Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, and Legacy: In Honour of G.A.J. Rogers (International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées)

STUDIES ON LOCKE: SOURCES, CONTEMPORARIES, AND LEGACY

´ ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDEES INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

197

STUDIES ON LOCKE: SOURCES, CONTEMPORARIES, AND LEGACY In Honour of G.A.J. Rogers Edited by

Sarah Hutton • Paul Schuurman

Board of Directors: Founding Editors: † † Paul Dibon and Richard H. Popkin Director: Sarah Hutton (University of Wales, Aberystwyth) Associate Directors: J.E. Force (University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA); C. Laursen (University of California, Riverside, USA); Editorial Board: M. Allen (Los Angeles); J.-R. Armogathe (Paris); J. Henry (Edinburgh); J.D. North (Oxford); M. Mulsow (New Brunswick); G. Paganini (Vercelli); J. Popkin (Lexington); G.A.J. Rogers (Keele); Th. Verbeek (Utrecht)

Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, and Legacy In Honour of G.A.J. Rogers Edited by

Sarah Hutton and

Paul Schuurman

123

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008927178

ISBN 978-1-4020-8324-2 (HB) ISBN 978-1-4020-8325-9 (e-book)

Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com

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Contents

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii John Cottingham Editors’ Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Sarah Hutton and Paul Schuurman List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii Abbreviations: Writings of Locke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix 1 Aspects of Stoicism in Locke’s Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Victor Nuovo

1

2 Hobbes, Locke and the State of Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Tom Sorell 3 The Sovereignty of the People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Stuart Brown 4 Locke’s Account of Abstract Ideas—Again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Michael Ayers 5 Descartes and Locke on the Nature of Matter: a Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Shigeyuki Aoki 6 Personal Identity and Human Mortality: Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz . . . . 89 Luc Foisneau 7 Locke and Leibniz on the Structure of Substance and Powers: The Metaphysics of Moral Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Martha Brandt Bolton 8 John Locke, Thomas Beconsall, and Filial Rebellion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Mark Goldie v

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9 Some Thoughts Concerning Ralph Cudworth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Sarah Hutton 10 Circles of Virtuosi and “Charity under Different Opinions”: The Crucible of Locke’s Last Writings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Luisa Simonutti 11 Vision in God and Thinking Matter: Locke’s Epistemological Agnosticism Used Against Malebranche and Stillingfleet . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Paul Schuurman 12 Pierre Coste, John Locke, and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury . . . . . . . . 195 John Milton 13 Toleration and its Place: A Study of Pierre Bayle in his Commentaire Philosophique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Ian Harris 14 Rousseau Juge de Locke or Reading Some Thoughts on Education ´ after Emile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Sylvana Tomaselli 15 Locke’s “Things Themselves” and Kant’s “Things in Themselves”: The Naturalistic Basis of Transcendental Idealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Yasuhiko Tomida List of Publications by G.A.J. Rogers∗ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

Foreword John Cottingham

In the anglophone philosophical world, there has, for some time, been a curious relationship between the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophical inquiry. Many philosophers working today virtually ignore the history of their subject, apparently regarding it as an antiquarian pursuit with little relevance to their “cutting-edge” research. Conversely, there are historians of philosophy who seldom if ever concern themselves with the intricate technical debates that fill the journals devoted to modern analytic philosophy. Both sides are surely the poorer for this strange bifurcation. For philosophy, like all parts of our intellectual culture, did not come into existence out of nowhere, but was shaped and nurtured by a long tradition; in uncovering the roots of that tradition we begin see current philosophical problems in a broader context and thereby enrich our understanding of their significance. This is surely part of the justification for the practice, in almost every university, of including elements from the history of philosophy as a basic part of the undergraduate curriculum. But understanding is enriched by looking forwards as well as backwards, which is why a good historian of philosophy will not just be concerned with uncovering ancient ideas, but will be constantly alert to how those ideas prefigure and anticipate later developments. By engaging in a dynamic dialogue with the past, we gain a fuller sense of who we now are, and in this sense the history of philosophy has a vital role to play in the “examined life”, by helping to develop that critical self-awareness which Socrates identified as the goal of all philosophical inquiry. For these, and many other reasons, the vigorous growth of scholarship in the history of philosophy in recent years is greatly to be welcomed, and, in Britain, G.A.J. Rogers has played a very significant part in fostering a climate favourable to such growth. It is therefore is a pleasure and a privilege for me to have been asked to write a short foreword to this volume honouring his work. As Chairman of the British Society for the History of Philosophy from 1991-5, I was able to see at first hand what a vital role John Rogers played in the work of the Society; its annual conferences and other activities not only kept the history of philosophy strongly alive in the UK, but strengthened a host of valuable links between British scholars and those working in Continental Europe, North America and the rest of the world. One great joy of working in the history of philosophy is its genuinely international dimension. The radical disparities of methodology and style, which still to a considerable extent vii

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divide contemporary “analytic” and “continental” practitioners seem to melt away once one goes back a century or more, so that when philosophers from diverse backgrounds leave behind Quine and Derrida, and sit down to hear papers on Kant or Descartes, they are able to tread common ground. The several different nationalities of the contributors to this volume testify to that catholicity in the study of history of philosophy, which is such a welcome contrast to the cliquishness found in some other areas of philosophical research. To expatiate on John Rogers’ own particular contribution to the history of ideas would greatly exceed the space allowed for a brief forward of this kind. He has, of course, made the early-modern period especially his own, and, within that period, the philosophy of Locke has been his abiding interest; all the papers in this collection reflect the first focus of interest, and many of them the second. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are periods of particular richness for our philosophical culture, not just because the ideas developed then laid the foundations for modernity, but because of the striking continuities that linked the ideas of the early-modern writers with those of their classical forebears. The period that followed the Renaissance had a peculiar intellectual richness, since its philosophers broke strikingly new ground while at the same time being steeped in the newly revived ideas of antiquity. With an ease and familiarity that has long since ceased to be possible for us moderns, they were able to work out their new ideas while drawing on the philosophical frameworks of Stoicism, Epicureanism, Platonism and Aristotelianism. That extraordinary fertility of early-modern thought, in its reference back in time as well as its prefiguring of the future, is, again, captured in many of the essays printed here. Another feature of the collection, which also reflects John Rogers’ own work, is the range of philosophical areas covered—political, religious, ethical, scientific, epistemological; in our own more fragmented philosophical culture, it is not without nostalgia that we look back on a period when philosophers like Locke could write seriously and systematically in so many branches of inquiry that have now become the preserve of specialists. A final feature of this volume which deserves mention, and which is also a fitting tribute to its honorand, is the meticulous precision and detail with which the various texts and sources are treated. Our modern academic environment is one of complex Byzantine struggles for the allocation of funding and resources, and in-fighting its professional corner the history of philosophy has strong ammunition in the high standards of scholarship for which its practitioners are rightly known. Of crucial importance in this connection has been the establishment of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy as a major international quarterly; this has been an invaluable scholarly vehicle for those working in the subject during the past two decades, and the role of John Rogers has of course been absolutely central here. Not only has his vision and administrative efficiency been vital from the early days of the launch of the journal, but also (as noted by Michael Ayers in his essay in this volume) many scholars have cause to thank John Rogers for the help and guidance they have received as a result of his editorial labours. Though the BJHP constitutes a continuing visible sign of John’s service to the history of philosophy, the present volume is a more special and particular tribute to his work, and I am sure that the

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reader will find, in the richness and variety of the papers gathered here, ample evidence of the flourishing current state of the subject, to which he has himself so signally contributed. University of Reading, England November 2007

