Wood, N. - The Baconian character of Locke's ‘essay’

THE

IVEAL WOOD

BACONIAN CHARACTER OF LOCKE’S ‘ESSAY’*

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I N spite of his many excoriations of party and party orthodoxy, John Locke was a good party man. Not only was he a devoted Whig, but also a dedicated adherent to the Baconian ‘party’ of the ‘moderns’ in their bitter strife with the ‘ancients’, an intellectual controversy that began in England about the middle of the seventeenth century, and culminated in the ‘Battle of the Books’, involving Sir William Temple, William Wotton, Richard Bentley, and Jonathan Swift. Indeed, among other things, the Essay concerning Human Understanding is a Baconian work.’ Such a contention

* This essay is part of a larger study of the politics of Locke’s Essay that I hope in the future to publish as a book. The research and some of the writing were made possible by the award of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for 197 1-2 that enabled me to spend a year in England. I wish to thank Dr E. S. DeBeer for his hospitality and kindness in allowing me to use his tran- scripts of Locke’s correspondence and journals, and for commenting upon a previous version of this article. I have followed his dating and identification of the correspondence and journals cited below, although Locke’s spelling has generally been modernized. Moreover, I am indebted to his helping this to be a less erroneous and more balanced piece than the original version. Thanks also are due to the Bodleian Library, and to the helpfulness of its staff, for allowing me to examine the Lovelace Collection of the manuscripts of John Locke. Professor John W. Yolton, of York University, Toronto, has been most generous of his time in reading and criticizing a preliminary draft, but naturally any defects and shortcomings that still remain are my sole responsibility.

Abbreviations of frequently cited works used below are as follows: E: John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, J. W. Yolton (ed.), revised edition (London, New York, x965), 2 vols., the complete text of the fifth edition published in I 706. The volume and page number of this edition are indicated in parentheses following the standard citation. Z3L. MS. Locke: Bodleian Library Manuscripts, the Lovelace Collection of the Manuscripts of John Locke. W: The Works of John Locke, ninth edition (London, I 7g4), g ~01s. CU: Locke, Of the Conduct of the U&standing, in W, II. Draft A: Locke, An Early Draft of Lockef Essay Together with Excerpts from his Journals, R. I. Aaron and J. Gibb (eds.) (Oxford, I 986). Draft B: Locke, An Essay concerning the understanding, knourlcdge, opinion and assent, J. B. Rand (ed.) (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). MC, M. Cranston, John Lucke, A Biography (New York, 1957). AL: Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, G. W. Kitchin (ed.) (London, New York, 1965). The following writings of Bacon are from vol. IV of Bacon, Works, J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (eds.) (London, x888-Igor), 7 ~01s. .NO: .Novum Organum, Bk. I. GZ: ‘Proemium’, ‘ Preface’, ‘Plan of the Work’, The Great Instauration. DA: De Augmentis. P: Parasceve.

’ In nothing that follows do I mean that the Essay is solely a Baconian work, nor do I intend to get involved in the question of the relative importance of the elements of rationalism and empiricism in his philosophy. Obviously Locke’s philosophic thought drew upon sources other than Bacon and the Baconians, for example, Descartes and probably Gassendi. I do hope to

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 6 (1g75), no. I. Printed in Great Britain

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44 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

flies in the face of twentieth century scholarly opinion, although during the Enlightenment, and particularly among members of the ‘Scottish School’ of philosophy the connection between the two thinkers was generally taken for granted. ’ The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid, a keen student of both men, in I 785 quite naturally associated the treatment of language in Book III of the Essay with Verulam’s ‘Idols of the Market-Place’.3 Reid’s countryman, Dugald Stewart, in an Encyclopaedia Britannica article, reprinted in 1821 in the Edinburgh Review, spoke eloquently of how Locke followed the road first pointed out by Bacon. The first biography of Locke by his kinsman Lord King, published in 1829, quotes approvingly a lengthy fragment on the subject from Stewart’s essay. 4 Similarly, Thomas Fowler, Professor of Logic in Oxford during the last quarter of the century, stressed the Baconian characteristics of both the Essay and Of the Conduct of the Understanding,’ and H. R. Fox Bourne in 1876 in his classic life of Locke refers briefly to his subject’s intellectual debt to Bacon6

But philosophers are no more immune to fashion than others. After about 1850 and continuing to the present, Descartes receives greater attention than the Lord Chancellor in discussions of the intellectual sources of the Essay.7 Between 1857 and 1900 a series of studies primarily in German assessed Locke’s relationship to Descartes. In England this change is reflected in 1876 in Leslie Stephen’s popular Histoy of English Thought in the Eighteenth Centqv in which Descartes’ name, but not Bacon’s,

suggest, however, that in terms of general style, mode of presentation, method, and several major themes, the Essay is clearly Baconian. However, much of Locke’s Baconianism may not be of direct derivation.

2 F. H. Anderson, Francis Bacon: His Career and His Thought (Los Angeles, 1g62), Arensburg Lectures, 2nd Series, I I.

’ T. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (I 785 edition), in The Works of Thomas Reid, D.D. Jvow Fully Collected with Selections from His Unpublished Letters, Preface, .Notes and Supplementary Dissertations by Sir William Hamilton, Bart., Prefixed to Stewart’s Account of the Life and Writings of Reid, sixth edition (Edinburgh, 1863), Essay VI, ch. viii, 474. Also see Essay II, ch. ix, ‘Of the Sentiments of Mr. Locke’, for Reid’s praise of Locke’s discussion of language.

4 D. Stewart, art. X. A General View of the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Politixal Science, since the Revival of Letters. Pt. II. By Dugald Stewart, F.R.S.S. London and Edinburgh. (Supple- ment to the Emyclopaedia Britannica, V, pt. I), in The Edinburgh Review, vol. XXXVI (Oct. 1821), 240-3, quoted in part in Lord King (Peter King, 7th Baron), The Life and Letters of John Locke with Extracts from His Journals and Common-place Books (London, x884), I 7g-80. Also see Stewart’s Account of the Ltfe and Writings of Thomas Reid D.D., in Reid, op, cit. 14.

5 Bacon’s .Novum Organum, T. Fowler (ed.) (Oxford, 1878), 98, 123; Locke’s Conduct of the Understanding, T. Fowler (ed.), fifth edition (Oxford, rgor), xxiii. But his Locke (New York, London, no date) fails to stress Bacon as a source of Locke’s philosophy.

6 H. R. Fox Bourne, The Life of John Locke (London, I 876), I, 62. ’ H. 0. Christophersen, A Bibliographical Introduction to the Study of John Locke, in Skrtfter utgitt

au Det .Norske Videnskaps-Akademi, no. 8 (Oslo, rg3o), I 13-14.

The Baconian Character of Locke’s Essay 45

appears in the treatment of Locke’s thought,’ a formula repeated in his subsequent article on Locke in the Dictionary of .National Biography. Among professional philosophers, the same tendency is also manifest. Alexander Campbell Fraser, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in Edinburgh and best remembered, although not always favourably, for his critical edition of the Essay published in 1894,~ fails to mention Bacon’s influence in his Locke ( I 890)) lo but does cite Descartes 1 ’ concluding: ‘The sources of the “Essay” and of Locke’s philosophy a:e not to be sought in the books of his own or preceding generations, so much as in the reaction of his sagac- ious intelligence against the bondage of books, and his cool and independent observation of the facts of human nature.‘12 The position of Professor Alexander of Manchester in his volume on Locke in Igo8 is similar. l 3

With few exceptions the verdict of twentieth-century British and North American commentators upon the role of Bacon in the Essay is completely negative. The deathblow was delivered in I g I 7 in a highly influential study of Locke’s epistemology by J. P. Gibson, with the terse comment: ‘Of the work of Bacon there is not the slightest trace in the Ess~y.“~ A. S. Pringle- Pattison, who praises Gibson’s work and like him replaces Bacon by Descartes, writes in 1924 in the introduction of his frequently reprinted abridgement of the Essay:

Although he was preceded in England by two thinkers of the first rank-Bacon and Hobbes-Locke derived little that is specific from either. Bacon’s theory of scientific method and his classification and organization of the sciences have little in common with Locke’s critical inquiry into the powers of the human mind. Locke may even be said to be a philosopher in a sense in which Bacon was none; for in regard to knowledge Bacon occupies the standpoint of ordinary scientific thought, assuming its competency, and leaving unraised those questions as to the ultimate nature of Knowing and Being, and the relation of the

s L. Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, with a new preface by Crane Brinton (New York, Ig62), ch. I.

‘John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Un&rstanding, A. C. Fraser (ed.) (Oxford, 18g4), 2 ~01s. Although Fraser does not mention Bacon in his lengthy introduction, he does refer in his notes throughout the text to Bacon and to possible Baconian thoughts in Locke. However, very little of it is helpful. See vol. I, 8, 25, 89, 124, 501; vol. II, 13, 71. 147, 201, 204, 206, 216, 217,

223, 267, 378, 380, 400, 42% 42% 453,~456, kc3. _ _.

lo A. C. Fraser, Locke (Edinburah, London, 1890). I1 Ibid., 12-13, 40, 173.

_ . . _I

l2 Ibid., 40. I3 S. Alexander, Locke (London, xgo8), 5: ‘It is not easy to make out the sources of Locke’s

philosophical thought-except Descartes, and the Port Royal Logic. Bacon he knew, and also Hobbes (though, he says, not intimately), and he appears to have been influenced by the atomism of Gassendi.’ Also on Descartes’ influence see 28,34,56.

l4 J. P. Gibson, ficke’s Theory of Knowledge (Cambridge, IgI7), 233.


two, which have been the peculiar business of modern philosophy. Locke’s question thus goes deeper than Bacon’s.15

Four years later with the publication of the fourteenth edition of the En#opaedia Britannica the single reference to Bacon in the articles on Locke in the ninth edition of 1875 and the eleventh edition of Ig Io has been eliminated. Although the fourteenth edition’s article is not initialled it seems to be substantially the text of A. C. Fraser, now dead, who had contributed the articles to the previous editions. In regard to the Essay the eleventh edition reads: ‘It was the first attempt on a great scale, and in the Baconian spirit, to estimate critically the certainty and the adequacy of human knowledge when confronted with God and the universe.’ According to the version of the fourteenth edition: ‘It was the first ex- tensive attempt to estimate critically the certainty and the adequacy of human knowledge when confronted with God and the universe.’ In 1931 C. R. Morris,16 who acknowledges a general debt to Gibson, plays down Bacon in his analysis of Locke, and is followed in 1932 by Gilbert Ryle’s well known Tercentenary address, ‘Locke on the Human Under- standing’, that refers to Descartes and the Cartesians but not to Bacon.” Five years later Richard I. Aaron in what has become a respected standard work on Locke’s philosophy states: ‘Nor again does Bacon of Verulam appear to have been a deep influence’, and ‘there is no evidence to show that Bacon was an influence on Locke’s philosophical development’, an opinion that remains unchanged in the editions of 1955 and 1971.~’ Moreover, in Aaron’s section, ‘Locke’s Philosophy’ under the article, ‘Locke’, in the I g7o edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica-the biographi- cal portion being written by E. S. De Beer-reference is made to Des- cartes, but not to Bacon. Neither D. J. O’Connor’s general assessment of Locke’s philosophy for Penguin in Ig52,1g nor R. S. Woolhouse’s specialized examination in 1970 of certain themes in the Essay, cites Bacon.” Writing on Locke in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy ( 1967)) James Gordon Clapp omits the name of Bacon, and claims that the two most important philosophical influences are Descartes and Gassendi.

I5 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, abridged and edited by A. S. Pringle- Pattison (Oxford, lgq), xii.

I6 C. R. Morris, Locke, Berkeley, Hume (London, 1931). I’ In John Locke: Tercentenary Addresses. Delivered in the Hall at Christ Church, October 1932

(London, lg33), x5-38. I* R. I. Aaron, John Locke, first edition (Oxford, Ig37), 12; second edition, 1955, 12; third

edition, 1971, 12. I9 D. J. O’Connor, John Locke (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1952). 2o R. S. Woolhouse, Locke’s Philosophy of Science and Knowledge: A Consideration of Some Aspects of

‘An Essay concerning Human Understanding’ (Oxford, 197 I).


One might expect analysts of Locke’s political thought to neglect Bacon since they focus upon the Two Treatises of Government,21 but perhaps the omission by British and North American biographers and literary scholars is less excusable. As we have seen, the nineteenth-century biographers, Lord King and Fox Bourne, recognized the influence of Bacon. However, Maurice Cranston in the most recent study of Locke’s life remarks upon Bacon’s connection with Boyle, but not with Locke.22 Kenneth Dewhurst in his medical biography cites several extracts from Bacon’s writings in Locke’s notebooks without attempting to place his scientific and medical views in a Baconian context. 23 Similarly Richard Foster Jones in a superb examination of the ancients versus the moderns in seventeenth-century England fails to relate Locke in any way to the dispute, although two important Baconians, his friends and mentors, Sydenham and especially Boyle, are fully treated. 24 In view of the widespread excision of Bacon from studies of Locke one can only appreciate Rosalie L. Colic’s references to the Lord Chancellor in a recent evaluation of the style of the Essay2 5 and her suggestion in the article on Locke in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences that Bacon is one important source of his nominalism.

Nevertheless, there have been exceptions to the cavalier treatment of Bacon in relation to Locke, and as one might expect, the initiative seems to have been taken by Bacon specialists. Beginning with the article on Bacon in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, reference is made to Thomas Fowler’s edition of the .Novum Organum, commending his views on the impact of Bacon upon Locke. Charles Singer’s article in the fourteenth edition, without acknowledging Fowler, incorporates this judgment which is expanded in the rg7o edition as follows:

” For example Bacon is not mentioned in any of the following well-known works on Locke’s political thought: R. H. Cox, Locke on War and Peace (Oxford, 1960); John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge, 1969); J. W. Gough, John Locke’s Political Philosophy: Eight Studies, second edition (Oxford, I 956) ; W. Kendall, John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule (Urbana, Ill., 1959) (Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, 26, no. 2); S. Lamprecht, The Moral and Political PhiIosoQhy of John Locke (New York, 1918) ; Locke, Two Treatises of Government, P. Laslett (ed.) (Cambridge, 1960); Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, W. Von Leyden (ed.) (Oxford, 1954); John Locke, Two Tracts on Government, P. Abrams (ed.) (Cambridge, 1967); C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, I 962) ; R. Polin, L-a Politique morale de John Locke (Paris, 1960); M. Seliger, The Liberal Politics of John Locke (London, 1968).

