Brutorum, Oxford, 1672. I am here quoting the English review

of the book published in the Philosophical Transactions the same year, which

consists principally in a translation of Willis’s preface (cf. H. Isler, Thomas Willis

1621–1675 Doctor and Scientist, New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1968).

Willis considers that the bestial soul (‘whereby both brutes and men have life, sense

and local motion’) is corporeal, composed of the ‘flammeous’ parts of the blood and

the ‘aetheral substance of the animal spirits’; it is ‘coextended to the whole body’ and

has ‘not only many and distinct, but also somewhat dissimilar parts’. Although man is

also endowed with an immaterial soul, his perception and action on objects that do

not exceed the bounds of things material, is operated by this corporeal soul. Willis

adds the following argument, strongly evocative of Locke’s own statements on

thinking matter: ‘none is like to undertake to prove, that the omnipotent maker, and

first mover, and constant governor of all things should not be able to impress such

powers upon matter, as might be proper and sufficient to perform the functions of the

sensitive soul’. According to John Wright, Locke was exposed very soon to Willis’s

doctrines, taking extended notes on courses given extra curriculum at Oxford about

the year 1663. These courses were later incorporated into the De Anima Brutorum (cf.

J. P. Wright, ‘Locke, Willis, and the seventeenth-century Epicurean soul’, in Atoms,

Pneuma, and Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, ed.

Margaret Osler, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 239–258).

20 Here, as well as in many other places in the chapter, Locke, in the fourth edition of the

Essay (1700), has added the word ‘immaterial’ before the word ‘spirit’ (see the

editorial notes in Nidditch p. 314, and also pp. 305, 306, 307, 310, 313). This should

not be taken as the sign of a growing inclination towards the immateriality of the soul,

as some commentators have believed. As many other additions in the successive

editions of the Essay, these are meant as clarification of the original meaning. By the

end of his life, Locke was more and more conscious that the word ‘spirit’ is

ambiguous. His own researches on classical Latin authors and biblical texts had

convinced him that the classical use of the word is not tainted with the doctrine of

immateriality. Thus, Cicero or Virgil applied ‘spiritus’ to the soul considered as a

thinking being whose nature is not opposed to body, as an immaterial substance might

be opposed to matter, but opposed to it only as an inflamed air is opposed to the two

gross elements, earth and water. (see Mr Locke’s Reply to the Bishop of Worcester’s

answer to his second letter, The Works of John Locke, London, 1801, reprint Elibron

Classics, vol. IV pp. 483 sq.). As chapter 23 is concerned with the conceivability of

un-solid (or immaterial) substances, and not simply with the conceivability of

‘thinking things’, Locke has felt that the word ‘spirit’, left unqualified, was simply

improper to refer to such substances—hence the additions. For a slightly more

complex explanation of these addenda, see M. Ayers, Locke, II, p. 46.

21 Interestingly, the hypothetical context of the discussion has been reinforced in the

fourth edition (1700). In the first version of 1694, paragraph 23 has a sentence that

reads as follows: ‘Though the thinking substance in man must be necessarily

supposed immaterial, ’tis evident, that immaterial thinking thing may sometimes part

with its past consciousness’. In 1700 Locke had replaced ‘though’ by a non-committal

‘granting that.’ See Nidditch’s editorial note, Essay,

p. 344.

22 The material soul that is condemned here is ‘Epicurean’ in the sense that it is

conceived as a result of a fortuitous organization of atoms, capable of being destroyed

as casually and randomly as it as been formed. On the contrary, the material soul of 4.

3. 6 is strongly dependent on God’s action, for its formation as well as for its action

and its duration.

23 The Works of John Locke, London, 1801, reprint Elibron Classics, vol. IV, A letter to

the . . . Bishop of Worcester concerning some passages relating to Mr Locke’s Essay .

. . , in a late discourse of his Lordship’s in vindication of trinity, pp. 33, 37; Mr

Locke’s Reply to the Bishop of Worcester’s answer to his second letter, pp. 474, 482,

483. For convenience, I shall refer to this last reply as Locke’s ‘Second Reply’.

24 Cf. Letter to Limborch, 29 Oct 1697 (in French): ‘Il y a sept ans que ce livre a été

23

publié. La première et la seconde édition ont eu le bonheur d’être généralement bien

reçues: mais la dernière n’a pas eu le même avantage. Après un silence de cinq on six

années, on commence à découvrir je ne sais quelles fautes dont on ne s’était point

aperçu auparavant; et ce qu’il y a de singulier, on prétend trouver matière à des

controverses de religion dans cet ouvrage où je n’ai eu dessein de traiter que de

questions de pure spéculation philosophique’ The Correspondence of John Locke, ed.

E. S. de Beer, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–, 6, p. 243. Cf. ibid, p. 6, for a similar

complaint in a letter to Molyneux.