John Cottingham

Editors’ Introduction Sarah Hutton and Paul Schuurman

This collection of new essays on John Locke (1632-1704) reflects the fact that he was very much a responsive philosopher. His groundbreaking work in epistemology, philosophy of science, political philosophy, theory of education and theology was produced in response to his predecessors and in friendly or polemical dialogue with contemporary thinkers. Locke, however, is a figure who is often studied in isolation from his contemporaries and in terms of his contribution to particular thematic developments in the history of philosophy and political thought. His legacy is fragmented by the separate disciplinary categories by which work is classified nowadays (epistemology, political thought, religious toleration and history of education) and his legacy is also divided by the chronological boundaries which separate seventeenth from eighteenth-century history. The present collection of essays views Locke not in isolation from his times, but alongside those thinkers to whom he responded, or who were engaged either directly with him or with the same sets of problems. Abandoning the traditional compartmentalization of his writings, we emphasise Locke’s links to his contemporaries and near contemporaries. A major emphasis of the collection is the relationship between Locke and seventeenth-century philosophers, Descartes, Hobbes, Cudworth, Bayle, Malebranche and Leibniz. Also represented here are members of his circle, like Pierre Coste and William Popple. And coverage is given to some of the early reactions to his philosophy, from the negative assessment of one of his earliest critics, Thomas Beconsall and the reception of aspects of his thought by two very different eighteenth-century thinkers, Rousseau and Kant. As Victor Nuovo reminds us, Locke was educated in the classics. Among classical philosophies, Stoicism is the one which appears to have strongest affinities with Locke’s philosophy. Nuovo’s opening essay examines the evidence for the impact of Stoicism on Locke’s thought. He identifies a number of characteristically Stoic themes in Locke’s philosophy (the relationship of God to nature, the origin of knowledge and, above all, moral rationalism). But he also shows areas where Locke differs fundamentally from the Stoics, such his theory of the law of nature, and his subordination of reason to revelation. He argues that although Stoic metaphysical and moral rationalism can be viewed as an instrument of modernization, Locke’s use of Stoicism was constrained by its Christian premises, and that this had the effect of reducing his foundational role in enlightenment thought. xi

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The philosopher who dominated the English philosophical landscape throughout his life was Thomas Hobbes. In the first of two essays on Locke’s political thought, Tom Sorell challenges the received view that Hobbes and Locke differ deeply and systematically, and, indeed that Locke formulated his concept of the State of Nature in opposition to Hobbes. With an acknowledgement to Peter Laslett he suggests that the likely target for Locke in Two Treatises, was Robert Filmer. He goes on to discuss difficulties in Hobbes and Locke’s divergent conceptions of the state of nature, arguing that Locke’s conception of the state of nature as the state of perfect freedom is contradictory, and that there is something utopian about of Locke’s view that reasonableness is natural. Stuart Brown discusses the development of the consent theory of government (the commonplace “that governments derive their rightful powers from the people”) as a European constitutional idea, by examining the specific seventeenth-century contribution to its history. As background to Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, he uses the examples of the Jesuit, Juan de Mariana and the Levellers, to illustrate how “the myth of the people’s consent” developed into political theory of contract theory of government. Richard Overton, who argued that “power is a property of individuals,” was one of the first to try to formulate a philosophical basis for the theory. Locke’s development of contract theory of government in Two Treatises makes a further distinction between the consent every individual must give in order to join political society and “the majority consent of the people as a corporate body.” His emphasis on the distributive character of the sovereign power of the people is democratic a modern sense. Michael Ayers focuses on a specific element of Locke’s epistemology: abstract ideas. His essay is a reply to two critical articles by Jonathan Walmsley in which Ayers crisply defends his original view about Lockean abstraction as partial consideration against Walmsley’s rival interpretation of abstraction as mental separation. Ayers argues that to have the abstract idea of a triangle actually before the mind, is to perceive or imagine a particular or determinate triangle, while considering it simply as triangle. Ayers extends his discussion to the earlier drafts of Locke’s Essay , and considers possible sources for Locke’s account of abstract ideas, most notably the Port-Royal Logic by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole. Alongside Hobbes, the other shaping influence on seventeenth-century philosophy in Locke’s youth, was Ren´e Descartes. Shigeyuki Aoki’s essay deals with an aspect of the relationship of Locke’s philosophy to Descartes’, Locke’s rejection of the Cartesian conception of matter. Aoki focuses on a particular aspect of Locke’s case against Descartes that has been overlooked, namely Descartes’ identification of extension with the essence of matter. He shows how Locke used a combination of a priori and a posteriori arguments to reject Descartes’ identification of matter with extension, and argues that Locke’s persitent attack on various aspects of the Cartesian system amounted to an alternative empiricist philosophy that provided an epistemological basis for the development of natural science. Although Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s attempt to engage Locke in philosophical dialogue was ultimately frustrated, his Nouveaux Essais sur l’Entendement Humain, with its titular echo of Locke’s Essay could be viewed as the dialogue he would like

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to have had with Locke. In the first of two essays on Locke and Leibniz, Martha Brandt Bolton compares Locke and Leibniz’s conceptions of powers and potentialities in substances. In a detailed analysis she argues that they agreed that “causality, action, and power cannot exist without a more complex structure that constitutes thinking.” But, insofar as Locke admits the possibility of the spirit existing without thinking, for example during sleep, there is the problem of how, and by what power, it can be brought back into thinking, since the state of thoughtless sleep seems to deny the presence of the very power that is supposed to end the state of non-thinking. Against Locke, Leibniz’s argues “(a) activity is essential to a substance; a substance is never without perceptions, although it is often unaware of them; (b) everything that occurs in a substance comes to it from its own depths; that is, a substance has no “passive” powers, if this means that it has modifications caused by another (created) substance; (c) in nature, there are not even bare inactive faculties, let alone inactive substances.” Although she appreciates Locke’s stand on the structure of substance as “sober, well-considered,” she concludes that Leibniz’s account can do something that Locke cannot: it can “explain how a substance underwrites and unites several powers, and specifically active powers.” Luc Foisneau discusses the theory of personal identity in Locke and Leibniz, demonstrating that Hobbes is an important point de rep`ere for both. He credits Locke with presenting the modern problem of personal identity through his conjunction of the theory of the person and the theory of identity. For his part, it was in response to Locke that Leibniz developed his ideas on the principle of individuation and on the basis of the identity of the human person. Foisneau discusses ways in which Hobbes may be said to provide some of the basis for Locke’s theory. Locke’s definition of the person as a juridical term is, he argues, indebted to Hobbes’s definition of the natural person. Leibniz, on the other hand, made self-conscious use of Hobbes when, in Nouveaux Essais sur l’entendement humain, he called into question Locke’s radical distinction between personal identity founded on unity of consciousness, and physical identity founded on the unity of substance. Notwithstanding their difference on the identity of the moral person, Hobbes’s concept of a natural person with its close coupling of the natural and the moral dimensions of human personality, may be said to anticipate the objections which Leibniz made against Locke. Mark Goldie introduces the first published critique of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Hitherto overlooked, this was published in 1698 in The Grounds and Foundation of Natural Religion by the sometime Oxford fellow and Anglican clergyman, Thomas Beconsall. The critique is remarkable, first for its early date (as critiques of Two Treatises go) and because, notwithstanding the anonymity of Locke’s book, Beconsall recognised the link with Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Beconsall focuses on law of nature. Although he convicts Locke of irreligiousness, his critique does not register the theological concerns raised by Stillingfleet. In defence of patriarchalism, Beconsall charged Locke with subverting the authority of fathers over sons and took Locke to be an advocate of uncontrolled emigration which, he claimed would have economically debilitating consequences.

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Differences in epistemology and philosophical style have resulted in Cambridge Platonists and Locke being treated as mutually antithetical. Taking as her starting point Locke’s highly positive evaluation of Ralph Cudworth in Some Thoughts concerning Education, Sarah Hutton argues that Cudworth’s philosophical horizons were more modern than might first appear from the space he devotes to ancient philosophy in his work. The essay focuses on Cudworth’s interpretation of Protagoras, and argues that, beneath its classical exterior, there is more affinity between Locke and Cudworth than is normally acknowledged. Locke was a sociable philosopher. As Luisa Simonutti reminds us, he enjoyed participating in discussion groups or intellectual salons (such as the “Lantern” group at the house of his friend, Benjamin Furly). He was also responsible for founding some of his own, such as the so-called “Dry Club”, taking care to set out rules for their governance. The purpose of such regulation was to ensure the free exchange of ideas, so that, they might serve as fora for exploring topical issues. She argues that religious issues, especially Socinianism, were a major subject of discussion in the with William Popple and members of the “Dry Club”. Since Locke’s views can be shown to anticipate his late writings on the same issues, it is likely that these discussions were an important stimulus for developing his ideas. The discussions continued even after Locke moved to live at the home of Lady Masham during his final years. As the hub of correspondence and calling point for friends and acquaintances, her home constituted a “virtual salon” of Lockeans. In his paper on Locke and Malebranche, Paul Schuurman shows how Locke’s epistemological agnosticism about God, mind and matter drove both his attack on Malebranche’s Vision in God and his defence of the possibility of thinking matter against Stillingfleet. Focusing on the Locke’s argumentative strategies he argues that there are similarities between these debates. In addition, there may be a direct connection between the content of Locke’s arguments in favour of the possibility of thinking matter and of his arguments against the Vision in God. For Malebranche there was a clear connection between these two issues: denial of the Vision in God opens the door to agnosticism about the essence of matter, which in its turn leads to the error about thinking matter. Locke denied the Vision in God and he was agnostic about the essence of matter and he refused to deny the possibility of thinking matter. As the French translator of Locke’s Essay Pierre Coste was a key transmitter of Locke’s philosophy to a European audience. John Milton’s essay examines the uneasy relationship between Locke and his translator which is revealed in Coste’s correspondence after Locke’s death. Coste’s closeness to Locke (they did after all live in the same household during Locke’s final years), did not, it seems amount to friendship. Although Coste wrote a very flattering “Eloge” immediately after Locke’s death, John Milton demonstrates that his private view of Locke was far from amicable, which may explain why he never honoured the deathbed request by Locke that he translate one of his other works after his death. This work is not named in Coste’s account, but Milton advances a plausible hypothesis that the book in question was Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. The subject of Ian Harris’s paper is, Pierre Bayle the protestant champion of religious toleration who is often compared to Locke. Focusing chiefly on Bayle’s