== MC, 75. 23 K. Dewhurst, John Locke, Physician and Philosopher (London, Ig63), 27, 49, 163. 24 R. F. Jones, Ancients and Modems: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-

Century England, second edition (Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1961). 25 R. L. Colie, ‘The essayist in his Essay’, in John Locke Problems and Persgectives: A Collection of

New Essays, J. W. Yolton (ed.) (Cambridge, Ig6g), 237-g, 253, 257.

48 Studies in Histoy and Philosofihy of Science

The basic principle of John Locke’s work, An Essay concerning Human Under- standing (16go), that all ideas are the product of sensation and of reflection is implicit in the first aphorism of Bacon’s Novum Organum, ‘Man, who is the servant and interpreter of nature, can act and understand no further than he has observed, either in operation or in contemplation, of the method and order of nature’. The whole atmosphere of Locke’s work is taken from or at least is characteristic of the Novum Organum. Through the practical tendency of his philosophy and through Locke, Bacon was the father alike of English psycho- logical speculation and of the empirical method in the department of ethics. Whatever his positive achievements may have been we may thus accord to him his own claim that ‘rang the bell which called the wits together’.

In The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (1g#3), Fulton H. Anderson, of the University of Toronto, who a quarter of a century before had written a monograph dealing largely with Boyle and Locke,26 asserts that he was ‘Bacon’s first considerable philosophical disciple’ and that ‘Locke, having refused to accept the results of Cartesian definition, undertook to describe the processes of the human mind by that plain, laborious, historical method which other Baconians had employed in investigating the nature of inanimate and animate bodies’.27 Fourteen years later his verdict is even more enthusiastic :

John Locke, whose scientific environment as a member of the Royal Society and whose study of the works of his philosophical progenitor made him one of the most thoroughly Baconian writers of the seventeenth century-specifically in doctrine, illustration, problem, and method-undertook the ‘historical’ recording of the operations and structures of the human mind.28

But Anderson and the Bacon specialists are not alone, for a leading Lockeian scholar, John W. Yolton, is in fundamental agreement. In John Locke and the Way of Ideas he mentions Bacon and suggests a Baconian influence: ‘Locke was seeking to interpret nature, as Bacon had enjoined, rather by a careful attention to nature than by anticipating her with metaphysical explanations.‘2g In addition, he indicates that the Jesuit, John Sergeant, one of the more discerning contemporary critics of Locke, perceived an important connection between Bacon and the Essay.3o More space is devoted to Bacon in Yolton’s second book on Locke, Locke and

26 F. H. Anderson, ‘The Influence of Contemporary Science on Locke’s Method and Results’, University of Toronto Studies: Philosophy (Toronto, x923), 2, no. I. Also for the influence of Boyle on Locke, and a recognition that Locke belonged to the Baconian tradition see M. Mandelbaum, Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception (Baltimore, 1g64), chaps. 1-2.

" F H. Anderson, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago, x948), 299, 302. =a Anderson, Francis Bacon: His Career and His Thought, 334. 29 J. W. Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford, tg56), 78. ” Ibid., 79.


the Compass of Human Understanding, particularly in respect to the Essay as part of the ‘natural history’ genre of Boyle, Sydenham, Hooke, and Power, a characteristic to which we shall return.31

Therefore, among recent British and North American writers, with the notable exceptions of Professor Anderson and Professor Yolton, Bacon apparently can be taken rather lightly in regard to Locke’s philosophy, taken so lightly, in fact, that he can be dismissed as being of little relevance to the subject at all. I wish to argue in what follows that this scholarly consensus is mistaken and that it obscures much of significance in attempting to understand Locke and his way of ideas. Therefore, I hope to suggest that Locke is a Baconian-not necessarily of direct derivation- by examining the available evidence, largely of two kinds. The first is bibliographical and circumstantial, and the second entails pointing out typical Baconian features and themes of the Essay. Because of the weight of scholarship against the enterprise, and at the risk of boring the reader, the evidence must be presented in considerable detail and assessed methodically.

II

If we are to judge Bacon’s influence upon Locke by specific references in his writings (other than the notebooks) to the Lord Chancellor, the result would be fairly inconclusive. It seems that his name appears only four times. The first occurrence is a neglected citation to the .Novum Organum at the end of the manuscript of the unpublished fragment, the De Arte Medica of 1669. 32 Locke’s reference is app arently to aphorisms XXX1 and XXX11 of Book I :

7 It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve for ever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.

The hour of ancient authors, and indeed of all, remains untouched; since the comparison I challenge is not of wits or faculties, but of ways and methods, and the part I take upon myself is not that of a judge, but of a guide.

31 J. W. Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding (Cambridge, 1970). I, 7, 4, 55, 62, 76-7, 201.

” The manuscript is Public Record Ofice, Shaftesbury Papers, Bundle 4712. I have used the text in A. G. Gibson, The Physician’s Art: An Attempt to Exfiand John Lacke’s Fragment De Arte Medica (Oxford, rg33), 13-26. The citation to Bacon, ‘Novum Organ, I, I § 31, 32’, is given on 26. To my knowledge no one has mentioned this citation. A slightly inaccurate rendering of the text from the standpoint of Gibson’s transcription is in Fox-Bourne, op. cit., I, 222-7. See below, 56-9, for a discussion of the De Arte Medica.

D


These two passages from Bacon, as we shall see, suggest in a remarkable way not only Locke’s intentions in the De Arte Medica, but also the nature of his future philosophic endeavours. A second reference to Bacon is Locke’s recommendation in a letter to Edward Clarke concerning his son’s reading : ‘if you would have your son reason well, let him read Bacon; and if you would have him speak well, let him be conversant in Tully to give him the true idea of eloquence.33 The third instance is in the posthumously published Of the Conduct of the Understanding, written about 1697 as an addition to the Essay in which he invokes the authority of Bacon to justify criticism of scholastic logic and quotes two passages from the preface of The Great lnstauration in both the Latin and the English translation.34 The fourth, in one of Locke’s last writings, also published posthumously, is the recommendation of Bacon’s The Historie of the Reigne of King Henry the Seventh (1622) as one of the best treatments of English history. 35 Hence, Bacon’s name does not appear in any of Locke’s works published during his lifetime. Of course, Locke seldom mentions other authors, even those to whom he is deeply indebted. Gassendi’s name is absent from the Essay. Boyle and Sydenham, whose profound influence upon his thinking is generally admitted, are mentioned only once in the Essay as the master-builders of the new science, along with Newton and Huygens. 36 Aristotle is mentioned five times; Descartes, three times; Hooker, whom Locke quotes frequently in the Second Treatise of Government and never fails to praise, once; and another favourite, Cicero or Tully, five times.37

If Bacon is not named in any of Locke’s major writings, at least the quarrel between the moderns (inspired by Bacon) and the ancients figures three times. In his valedictory speech as Censor at Christ Church in 1664 he unreservedly sides with the moderns,38 as he seems also to do in his sarcastic remark in the Essay against ‘the current stream of antiquity’.3g

s3 Locke to Clarke, 15 March 1686, quoted in The Educational Writings of John Locke, J. L. Axtell (ed.) (Cambridge, rg68), 360. In Some Thoughts concerning Education (x693), § 188, Locke substitutes Chillingworth for Bacon.

=4clJ, 5 I. s5 Some Thoughts concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman, in W, II, qo-I I. 36 E, ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I, xxxv). Newton’s name also appears at IV, i, g (II, 137); vii,

11 (11, '99). 37 E, Aristotle: I, iv, 24 (I, 59); III, x, 18 (II, 98); IV, xvii, 4 (II, 264-5); Descartes: III,

iv, IO (II, 29); IV, vii, 12-13 (II, 204-5); Hooker: IV, xvii, 7 (II, 273); Tully or Cicero is quoted on the title-page and is mentioned at II, xxviii, I I (I, 299) ; III, iv, 8 (II, 27) ; IV, iv, 8 (II, 169); x, 6 (II, 219).

38 ‘Censor’s Valedictory Speech’, on Von Leyden, op. cit., 225. 39 E, IV, xvii, rg (II, 278).

The Baconian Character of Locke’s Essay 5’

However, at first sight this evidence of his intellectual leanings towards the moderns would seem to be contradicted in the posthumous Of the

Conduct of the Understanding (I 697) by his wish that the contest between ancients and moderns might be terminated because of the fantastic and ridiculous claim of each side to a monopoly of truth and knowledge.40 But this view itself is expressive of an important Baconian sentiment in the Advancement of Learning.41

Among contemporaries it was clear to which camp Locke belonged in the contest between ancients and moderns. In 1692, William Molyneaux, a convinced Baconian who founded the Philosophical Society of Dublin in I 683 and was promoting the reading of the newly published Essay among students and the educated citizens of Dublin, wrote in the foreword of his Dioptrica 3Vova :

To none do we owe for a greater advancement in this part of philosophy [viz. logic] than to the incomparable Mr Locke, who, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, has rectified more received mistakes, and delivered more profound truths, established on experience and observation, for the direction of man’s mind in the prosecution of knowledge . . . than are to be met with in all the volumes of the Ancients.42

Another example was the effort in November I 703 of the heads of colleges in Oxford to suppress the Essay and Jean LeClerc’s Physics and Logic on the grounds, according to James Tyrrell, that students had been reading too much of the ‘new philosophy’, particularly these three books, with the consequence that scholastic logic and disputation were being dan- gerously subverted in the University. 43 The attempt seems to have been instigated by Tory High Church adherents to the party of the ancients. Finally, in October 1706 the Oxford bibliophile, Thomas Hearne, noted that the Essay was ‘written to advance new Schemes of Philosophy and to bring an odium on Ancient Learning’.44

From I 6go the struggle in England of ancients and moderns had entered a new phase, the so-called ‘Battle of the Books’. In that year Sir William Temple published An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, thereby introducing into England the controversy that had recently arisen in France. Hitherto the dispute in England had been restricted to the merits of the new Baconian inspired science and of the Royal Society, but now the issue as it emerged in France and in Temple’s work was expanded

40 cu, 5 24. 41 AL, 31. ” Quoted in MC, 359. 43 Tyrrell to Locke, April 1704, BL. MS. Locke, c. 22, f. 167, quoted in MC, 468. 44 g October 1706, T. Hearne, Remarks and Recollections, C. E. Doble (ed.) (Oxford, 1885), I,

P. 294.


to include the respective virtues of the ancients and moderns in every realm of human knowledge and culture. Temple argued against the superiority of the moderns. Four years later the vigorous Baconian, William Wotton, replied in Rejections upon Ancient and Modern Learning.45 The friend of Wotton and perhaps of Locke,46 Richard Bentley, a leading classicist who was to become Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, joined the fray in I 697 with the Dissertation on Phalaris-a second edition was published in 16gg-that demonstrated with brilliant learning and logic the spuriousness of the Epistles of Phalaris, offered by Temple as an example of the superiority of the ancients. Jonathan Swift, protegC and former secretary to Temple, rallied to the defence of his friend against the new philosophy and the men of letters so influenced by it, by writing in 1697 The Battle of the Books, not published, however, until 1704 with his other satiric contribution to the quarrel, The Tale of a Tub.

Although no reference to Locke appears in Temple’s book and in Swift’s two onslaughts against the moderns,47 he does figure in Wotton’s work which is a valuable catalogue of modern scientific accomplishment. Bacon clearly heads his list of the worthies of modern science and learning closely followed by Descartes, Boyle, and Newton. Wotton characterizes the new philosophy as being of no sect or party, impartial and undog- matic, relying upon arguments and principles that are intelligible in themselves, and upon mathematics, observation and experience in the study of nature. 48 As one instance of the superiority of the moderns over the ancients, he refers to their concern with ‘philosophical grammar’, citing John Wilkin’s Essay towards a Real Character, and Philosophical Language, (1668) and Book III of Locke’s Essay. 4g Later he calls attention to important modern work in the field of logic, naming Descartes, Locke, and

45 W. Wotton, Refictiom upon Ancient and Modern L-earning (London, 1694). 46 Locke evidentlv met oeriodicallv. beninnina in October, r6q7, with Bentley, Wren, Newton,

and probably Evelyn for’discussion :-See no. LXVIII, Bentle;.;o Evelyn, 2;. Octoder, 1697. The Correspondence of Richard Bentley (London, 1842), I, 152; J. H. Monk, The ~513 of Richard Bentley, second edition (London, x833), I, 96.

47 However Professor Adams maintains that the spider and bee fable that is common to both The Battle of the Books and A Tale of a Tub has reference to the controversy between Locke and Stillingfleet. See R. M. Adams, ‘The Mood of the Church and A Tale of a Tub’, in England in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century: Essays on Culture and Society, H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (ed.) (Berkeley, Ig72), 84-6. On the other hand I. Ehrenpreis in Swift: The Man, His Works and the Age (Cambridge, Mass., Ig62), I, 232-5, argues that the spider and bee fable does not refer to the new natural philosophers, but rather to ‘arid pedantry divorced from experience of the world’ (233).