25 Thus, the defense adopted in the Stillingfleet controversy appears clearly as a strategic

retreat, a closing up of the Essay on its pure epistemic content. But, as I tried to show

in the first part of this paper, the true scope of the Essay is somewhat larger than what

the ‘plain, historical method’ is apt to offer. Whether Locke is willing to acknowledge

it or not, the book distils a number of opinions or beliefs that help the reader to

capture the general picture of the world and mankind the Essay as a whole is

conveying. In that sense, I would say that Stillingfleet and his ilk are right in principle

when they suggest that the Essay has an underground core, although they are often

grotesque in the interpretation they try to give of that core, crediting Locke with a

skeptical, atheistic or Spinozist agenda. To prevent such gross misinterpretations was

Locke’s first priority in the replies. There, he is not addressing the happy few or the

small number of friends and disciples disposed to understand his thoughts in their full

depth, but the general public, worried by the accusations that important persons have

leveled against the book.

26 Second Reply, pp. 466–7: ‘they who are so forward to bestow hard censures or names

on the opinions of those who differ from them, may consider whether sometimes they

are not more due to their own . . . For talking with a supposition and insinuations, that

truth and knowledge, nay, and religion too, stands and falls with their systems, is at

best but an imperious way of begging the question, and assuming to themselves,

under the pretence of zeal for the cause of God, a title to infallibility’.

27 This seems to be implied in the implicit concession contained in the following

conditional: ‘If it be the motion of its parts, on which its Thinking depends, all the

Thoughts there must be unavoidably accidental, and limited . . .’ (4. 10. 17).

28 Ibid. (following the preceding quote): ‘. . . since all the particles that by Motion cause

thought, being each of them in itself without any thought, cannot regulate its own

motions, much less be regulated by the thought of the whole; since that thought is not

the cause of motion, (for then it must be antecedent to it and so without it) but the

consequence of it, whereby freedom, power, choice and all rational and wise thinking

or acting will be quite taken away’.

29 See Essay 2. 1. 10 sq.

30 In a lengthy note of the French translation of the Essay, Pierre Coste had given a

useful summary of these later arguments, making them directly available to the

European readers of the Essay. See Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement

humain, 5th edn, 1755, reprint Paris: Vrin, 1989, pp. 440–447.

31 Cf. Second Reply, p. 468: ‘I know nobody, before Des Cartes, that ever pretended to

show that there was any contradiction in it [i.e: a material soul]’. Locke mentions the

father of the Christian church, who, as far as he has seen or heard, ‘never pretended to

demonstrate that matter was incapable to receive a power of sensation, perception and

thinking, from the hand of the omnipotent creator’.

32 Not that these questions are devoid of interest to him. Large parts of the Essay have

been devoted to issues involving them directly, such as the distinction between real

and nominal essence, or the ideas we have of particular substances and modes. Locke,

though, is not willing to bring in these difficult issues when dealing with Stillingfleet.

33 Second Reply, p. 460. As stated here, the argument may help to understand how the

term ‘superaddition’, of which Locke had made an enigmatic use in the Essay, should

be construed. The superaddition of thinking to some parts of matter is analogous to

the superaddition of movement to some other parts. The prefix ‘super’ means that

what is added is added to a being that has already received its complete set of

ontological characteristics, and might as well stay at rest, inactive. The activity can

occur or not, the material being will not be affected in what makes it a material being.

As Locke has argued in the Essay, thinking should not be understood as an essential

property of the thinking thing but only as its ordinary operation, whose occurrence is

almost certainly interrupted by periods of mental inactivity. So, whatever the

ontological nature of the substance thinking, thinking has to be superadded to it,

because it is an operation of the mind, rather than its essence. This, of course, leaves

open the question of how the essential properties of matter relate to these superadded

activities, or how much ‘voluntarism’ this talk of superaddition reveals on Locke’s

behalf. For two diverging answers, see Ayers ‘Superaddition, mechanism, and the

proof of God’s existence in Locke Essay’, and Stuart: ‘Locke on superaddition and

mechanism’ (cf. supra note 8). Ayers traces the term back to late scholastic logic

textbooks, where superadded properties means ‘adjuncts’, accidental properties

shared by all individuals in the species (such as the blackness of the crows). For

another plausible source, see Samuel Pufendorf, De Jure naturae et gentium, Lund,

1672, (I, 1, 3). The word ‘superadita’ is used there to characterize the moral entities

(such as the Ciceronian persona) which are imposed on physical ones by an

intelligent being: ‘these do not proceed from principles ingraffed in the Substance of

Things, but are added [superadita], at the Pleasure of Intelligent Creatures, to being

already perfect in a natural sense’ (English translation: Basil Kennet and William

Percivale, 1703), quoted in Kenneth A. Winkler, ‘Locke on personal identity’,

Journal of the History of Philosophy, 29 (2), 1991, pp. 201– 226, reprinted in Locke,

ed. Vere Chappell, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 162).