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Commentaire philosophique Harris argues that Bayle’s the view of liberty of conscience was shaped by his metaphysical beliefs. Among these, he draws attention to the importance of epistemological certainty as the ground of toleration, thereby reversing the usual emphasis on Bayle’s scepticism. He also highlights the positive role Bayle accords the state as protector of religion and morality. He argues that this difference from Locke may be accounted for in terms of Bayle’s different personal experience of the institutions of church and state as a Hugenot in France and in exile. Jean Jacques Rousseau aspired to be a thorough Lockean, and his early educational writings clearly show a debt to Locke, in spite of his criticisms of him. Nevertheless, Rousseau dismissive of Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education. Refuses to take him at his word, Sylvana Tomaselli demonstrates the influence of Locke on Rousseau’s philosophy of education in less obvious ways. By focusing on the moral and political purpose of Some Thoughts she shows similarities between them, in spite of differences. Notwithstanding his denials, she argues that “Rousseau wrote with Locke in hand.” A less obvious dimension of Locke’s European legacy was his impact on Kant, explored here by Yasuhiko Tomida who examines the parallels and differences between “things themselves”, “affections”, and sensible “ideas” in Locke and Kant’s “things in themselves”, “affections” and sensible “representations”. For Locke, sensible ideas are the product of affections that are caused by corpuscular “things in themselves”. Similarly, in Kant’s framework sensible representations are given to us by things in themselves that affect our senses; but it makes no sense to talk about these unknown things in themselves as being in space, hence there can be no causal relation between things in themselves and our representations. Yet Tomida makes a convincing case for the profundity of Kant’s debt to Locke by focusing on Kant’s admission of similarities between Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities and his own distinction between space and all other modifications of body (the former being the subjective condition for the latter), including both primary and secondary qualities. Broadly speaking, by setting Locke’s thought in the context within which it was produced, the essays presented in this volume seek to give a rounded picture of his contribution to the intellectual culture of his time. However, the collection as a whole aspires to be neither comprehensive in its coverage of Locke and his immediate context, nor uniform in its treatment of the various topics discussed. Rather, the particular topics have been selected as representative of Locke’s philosophy and its context. Different approaches highlight different features of his thought and intellectual milieu, which, when taken together will, we hope, serve to complement one another. Furthermore, in their central focus on Locke and their diversity of style and content, these essays are designed to be a fitting tribute to John Rogers, to whose work Locke is central, and who has done so much to promote the cause of the history of philosophy in its widest sense.1

1 The editors wish to thank Ferdinand Delcker (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) for his assistance in preparing this volume.

List of Contributors

Shigeyuki Aoki is Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at Nagoya University. After spending one year at Keele University, were he studied under the supervision of John Rogers, he recently finished a dissertation on Locke’s theory of ideas at Kyoto University. Michael Ayers is Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Throughout his career he has published both in systematic philosophy and on its history. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and member of Academia Europaea. Martha Brandt Bolton is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. She is the author of articles on a variety of topics in early modern philosophy including the epistemic and metaphysical doctrines of both Locke and Leibniz. Stuart Brown was Professor of Philosophy at the Open University where he is now an Emeritus Professor. He has published on the history of philosophy, especially on Leibniz. He was a founder and one-time chair of the British Society for the History of Philosophy. Luc Foisneau is a Senior Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He is the author of Hobbes et la toute-puissance de Dieu (2000) and he is the general editor of the Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century French Philosophers (2008). Mark Goldie teaches in the Faculty of History in the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Churchill College. He has published on British political, religious, and intellectual history, 1650-1750. These include a source collection, The Reception of Locke’s Politics, 6 vols (1999). Ian Harris lectures in intellectual, literary and political history in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Leicester. He is author of The Mind of John Locke (1994, 1998), and at present is working on Edmund Burke.

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Sarah Hutton holds a chair at Aberystwyth University and is director of the international Archives of the History of Ideas. Her publications include, Anne Conway . A Woman Philosopher (CUP 2004). She has also edited Ralph Cudworth’s Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (CUP 1996). J. R. Milton is Associate General Editor of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke, and Professor of the History of Philosophy at King’s College London. Victor Nuovo is Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Middlebury College and Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, Oxford. He is an editor of the Clarendon Locke Edition. Paul Schuurman is Lecturer at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, has published on Locke and Descartes, and is currently editing the Encyclopaedia of Locke and his Times and, with John Rogers, Locke’s Drafts for the Essay, vol. III for the Clarendon Locke Edition. Luisa Simonutti is Research Assistant for the National Research Council, Istituto per la Storia del Pensiero Filosofico e Scientifico Moderno (Milan) and Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy,University of Ferrara. She has published on early modern (political) philosophy. Tom Sorell is John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics in the Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham. He has published on Hobbes, Descartes, moral theory and various topics in applied ethics. Sylvana Tomaselli is a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. She has written on Montesquieu, Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft. With John Rogers, she co-edited The Philosophical Canon in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Essays in Honour of John W. Yolton (1996). Yasuhiko Tomida is Professor of Philosophy at Kyoto University. He has publishing extensively on Locke and his two most recent books are The Lost Paradigm of the Theory of Ideas (Hildesheim: Olms, 2007) and Quine, Rorty, Locke (Hildesheim: Olms, 2007).

Abbreviations: Writings of Locke

Correspondence Drafts

The Correspondence of John Locke, 9 vols., ed. E.S. de Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976—) Drafts for the Essay concerning Human Understanding, vol. I, ed. Peter Nidditch and G.A.J. Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)

ELN

Essay on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leiden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)

Essay

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)

LL

The Library of John Locke, compiled by J. Harrison and Peter Laslett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul, ed. Arthur W. Wainwright (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)

Paraphrase and Notes Reasonableness STCE TOL Two Treatises

Works WR

The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. J.C. HigginsBiddle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) Some Thoughts concerning Education, eds John W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Epistola de Tolerantia, ed. Raymond Klibansky (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (second edition corrected (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) The Works of John Locke (London: Thomas Tegg, 1823; repr. Aalen: Scientia, 1963) Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002)

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Chapter 1

Aspects of Stoicism in Locke’s Philosophy Victor Nuovo

Introduction To begin with, Locke was not a Stoic philosopher, at least not a self-conscious one. There is no evidence that he made any attempt to recover Stoic principles through a careful study of ancient sources that were available to him, one comparable to the study he made of the New Testament in search of the fundamental principles of the Christian Religion, or that, having once recovered Stoic principles, he endeavoured to conform his philosophical theories to them. Nevertheless, there are major aspects of Locke’s philosophy that appear characteristically Stoic and that, when brought clearly into view, make him seem almost but not quite a Stoic philosopher. Almost, but not quite: this may serve as a motto for my essay. Being not quite one thing suggests not just privation but being something else as well. This other may consist of contrary philosophical positions. No modern philosopher who was schooled in antiquity, as was Locke, could escape being somewhat eclectic. In Locke’s case, however, the other consisted of something very different, that was not philosophy, even though it was regarded by many who professed it as a form of wisdom, something which when reduced to dogma often seemed antithetical to philosophy generally and to Stoicism in particular, even while it claimed to represent what all philosophers knowingly or not aspired to. That significant other is Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures. Locke was a Christian, who was confident of his faith, and who held his Christian beliefs in higher regard than mere philosophical opinion, including his own. My essay falls into three parts. The first part will focus upon philosophical themes in Locke’s thought that are characteristically Stoic, in particular the following: God and nature, the origin of knowledge and the growth of reason, good and bad, the passions, the grounds of morality and the law of nature. Locke’s philosophical opinions concerning these themes will be compared with their Stoic archetypes, and, since it is not my intention to make him out to be a complete Stoic, special attention will be paid to those instances where Locke departs from Stoic orthodoxy: in his opinions about God and creation, about the origin of our ideas of good and bad and about moral obligation. However, these differences are far outweighed by Locke’s profound affinities with Stoic rationalism. Locke’s