48 Wotton, op. cit., 3-I. 4g Ibid., 60. Two passages in Wotton are reminiscent of Locke. In attempting to explain why

learned men of the ‘last age’ did not assume that they had surpassed the ancients as do men of the present age, he writes: ‘It was the Work of one Age to remove the Rubbish, and to clear the


Tschirnhaus, who rely not on the writings of the ancients-an attack upon the scholastic logic and its dependence upon Aristotle-but upon ‘their own Strength of Thought, and Force of Genius’.” And in a Baconian passage he couples the name of Locke with Descartes, Velthuysius, and Male- branche as creators of modern metaphysics who, in contrast to the ancients, reason upon real foundations so that the superstructures ‘are not entirely fantastical: And therefore they afford a vast Number of Hints to those who love to apply their Thoughts that Way which are useful to enlarge Men’s Understandings, and to guide their Manners’.51 Like Locke’s Baconian conclusion in Of the Conduct of the Understanding, however, on the virtue of the contest between ancients and moderns, Wotton ends with the warning that the future of knowledge in England will continue to be improved only ‘by joining Ancient and Modern Learning together, and by studying each as Originals, in those things wherein they severally do most excel . . .‘.52

That contemporaries were correct in their recognition of Locke’s adherence to the Baconianism of the moderns in their struggle with the ancients, in spite of his failure to acknowledge the Lord Chancellor in his published writings, is in part borne out by his library holdings. He certainly possessed in abundance the books of Bacon, an indication that he was a highly esteemed author. In Locke’s final library of over three thousand six hundred titles, owned between the late sixteen- seventies and the early years of the next century, Bacon ranked fourth as the best represented author in the Hyde catalogue with seventeen entries, exceeded only by Cicero with twenty-nine, by Locke himself with forty-five, and by Boyle with sixty-two.s3 Locke had not just acquired the volumes of Bacon upon his return to fame and affluence in England Way for future Inventors’ (3). Cf: with Locke’s assertion about his role, E ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I, xxxv), that ‘it is ambition enough to be employed as an underlabourer in clearing ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge’. And in discussing whether or not mastery of the arts arises from nature or by study, Wotton comments: ‘If by Nature, why have we heard of no Orators among the Inhabitants of the Bay of Soldania, or Peru?’ (24). Again, cf. with Locke’s reference to the Bay of Soldania, or Saldanha, E, I, iv, 11 (I, 50) in respect to whether the quality of the intellect depends upon nature or the culturally determined exercise of one’s faculties.

So Wotton, op. n’t., 156. 51 Ibid., 157-B. ” Ibid., 358. 53 See J. Harrison and P. Laslett, The Library of John Locke, second edition (Oxford, 1971).

Their verdict on the measure of Locke’s esteem for author or subject is the following, 23 : ‘This much can be safely said of Locke’s philosophical books, and of every other subject in his library. If he is found with a good collection in his final catalogue, especially if there is evidence that he was extending his holdings in his later years, then that writer or that subject must have had his approval.’ They then comment that Bacon was ‘handsomely represented’ (24).


in the years after 1690, for his Christ Church Library in I 681 contained five titles of Cicero, seven of Bacon, and eight of Boyle.54 Furthermore, Locke seems to have treasured Bacon enough to have burdened himself with at least the Novum Organum when he fled to Holland in 1683 where he completed the final draft of the Essay some three years later.55 But the possession of books by a particular author even in this large number is not by itself conclusive evidence that they were read and studied, particularly since Locke seldom wrote in his volumes. However, Locke copied out extracts from Bacon and referred to him in his notebooks.56

Obviously, he knew Bacon firsthand, although my argument does not depend upon this fact, since I am only asserting that he was a Baconian, which implies that he could have acquired his Baconian ideas from other Baconians who did know Bacon firsthand. Certainly Locke’s two friends and most influential teachers of medicine and science, Sydenham and

As for the thirty-six remaining books of the library that bear Locke’s secret symbol or paraph- whatever it may mean, perhaps a sign of importance or excellence-Bacon is represented by one volume: Opuscula variu posthuma 8” Lon. [16]58 (No. 175 in the Harrison and Laslett catalogue, hereafter abbreviated HL). Harrison and Laslett suggest (41) that the paraph may have denoted that the work ‘was singled out for particular attention’. Boyle was represented by five such volumes, Newton by the Principia, Descartes by the Opera philosophica, and Aristotle, Cicero, and Hooker by none. See 41, 63, 278-g.

54 The Christ Church collection of 1681 consisted of 288 titles out of a total of perhaps 5-600 books, the others being in London. See Harrison and Laslett, op. cit., appendix I.

55 BL. MS. Locke, f. 29, 36, a notebook entry by Locke dated 1685, and entitled ‘Baco I have’. The four works noted by Locke were: De augmentis scientarum 12~ Lugd. Bat [16]52 (HL 168); JVovum Organurn [Ed. 28.] 12’ Amst. [16]60 (HL 169); S ermone~ Jideles I 2’ Elz: [Amstelodami, 16162 (HL 171); Hid: vitae G3 mortis 24 Lug: Bat [16]37 (HL 173). Locke must have meant that these were books he had with him in Holland for we know that if he meant the total number of books by Bacon he possessed, then the Christ Church Library of 1681 contained six different volumes. Of the four titles only the JVovum Orgunum of the same edition had been in the Christ Church Library. Hence, this could be a volume that he carried with him to Holland in 1683. Harrison and Laslett, op. cit., 3, remark on Locke’s exile: ‘Except for a few indispensable volumes, John Locke the expatriate was a man without his library’. The _Novum Organurn, then, could be one of these ‘few indispensable volumes’ carried by Locke to Holland. In the case of the other three volumes of Bacon mentioned by Locke it is unclear whether he brought them to Holland from England-they could have been among his London books or acquired in England after r68r-or whether he purchased them in Holland. Certainly while he was in Holland Locke purchased many books for his library. See Harrison and Laslett, ofi. cit., 4-5.

ss Locke went to the trouble of indexing, contrary to his usual practice, his copy of Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (HL 164). Moreover, throughout the years he either refers to or extracted medical remedies (or had his amanuensis Brounover do it) from this work. See BL. MS. Locke, f. rg, 160 (notes and reading extracts between 1664-g); BL. MS. Locke, f. 22, iv (sometime after Mar. 74175) ; BL. MS. Locke, c. 29, 57 (Brounover’s handwriting) ; BL. MS. Locke, c. 44, 39.

Elsewhere he refers to Bacon: BL. MS. Locke, f. t4 (dated 1667 on inside cover), 5, 44, 93, 196; a eulogy to him is found on g2 where the Novum Organum is juxtaposed with Descartes’ Principles of Philosojhy, and three comments are cited from Boyle’s ‘Phys. Ess.’ [probably Certain physiological Essays 4’ Lon. [16]& (HL 433)], 6, 98, I 15, praising the JVovum Organum and its author. He then mentions the Great Znstauration and New Atlantis, and concludes with a reference to Bacon as ‘The English Plato’ from Morris Cana. Also see BL. MS. Locke, d. IO, 5.


Boyle, were dedicated Baconians. Without doubt Boyle was the most prominent Baconian of the time,” and as we have seen, he was by far the best represented author in Locke’s library. His notebooks abound in references to Boyle, and Boyle’s comments on Bacon are noted.‘* Although rarely marking his books, page lists are in at least three of Boyle’s volumes in his library.59 Much the same can be said of Sydenham, a far less prolific author than Boyle, two of whose works, one of which contained notes and a page list,60 were in the Christ Church Library. In addition Locke’s library included at a relatively early date the exceedingly influential works by the arch-Baconians, Henry Power and Robert Hooke,61 and his final collection contained an excellent selection of the leading contemporary Baconian publicists.62 Interestingly enough he never seems to have owned the most famous anti-Baconian works of the period by Merit Casaubon and Henry Stubbe. On the basis of his books alone, then, Locke was a good party man. Nor should it be forgotten that John Wynne, a don at Jesus College, Oxford, whom Locke authorized to issue by his own pub- lishers, the Churchills, an abridgement of the Essay, may have been a Baconian.

5’ See comment of R. F. Jones, op. cit., 169-70: ‘Bacon exerted a pronounced influence upon Boyle. In fact, no other scientist of the period was

so imbued with the Verulamian spirit. Every mention of Sir Francis is instinct with praise, and he is mentioned again and again and again in Boyle’s writings. He is most frequently “excellent Verulam” or “illustrious Verulam”, but the unvarying tribute finds varied expression: “so great and so candid a Philosopher “, “that great Ornament and guide of Philosophical Historians of Nature”, “one of the most judicious Naturalists that our Age can boast”, “That great Restorer of Physicks”, “our famous experimenter”, “the first and greatest Experimental Philosopher of our Age”, and “the great architect of experimental history”. The experiments in Certain Phy- siological Essays, Boyle says, were first collected as a continuation of the Sylua Syluarum. He frequently refers to Bacon for evidence or justifies himself by Bacon’s example. He discusses Bacon’s ideas with approval, and when he dissents, it is with the utmost reverence. The above are only a fraction of the citations which might be produced. Finally, Boyle’s insistence upon experimentation, his aversion to theories based upon insufficient experiments, and his conception of the need of collecting comprehensive data, as well as the pronounced utilitarian element in his view of science, go straight back to Verulam. He is the greatest scientist who can be placed without reservation to the credit of the Lord Chancellor.’

58 For example, BL. MS. Locke, f. 14, 92-3. ” HL 440,447,46o. 6o HL, 2814. ‘l Robert Hooke, Micographia . . . (London, 1665) (HL 1488); Henry Power, Experimental

philosophy in three books . . . (London, 1664) (HL 2380). 62 George Ent, Joseph Glanville, Francis Glisson, Jonathan Goddard, Samuel Hartlib,

Christopher Merrit, Francis Osborne, William Simpson, Robert Sprackling, Thomas Sprat, George Starkey, George Thomson. Also there were two anonymous works in defence of the Royal Society (HL 2506, 2507).

63 J. Wynne, An Abridgment of Mr. Locke’s Essay concerning Humane Understanding (London: I 696). This abridgement was widely circulated in at least seventeen different editions and reprints including two in the United States, four French translations, one Italian, and one Greek.


Turning from these speculations to what Locke actually wrote before he completed the final draft of the Essay, it is important to begin with some minor unpublished writings. At the very beginning of his intellectual career, the letter of 1659 to Tom, apparently never sent, reveals the unmistakable Baconian imprint:

. . . I can not blame you for yielding to that which is the great commander of the world and tis fancy that rules us all under the title of reason, this is the great guide both of the wise and the foolish, only the former have the good luck to light upon opinions that are most plausible or more advantageous. Where is that Great Diana of the world Reason? Every one thinks that he alone em- braces this Juno, whilst others grasp nothing but clouds. We are all Quakers here and there is not a man but thinks he alone hath this light within and all beside stumble in the dark. Tis our passions that brutish part that dispose of our thoughts and actions, we are all centaurs and tis the beast that carries us, and everyone’s Recta ratio is but the traverses of his own steps. When did ever any truth settle itself in anyone’s mind by the strength and authority of its own evidence? Truths gain admittance to our thoughts as the philosopher did to the tyrant by their handsome dress and pleasing aspect, they enter us by composition, and are entertained as they suit with our affections, and as they demean themselves towards our imperious passions, when an opinion hath wrought itself into our approbation and is got under the protection of our liking tis not all the assaults of argument, and the battery of dispute shall dislodge it? Men live upon trust and their knowledge is nothing but opinion moulded up between custom and interest, the two great luminaries of the world, the only lights they walk by.64

In language and style the young Locke has written with remarkable Verulamian flavour. Apart from the general theme that is Baconian to the core, 65 the stress on ‘fancy’, ‘appearances’,b6 and upon the distortion of knowledge and the understanding because of the ‘affectionsy6’ is strongly reminiscent of the works of the Lord Chancellor. Again there is a striking parallel between a passage in what King calls Locke’s ‘First Commonplace Book of 1661’ and one in the Advancement of Learning.68 When Locke actually wrote this is not clear, since King is the only source,

but it is probably later than 1661, perhaps datir g from some time after 1667.

More important is the little known unpublished fragment, De Arte

w Locke to Tom [Thomas Westrowe?] 20 October x659, BL. MS. Locke, c. 24, f. 182. 65 Cf. AL, 133; NO, XLV, CXXIV. ” Cj AL, 132, 134; DA, V, iv, 431. 67 Cf. AL, 7; NO, XLIX, LII. ” King, op. cit., 292-3; AL, 155 f.


Medica, written about I 66g,6g approximately half way between the time Locke noted Bacon with praise in 1667 in one of his notebooks” and the composition of the two early drafts of the Essay in I 67 I. Written during the height of his medical work with Sydenham, it is not clear whether it is his, Sydenham’s, or a joint endeavour.‘l The manuscript, in Locke’s hand, was evidently meant to be an introductory chapter to a lengthy treatise on medicine. Whether Locke actually composed it-and there is at least one distinctive touch”-or Syndenham did makes little difference since their views on the subject matter seem to have been identical. Indisputable is the fact that the little incomplete essay is non-technical and overwhelmingly Baconian in spirit and orientation. Most of it is a hammering away at one Baconian theme after another. The fact that it is so thoroughly Baconian does not, of course, prove that either Locke or Sydenham knew Bacon intimately, but only as Axtell puts it in respect to Locke: ‘the new F. R. S. was only singing in the chorus of his contemporaries’.73 Sydenham, who obviously did know Bacon, called him ‘That great genius of rational nature’,74 and was singled out for attack by Henry Stubbe in one of his vitriolic anti-Baconian polemics.” Perhaps the essay’s patent Baconianism can in part be accounted for by the extremely heated polemical battle that was then being waged between the ancients and moderns. Robert Crosse had taken issue in 1667 with Joseph Glanvill who published his Plus Ultra the next year. Then, Merit Casaubon entered the fray to be followed by Henry Stubbe in 1670. Perhaps Locke and Syden- ham hoped to provide the Baconians with a new weapon.

s9 The text used is that of A. G. Gibson, op. cit., 13-26. In subsequent quotations the spelling has been modernized, but the original punctuation has been retained.

‘e BL. MS. Locke, f. 14, 92. ‘i Fox Bourne, op. cit., I, 221-2, accepts it as Locke’s as does A. G. Gibson, op. cit., r-13;

and MC, 92-s. In Cranston’s judgment, 93: ‘Locke and Sydenham were very unlike each other as persons, but they had many ideas in common: if Sydenham was the teacher he was no scholar and he needed help to express himself in good Latin.’ Dewhurst, op. cit., 38-g, believes it was a collaborative effort, adding that contemporary evidence suggests that it is Sydenham’s with Locke performing a secretarial function. Abrams, op. cit., 57, 84-5, refers to it as Locke’s. Axtell, op. cit., 72-3, ascribes it to Locke, but at 72, note I, he says: ‘The debate over whether Locke or Sydenham actually wrote it is irrelevant here; if he did not write it, Locke shared its philosophy’.