34 Essay 2. 11. 5. See also 2. 9. 12 and 2. 11. 7.

35 Vide Essay 2. 23. 21, where Locke evokes sarcastically this unintelligible

distinction. 36 Cf. pp. 474–5. And for the rationale of that, Essay 4. 18. 9. 37 Quoted

in Fox Bourne The Life of John Locke, vol. 2, New York: Harper, 1876,

chap. VIII, p. 464.

38 The argument foreshadows Locke’s chapter on personal identity, introduced in the

Essay in 1694, precisely at the time when Locke redirects his interests from purely

philosophical matters to theological ones.

39 Cf. Victor Nuovo’s Introduction to John Locke’s Writing on Religion, Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2002, p. xxix. 40 Simon Episcopius, Opera Theologica, 2nd

edn, London, 1678, I, p. 354 41 John Locke’s Writings on Religion, p. 29. In a later

24

manuscript note, entitled

‘Spirit, Soul and Body’ and written probably in preparation to the Paraphrase on the

Epistles of St. Paul, Locke carries on with similar considerations. There, he is even

more explicit on the bodily nature of the soul: ‘The apostles distinct notion between

Soule and spirit I take to be not any distinction of substance, as if some men were two

substances whereof the one was the soule the other the spirit, but different

constitutions of the same person . . .’ Body, in the language of the scriptures means

‘this visible grosse part of a man consisting of bones, flesh and blood’; soul is ‘the

fine spirituous part of the bloud which sustain the Systeme of animal spirits in which

consists the animal life.’ This soul, called ‘Sôma psukhikón’ or ‘animal body’ ‘is

derived from Adam and it is liable to decay and corruption and may entirely perish

and loose all life and sense for ever’. Then there is spirit, ‘an higher life or state of

being not depending on nourishment supplied by the products of this gross earth nor

derived to us from Adam, but which we receive soly from Christ who is the

quickening Spirit who give us this spirit of life . . .’ In a next folio Locke adds this

crucial remark: ‘that soul and spirit are not two distinct substances, I think I may

conclude for I suppose nobody will say that the spirit of a man is a distinct substances

from his soule or his soule a distinct substance from his spirit’. Cf. MS Locke c. 27,

fol. 131r and 134r, transcribed in John Locke A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles

of St. Paul, ed. W. Wainwright, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, vol. 2

appendix V, pp. 675 sq. An echo of these considerations is to be found in the

posthumously published Paraphrase, vol. 1, p. 254.

42 John Locke’s Writings on Religion, p. 30.

43 Essay 2. 15. 8

44 Cf. Essay 4. 16. 14.

45 ‘The difference is exceedingly great between some Men and some Animals: but if we

will compare the Understanding and Abilities of some Men, and some Brutes, we shall

find so little difference, that ’twill be hard to say, that that of the man is either clearer or

larger’ (4. 16. 12)

46 See Essay 2. 15. 2; 2. 23. 21.

47 I am purposely setting aside here the difficult issue of chronology. It is certainly the

case that Locke’s interest in the question of the nature of the soul had gained new

strength by the end of his life, in the course of his theological studies. But, as we saw,

doubts concerning the standard, Cartesian, immaterialist view of the soul, were

already expressed in manuscripts in 1682. More work is needed to clarify the progress

of Locke’s doxastic quest between the early notes aforementioned and the ones on

‘spirit, soul and body’, written probably after 1700. However, I do not think that a

dramatic change in Locke’s opinions occurred during that time. I am rather inclined

to think that the suspicion that the human soul might be material has grown together

with Locke’s interest in the question. In 1690, the suspicion is already there, but

Locke might have thought that the question of the nature of the soul was not quite as

urgent as others—although, the Essay is already making a strong case against the

Cartesian view of the soul. In the next years, the question is more and more present.

Between 1694 and 1700, Locke introduces new chapters to the Essay, and as a matter

of fact, they are all somehow related to the question of how much the mind is

dependent on matter for its thinking. This is obvious in the chapter on the association

of ideas (1700); and it is also the case in the chapter on enthusiasm (1700), which can

be described as criticizing a false pretense that some men have to a disembodied or

extra-sensorial access to God’s words. As for the chapter on identity (1694), we have

already seen how crucial it was for securing the thinking matter conjecture against

potentially destructive Cartesian arguments. Locke’s last years bear witness to an

almost obsessive interest in the question of the soul’s nature and destination.

Circumstances alone do not explain the massive presence of the topic in the replies to

Stillingfleet, the notes on Burnet’s Remarks on the Essay, or the notes addressed to

Samuel Bold to help him preparing a defense of the Essay: I do really think that

Locke at that time had elicited the topic as one of those that might be said of maximal

‘concernment’, and in respect to which doing one’s best to believe right has become

an almost imperative commitment. (For the marginalia on Burnet’s Remarks, see

Remarks on John Locke by Thomas Burnet with Locke’s Replies, ed. G. Watson,

Doncaster, 1989; the manuscripts notes on Samuel Bold’s draft of Some

Considerations (1698) are transcribed in ‘Testi teologico lockiani dal Ms Locke c27 .

. . a cura di Mario Sina’, Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica, 64, 1972).