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 1–25. and Legacy, 

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reliabilist and developmental theory of reason and cognition constitutes a revival of Stoic theory. To be sure, it is original and idiosyncratic, yet its pedigree remains. However, reason is, for Locke, not merely the indispensable and only means to our human pursuits of truth; it is also, and just for this reason, the divinely ordained key that provides us access to revelation, to things above reason, which without reason cannot be vouchsafed or understood. Locke’s Stoic rationalism, then, together with his departures from Stoic orthodoxy, sets the stage for the second part of this essay. Here my main purpose is to provide a clear and comprehensive account of Locke’s Christian worldview and the beliefs that it encompassed. The first part of this essay falls under the heading of Reason, and the second, Reason Enlarged. This should remind the reader of Locke’s grand assertion concerning reason and revelation, that reason is natural revelation and revelation reason enlarged.1 These are headings, of which Locke might have approved, for the terms, as he uses them, suggest not only a continuity between reason and revelation but a synthesis of them. The third part of this essay is more reflective and evaluative than expository. It adds nothing new to what precedes it. Some brief historical comments on the role of Stoicism with respect to Christianity and modernity may clarify my purpose. Locke’s encounter with Stoicism occurred at a critical moment in history when Stoic philosophy, long domesticated as part of the Christian intellectual tradition, re-emerged as an instrument of modernization. Metaphysical naturalism and moral autonomy, which are basic marks of modernity, have their roots in Stoicism. Stoic moral rationalism had a more immediate role to play. Christian scholars, most notable among them, Justus Lipsius and Hugo Grotius, employed it as a means to counteract sectarian dogmatism. Locke is loosely connected to this group of Christian humanists. In this connection, his role as a major founder of liberal Protestantism, or indeed of liberal evangelicalism, becomes apparent. It is arguable that by joining reason to revelation Locke fashioned a momentous synthesis that is still a source of intellectual capital from which Christian philosophers may continue to draw. This is what, I think, Locke hoped for. On the other hand, it is arguable, from the standpoint of modernity and the Enlightenment, that the effect of this conjunction of reason and revelation was a fettering of reason and a diminishment of its potential. Accordingly, the

1 Essay IV. xix. 4, p.698: “Reason is natural Revelation, whereby the eternal Father of Light, the Fountain of all Knowledge communicated to Mankind that portion of Truth, which he has laid within the reach of their natural Faculties: Revelation is natural Reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by GOD immediately, which Reason vouches the Truth of, by the Testimony and Proofs it gives, that they come from GOD. So that he that takes away Reason, to make way for Revelation, puts out the Light of both, and does much what the same, as if he would perswade a Man to put out his Eyes the better to receive the remote Light of an invisible Star by a Telescope.”

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heading of this final section identifies two evaluative options: Reason Enlarged or Diminished?2 Before proceeding, I offer a brief account of the Stoic sources available to Locke. He owned numerous copies of the works of Cicero and Seneca.3 The former, although not a Stoic, was an important transmitter of Stoic ideas, and was sympathetic to many of them, especially ethical ones. Locke especially valued the latter’s De Officii , which offers a compendium of Panaetius’ moral doctrines. He also owned two editions of Epictetus’ Enchiridion, several copies of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and of Plutarch’s Moralia and Gellius’ Noctes Atticae.4 Hence he had immediate access to the main Latin and Greek sources. Among the Patristic transmitters of Stoic ideas, he owned copies of the works of Lactantius and Origen.5 Among more or less contemporary sources he owned an English translation of Guillaume Du Vair’s Moral Philosophy of the Stoicks and a Latin edition of Justus Lipsius’ De Constantia.6 Hugo Grotius’ De Jure belli ac pacis was a modern source of Stoic natural law theory.7 Manuscript sources show that Locke read extensively in Seneca and Cicero. One undated manuscript, in Locke’s hand, contains chronology of almost all of Cicero’s writings.8 Locke also owned a copy of the first edition of Spinoza’s posthumous works. The latter is arguably the most creative of modern Stoics.9 Locke’s earliest writings on the law of nature show that he consciously connected the doctrine of the law of nature to Stoic sources and adopted Stoic terminology in defining it.10

2 There is a third option: Locke’s achievement may be viewed as a corruption or profaning of revelation. Whether this is so is a question for theologians to consider and is beyond the scope of this essay, which is historical and philosophical.

LL; Cicero, items 711–720, 721a–q; Seneca: 2612–16, 2616a. In an early notebook, Locke made extensive notes from Seneca’s De Ira, especially Bk. III (there are 22 citations), plus several from Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, MS Locke e.6, fos. 7, 8, 9, 10.

3

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (henceforward DL) 2 copies, LL 969, 970; Plutarch, Moralia 2356–58, 2358a–b, 2359, 2360.; Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 4 copies, 1231, 1232, 1232a–b.

4

5

Lactantius, LL, 1651, 1651a; Origen: LL, 2140.

6

Du Vair, LL, 1003d; Lipsius, LL, 1763.

7

Grotius, De Jure, 2 copies, LL, 1329, 1329a.

8

“Ciceronis Scripta secundum ordinem temporis digesta,” MS Locke c. 31, fos. 139–46.

Susan James, “Spinoza the Stoic,” in The Rise of Modern Philosophy, ed.Tom Sorell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 289–314; also Paul Kristeller, “Stoic and Neoplatonic Sources of Spinoza’s Ethics,” History of European Ideas 5: 1–15. See A.A. Long, “Stoicism in the Philosophical Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 365–92. Long cautions that Spinoza should be regarded as at best a partial Stoic and not at all as a self-conscious one. 9

10

ELN 108f.

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Reason God and Nature Stoicism is a sort of naturalism, although the particular variety of naturalism that it espouses differs fundamentally from modern naturalism. The Stoics conceived of nature as a finite unified system, a living body that manifests not only intelligence but also design. It exists self-contained in an infinite void of space. Stoics admit two principles of nature: an active and a passive one, the former indwelling and infusing the latter with its active intelligent substance (a sort of natura naturans), and causing the emergence of manifold beings organized in a totality that is a perfect expression of the intelligent creative agent operating within it.11 Stoics equate the active principle of nature with God, or Zeus, whose creative power is entirely subject to right reason, his primary attribute, by which he rules the universe and exercises providential care over everything in it. This personification of the divine seems to be more a matter of speaking than a real attribution. Stoics conceived of God as a material being. Thus it is represented as the creative fire (pur technikon), not to be confused with its familiar and grosser counterpart, or, derivatively, as spirit, a combination of rarefied fire and air that infuses everything and accounts for their expansive and contractive functions, and from whose substance all other grosser kinds of matter and material things proceed and are vivified, or again as pure energy or light endowed with the most sublimeintelligence.12 Finally, the Stoic God is not a transcendent being. It is not exalted and exists by itself only in those intervals between an infinitude of world cycles, when the process of generation has been reversed and the manifold world is returned to its primitive inchoate state, in which the active principle remains indwelling.13 Locke’s God, by way of contrast, is a transcendent person, who created the world out of nothing at a particular moment in time, not by virtue of the necessity of his nature but according to his good pleasure. Thus, God’s actions are expressions not only of power, wisdom and goodness, which are not fully fathomable, but of his inscrutable will which endows all that he does with a transcendent authority that is supposed to be unlike anything in the world.14 The primary motive of Locke’s theology is biblical, that is, so far as the manifold representations of God in the Scriptures have been more or less refined by philosophical reflection, and codified A.A. Long, “The Logical Basis of Stoic Ethics,” Stoic Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 137. 11

12 A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley (eds.), The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) vol. I, § 44, 268–72; § 46, 274–79. Recently, John M. Cooper has argued that some Stoics, Chyrsippus in particular, have supposed God to be an indwelling immaterial body. “Stoic Autonomy,” in his Knowledge, Nature and the Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 204–46. esp. 220f.