72 See the culinary analogy, A. G. Gibson, op. cit., 18-19. l3 Axtell, op. cit., 73, 74 Quoted in Jones, op. cit., 221.

75 H. Stubbe, The Lord Bacons Relation of the Sweating-sickness Examined, in a Reply to George Thomson, Pretender to Physick and Chymistry. Together with a Defence of Phlebotomy. . . In Opposition to the same Author and the Author of Medela Medicinae, Doctor Whitaker and Doctor Sydenham. . . . And a Reply, by way of Preface to the Calumnies of Eccebolius Glanoile (London, 1671). See Jones, op. cit., 258 and 339, note 68. Stubbe’s wrath was directed against Sydenham’s Obseroationes medicae . . . (London, 1666). Locke indexed his copy (HL 2814) and made notes in it.

58 Studies in History and Philosofihy of Science

The Baconian face of the essay is so obvious that it is a puzzle why commentators have failed to perceive it, particularly since, as we have seen, Locke cites the Novum Organum at the end. A stress upon the utility of science begins in the first sentence and continues throughout to a characteristic concluding passage :

for, speaking here of the knowledge of natural bodies the end and benefit whereof can be no other than the advantages and conveniences of human life. All speculations in this subject however curious or refined or seeming profound and solid, if they teach not their followers to do something either better or in a shorter and easier way than otherwise they could, or else lead them to the discovery of some new and useful invention, deserve not the name of knowledge, or so much of the vast time of our idle hours to be thrown away upon such empty idle philosophy.76

Intellectual co-operation is praised, the ancients and schoolmen with their systems and hypotheses are condemned with customary Baconian zest, and a blessing is conferred upon observation, method and experience. Study of the ‘works of nature’ and ‘well-designed experiments’ yield far more than fanciful speculation. Practical men, ‘the ploughman tanners smiths bakers dyer painter etc.’ and practical inventions like gunpowder and the loadstone are the true energizers of civilized life. Human happiness and well-being owe far more to the experience of the ‘dull ploughman’ and ‘unread gardener’ than to all the learned doctors. And throughout there is the repeated explanation of the present sad state of science and learning in terms of Bacon’s ‘idols’. ‘Fame and reputation’, have determined the intellectual fashion of the age, accounting for the blinding effect of learned disputation, and ‘these empty impractical notions yet are but the puppets of men’s fancies and imaginations. . . .’ And Bacon’s ‘idol of the cave’ is brought into the open air:

the notions that have been raised into men’s heads by remote speculative principles though true are much like the curious imagery men sometimes see in the clouds which they are pleased to call the heavens, which though they are for the most part fantastical and at best but the accidental contexture of a mist yet do really hinder the sight and shorten the prospect, and though these painted apparitions are raised by the sun and seem the genuine off-spring of the great foundation of light, yet they are really nothing but darkness and a cloud, and whosoever shall travel with his eye fixed on these ‘tis ten to one goes out of his way.”

” A. G. Gibson, op. cit., 22.

77 Ibid., x7-18.


This is about the sum of what the crusading author has to say, Baconian to the very phrasing.

Two years later in Draft A of the Essay and especially in Draft B several of these themes recur. Both drafts dwell upon how men conform to received opinion and authority out of custom and interest,‘s having been brought up as children to accept the sacredness of some of the grossest absurdities; and in the second draft appears the ‘idols’ passage that is repeated in the Essay. 79 Draft B, given a distinctly Baconian title, De Intellect0 Humano, also the title of Exekiel Burridge’s Latin translation of the Essay of I 70 I, begins by indicating that the enterprise of examining the understanding will be of great advantage.” Locke is obviously conscious that he is employing the method of the Baconian natural history, then so much in vogue,” and he underscores the importance of experience and observation for his task.” Throughout he resorts to experimentation to prove a proposition, and urges his readers to do likewise. Finally, he ridicules the schoolmen, seeing them and their doctrines as impediments to human progress, comparing them unfavourably to practical men who have made valuable contributions to the advancement of civilization.83 These points and some of the passages in which they appear are incorpor- ated, expanded, and repeated in the Essay, and will be commented upon more fully in their final form.

III

Now to turn to the evidence of the Essay concerning Human Understanding itself, stemming from these two early drafts some fifteen years later. Title and form express in authentic Baconian spirit Locke’s consciousness of the novelty of his undertaking. The title was apparently an unsual one for lengthy books in English up to that time. As Rosalie Colie has indicated, the essay form suggests Locke’s actual procedure, a testing and weighing of one idea against another, a venture of exploration, all conducive to his major objective of performing a continuous thought experiment.84 Not only can the book as a whole be read as an essay with its informality and variety and unevenness of styles, but also individual chapters stand alone as separate essays, many of their titles beginning ‘Of so and so’, reminiscent

‘* DraftA, $3~p;DraftB, $8, IO, 13. " Draft B, § IO; E, 1, iii, 26 (1, 42). *’ Draft B, g I. 81 Draft B, § 31. *‘Draft B, tj 16, 31. 83 Draft B, s 87. 84 Colie, ofi. cit., 236-g. E, II, xi, 17 (I, x29): ‘I pretend not to teach, but to inquire. . .‘.

60 Studies in Histoy and Philosophy of Science

of all of Bacon’s and some of Montaigne’s essays, both of whom, of course, created the essay form. The word ‘understanding’ does not seem to figure in the title of a previous English work of substance. Bacon uses it frequently; five of the famous aphorisms of the JVovum Organum dealing with the ‘Idols of the Tribe’ begin ‘The Human Understanding’ or Intellectus humanus,*’ the term that Locke employed both for Draft B and the final draft, De Intellectu humano. Even Locke’s frequent employment of ‘idea’ unparalleled in previous English philosophical writing may be of Baconian instead of Cartesian origin,86 and perhaps its use reflects Locke’s recognition of the novelty of his enterprise. Again like Bacon and the official policy of the Royal Society, Locke rejects literary affectation for sim- plicity, homeliness, and above all else clarity.*’ His imagery and metaphor

85 NO, XLV, XLVI, XLVII, XLIX, LI. s6 NO, XXIII. Of course some of the similar conceptions and positions of Locke and Des-

cartes may have been of common Baconian origin and do not necessarily reflect Locke’s in- debtedness to Descartes. According to Gabriel Bonno, both Descartes in Regulae, Rtgle X, and Locke in E, IV, xvii, 6 (II, 272-3), criticized the syllogism from the standpoint of Bacon in NO, I. See his Les Relations IntellectwIles De Locke Auec La France (D’apr2s des documents in&dits) (Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1933) (University of California Publications in Modern Philology, 38, no. 2, 37-264), 236.

s’ E ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I, xxxv); III, x, 34 (II, 103-6). In the latter Locke writes: ‘Since ht and fancy find easier entertainment in the world than dry truth and real knowledge, figuratiue speeches and allusion in language will hardly be admitted as an imperfection or abuse of it. 1 confess, in discourses where we seek rather pleasure and delight than information and improvement, such ornaments as are borrowed from them can scarce pass for faults. But yet, if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, all the artifical and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment, and so indeed are perfect cheat; and therefore however laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided and, where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault either of the language or person that makes use of them. What and how various they are will be superfluous here to take notice, the books of rhetoric which abound in the world will instruct those who want to be informed; only I cannot but observe how little the preservation and improvement of truth and knowledge is the care and concern of mankind, since the arts of fallacy are endowed and preferred. It is evident how much men love to deceive and be deceived, since rhetoric, that powerful instrument oferror and deceit, has its established professors, is publicly taught, and has always been had in great reputation; and I doubt not but it will be thought great boldness, if not brutality, in me to have said thus much against it. Eloquence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against. And it is in vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.’ Also see Locke’s remarks to Van Limborch, 13 March 1691, Amsterdam University Library MS. RX., Ba 236t: ‘I myself am very careless about words, and I scorn literary graces perhaps more than I should; so long as my style does not offend my readers’ taste and so long as it exhibits my meaning clearly and lucidly and does not further complicate subjects that are obscure enough in themselves, I am not concerned for anything else.’ Locke in a draft letter to Wynne about the abridgement of the Essay, 8 February 169413, BL. MS. Locke, c. 24, f. 287, quoted in MC, 384, describes the Essay as ‘a treatise written in a plain and popular style, which, having in it nothing of the air of learning nor so much as the language of the schools, was little suited to the use or relish of those who, as teachers or learners, applied themselves to the mysteries


are always down-to-earth and common-sensical, drawn from the com- mercial, medical, military, culinary, and sporting worlds. And as a good Baconian he emphasizes that the book originated in a form of mutual assistance, the intellectual co-operation of the circle of friends who met in Shaftesbury’s London residence, Exeter House, for intellectual discussion.88 In fact, Locke is continuing this kind of association by inviting his readers to join in the effort, to become members of the club, by reflecting upon their own experience and understanding.*’

Bacon is less modest and more positive about the novelty of what he is doing than his compatriot, but despite masterful understatement Locke is fully aware of the unique features of the Essay, expressing himself with a Baconian metaphor : ‘truth, like gold, is not the less so for being newly brought out of the mine’.g0 He is quite explicit about the newness of certain parts and certain ideas of the Essay, referring to them as ‘somewhat out of the common road’,g1 and ‘out of the ordinary road’.” His argument about the essences of mixed modes and relations ‘appears’ to him ‘new and a little out of the way’,g3 and nobody as far as he knows has ever demonstrated in respect to self-evident propositions ‘the reason and of Scholastic knowledge’. Also Locke to J. F. [J ames Fraser ?] [1698-g ?] BL. MS. Locke, c. 24, f. 46, draft: ‘Those whose aim is to divert and make men laugh let them write plays and Romances and there sport themselves with words and false images of things as much as they please. But a professor to teach or maintain truth should have nothing to do with all that tinsel trumpery, should speak plain and clear and be afraid of a fallacy or equivocation however prettily it might look and be fit to cheat the reader; who on his side should in an author who pretends instruction abominate all such arts and him that uses them as much as he would a common cheat who endeavours to put off brass money for standard silver.’ C$ Bacon’s advice in P, III, 254-S: ‘First then, away with antiquities, and citations or testimonies of authors; also with disputes and controversies and differing opinions; everything in short which is philological. Never cite an author except in a matter of doubtful credit: never introduce a controversy unless in a matter of great moment. And for all that concerns ornaments of speech, similitudes, treasury of eloquence, and such like emptiness, let it be utterly dismissed. Also let all those things which are admitted be themselves set down briefly and concisely, so that they may be nothing less than words. For no man who is collecting and storing up materials for ship-building or the like, thinks of arranging them elegantly, as in a shop, and displaying them so as to please the eye; all his care is that they be sound and good, and that they be so arranged as to take up as little room as possible in the warehouse.’

ss E ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I, xxxii). For other brief allusions to the ‘five or six friends’ see E, ‘Epstle to the Reader’ (I, xxxiv).

s9 See below, 67. Colie, op. cit., 245, comments: ‘In the highly clubbable world out of which and into which the Essuy was born, the collective pursuit of learning meant a great deal.’ Also, 260: ‘Locke set himself to involve his readers in the endeavour he believed the common responsibility of mankind.’

go E ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ (I, xxviii). Cf. AL, go. This is also a favourite of Locke, for example, Essays in the Law of Nature, Von Leyden, op. cit., 135; Locke to William Molyneux, 20 September I 692, Some Familiar Letters, Between Mr. Locke and Several of his Friends (London, I 708)) g ; CU, g 3.

‘l E, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ (I, xxvii). ” E, ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I, xxxiii). 93 E, III, v, 16 (II, 41).


foundation of their clearness or cogency’.g4 That what he was saying to a great extent contradicted received opinion and authority is clearly recognized by him and testifies again to his belief in its novelty.g5 Similarly, his modest portrayal of his work as being that of an cunder-labourer’ to the master builders-Boyle, Sydenham, Huygens, and Newton-indicates that new foundations are being laid in the conception of philosophy as the handmaiden of science.g6 Quite plainly L oc k e’s contemporary critics and commentators, no matter how much they may have disagreed with him, took the book for a voyage of exploration, a new experiment, a novel approach to some traditional philosophic problems. So the persistent Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, condemned this ‘new way of ideas’,” to which Locke typically objects, but also admits that ‘if I have done anything new, it has been to describe to others more particularly than had been done before, what it is their minds do when they perform that action which they call knowing’,” and again:

if it be new, it is but a new history of an old thing. For I think it will not be doubted, that men always performed the action of thinking, reasoning, believing, and knowing, just after the same manner that they do now: though whether the same account has heretofore been given of the way how they performed these actions, or wherein they consisted, I do not know.”

The obvious novelty of his book, however, did not prevent Locke as a good Baconian from professing a great love for truth, and from denying quite strenuously that he had any stake in his own reflections except the discovery of truth. loo While Bacon prefaces the Novum Organum with the

g4 E, IV, vii, I (II, xgz). g5 E, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ (I, xxvii-xxviii); ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I, xxxi, xxxiii). ‘e E, ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I, xxxv). But Bacon also could display modesty, for example,

NO, ‘Preface’, 41: ‘. . . I appear merely as a guide to point out the road; an office of small authority, and depending more upon a kind of luck than upon any ability or excellency.’