Cicero, De natura deorum (hereafter ND) II, 118; Loeb Classical Library, 235. Hereafter all texts from Loeb Classical Library are abbreviated as LCL. 13

14 “Supposed,” because divine authority bears a striking resemblance to the authority and power of an absolute monarch.

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into Christian doctrines that are conveniently read into biblical texts by learned expositors. Yet, notwithstanding this, Locke did not think it inappropriate to substitute the term “Nature” for “God,” which he did without embarrassment, although rarely and only on suitable occasions, for example, when discoursing about aspects of natural existence that testify to the existence and attributes of God. In Essay I. iii. 3, he writes, “Nature, I confess, has put into Man a desire of Happiness, and an aversion to Misery: These indeed are innate practical Principles which (as practical Principles ought) do continue constantly to operate and influence all our Actions.”15 This practice of using the terms “nature” and “God” synonymously was not a new one for him; there are instances of it in one of his earliest writings, the so-called Essays on the Law of Nature. Here also it is an occasional practice. In one instance it is employed with a caution: Locke writes that “nature or (as I should say more correctly) God” could have created mankind differently.16 The reason for the caution is that a Christian monotheist and voluntarist like Locke would not want it to be thought that nature by virtue of some principle inherent in it could create itself or that, as creator, God is bound by some necessity to create the world just the way it is. If he had such scruples, which seems most likely, then why use the practice at all? The answer lies in the indispensability to Locke’s scheme of things of natural theology, and Stoic natural theology, as opposed to an Aristotelian variety, was for him the article of choice. Locke’s preference for Stoic natural theology is in no small way due to the important role that the doctrine of the law of nature plays in his moral and political theory, and to the Stoic derivation of this law from divine reason.17 No doubt it also had something to do with the way Stoic proofs linked natural history to theology, by attributing the admirable contrivances of nature to the intelligent design of a superior rational being, whose wisdom, power and goodness are evident from all his works.18 In his long chapter on the existence of God, Locke emphatically denies the materiality of God, yet, curiously, he also expresses indifference to the hypothesis, allowing its admissibility so long as God’s intelligence or cogitative nature was unequivocally and irrevocably affirmed. The variety of materialism he opposes in this chapter is not Stoic materialism, but Corpuscularism, which was the dominant

15

Locke, Essay, 67; see also Essay III. iii. 13, p. 415.

ELN, 199: Von Leyden notes that there are two manuscript versions of this remark: “natura vel (ut rectius dicam) Deus” and “natura (vel ut rectius dicam) Deus”; see also pp. 123, 137. Locke’s expression “natura vel Deus” means just the opposite of Spinoza’s “deus sive natura” and was composed by him before he could have become aware of Spinoza’s formula. Locke’s caution is reminiscent of Calvin’s remark, “I confess, of course, that it can be said reverently, provided that it proceeds from a reverent mind, that nature is God.” Institutes of the Christian Religion, I. v. 5, ed. J.T. MacNeill (Philadelphia, 1960), 1:58. 16

17

ELN, 109, 111.

A primary source of such arguments, well known to Locke, is Book II of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum. 18

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theory, or, as Locke styled it, “the Philosophy now in the World.”19 It served his purposes well, giving him a rhetorical advantage over the unnamed materialists he was zealous to refute. But as though to suggest that this paradigm is not the final truth about matter, Locke alludes in a veiled and cautious manner to another philosophical notion of primal matter and the origin of the visible world, one that he may have learned of from Isaac Newton: according to this hypothesis, primal matter is infinite space, a portion of which God made into the visible world by a process of thickening.20 Which brings us to the idea of God as an indwelling spirit. Locke conceived of God as sending forth from himself an ubiquitous creative divine Spirit capable of operating in all things, illuminating the minds of intelligent creatures, providing for their happiness and making available to them the opportunities as well as the means to achieve it, yet always maintaining its self-identity, never ceasing to be itself. The motto printed on the title page of the Essay expresses this sentiment. “As thou knowest not what is the way of the Spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the Womb of her that is with Child: even so thou knowest not the works of God, who maketh all things.”21 The scepticism expressed here should be taken in a reverential rather than in a dogmatic sense. Throughout his life, the idea of spirit fascinated Locke, and he attempted to comprehend its nature even while he admitted the immense difficulty of the task. The proposition that a creative spirit invigorates matter, which, when considered abstractly by itself, seems to be a shared principle between Locke and the Stoics, and although stated in different contexts, expresses the same abstract metaphysical principle. Locke’s thoughts about spirit present his interpreters with a confusing tangle of ideas, some drawn from Stoicism, for example, that there are enduring spiritual beings that reside in realms above the terrestrial sphere, who in their refined state are pure intelligences, and that the spiritual state is a corporeal one, at least for angels and the resurrected spiritual bodies of the saints, although not for God. Mention of the latter, of course, shows that Locke’s thoughts were intertwined with biblical cosmology and eschatology.22 Like the Stoics, Locke believed that the individual soul is a spiritual substance, and even though he did not hold that individual souls are portions of the divine spirit, he also admitted the difficulty of conceiving the creation out of nothing of a spiritual entity. Finally, like the Stoics, Locke believed that the individual soul is mortal, although the authority he cites for

19

Essay IV. x. 18, p. 629.

For what follows, see Essay IV. x. 13–19, pp. 625–30. The hypothesis and its source were identified by Pierre Coste, Locke’s sometime secretary and French translator; see Jonathan Bennett, “God and Matter in Locke: An Exposition of Essay 4.10” in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Christia Mercer and Eileen O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 180f. In §§ 18, 19 Locke also defends the doctrine of creation out of nothing. 20

21

Essay, title page, eds. 4 and 5 only; the text quoted is Ecclesiastes 11: 5.

On the idea of spirit during the Hellenistic age, see Kirsopp Lake, “The Holy Spirit,” in The Beginnings of Christianity, Part I, ed. F.J. Foakes-Jackson and Kirsopp Lake (London: Macmillan, 1933), 5: 97–111. The threads of thought, biblical and philosophical, popular and learned, that made up the tangle in Locke’s mind are carefully delineated here. 22

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this opinion is not some Stoic text but Genesis 2: 19.23 To say anything more on this theme here would be to introduce topics that will be properly treated in the next section of this essay.

Reason and the Origin and Growth of Knowledge Locke conceived of the place of a human individual in the world in the same way as the Stoics did. This becomes particularly clear when one compares their theories concerning the origin of knowledge and the growth of reason. The following summary offers a convenient account of Stoic opinion on these topics. The Stoics say: when a man is born, he has the controlling part of his soul like paper well prepared for writing on. On this he inscribes each of his conceptions. The first kind of inscription is that by way of the senses. For in sensing something as white, they have a memory of it when it has gone away. And when many memories of the same type have occurred, then we say that we have experience, since experience is a multitude of impressions similar in type. Of the conceptions, some occur naturally by means of the aforementioned modalities and without conscious effort, while others come about by our instruction and attention. These latter are called conceptions, but the former are preconceptions as well. Reason, for which we are called rational, is said to be completed [lit. “filled up’] from our preconceptions as well. A concept is an image in the mind of a rational animal; for when the image comes to the rational soul, it is called a concept, taking its name from the mind. For this reason, what comes to irrational animals are images only; while those which come to us and to the gods are generically images but specifically concepts.24

Although this text is not one Locke is likely to have read, its convenience as a basis of comparison makes its use irresistible. In the first place, Locke and the Stoics agree (1) that the original cognitive state of a newborn infant is, like a blank tablet, devoid of content.25 They agree also (2) that the senses are the first sources of cognitive content, whereby a thing (e.g. something white) inscribes its likeness on the mind, which the memory then retains;26 (3) that recurring sensations or tokens of like things fuse, by experience, into a

See Reasonableness, WR, 92f.; also pertinent are Locke’s reflections on the materiality/immateriality of the soul in “Adversaria Theologica 94,” MS Locke c. 42, pp. 32–3, WR, 20–30. The Stoic doctrine is that the individual soul is mortal, except in the case of those perfected in wisdom, but that the latter and the soul of the world persist throughout a particular world cycle; see DL, VII, 156–57; Plutarch, On Stoic Self-Contradictions, 1053, Moralia, LCL, Vol. XIII/2, p. 571f. 23

24 Aetius Placita, IV, 1–4, Doxographi Graeci, ed. Herman Diels (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1958); the translation, with one exception, is by R.J. Hankinson, “Stoic Epistemology,” Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, p. 62; translation of the first sentence of the fourth paragraph is taken from Long and Sedley (eds.), Hellenistic Philosophers, § 39E, 1: 238. 25

Essay II. i. 2, p. 104.

26

Essay II. i. 6, p. 106; also II. x, passim.

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type or preconception;27 (4) that the process is wholly natural and, with respect to the acquisition of content generally, passive;28 (5) but that the mind is also active, attending carefully to certain things and their qualities, and reflecting upon them, thereby transforming confused images into concepts (ennoiai);29 (6) that reason is a capacity that grows, and so it is said to be filled up or enlarged, until it reaches completion, that is, until it is operationally mature.30 Thus not only knowledge, but the capacity to reason also is the product of experience, and reason, as it grows or is enlarged, gains the ability to see the reasonableness of things that before it might not have expected could be so. Our text does not mention any other activities of mind than abstraction or the formation of general concepts, but other texts provide what is missing here, and once again, there is broad agreement. Thus the mind, when reflecting on its concepts, not only abstracts, but also combines, compares, adds and subtracts, fits them into propositions and hypotheses, from which it draws inferences, and so forth. For the sake of completeness, one may add to this list that Locke, like the Stoics, adhered to a causal theory of perception, and that the perception of a thing is the criterion of its existence.31 I have remarked that Locke and the Stoics are in agreement that the mind is generally passive as a receptor of ideas. (See above, item (3)). But there is a subtle difference between the two that must not be overlooked. If I understand them correctly, Stoics were more cognizant than was Locke that the acquisition of knowledge is always a natural or organic process, which does not always involve conscious effort, but in which the mind is never entirely passive. The Stoic idea of a cataleptic impression (katalˆeptikˆe phantasia) involves grasping or apprehending.32 Thus Locke defines perception, “the first faculty of the Mind,” as thinking or what the mind does with its ideas; the Stoics carry the process back one step further to the very acquisition of ideas.33 In this respect, they seem to be more consistent naturalists, a consequence, perhaps, of their belief that mind, as well as body, was a material composition. There is a notable difference between Locke and the Stoics with respect to terminology. He displays a casual indifference to Stoic terms like “phantasm” and 27 Essay II. ix. 8, p. 145. This is a particularly interesting passage, for Locke observes that in the minds of mature adults simple ideas are upon reception “alter’d by the Judgment, without our taking notice of it.” This, I think, approximates the Stoic idea of a preconception. 28

Essay II. i. 25; xii. 1, pp. 118, 163.

29

Essay II. xii. 1, p. 163.

30

Essay II. i. 20, 22, pp. 116–17.

31

Reason and reasoning are not “a priori and independent of events.” Rather for Stoics as well as for Locke, it may be said that “the primary contents of human rationality . . . are derived from direct acquaintance of empirical events.” A.A. Long, “The Harmonics of Stoic Virtue,” Stoic Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 206. 32

Here I follow R.J. Hankinson, “Stoic Epistemology,” 60, especially fn. 1.

Essay II. ix. 1, but see also II. ix. 2, p. 143), where Locke directs his readers to what they themselves do when they see or hear or think. 33

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“common notion,” yet this may have had less to do with any antipathy to Stoic epistemology than with the fact that the meaning of the terms had become obscure.34 This indifference to terminology probably does indicate that Locke had no professional interest in Stoic epistemology, with which he was surely acquainted, and whose affinities to his own thought he could not have failed to recognize, but he had no need to acknowledge this.

The Foundations of Morality and the Law of Nature In this section I treat a series of moral topics, or, better, a medley of them, for each of the themes considered here mixes with the rest to constitute Locke’s moral outlook. Here also my purpose is to clarify Locke’s more or less near Stoic affinities. Good and bad and indifferent: Stoic theory of value divides things into three classes: good, bad and indifferent.35 Stoics maintain that virtue is the only proper good. Virtue is a unitary state of being, or a unitary disposition to act that has multiple expressions, viz. the cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, courage and temperance. A virtue is a characteristic that is “transferred adverbially” to actions, for example, speaking truthfully or drinking sparingly.36 The opposite of virtue is vice, which comprises all actions and motives that are contrary to virtue as well as the unsettled character from which they proceed. Happiness is a concomitant state with virtue. Since virtue involves the perfection of reason, all the judgements of reason would be correct, that is, the virtuous individual or sage would be guided in all her judgements by right reason, and so would not be led astray by bad or debilitating passions. The sage would know that the fears and hopes and anxieties of those less perfect involve false judgements and so would not be affected by them. This perfect state is not passionless. Stoic theory allows for good passions as well as bad ones. A standard list of good passions (eupatheiai) mentions three: joy, caution and wishing.37 Indifferent things include all states, circumstances and events connected to an 34

Essay I. i. 8, p. 47.

35

The summary of Stoic moral opinions that is provided in this section is not original. It is very much dependent upon the expertise of a number of scholars, especially Michael Frede, Brad Inwood, A.A. Long and the notes in Long and Sedley’s The Hellenistic Philosophers. For details of their works on which I have relied see the notes and the bibliography. 36

Long and Sedley (eds.), Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:365.

DL VII, 116 (LCL 2: 221): these are rational states: elation of mind (as opposed to immediate vain or sensual pleasure); rational avoidance (as opposed to fear) and rational desire (as opposed to craving). See also Long and Sedley (eds.), Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:412, 419f. All three are arguably characteristics of Locke: the joy or pleasure of new learning and in general of rational pursuits (see Essay, Epistle to the Reader); Leo Strauss’s characterization of Locke as a cautious man surely is apt, even if his use of it is doubtful; see his Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 206f; Locke’s persistent desire for heaven was, at least as he understood it, a rational desire (Locke’s considered opinion about the power of choice asserts the capability of an individual to suspend immediate desire for a greater good, viz. the joy of heaven; see Essay II. xxi. 65–71, pp. 277–84. 37

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individual life that cannot either wholly or in part be brought under the hegemony of reason: these include physical states such as health, or socio-economic conditions, for example, one’s station in life, reputation, prosperity or wealth. Indifferent things also include actions that have no immediate moral bearing: whether I stand or sit, dine now or later, exercise or rest. Yet a distinction can be properly made among all of these between what is to be preferred and what is to be rejected: among the former, health, vigour, good reputation and regular exercise. The sage will always make the right judgement concerning these actions and pursuits. It is by extending ethical thought to such circumstances as these that Stoic ethics comes to embrace the common life, recommending appropriate actions or prescribing rules or laws of various generality. Of course, Stoics believe that we live in a world perfected by reason, so that it may be said that everything happens for the best and nothing happens by chance. Stoic determinism, however, is of a compatibilist variety. Events are not determined by an unbroken chain of causes and effects, but by a sequence of causes, among them, rational choice. Misfortune always offers to the individual the opportunity to respond; there is always something that is “up to us.”38 Locke’s theory of good and bad seems irreconcilably opposed to Stoicism. He traces our ideas of these principles to perceptions of pleasure and pain that often accompany our perceptions of things in or outside of the mind, and on account of which we judge these things to be good or bad. Good is whatever “is apt to cause or increase Pleasure, or diminish Pain in us, or to preserve us the possession of any other Good or absence of any Evil” and likewise, mutatis mutandis, for good and bad.39 Locke’s account of the origin of our ideas of good and bad was not meant as a mere description of how these common notions arise in experience. For, since the conjunction or super-addition of pleasure and pain with or to certain perceptions is divinely ordained and not just a natural consequence of a thing affecting us, there must be something divinely normative in the affects as well as in our judgements about them. Moreover, reflection reveals to us that pleasure and pain often accompany things that are by design beneficial to us, for example, heat and cold cause comfort or discomfort respectively in those very situations where they are beneficial or harmful to us, and thus they serve in these different capacities to preserve us in life.40 Hence, that there may be an alternation of the conjunction of pleasure and pain to the same perceived object that in the first instance is beneficial and in the second, harmful, should awaken the mind to the wisdom and goodness of the creator. There is an even higher truth to be learned from the inconstancy and impermanence of pleasure too often punctuated with pain. Beyond all this [viz. what serves the preservation of life], we may find another reason why God hath scattered up and down several degrees of Pleasure and Pain, in all the things that environ and affect us; and blended them together, in almost all that our Thoughts and Senses have to do with; that we finding imperfection, dissatisfaction, and want of complete

38

See Dorothea Frede, “Stoic Determinism,” The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, 189, 192ff.