” Reply to the Right Rev. The Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Second Letter (I 6gg), in W,

IV, 459. ‘* Reply to the Right Rev. The Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answers to his Letter (16g7), in W, IV,

‘43-4. ” Ibid., x34-5. Cf. NO, ‘Preface’, 41: ‘my object being to open a new way for the understand-

ing, a way by them [the ancients] untried and unknown . . .‘. In GZ, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, I I, Bacon, in referring to the things he intends to do, writes: ‘Certainly they are quite new; totally new in their very kind . . .‘. He then makes a remark strikingly like the ‘new history of an old thing’ of Locke: ‘and yet they are copied from a very ancient model; even the world itself and the nature of things and of the mind’.

loo E, ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I, xxv) ; I, iv, 24 (I, 58) ; IV, xix, I (II, 288-g). Also see Locke to William Molyneux, 20 September 1692, Some Familar Letters, g; Locke to John Gary, 2 May 1696, Bn’tish Museum Additional MS. 5540, ff. 70-l; Reply to the Right Rev. The Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Letter (I 697)) in W, IV, I 36; Locke to Van Limborch, 22 February I 70 I, Amsterdam Uniuersity Library Ms. RX. Ba 2581.


announcement that ‘party zeal and emulation are at an end’,“’ Locke cautions the ever-doubting Stillingfleet that he is ‘of no party but that of truth.‘l” And like Bacon he also vigorously rejects the idea that the Essay in any way contradicts Christian doctrine.lo3

In Bacon’s lengthy ‘Catalogue of Particular Histories’, a list of titles of subjects, among them natural histories, that he believes would have to be written before his scheme of a universal science could be realized, the seventy-eighth is ‘History of the Intellectual Faculties, Reflexion, Imagi- nation, Discourse, Memory, etc.‘lo4 Locke’s essay, De Intellectu humano,

somewhat broader in scope, is just such a natural history. Bacon’s words in the Aduancement of Learning could have served as an inspiration of the project and a guide for Locke’s method:

For he that shall attentively observe how the mind doth gather this excellent dew of knowledge . . . distilling it out of particulars natural and artificial, as the flowers of the field and garden, shall find that the mind of herself by nature doth manage and act an induction much better than they [the ancients] describe it.lo5

The Essay is a ‘natural history’ of the understanding in keeping with the many natural histories in the sciences of Locke’s day, written under the influence of Bacon.lo6 ‘Natural history’ simply meant a systematic recording over time of facts about nature, and Locke was in this sense a

io1 .No, ‘Preface’, a*. lo2 Reply to the Right Rev. The Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Second Letter (16gg), in W,

IV, 258. lo3 A Letter to the Right Rev. Edward Lord Bishop of Worcester (16g7), in W, IV, Postscript, 86.

Locke believed that the study of nature was subordinate and instrumental to the supreme science of Christian morality, and that while his efforts at natural history might be of practical use and benefit to men, they were above all a means of worshipping and glorifying God. See R. Ashcraft, ‘Faith and knowledge in Locke’s philosophy’, inJohn Locke, Problems and Perspectives: A Collection of jVew Essays, J. W. Yolton (ed), esp. 197-8. In regard to this matter Locke also

conformed to a neglected aspect of Bacon’s position, one which is stressed in P. M. Rattansi, ‘The social interpretation of science in the seventeeth century’, in Science and SoC;ety r&o-Igoo, P. Mathias (ed.) (Cambridge, rg72), rg, 27, ng; and J. R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (New York, rg7r), 308, 435-6.

lo4 P, ‘Catalogue of Particular Histories’, 269. lo5 AL, 125. lo6 The subsequent discussion relics upon the following: F. H. Anderson, The Philosophy of

Francis Bacon, 66-7, 70-3, I 20; Gerd Buchdahl, Metaghysics and the Philosophy of Science: the Classical Origins Descartes to Kant (Oxford, rg6g), ch. IV, see especially pp. 210-15; Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 13oo-1800, second edition (New York, tg57), 120-2, 127, 130-6, 147-8; A. R. Hall, The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800: the Formation of the Modern ScientiJic Attitude (Boston, rg56), 205-13; R. F. Jones, op. cit., 57-8, 185-6, 314-15 n. 78; Maurice Mandelbaum, op. cit., ch. I ; J. W. Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding, 4-7, 58-g, 62-3, 74-9, 86-g, 103. I wish to thank Gerd Buchdahl for pointing out some of the problems with the original version of this paragraph.


skilful historian, in that he persistently and meticulously kept records of all kinds, including weather and medical observations and personal finances throughout his life. From the beginning of the century to the time in which Locke was writing, a great number of scientific works that were essentially natural histories of phenomena had been produced by physicians, biologists, chemists, and informed laymen, to a great extent finding a teacher in Bacon and a guide in his emphasis upon observation, continual experimentation, and the detailed compilation of data. This was the sort of thing performed at its best by Boyle, Power and Sydenham, and it was the general approach and policy of that ‘Solomon’s House’, the Royal Society. The natural philosophy of these Baconians must be distinguished from the outlook of the Cartesians, although Descartes did influence members of the Royal Society including Boyle and Locke. Both Baconians and Cartesians adhered to some kind of atomism, although the latter took the form of a plenist particularianism whereas Bacon seemed to have admired, not altogether uncritically, Democritean materialism. Certainly Boyle, evidently greatly attracted to Bacon’s atomism, became the foremost atomist in England, calling his own philosophy, ‘corpuscularian’. In general the atomism of the ‘virtuosi’ with its belief in the basic indivisibility of matter and the existence of a vacuum between particles was more immediately indebted to Gassendi than to Descartes, notwith- standing that Boyle in his later work looked increasingly to the latter thinker. Furthermore, differing from the Cartesians, the Baconians stressed induction based on observation and experimentation. Such hypotheses as they employ are much more provisional and tentative than those found in the writings of the Cartesians whose hypothetical construc- tions were regarded as applying to a material substratum possessing metaphysical sanction.

Locke, an associate of Boyle and Sydenham, and from 1668 a member of the Royal Society, on the whole proved to be a thorough-going Bacon- ian. With Boyle he was convinced of the truth of Corpuscularianism, whilst at the same time insisting that our knowledge of that truth was highly tentative only since we have no direct insight into the internal constitution of bodies. That constitution, he claimed, could provide only a metaphysical explanation of the observed qualities of bodies, which, however, was unavailable to the natural philosopher. For this reason, Locke was emphatic about the crucial value of collecting data and making experiments; and while he held it to be perfectly proper that for the purpose of scientific explanation we should avail ourselves of ‘any probable


hypotheses whatsoever’, since they ‘often direct us to new discoveries’, he stressed that such hypotheses should not receive sanction from any views we might otherwise hold concerning the invisible corpuscularian constitution of things. So while it is true that the shadow of Locke’s metaphysical corpuscularianism frequently haunts his (sceptical) estimate of the possi- bility of scientific knowledge (in the older, Cartesian, sense of that word), in its practical recommendations, and over-all tone, the Essay is more usually a natural history in the Baconian tradition reflecting the dominant point of view of English experimental philosophy.

Locke’s ‘historical plain method’ is, indeed, exactly the method of the Baconian natural history. lo7 By its means he proposes to describe the emergence of the human understanding, the evolution in ontogenetic

terms of the capacity in man to have ideas and to know what exists. Having rejected the notion of innate ideas rather simplistically expounded in many of the sermons and theological writings of his day, Locke begins

with the mind as tabula rasa, and proceeds to demonstrate how the empty room with which man is endowed at birth is gradually over time furnished out of the objects of experience. The method is nicely summarized:

Follow a child from its birth and observe the alterations that time makes, and you shall find, as the mind by the senses comes more and more to be furnished

lo7 E I i 2 (I 5-6) ; II, xi, 15 (I, 128-g) ; IV, xii, IO (II, 241-2) ; xvi, I I (II, 258-g). Voltaire, 3 >3 who did so much) through his Philosophical Letters (I 734) to popularize Locke in France, sums up the natural history approach of the Essay in the thirteenth letter ‘On Locke’: ‘Locke has exposed human reason, just as a learned anatomist would have explained the functions of the body. He is aided throughout by the light of physics; he sometimes dares to speak in a positive manner, but he also dares to doubt. Instead of defining at once what we do not know, he examines by degrees, what we want to know. He takes a child from the moment of its birth; he follows all the stages of its understanding; he views what it possesses in common with animals, and in what it is superior to them. Above all, he consults his own experience, the consciousness of his thought.’ See Voltaire, Can&e and other Writings, H. M. Blocke (ed.) (New York, rg56), 342.

Locke’s general procedure in the Essay bears comparison with the standard of the ‘Rational Physician’ (as against the ‘Empirick Physician’) offered by Wotton, op. cit., 290-x : ‘A Rational Physician is he who critically enquires into the Constitution, and peculiar Accidents of Life, of the Person to whom he is to administer, who weighs all the known Virtues of the Medicines which may be thought proper to the Case in hand; who balances all the Symptoms, and, from past Observations, finds which have been fatal, and which safe; which arise from outward Accidents, and which from the Disease itself: And who thence collects, which ought soonest to be removed, which may be neglected, and which should be preserved or augmented; and thereupon prescribes accordingly.’

Or again, Locke’s technique might be that of his friend and colleague, Thomas Sydenham, the founder of modern clinical medicine, who describes his own method: ‘The function of a physician [is the] industrious investigation of the history of diseases, and of the effect of remedies, as shown by the only true teacher, experience. . . . True practice consists in the observations of nature: these are finer than any speculations. Hence the medicine of nature is more refined than the medicine of philosophy.’ T. Sydenham, Works (London, x848), II, 12 and 22, quoted in MC,

92.

E

66 Studies in History and Philosojhy of Science

with ideas, it comes to be more and more awake; thinks more, the more it has matter to think on. After some time it begins to know the objects which, being most familiar with it, have made lasting impressions. Thus it comes by degrees to know the persons it daily converses with, and distinguish them from strangers; which are instances and effects of its coming to retain and distinguish the ideas the senses convey to it. And so we may observe how the mind, by degrees, improves in these, and advances to the exercise of those other faculties of en- larging, compounding, and abstracting its ideas, and of reasoning about them, and reflecting upon all these. . . .lo8

Locke believes that ‘by following nature in its ordinary method’,log he is writing a ‘true history of the jrst beginnings of human knowledge : whence the

mind has its first objects’,110 ‘the progress of our minds’lll in the acquisi- tion of knowledge, and a description of the various kinds of knowledge it is capable of acquiring. Writing to Clarke when he had just completed the final draft of the Essay he explains that he had written it on the basis of his own observations, studiously avoiding reading books on the subject and consulting the opinion of others. ‘12 Much later in the controversy with Stillingfleet he confessed that reflection upon the operations of his own mind had led him ‘to copy nature’, to copy his own mind in its various ways of proceeding. I13 And just before he died he claimed to Anthony Collins that he had followed the ‘plain and easy method of nature’, and as to the validity of what he wrote Locke was convinced that ‘however I may be mistaken in what passes without me I am infallible in what passes in my mind’, a startling confession of Locke’s own limitations and those of modern pre-Freudian psychology. ’ l4 At least Locke hoped that his conclu- sions were open to being tested by the observation and experience of others.

Following the lead of Bacon, Locke never fails to remind his reader that his generalizations are derived from his own observation, experience, and conscious experiment. 115 In the first chapter, as he does throughout, he discredits received opinion and authority,’ l6 concluding the first book

lo8 E, II, i, 22 (I, 88). lo9 E, II, xi, 14 (I, x28). Ilo E, II, xi, 15 (I, 128). 11x E, II, xii, 8 (I, 132). X1’ Locke to Edward Clarke, 21131 December 1686, in The Corres~ondmce of John Locke and

Edward Clarke, J. B. Rand (ed.) (Oxford, rg27), 177. I13 Reply to the Right Rev. The Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Letter (1g67), in W, IV,

x3%9. ‘14 Locke to Anthony Collins, 21 [and 241 March 1704, The Hyde Collection, Four Oaks Farm,

Somerville, New Jersey. “e Bacon, of course, emphasizes observation, experience, and experiment throughout his

works. See in particular: AL, 33; NO, I. I’6 E, I, i, 2 (I, 6).


by stating that whatever its shortcomings, his ‘edifice’ will be constructed on the foundations of his own experience and observation, and for its truth he will appeal to the observation and experience of 0thers.l” Such is his emphasis throughout the rest of the work.‘l* Within the bounds of his subject the importance of experiment is particularly underlined in various ways. The only hope for a science of nature is to be of a high degree of probability afforded by ‘rational and regular experiments’.‘lg Hypotheses are conditionally approved. They may be invaluable aids to the memory and guide us to new discoveries, but they should never be adopted too hastily ‘till we have very well examined particulars, and made several experiments’ and checked our results against our particular hypotheses. lzo Locke occasionally engages in explicit self-experiment :

‘whilst I write this, I have, by the paper affecting my eyes’,r21 or ‘Thus I see, whilst I write this, I can change the appearance of the paper. . . .‘122

Often he exhorts the reader to experiment for himself, to become a colla- borator in the common Baconian enterprise : 123 ‘be pleased to make a trial, with the air enclosed in a football ‘,124 ‘consider the red and white colours in porphyry ‘,125 ‘Pound an almond ‘,126 ‘When we set before our eyes a round globe of any uniform colour’, 12’ ‘every one, I think, has experimented in himself. Trace it a little further, and you find the mind in sleep retired as it were from the senses’,r2s ‘A musician used to any tune will find that, let it but once begin in his head. . . .‘12’

Bacon of course, never hesitates to point out, in opposition to the views

11’ E, I, iv, 26 (I, 60). its For example E, II, i, I (I, 77); 5 (I, 79); 21 (I, 88); 22 (I, 88); vii, g (I, 101); viii, 5

(I, 103); ix, IO (I, 115);xix, 4 (I, 188-g); xxi, 34 (I, 208) ; 6g (I, 231-2) ; IV, xii, g (II, 240-1) ; 12 (II, 242-S); xvii, 4 (II, 264).

tr9 E, IV, xii, IO (II, 241). la0 E, IV, xii, 13 (II, 243-4).

lzl E, IV, xi, 2 (II, 228). I** E, IV, xi, 7 (II, 231). iz3 On self-experiment see Colie, Op. cit., 247: ‘readers who penetrate to the core of the book

are, simply, joining that colleagual audience fit and few . . . he draws his readers into a circle of independent amateurs of thought.’ Or again, 259: ‘This is philosophy not only laicized, but domesticated: grown men are asked to watch in their developing children the growth of mind, intellect, and understanding, by which Locke’s hypotheses can be checked in every family.’ And finally, 261: ‘its hospitable author makes the process of thinking about thinking so engaging that men naturally took up his book, and took him, so generously recorded in his Essay, as a model for self-experiment, for self-assaying’.

iz4 E, II, iv, 4 (I, 96). i2s E, II, viii, rg (I, 108).

lz6 E, II, viii, 20 (I, 108). “‘E, II, ix, 8 (I, 113). r** E, II, xix, 4 (I, 188). “’ E, II, xxxiii, 6 (I, 336).


of the ancients, that man’s signal weakness lies in his intellectual powers, not in his senses,13’ a position approached if not exactly duplicated by Locke. More prone to err, beset and distorted by false idols, the Lord Chancellor holds, the intellect should be distrusted.’ 31 The senses may deceive us, and even by themselves be ‘infirm and erring’, l 32 yet they supply their own corrective by means of systematic observation and experiment, and consequently ‘are very sufficient to certify and report truth’. l3 3 Similarly, Locke recognizes the limitations of the intellect, beguiled by the idols of fashion and authority. But generally he seems to have greater faith in the intellect and the senses than his master. Although our senses are ‘dull and weak’, 134 habit and custom distorting our ideas of sensation,‘35 and producing unnatural connections among them,‘36 nevertheless, God in his infinite wisdom ‘hath fitted our senses, faculties, and organs to the conveniences of life, and the business we have to do here’.’ 37 If we think about it, our simple ideas of sensation are generally in agreement. ’ 38 Conflict among me n comes not so much from the contradictory testimony of the senses as it does from the fictional fabrications of the intellect. Moreover, our knowledge of the existence of other things depends entirely upon sensation. -139 ‘nobody can, in earnest, be so sceptical as to be uncertain of the existence of those things which he sees and feels’. I40 While Locke does not seem to recommend explicitly experiment as a corrective for the weakness of the senses, as does Bacon, he implies as much, and hence his caution in respect to hypothesis, and his insistence upon painstaking industry, rigorous method, and patient repetition in all observation and experimentation. 14’

Finally, a special Baconian feature of Locke’s emphasis upon observation and experience that merits attention is his deep interest in what Peter Laslett has called his ‘comparative anthropology’.‘42 At least from

I30 AL, 126-7; G1, ‘Proemium’, 7. I31 G1, ‘Plan of the Work’, 26-7. 13= NO, XVI. 133 AL, 127. 13’ E, II, xxiii, 12 (I, 251); IV, xii, IO (II, 241). I35 E, II, ix, 8-10 (I, 113-15); BL. MS. Locke, e.r. 260. I36 E, II, xxxiii, 5-10 (I, 336-8). 137 E, II, xxiii, 12 (I, 250). I’* E, II, Xiii, 28 (I, 145). 139 E, IV, xi, I (II, 228). Ido E, IV, xi, 3 (12, 229). I41 E, IV, xii, g-13 (II, 24o-4). 14’ Laslett is the first to use the term ‘comparative anthropology’ in connection with Locke,

and to call attention to his deep and abiding interest in the travel literature of the period. See the introduction of his critical edition of Locke, Two Treatises of Government, op. cit., 98, note. Also,


the time of his election to a studentship in Christ Church in 1658 until his death, Locke was always curious about the customs, values, and ways of life of foreign lands and strange and exotic peoples. Not only did he live and travel widely in France and Holland, with a brief sojourn in Cleves, but also he read widely in ancient and contemporary history and was fascinated by travel books and journals of voyages to remote parts appearing with increasing frequency from the previous century. Ever the indefatigable record keeper, Locke filled his notebooks with ethno- graphical references from these sources, cited examples in his writings, purchased numerous works of the genre for his library, and corresponded with his friends about the details of cultural lore. In the sixteenth century the educated classes throughout Western Europe began to exhibit a passion for collecting objects of all sorts, artifacts and curios from remote corners of the globe, books and manuscripts, zoological, botanical, and anatomical specimens, etc. 143 Bacon’s recommendation in the Parasceve for the amassing of vast numbers of facts in order to facilitate the pene- tration of the secrets of nature reflected this outlook and in turn exercised substantial influence upon Englishmen, particularly the virtuosi of the Royal Society, to pursue with vigour and enthusiasm this collecting enterprise. 144 Bacon also urged travellers to keep diaries, but largely for assembling political rather than cultural data. 14’ And although the Royal Society itself did not officially encourage the gathering of ethnographic materials or the investigation of foreign cultures, many of its members, including Locke, did ~0.l~~

While in his earlier writings Locke had used and benefited from comparative anthropology, nowhere is it more evident than in the Essay. 14’ The book contains more than two dozen anthropological references to: illiterate peoples, savages, Indians, America and Americans, Greeks and Romans, Mohammedans and Jews, and a host more of foreign

Harrison and Laslett, op. cit., 18-19, 27-g. Locke had 275 titles in his library concerned with geography, exploration, travels and voyages.

I43 M. T. Hodgen, Earb Anthropolo~ in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1g64), chaps. 4-5.

144 Ibid., I 15, 123-4, 12g-30. Unfortunately in her splendid book, Professor Hodgen says - _. little abou; Lo&e. See x88,-374, 384, 410, 428..

14s Ibid.. 187. The reference is to Bacon’s Of travel. 146 Ibid.; 118-19, 157. 14’E, I, ii, 12 (I, 14); 27 (I, 23-4); iii, g-10 (I, 30-2); 12 (I, 32-3); 17 (I, 37); iv, 8 (I,

46-7) ; 12 (1, 50) ; ‘7 (I, 52) ; 23 (I, 57-8) ; 11, xiii, 20 (I, 140); xiv, 20 (I, 152-3); 23 (I, 155); 29 (I, 157-8); xvi, 6 (I, x69); xxii, 6 (I, 240-I); 10 (I, 243); xxiii, 2 (I, 245); 111, v, 8 (II, 37); vi, 9 (II, 48); viii, 2 (II, 76); xi, 25 (II, I 19); IV, viii, 6 (II, 213); xii, I I (II, 242); xvii, 4 (IL 264); xix, 15 (II, 295-6); xx, 3 (II, 298).


places and peoples. 14* Some eighteen citations to specific travel works are to be found in the text and in footnotes.149 Apart from this, his recognition and appreciation of cultural diversity, his acknowledgement although not approval of the relativism of values, and his stress upon the crucial role in conduct of reputation, fashion, and opinion all seem to have arisen from his anthropological interests.r5’ Like Bacon’s position, moreover, Locke’s view of natives and tribesmen is not marked by the negative attitude and anti-primitivism to be found in much of contemporary and later literature on the subject. lsl Primitive tribal men are by no means lacking in reason and humanity, Locke believes, however appalled he may have been by what he took to be their crudity and bizarre customs. He affirms that all men, savages as well as Europeans, are roughly of equal intellectual capacity and that their respective cultures account for the intellectual differences among them. 152 Locke agrees with Bacon who wrote:

7 Again, let a man only consider what a difference there is between the life of men in the most civilized province of Europe, and in the wildest and most barbarous districts of New India; he will feel it be great enough to justify the saying that ‘man is god to man’, not only in regard of aid and benefit, but also by comparison of condition. And this difference comes not from soil, not from climate, not from race, but from the arts.153

Then Bacon points to printing, gunpowder, and the magnet as fundamental to the rise of modern European civilization. Locke, who had written in the Second Treatise of Government that ‘in the beginning all the world was America’ ls4 never hesitates to compare favourably the native American with the European in regard to intelligence and reasoning powers. He sees the difference between them primarily in terms of acts of fortune such as the discovery of iron that led to the development of the arts and in the particular mode of life that determines the way the faculties of an individ-

r’s Boranday, Brazil, Caribbees, China and Chinese, Japan, Mingrelians, Peru, Saldanha, Hottentots, Siam, Tonoupinambos.

r4’ M. Baumgarten, J. de Bourges, F. T. de Choisy, G. Grueber, Claude-Francois Lambert, Jean de L&y, S. La Loubtre, P. M. La Martini&e, Peter Martyrus, D. Fernandez Navarrete, J. Ovington, Sir Thomas Roe, Nicholaus de Techo, E. Terry, M. Thevenot, P. della Valle, Garcilasso de la Vega, Isaac Vossius.

‘so See below, notes 169, 170, 174, I 75 for relevant citations. Is’ On the anti-primitivism of the age see Hodgen, op. cit., chap. IX-X. 152 E, I, iv, II (I, 50); 23 (I, 57); II, xiii, 20 (I, 140); xvi, 6 (I, 169); IV, xii, II (II, 242),

Xvii, 4 (II, 264); 6-7 (II, 272-s).

IS3 NO CXXIX. Is4 Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 5 49.

The Baconian Character of Locke’s Essay 7’

ual are used: some encouraging initiative, industry and perseverance; others conducive to indolence and amusement.

IV

No less than Bacon, Locke is concerned that his scientific efforts in the Essay will prove to be of practical use in the daily lives of his readers. ’ 55 His stated purpose in writing the book is familiar: to investigate ‘the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent . . .‘.ls6 He adds the further justification :

were the capacities of our understandings well considered, the extent of our knowledge once discovered, and the horizon found which sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things, between what is and what is not comprehensible by us, men would perhaps with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction in the other.’ 57

However, students of the Essay sometimes tend to overlook the fact that Locke wrote not only for the sake of technical philosophic analysis but also to help men act more effectively in the world of practical affairs. At the very beginning he gives his reason for writing, ‘to be as useful as I

may, ’ ls8 and hopes that the work will ‘be useful to others’.“’ His self- declared aim was ‘truth and usefulness’.‘60 At one point he describes the human condition as ‘this fleeting state of action and blindness . . .‘.161

Despite their blindness and uncertainty in the flux of things, men must act, and perhaps an incisive self-awareness of their blindness, together with a little light, would better enable them to do so. Locke’s natural history, then, is aimed at utility, and not only at philosophic analysis:

Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct. If we can find out those measures whereby a rational creature, put in that state in which man is in this world, may and ought to govern his opinions and actions depending thereon, we need not to be troubled that some other things escape our knowledge.‘6Z

IS5 For Bacon upon the utility of science see especially the following: AL, 35, 63, IOO; GZ, ‘Preface’, 14, 2o-I ; NO, LXXIII, LXXXI, LXXXV.

is6 E, I, i, 2 (I, 5). is’ E, I, i, 7 (I, 8-g). Is8 E, ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I, xxxiv). Is9 E, ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I, xxxiv). iso E, ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I, xxxv). i6’ E, IV, xvi, 4 (II, 255). 16’ E, I, i, 6 (I, 8) ; cf. E, IV, xiv, I (II, 247) : ‘Th e understanding faculties being given to man,

not barely for speculation, but also for the conduct of his life. . . .’


Then follow two remarkable passages in which he succinctly draws the connection between the utility of the Essay and the imperative of political action. In the first he writes:

For action being the great business of mankind, and the whole matter about which all laws are conversant, it is no wonder that the several modes of thinking and motion should be taken notice of, the ideas of them observed and laid up in the memory and have names assigned to them, without which laws could be but ill-made, or vice and disorder repressed.‘63

In the second passage he concentrates upon the necessity for action although only a fortunate few have the leisure to examine all the opinions upon the basis of which men do in fact act:

And yet we are forced to determine ourselves on the one side or other. The conduct of our lives and the management of our great concerns will not bear delay: for those depend, for the most part, on the determination of our judgment in points wherein we are not capable of certain and demonstrative knowledge, and wherein it is necessary for us to embrace the one side or the other. 1 64

He would certainly include his examination of the understanding in the category of the science of nature which employs experimentation and natural history ‘from which we may draw advantages of ease and health, and thereby increase our stock of conveniences for this life . . .‘. 165

Locke, therefore, in addition to writing a technical philosophic treatise, is offering a guidebook to ordinary educated men for their daily lives and the management of their practical concerns. In the last analysis, an important intention of the Essay is very matter of fact and hardheaded, to aid men in acting more rationally in the social and political arena.

If attention is given to Locke’s metaphor and literary imagery, one can only be impressed by how pragmatic and realistic he actually is. The book abounds with language drawn from culinary, sporting, nautical, medical, and military activity. Games, particularly chess and tennis, are also a source. As a member of ‘no party but that of truth’, Locke in accord with his convention employs military metaphor in the closing lines of Book I to identify his opposition to the various parties of received opinion : ‘it happening in controversial discourses, as it does in assaulting of towns, where, if the ground be but firm whereon the batteries are erected, there is no further inquiry of whom it is borrowed nor whom

I63 E, II, xxii, IO (I, 243). 164 E, IV, xvi, 3 (II, 254). Although Locke uses ‘great concerns’ (or ‘great concernments’),

to refer to religion and morality, for example in ‘Of Ethick in General’ (ISgo), BL. MS. Locke, C. 28, f. 146, he also employs the expression in E, III, x, 1-2 (II, 95) to include religion, law and politics.

16s E, IV, xii, IO (II, 241-z).


it belongs to, so it affords but a fit rise for the present purpose’.166 Locke has fashioned a weapon to be used for the assault upon the party ofdarkness by the Baconian party of light. Of particular interest is his recourse to the language of architecture, and even more frequently and pointedly to that of labour and commerce. God is termed the ‘wise Architect’; the great scientific innovators are ‘master-builders’; the philosopher, properly speaking, is an ‘under-labourer’.‘67 The Essay itself is an ‘edifice’; the world is a ‘mansion’; the understanding, a ‘dark room’ and ‘closet’; and the brain, the mind’s ‘presence room’.16* From the realm of work and trade are the following: ‘truth, like gold’, the ‘price’ of truth, knowledge as ‘stock’ and ‘gold’, received opinion as ‘borrowed wealth’ and ‘fairy money’, the memory as the ‘storehouse of our ideas’, the ‘weight’ of an action, judging as ‘balancing an account’, general and abstract ideas as the ‘workmanship of the mind’, and reasoning as ‘reckoning’.169 In writing a book to influence men of action and the marketplace it is natural for Locke to resort to the familiar language of a world in which they were completely at home.