39

Essay II. xx. 2, p. 229.

40

Essay II. vii. 3, p. 129.

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happiness, in all the Enjoyments which the Creatures can afford us, might be led to seek it in the enjoyment of him, with whom there is fullness of joy, and at whose right hand are pleasures forever more.41

Locke also allows that pleasure and pain are conjoined to moral actions and higher attitudes of mind. In an entry written in one of his notebooks, dated 1692, he comments on the varieties and degrees of pleasure that a rational being may enjoy. Pleasures of the mind or contemplation are to be preferred to those material or sensible pleasures, because they are more lasting. He observes that the sum of corporeal pleasures, including those that “modestie speaks not openly of,” take up no more than and probably less than a quarter of one’s time. And even these enjoyments are, as it were, surrounded by or embedded in the satisfactions of reflection. He then prescribes a better way for all whose “interest & businesse” in life is “happynesse.” The pleasures that are connected with giving food to a starving man, or to a friend, which give even greater pleasure, or saving the life of a child, in short, in doing good works of love and charity, yield a greater happiness, an “undecaying and uninterrupted” reward in heaven.42 Locke seems to have wanted to combine in a single perception of pleasure the satisfaction that a virtuous agent takes in doing good deeds, a joy that, according to Stoic theory, accrues to self-governing rational agents through their virtuous actions, with the consolation of the pilgrim Christian hoping for a heavenly reward, which is a consummate pleasure to which no earthly pleasure can compare. The result is a mismatch. A brief comment about public morality and the pleasure principle provides a useful conclusion to this discussion, for Locke supposed that public morality was motivated by pleasure and advantage. In one place in the Essay, he attributes the stability of public morality to the concurrence of virtue and public happiness. This too is divinely ordained, for God “by an inseparable connexion, joined Virtue with publick Happiness: and made the Practice thereof, necessary to the preservation of Society; and made visibly beneficia to all, with whom the Virtuous Man has to do,” so that virtue is everywhere praised, as are the rules of government, which are supposed to be expressions of virtue. Here private interest and public esteem join to form what Locke acknowledges, somewhat petulantly, is a most effective bond of civil society.43 The Passions: Locke’s theory of the passions follows after Stoic theory in one very important respect. He maintained that the passions are not mere emotions or impulses to action, but are judgements, or thoughts that something is good or bad and therefore is to be desired or avoided.44 These judgements represent the

41

Essay II. vii. 5, p. 130; see also II. xx. 1–3.

“Ethica,” MS Locke c. 42, p. 224, WR, p. 15f. Mention of an undecaying reward no doubt was intended to evoke Matt. 6: 20. 42 43

Essay I. iii. 6, p. 69.

On the Stoic theory of emotions as value judgements, see Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind (Oxford, 2000), ch. 2, pp. 29–54 and passim. 44

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coincidence of pleasure or pain with certain objects. Locke’s position on this theme is clearly stated in Essay II. xx. There, for example, he defines sorrow as “uneasiness of the mind, upon the thought of a Good lost” or of a “present Evil”; he observes that fear arises from “the thought of a future Evil likely to befall us”; he defines despair as “the thought of the unattainableness of any Good.” Love and hatred are also judgements of value with respect to things that please or displease us. Our love or hatred of an inanimate object is a function of their utility or disutility; love or hatred of sensitive living beings arises “from a consideration of their very Being, or Happiness.”45 Violent emotions were the effects of wrong judgements. Locke also supposed that madness arose from wrong judgement.46 Hence he maintained that the understanding must regulate desire by correcting its own misadventures and miscarriages.47 This practice applies not only to matters of individual morality, but to religion as well. His common charge that every man’s belief is his own orthodoxy is an instance of wrong judgement from which arise passions of pride or arrogance.48 For the most part, Locke’s thoughts about the passions appear to have been his own and not deliberately fashioned after Stoic models. Yet in one instance at least, he may have borrowed a definition. His definition of Anger: “uneasiness or discomposure of the Mind, upon the receipt of any Injury, with a present purpose of Revenge,” has classical, if not strictly Stoic, antecedents.49 Locke’s contention that the will is not an independent faculty or separate agency, distinct from the understanding, fits nicely here, and shows him to be in basic agreement with the Stoics, in contrast to Plato and Aristotle who claimed that the soul consisted of three parts, each with its distinct faculty, and with Augustine, who subscribed also to a doctrine of a will divided against itself.50 Accordingly, Locke adhered to an intellectualist view of voluntary actions. These are actions that follow the “order or command of the mind,” and hence are preceded by choice or judgements of good or bad, which are in turn determined by various passions, that is, by modifications of desire or uneasiness.51

45

Essay, p. 230f.

46

Essay II. xx. 13, p. 161.

Essay II. xxi. 62, p. 274f); also Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Paul Schuurman, (Diss., Keele, 2000), passim.

47 48

See, TOL, p. 58.

Essay II. xx. 12, p. 231. Seneca, de Ira, 2. 3. 4–5; see Richard Sorabji’s translation and discussion in his “Stoic First Movements in Christianity,” in Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations, ed. Stephen K. Strange and Jack Zupko (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); see also Seneca: Moral Essays, ed. John M. Cooper and J.F. Procop´e (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19, 20, fn. 8, 44. See also above fn. 3.

49

For a full exposition of these distinctions, see Richard Sorabji, op. cit., and Emotion and Peace of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 50

51 Essay II. xxi. 5, 28–30, 39, 54–5, 62; pp. 230, 248f, 257, 268f, 274f. Locke’s notion of uneasiness seems to fluctuate between the Stoic (or more precisely Senecan) idea of a “first movement of action” and a proper passion. On Stoic first movements, see Richard Sorabji, “Stoic First Movements in Christianity.” Locke follows a separate path from the Stoics in developing his theory of

1 Aspects of Stoicism in Locke’s Philosophy

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The Education of Children: Of all of Locke’s works, the one that shows the greatest Stoic affinities is Some Thoughts concerning Education. It is, therefore, assigned its own place in this essay. Stoic naturalism predominates throughout this work. Indeed, there is a prevailing secularity manifest in Locke’s thoughts that confronts the reader in the very first sentence. “A sound Mind in a sound Body, is a short, but full Description of a Happy State in this World.”52 The expression “A sound Mind . . . ” is from Juvenal, and in its context it may be read as recommending a self-governed life lived within the frame of divine providence. We may count it, then, as a Stoic idea. The love of heaven, however, does not go unmentioned in this work, and there are, as I shall point out, other signs that Locke has kept religious expectation alive in this work. Absent from it, however, is any consideration of evangelical themes: temptation, sin, repentance, grace and forgiveness.53 A mortal life, then, in Locke’s judgement, is something good in itself, and it provides sufficient opportunity for satisfaction and delight to warrant living it and not grieving over what it might have been. The purpose of education is to enable a child to achieve a state of rational selfcontrol, so that it may properly attend to the great business of life, which is virtue and wisdom.54 A sound body is not something good in itself, although it is a state to be preferred just because it allows freedom of action, that is, action according to nature. The proper means to achieve it produces not only health; rather they endow the whole child, mind and body, with a predisposition to fortitude, by requiring it to endure hardship, and temperance, by training it to resist desire.55 Such robust physical training is preparatory for that moment when it reaches the age of discretion, “when Reason comes to speak in them, and not Passion,” although even then a child’s education continues through reading and discourse.56 It is in connection with this early training that Locke acknowledges the Stoic affinities to his counsels: to discipline the body through austerities such as exposing it to cold; eating plain food, sparingly and only when hungry and not, as custom prescribes, at regular

free agency: whereas the Stoics attributed freedom only to the Sage, on account of the perfection of his reason, Locke’s account is more clinical and descriptive: an action is free if and only if the agent of the action has “has the Power of doing, or forbearing to do, according as the Mind shall chuse or direct.” Essay II. xxi. 10, p. 238. 52

Yolton & Yolton, p. 83, italics mine. By secularity, I mean not that religion is assigned no place in the education of children, but that the prospect of a happy and fulfilled mortal life is entertained, and that such a life involves the cultivation of reason and virtue. This is consistent with the claim Locke makes in The Reasonableness of Christianity that a mere mortal life is better than no being at all, and that God did nothing unjust in ordaining that Adam’s progeny, although innocent of his sin, should nevertheless inherit mortality, which counted for Adam as punishment but for his progeny as a natural state. See WR, p. 94. See Essay II. xxi 57, p. 271f, where Locke equates temptation with the effect on an individual of physical deprivation, disease and violent torture. 53 54

Ibid., p. 255.