Locke’s utilitarian object of influencing human conduct is further reflected by his typically Baconian attack upon the schoolmen and their systems and his praise of practical men like statesmen and technical innovators. “O With Bacon he commends Aristotle, but launches a scathing attack upon his latter-day disciples who represent the kind of narrow intellectual specialist he so wholeheartedly detests.“l On the one hand the practical men are responsible for whatever light there is in the world, for the amenities, comforts, and security of civilized life.“* Speculation

‘M E, I, iv, 26 (I, 60). i6’ For example, E, IV, iii, 2g (II, 164); also ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I, XXXV). 16s E, I, iv, 26 (I, 60); I, i, 5 (I, 7); II, xi, 17 (I, 129); II, iii, I (I, 92). 169 E, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ (I, xxviii); I, iv, 24 (I, 59); II, x, 2 (I, I 17); xxi, 52 (I, 220); 67

(I, 229); IV, xii, 3 (II, 237); xvii, g (II, 274). Also see E, I, iv, 20 (I, 53-4) for a characteristic illustration: ‘Whatever then we talk of innate, either speculative or practical principles, it may with as much probability be said that a man hath EIOO sterling in his pocket, and yet denied that he hath either penny, shilling, crown, or any other coin out of which the sum is to be made up, as to think that certain propositions are innate when the ideas about which they are can by no means be supposed to be so.’

r” For Bacon’s praise of the mechanical arts see: AL, 71-S; _NO, CXXIX; P, III, 254-5. “’ Bacon’s praise of Aristotle is in AL, 28, 91, 104; DA, V, iv, 434. Locke’s only specific

references to Aristotle in the Essay are eulogistic: I, iv, 24 (I, 59) ; IV, xvii, 4 (II, 264-5). In his polemic with Stillingfleet about the Essay he comments in regard to Aristotle: ‘that acute and judicious philosopher, if he had gone farther in that matter, would have done as I have done’. See Re& to the Right Rev. Thz Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Letter, in W, IV, 384.

r’s For Locke’s praise of technical innovations and practical men coupled with his attack upon the impractical schoolmen see E, II, xiii, x9-20, (I, 140); III, x, 8-14 (II, 93-6); IV, iii, 30 (11, 164-5); xii, 11-12 (II, 242-3); Xvii, 6 (II, 272-3).

F


for them is always a tool in the advancement of life and the pursuit of happiness. On the other hand, the schoolmen, he maintains, are sterile, hair-splitting pedants who regard their theoretical activity as an end in itself. 173 Their rationalistic systems and use of syllogism are major forces of obscurantism confusing the minds of men and leading to un- necessary strife, having ‘invaded the great concernments of human life and society; obscured and perplexed the material truths of law and divinity; brought confusion, disorder, and uncertainty into the affairs of mankind; and if not destroyed, yet in a great measure rendered useless, these two great rules, religion and justice’.‘74 While the schoolmen are ‘great mint-masters”” of terms with their ‘artificial ignorance’ and ‘learned gibberish ‘,176 ‘it was to the unscholastic statesman that the govern- ments of the world owed their peace, defence, and liberties; and from the illiterate condemned mechanic (a name of disgrace) that they received the improvements of useful arts’.“’ Fortunately, for the cause of civilized life the methods of the schoolmen have made little impact upon practical men and innovators:

Had men, in the discoveries of the material done as they have in those of the intellectual world, involved all in the obscurity of uncertain and doubtful ways of talking; volumes writ of navigation and voyages, theories and stories of zones and tides multiplied and disputed, nay, ships built and fleets set out would never have taught us the way beyond the line; and the antipodes would be still as much unknown as when it was declared heresy to hold there were any.17E

173 Although Locke attacked many of their doctrines without explicitly mentioning the schoolmen, some of his references to them and their systems are: E, II, xvii, 16 (I, 18c-I) ; III, iii, g-10 (II, 18-10); vi, 26 (II, 55-6); IV, iii, 6 (II, 146-g) ; vii, 8 (II, 196); II (II, 198-204). For a comprehensive discussion see J. P. Gibson, op. cit., 182-204.

1'4 E, III, x, 12 (II, 95). i’s E, III, x, 2 (II, go). 1’6 E, III, x, g (II, 93). 177 n&f

I’* E IV, iii, 30 (II, 165). Locke’s views on the intellectual specialist are also found in CU, §3: ’ ‘some men of study and thought, that reason right, and are lovers of truth, do make no great advances in their discovering of it. Errour and truth are uncertainly blended in their minds; their decisions are lame and defective, and they are very often mistaken in their judgments: the reason whereof is, they converse but with one sort of men, they read but one sort of books, they will not come in the hearing but of one sort of notions: the truth is, they canton out to themselves a little Goshen, in the intellectual world, where light shines, and, as they conclude, day blesses them; but the rest of that vast expansum they give up to night and darkness, and so avoid coming near it. They have a pretty traffic with known correspondents, in some little creek; within that they confine themselves, and are dexterous managers enough of the wares and pro- ducts of that corner, with which they content themselves, but will not venture out into the great ocean of knowledge, to survey the riches that nature hath stored other parts with, no less genuine, no less solid, no less useful, then what has fallen to their lot, in the admired plenty and sufficiency of their own little spot, which to them contains whatsoever is good in the universe. Those who


In a similar vein Locke eulogizes the technical innovator and experimenter: the one who first made use of iron, the very foundation of civilized life, the inventors of printing and the compass, the discoverer of quinine. I” Knowledge, therefore, should always serve human life in the most practical sense.

Locke’s fondness for the useful and practical and antipathy to idle speculation and disputation perhaps helped shape his reaction to the criticism of the Essay, once it was published in I 6go and in the subsequent three editions during his lifetime. lso The criticisms were numerous, often substantial and cogent. Yet Locke is rather unphilosophic in his response to them, completely failing to appreciate the process of criticism and reply as a constructive intellectual debate from which both sides might profit. Actually he took the criticism badly, indeed as Burnet put it, in a ‘snap- pish and peevish way’, and published relatively few replies. In general, he seems to feel that the critics had not read the book carefully, had mis- understood what he had written, and that many of their remarks were picayunish, and instead of resorting to mere nit-picking, they should have offered genuine alternatives of their own, constructive solutions to the problems with which he struggled so unsuccessfully in their eyes. In all fairness to Locke it should be understood that he is quite conscious of his .own fallability and the imperfections of the book, written and rewritten in many different places and circumstances over nearly two decades. Certainly, he is modest enough about his own philosophic efforts ‘as an under-labourer in clearing ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge . . .‘.181 What, then, was at the root of his intolerance of his critics? Quite possibly, it may have been his view that they dwelt upon particulars rather than grasping the architec-

live thus mewed up, within their own contracted territories, and will not look abroad beyond the boundaries that chance, conceit, or laziness, has set to their inquiries; but live separate from the notions, discourses, and attainments of mankind; may not amiss be represented by the inhabitants of the Marian islands; who, being separated by a large tract of sea, from all com- munion with the habitable parts of the earth, thought themselves the only people of the world. . . . Let not men, therefore, that would have a sight of what every one pretends to be desirous to have a sight of, truth in its full extent, narrow and blind their own prospect. Let man not think there is no truth, but in the sciences that they study, or books that they read.’

r” E, IV, xii, I I-12 (II, 242-3).

la0 For a treatment of Locke’s reaction to criticism see Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas, 7-8, 13-14, 16; also Colie, op. cit., 248-51. Locke requested criticisms of his ideas in a footnote at the end of the epitome of the yet unpublished Essay that appeared in French in Jean LeClerc’s Bibliothdque Uniuerselle in January, 1688. This footnote is omitted in the reprint of the epitome, the Abr@, printed for private circulation by Locke, and no similar request is included in any of the published versions of the Essay. See MC, 290-r.

Is1 E, ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I, xxxv).


ture of the book as a whole. As he himself wrote at the end of the first book of the Essay, even if the work should prove to be ‘a castle in the air, I will endeavour it shall be all of a piece and hang together’.‘82 There was some warrant for dismissing his critics on the grounds of overlooking the forest for the trees. Like his practical heroes, the inventors, technical innovators, and statesmen, Locke was a builder rather than a controver- sialist and syllogist. His attitude is expressed in a letter of October 1686, to Van Limborch who evidently was embroiled in some theological dispute, perhaps over his Theologia Christiana published the preceding May: ‘But to tell the truth I confess I do not expect much from such quarrelsome disputants, who seek glory in tearing the ideas of others to pieces, not in making good their own. The business of a craftsman who deserves any credit is to build.‘lE3 Locke, of course, is the builder, par excellence, always with an eye on the usefulness of the structure as a whole.

V

My concluding argument for the Baconianism of the Essay is perhaps the most significant as well as the most obvious: Locke’s debt to the doctrine of the ‘idols’ in the Novum Organum. A persistent and fundamental theme of all Locke’s writings from his correspondence of 1659 onwards, no doubt due in part at least to his anthropological interests, is that reason has little part in determining men’s actual outlook and conduct. lE4 Much more important factors than reason in accounting for human behaviour are example, custom, fashion, opinion, authority, education, party, interest, passion, and superstition. Locke constantly reiterates in the Essay the idea that although men are born with a potential for rationality, the human understanding becomes biased and distorted because of these various environmental influences. lE5 The consequence of the blinding

lSz E, I, iii, 26 (I, 60). See Hans Aarsleff, ‘The state of nature and the nature of man in Locke’, in Yolton (ed.), John Locke; Problems and Perspectives, 264. Colie, op. cit., 241, suggests that Locke was perturbed by his critics for not understanding the essay form of the Essay, its essentially ‘experimental character’.

Is3 Locke to Van Limborch, I/I I October 1686, Amsterdam University Library MS. RK., Ba

25% For example: Locke to Tom [Thomas Westrowe?], 20 October 1659, BL. MS. Locke, c. 24, f. 182; First Tract on Government, in Abrams, op. cit., 129; Second Tract on Government, in Abrams, op. cit., 2x6-17; Essays orz the Law of Nature, in Von Leyden, op. cit., ~29, 135, 141-3; ‘Philanthropoy or the Christian Philosopher’s’ (1675), BL. MS. Locke, c. 27, f. 30; Journals, Tues., I 7 June x679, BL. MS. Locke, f. 3, IOI ; Mon. 16 May 1681, BL. MS. Locke, f. 5, 59; First Treatiseof Government, 5 58,gn; Second Treatiseof Government, § 13, 123, 124, 125, 128, 175,230.

Is5 A sample of such passages in E: I, ii, 27 (I, 24); iii, 22 (I, 40); iv, 23 (I, 57); II, xiii, 28 (I, 145); xxi, 70 (I, 232); xxviii, IO (I, 297); 12 (I, 300-1); xxxiii, 18 (I, 340-1); III, v, 8 (II, 37); v, 16 (II, 41-n); vi, 30 (II, 59); IV, iii, 6 (II, 146); iii, 20 (II, 157); xx, g (II, 302-3); 17-18 (II, 307-8).


of the individual’s perception of reality is that he acts irrationally. In great part men live by ignorance and error, develop faulty understandings, and are stunted in intellectual growth. They hold their views, beliefs, and doctrines on trust, on the basis of early and lasting social exposure, and not because they have ever thought about or critically examined them. Mankind suffers from ‘opiniatrety’, from the ‘floating of other men’s opinions’ in their brains, rather than using their reason to analyse and penetrate the pronouncements of such authorities.‘s6 Ideas become artificially and erroneously connected in the mind because of the pervasive influence of custom and fashion, the source of ‘most of the sympathies and antipathies observable in men . . .‘.l” Similarly, words are simply taken from the language of one’s social environment and used parrot-like without thought or knowledge of their meaning.‘** A feature of the syndrome of irrationality outlined by Locke, clearly resulting from his anthropological studies, is the existence of moral relativism.ra9 Fashion, esteem, and reputation seem to be the common measures of morality in society. Since what is praiseworthy among one people is deemed to be evil by another, and what is blameable is thought elsewhere to be virtuous, the goods of one country are the vices of another. Locke, himself, comes down firmly for a universal Christian morality, that should be recognized by all men if only they would reject false opinion and utilize their reason. 190 Finally, he is very sensitive to the situation of children in this total process of irrationality compounding irrationa1ity.l” While they are less corrupted by custom and received opinion, at the same time they are most susceptible to having their minds shaped by those in immediate authority over them, particularly their nurses, family servants, and parents, and these views become fixed through custom and education. Hence, those who care for children have a special responsibility not to instil in them superstitions, false ideas, and erroneous connexions of ideas.

Speculation about the intellectual antecedents and sources of Locke’s general point of view upon these matters brings us to the consideration of an important passage in Book I of the Essay. In explaining why men succumb to and seldom deviate from received opinion Locke remarks:

Is6 E, I, iv, 24 (I, 58-g). For ‘opinionatry’ also CU, § 16. Is7 E, II, xxxiii, 7 (I, 337). ls8 E, III, x, 4 (II, go-r). ‘WE, I, iii, IO, 14, 18 (I, 31-2, 35-6, 37); II, xxviii, 10-12 (I, 297-301). ‘NE, I, iii, I, 5-6, 13, 18 (I, 25-6, z&g, 33-5, 37-8); I, iv, 16-18 (I, 52-3); II, xxi, 56, 70

(I, 223, 232-3); II, xxviii, 8, II, 14-16 (I, 296, 297-300, 301-3); III, xi, 16 (II, 113); IV, iii, 18-20 (II, 154-7); IV, x, I-19 (II, 217-27); IV, xii, 8, II (II, 240, 242).

lgl E, I, ii, 27 (I, 23-4); I, iii, 22-5 (I, 40-2); II, xxxiii, 8 (I, 337-8); IV, xx, g (II, 302).


7 It is easy to imagine how, by these means, it comes to pass that men worship the idols that have been set up in their minds, grow fond of the notions they have been long acquainted with there, and stamp the characters of divinity upon absurdities and errors, become zealous votaries to bulls and monkeys, and contend too, fight and die in defence of their opinions.l”

The reference seems to be to Bacon’s famous doctrine of the idols. From what has been suggested previously about the Baconian character of the Essay as a whole, it seems safe to assume that this is another Baconian feature of Locke’s thought, moreover one that is given appreciable attention and emphasis throughout the Essay and other writings.

Therefore, in order to establish the nature of the relationship between this notion of Locke and the ideas of Bacon, the latter’s doctrine of the idols will be summarized briefly. After discussing in The Advancement of

Learning (I 605) what he calls ‘vanities’ and ‘peccant humours’ that affect the intellect, Bacon introduces his conception of the ‘idola’ or idols: ‘But lastly, there is yet a much more important and profound kind of fallacies in the mind of man, which I find not observed or inquired at all, and think good to place here, as that which of all others appertaineth most to rectify judgment. . . .‘lg3 The first such fallacy he describes consists of the false appearances imposed upon the individual by his own nature and customs, ‘the caves of our own complexions and customs’,1g4 in a succinct reference to Plato. The second error results from the false appearances imposed upon us by words. In a later passage Bacon stresses the role of habit and custom in determining the operations of the mind, listing those factors that alter and influence the intellect, affect the will and appetite, and shape one’s behaviour: custom, exercise, habit, education, example, imitation, emulation, company, friends, reproof, exhor- tation, fame, laws, books, studies.lg5

These early ideas are welded together and expounded in the doctrine of the four idols of the mind that is definitively presented in the Novum Organum of 1620. The idols are primarily treated in aphorisms XXXIX through LXVIII of Book I of the work, although they receive some general consideration in subsequent aphorisms. The idols, those fallacies and errors that beset the mind and corrupt and distort its perception of things and activities, are four in number: idols of the tribe, idols of the cave, idols of the marketplace, idols of the theatre. In the later ‘Plan of the Work’ of

lg2 E, I, iii, 26 (I, 42). lg3 AL, 132.

lg4 AL, 134. lg5 AL, 172.

2% Baconian Character of Locke’s Essay 79

The Great Instauration he specifies that the idols are either ‘innate’ or ‘adventitious’.1g6 Innate idols are those that are ‘inherent in the very nature of the intellect’, and apparently comprehend the idols of the tribe, the cave, and the marketplace. The idols of the theatre are adventitious, coming ‘into the mind from without; namely either from the doctrines and sects of philosophers, or from perverse rules of demonstration’.

In the Novum Organum each of the four idols is dealt with in turn. The idols of the tribe ‘have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men’.“’ They are many in number and include the tendency of the human understanding to presuppose more order and regularity in nature than actually exists, to neglect any evidence that might negate an opinion once held, to be moved by whatever strikes the intellect simultaneously and suddenly, to be prone to error as a result of the restless search for final causes, and to rely far too much on the senses alone, unaided by instruments and experimentation. Moreover, as Bacon puts it: ‘The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections. . . .‘lg8 The intellect tends to be biased and distorted by the will and the affections of the individual; for example, what one wishes or wants affects what one perceives and believes. To a great extent one’s perception of reality is conditioned by his hopes, fears, pride, and superstitions. This brings us to the idols of the cave that arise from the ‘peculiar constitution, mental or bodily, of each individual’, and also from ‘education, habit, and accident’.l” They are fallacies whose source is individual physiology, education, social intercourse, reading, authority of those esteemed and admired, and one’s state of mind at any given time. As a consequence of these determinants, individuals become especially attached to certain ideas, theories, and speculations that influence their outlooks and actions. Some individuals tend to emphasize the similarities among things; others, the differences. Some love antiquity, others side with the moderns; but few are able to steer a middle course, giving to each its due. Idols of the cave ‘grow for the most part either out of the predominance of a favourite subject, or out of an excessive tendency to compare or to distinguish, or out of partiality for particular ages, or out of the largeness or minuteness of the objects con- templated’.z00 Under the category of the idols of the marketplace are

lg6 GI, 27.

x91 NO, XLI. lg8 NO, XLIX. lg9 NO, LIII. 2oo NO, LVIII.

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included fallacies and errors resulting from the use of language in human intercourse. Men are prone to use words that have no actual referrent in reality, the objects of which are non-existent, mere fancies of the imagina- tion. Often the names of objects are confused and ill-defined. Hence, Bacon argues, science and philosophy have been imperilled, and frequently disputes among learned men are in fact no more substantial than quarrels over words that might be avoided by initial attempts at precise usage. Idols of the theatre are errors flowing from the distortion of the understanding by philosophic systems and theories and fallacious modes of demonstration, usually accepted upon the basis of authority and without rational analysis. Sects in philosophy and theology often flourish and possess wide influence because of this human proclivity. A prime example is Aristotelianism, as it has been developed by the scholastics, a system of thought that has seldom if ever been put to rigorous, critical test. Further- more, theological and poetic ideas are often introduced into philosophy, thereby corrupting it. Finally on the basis of too few experiments men are prone to arrive erroneously at the most broad and sweeping empirical generalizations.

If this summary indicates that much of Locke’s account of the sources of error of the human understanding seems to have been inspired by Bacon’s doctrine of the idols, the remedy for the universal malady afflicting mankind prescribed in the Essay also seems to parallel the therapy outlined in the .hfovum Organum. Bacon’s remedy for the idols is twofold. 201 The first is the ‘formation of ideas and axioms by true induction’; and the second is to identify the idols, in other words to become aware of them and knowledgeable about them and how they affect the understanding, a procedure he later refers to as ‘the expurgation of the intellect’.202 At the end of his treatment his meaning of expurgation or purification is clarified :

So much concerning the several classes of Idols, and their equipage: all of which must be renounced and put away with a fixed and solemn determination, and the understanding thoroughly freed and cleansed; the entrance into the kingdom of man, founded on the sciences, being not much other than the entrance into the kingdom of heaven, where-into none may enter except as a little child.‘03

Basic to these thoughts is the idea of the mind as tabula rusa. The intellect can only be cleansed because in infancy it is, to use Bacon’s words, ‘like a

201 Jvo, XL. *” Cl, ‘Plan of the Work’, 27. 203 NO, LXVIII.

The Baaonian Character of Locke’s Essay 81

fair sheet of paper with no writing on it’, strikingly similar to Locke’s well-known description of the mind at birth as, ‘white paper void of all characters’.204 In much the same way, Locke with his notion of the mind as tabuh rusa, also refers to the purity and innocence of the child’s intellect.‘05 As early as the sixteen-sixties he writes of the ‘still fresh minds of the young’.2o6 In Drafts A and B of the Essay in passages that became part of the published version, he mentions children’s ‘unwary as well as unbiased understandingsy2” and the fact that ‘children, idiots, savages, and illiterate people, being of all others the least corrupted by custom or borrowed opinions; learning and education having not cast their native thoughts into new moulds, nor by super-inducing foreign and studied doctrines confounded those fair characters nature had written there . . .‘.208 For these reasons Locke warns his readers against the use of servants in bringing up children, servants who might corrupt the un- tainted minds of their wards,20g a caution he repeats in Some Thoughts concerning Education. ‘lo Locke like Bacon, consequently, is making every effort to convince his readers to expurgate or purify their intellects of the false notions they have acquired since their childhood so that they can act as rational human beings.

His remedy for the errors and distortions besetting the understanding follows Bacon’s twofold stipulation of self-awareness and self-knowledge and the use of a systematic method. The individual must become fully aware of the nature of the affliction and its causes. He must cast off the yoke of tradition, orthodoxy, and authority, and adopt a basic questioning attitude.211 In order to forward this enterprise, Locke proposes a systematic mode of procedure, a rigorous method of analysing language and the propositions of which opinions and doctrines are composed. First, he expounds five ‘remedies’, the word is his, for ‘defects of speech’, that if followed might resolve much of the world’s discord.2’2 Second, he provides

*04 GZ, ‘Plan of the Work’, 26-7; E, II, i, I (I, 77). so5 Cf. Bacon’s position with Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, g 120: ‘The native

and untaught Suggestions of inquisitve Children, do often offer things, that may set a considering Man’s Thoughts on work. And I think there is frequently more to be learn’d from the unexpected Questions of a Child, than the Discourses of Men, who talk in a road, according to the Notions they have borrowed, and the Prejudices of their Education.’

“s Essays OR the Law of .Nature, in Von Leyden, op. cit., 143. “’ Draft A, $ 42; E, IV, xx, g (II, 302) ; and E, iii, 22 (I, 40), where Locke writes of the ‘as

yet, unprejudiced understanding’ of children. so8 Draft B, § 13; E, I, ii, 27 (I, 24). Also cf. Draft B, § IO, with E, I, iii, 25 (I, 41). so9 E, II, xxxiii, 8-10 (I, 337-g). 2’o Some Thoughts concerning Education, g 19, 57-g. ‘I1 E, IV, xx, 14, 17-18 (II, 296-301, 307-g). s’s E, III, xi, a27 (II, 109-20).

a2 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

his readers with a technique of assessing the degrees of probability of the constituent propositions of doctrines and opinions, and the principles for guiding the examination of conflicting testimony concerning matters of fact.” 3 Received hypotheses, pronouncements of authority, opinions sanctioned by fashion and particular interests should be analysed by employing both of these methods with an impartial, doubting intellect and a critical eye. In the process one must dedicate himself to and revere the truth, and reject that ‘principle of principles’ of masters and teachers throughout the ages: ‘that principles must not be questioned’.‘14 Only when all of these proposals are conscientiously followed can men begin to fulfil their God-given rational potential.

VI

In sum, the evidence is compelling that Locke is a Baconian, and that the Essay concerning Human Understanding is fundamentally Baconian, whether directly or indirectly derivative. Although he failed to acknowledge Bacon in his published writings, his contemporaries generally recognized that he was a dedicated Baconian protagonist in the intellectual conflict between the ancients and moderns, culminating in the Battle of the Books. Moreover, he collected and read numerous of Bacon’s works and those of his party, referred to him and his ideas in his notebooks, and was guided in scientific matters by two of the most prominent Baconians of the day, Boyle and Sydenham, with whom he had been intimately associated. The early unpublished fragment, De Arte Medica, largely a Baconian polemic, if not actually composed by Locke would seem to represent his position in 1669, and the two drafts of 167 I

of the Essay contain important Baconian elements. The final draft of the Essay, whatever else it may be, is clearly a Baconian work. The title itself, the essay form of the book, the style of writing, the stress upon the importance of intellectual co-operation, the consciousness of the novelty of the enterprise and of a devotion to truth all seem to be of unmistakable Baconian stamp. But more significant testimony of the Baconian imprint is Locke’s adoption of the mode of natural history, a popular genre for scientific writings by Baconians, with its emphasis upon observation, experience, experiment and the superiority of the senses over the intellect as a source of knowledge. In this connexion Baconianism was also probably

‘I3 E, IV, xv, 4-6 (II, 250-2); xvi, 5-14 ( II, 255-62). Also of relevance is Locke’s brief mention of ‘bottoming’, the analysis of questions at issue into basic propositions known to be true. See E, I, iii, 24 (I, 41); II, xiii, 28 (I, 145); IV, xvi, 4 (II, 255); xviii, 1 (II, 280); CU,

§ 43-4. ‘I4 E, I, iv, 25 (I, 59).


an initial stimulus to Locke’s continuing interest in comparative anthropology and the collection of diverse cultural data. Asecond major Baconian characteristic is Locke’s intention that the Essay should be practically useful. He wrote not simply for philosophic speculation, but for the guidance of his readers in their practical affairs, a purpose also reflected in his Baconian attacks upon the schoolmen and their systems and in his praise of practical men like technical innovators and statesmen. A final and perhaps most significant Baconian trait of the Essay appears to be its emphasis upon the nature of human error, prejudice, and bias and the means by which this universal malady of the understanding can be cor- rected, all of which seems to be a development of the doctrine of the idols in the Afovum Organurn.

Apart from considerations of historical accuracy and the correction of an extraordinary misreading of the record by commentators and historians of philosophy, is there any further value to demonstrating the Baconian pedigree of Locke’s philosophic thought? Perhaps, above all, the effort will intimate something commonly overlooked about the Essay.

The Baconian spirit of the book, aside from more substantive components, suggests that it was never written solely as a technical philosophic treatise to be read by the specialist, but that it is a living work. The passage of nearly three centuries has tended to obscure the fact that the Essay was addressed to and meant to be read by the ordinary educated reader of common sense. Just as its subject was the ordinary self so was its intended object the ordinary man of affairs, like the London pepper merchant writing from Sumatra in I 7 I 4 : ‘The Bible has the first Place in my Study, as teaching me the whole Compass of Duty. Mr Lock, who first taught me to distinguish between Words, and Things, has the next place.‘215 Locke was not writing so much for scholarly specialists as he was for practical men : gentry, merchants, administrators, professionals, and educated artisans. His words were part of the new philosophy that had ‘introduced so great a Correspondence between Men of Learning and Men of Busi- ness . . .‘.216 Locke hoped to improve these men, to persuade them to act to change themselves for the better and to create a society more habitable for rational beings. As Rosalie Colie has so aptly phrased it:

‘Is The remark of Joseph Collet, a London pepper merchant in Sumatra writing in 1714 to Richard Steele, quoted in Calhoun Winton, Sir Richard Steele. M.P. : the Later Career (Baltimore. London, 1970); 1-2-13. A number of men of letters, including Sterne, evidently shaied Collet’i view, according to Kenneth MacLean, John Lacke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1g36), v.

‘16 Wotton, op. cit., 353.


< . . . Locke’s entire philosophical enterprise including his examination of human understanding was directed to the better organization of man’s life in society.‘* l7 From this standpoint the Essay was not only a living work, but also a living political work. Perhaps Locke’s ‘liberalism’ was not unconnected with his Baconian roots.

York University, Toronto

“’ R. L. Colie, ‘John Locke and the Publication of the Private’, Philological QuarterJv, 45 (January 1966)~ 3.5.

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Wood, N. - The Baconian character of Locke's ‘essay’