55

Ibid., pp. 103, 175.

56

Ibid., p. 167. See also Seneca Moral Epistles, no. xciv, LCL, 3:42f.

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intervals; drinking “no more than Natural Thirst requires,” sleeping on a hard bed with the head uncovered even in winter and such like practices. He makes light of these affinities, but is nonetheless serious in his commendation of the practices.57 The discipline he prescribes is entirely according to nature. The recommended austerities are in no way intended to mortify the flesh, but to allow nature to exercise its proper discipline on the body, thereby ensuring as much as possible a sound body fit for a sound mind. Natural impulses are not to be suppressed, rather it is the corrupting influence of custom that is to be hindered from deforming a child in mind or body. Custom is often “soft and effeminate” and accordingly debilitating and enfeebling and dissolute. In contrast, nature’s discipline is always reasonable, and guaranteed to make one free, to be master of one’s self. The fault of custom lies in false judgements about what natural impulses might mean in a rational life, and rationality is clearly the intended goal of all of this.58 In the same way, with regard to the principles of behaviour, the goal in nurturing a child is to let nature be its guide by protecting it or weaning it from custom. Good nurturing requires that “every one’s Natural Genius” be allowed to reach its proper end. The gracefulness and beauty of natural manners, which are never forced or awkward, but “Genuine and Easie,” are contrasted with the affectations of fashion, which never grow in the “wild uncultivated Wast,” but emerge only in poorly cultivated “Garden-Plotts.”59 Reason also must be allowed to develop naturally or, one might say, autonomously, where it is guided by an unclouded perception of what is appropriate or fitting and not by the artificial constraints of the schools or social affectations.60 Locke’s prescription of parental roles is designed to fit the progress of a child from animality, when it is guided merely by the natural impulses of self love, to rational personality. During childhood an individual is subject to the absolute rule of its parents, who in turn are subject to restrictions in their exercise of it which are consistent with natural experience and that follow from a developmental process that is consistent with nature generally and with the nature of the individual. Most importantly, parents must for the most part avoid harsh and violent measures, “I am apt to think that great Severity of Punishment does but very little Good; nay, great Harm in Education: And . . . Ceteribus paribus, those Children, who have been most chastised, seldom make the best Men.” The “Fear and Awe” of Parental power that holds sway when a child is very young and lacking judgement must give way, as its rational capacities develop, to “Love and Friendship,” which joined to a cultivated virtue and a sense of honour guarantee a sure result.61 Locke allows one notable exception to this. Severe measures must be employed to counteract early signs of injustice in a child’s behaviour towards others, and to counteract obstinacy and 57

Locke, op. cit., 87.

58

Ibid., pp. 90, 105.

59

Ibid., pp. 122f.

60

Ibid., p. 128.

61

Ibid., pp. 111, 115. 162.

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rebelliousness. The aim in all such discipline is supposed to predispose the child towards justice and liberality.62 As a means of cultivating virtue in a child, Locke recommends that parents employ a system of rewards and punishments, the most effective of which is praise or blame. The goal of such discipline is to instill in a child a sense of honor and disgrace, to “relish” the one and to fear the latter.63 These are characteristics of a secular morality, which Locke elsewhere demeans.64 Yet, in another place, he makes it very clear that the true foundation of virtue rests upon “a true Notion of God,” which “ought very early to be imprinted” on a child’s mind, and accompanying this a love and reverence for God and a belief that God governs all things. Likewise, Locke prescribes that children learn by heart the Lord’s Prayer, the ecumenical creeds and the Ten Commandments. Finally, consistent with the practice of enlarging a child’s reason by cultivating curiosity in it, Locke recommends reading the Bible as the surest way to instill in it a proper notion of spirit.65 The Law of Nature: The classical theory of the law of nature has roots in Stoic theology and anthropology. Gods and men are united in a commonwealth of reason. Right reason, which pervades all things, may be personified as Zeus, the Lord and Ruler of the universe. Yet since it is this same reason that is the ruling principle of every rational being, reason rules not theonomously from above but autonomously from within. Zeus is not a superior being, which is what Locke believed, but is nature herself, a self-governing totality. Every rational being who chooses to act according to nature’s law does so by its own authority, and its motivation to act is altogether internal and rational.66 Locke’s theory of the law of nature differs fundamentally from the Stoic doctrine. According to his view, laws of nature are divine commands that derive their authority from God’s transcendent power, by which he created us. Our motivation to obey them derives also from his power and will to reward and punish, to exercise the divine right of retribution. Yet Locke continued to claim that there was a law of nature and conceived of it as a philosophical law, and he agreed that ancient Stoic philosophers were most active and proficient in promoting it. He acknowledged all this in his earliest work on the theme, the so-called Essays on the Law of Nature (c.1663), and he never took any of it back. 62

Ibid., 138f, 170f. See also Cicero De Officii , I. 20–59.

63

Ibid., pp. 119, 134.

See Essay II. xxviii. 11, 356, where Locke disparages the very view of rewards and punishments that he advocates in Some Thoughts, grudgingly admitting their efficacy, but demeaning their moral value. See also “Mr Locke’s Extempor`e Advice. &c.” (aka, “Some Thoughts concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman”), Appendix III in STCE, 321: Here Locke asserts the excellence of the morality of the Gospel, and recommends Cicero’s De Officii as an instance of Pagan morality. On Locke’s ambivalence towards Cicero and ancient Roman moral teaching, see Philip Mitsis, “Locke’s Offices,” Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy, Jon Miller and Brad Inwood, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 45–61.

64

65

STCE, 212, 245.

66

DL, VII, 88. See also John M. Cooper, “Stoic Autonomy,” p. 225 and passim.

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A later and more pertinent treatment of the law of nature occurs in Locke’s manuscript, “Of Ethick in General.” It appears to have been a preliminary draft of what was originally intended to be the concluding chapter of the Essay.67 Locke wrote it c.1686. A final chapter on this theme was a fitting conclusion for a work that was originally intended to inquire into the foundations of morality and revelation and which, notwithstanding the enlargement of its scope, never departed from this practical intent. It seems highly plausible that Locke meant to represent in this chapter his considered opinion on the subject. However, he never finished the chapter and abandoned any plan of concluding his great book in this way. Why he did so can only be conjectured. There is a prevailing view that Locke’s decision not to carry through with his design marks a crisis in his thinking about morality and the law of nature, one that was precipitated as he contemplated the task before him. Wolfgang Von Leyden has observed that the manuscript ends just at the point where one might expect Locke to have begun a derivation and demonstration of the law of nature, of its authority and prescriptive rules.68 He supposed that Locke found himself unable to proceed because he had settled into philosophical positions that were either inconsistent with a theory of the law of nature or would prove a hindrance to constructing one. First, by the time of writing, Locke had adopted hedonist principles of human agency. In the second place, ambiguity of language proved an obstacle to the expression of an adequate theory, although Von Leyden admitted this was not to Locke’s mind an insurmountable obstacle.69 Finally, Von Leyden supposed that Locke was stymied by his methodology. He had chosen to follow a method that was purely descriptive and that lacked any capacity to discover normative principles. This is the “historical, plain method” of ideas.70 Von Leyden’s account of the causes of a crisis in Locke’s mind are unpersuasive. The last two obstacles can be dismissed easily. As already noted, Locke supposed that ambiguities of language can be addressed and corrected.71 Locke’s epistemological Reliabilism can be employed to overcome the last obstacle. Like the Stoics, he believed that our cognitive powers were designed by a benevolent providence and are therefore fit to accomplish the moral purpose for which we were created. There are norms of nature inherent in its design that guarantee the efficacy of the historical plain method and that enable its user to make proper judgements about what is useful and morally fit. There remains the hedonistic doctrine of motivation. What is noteworthy is that in “Of Ethick in General” Locke unequivocally reasserts this doctrine as a mainstay of the theory he is about to represent. Von Leyden was well aware of this. Where he

MS Locke c. 28, fos, 146–52. The text is printed in WR, pp. 9–14. On the approximate date of composition I follow Von Leyden, ELN 69–72., 13ff with § 160 of Draft B of Locke’s Essay, Drafts, p. 269. 67

Von Leyden, op. cit. p. 70. See also John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 187–99. 68 69

Ibid, 73–4.

70

Ibid. 75–6.

71

The whole of Book III of the Essay, especially chapters x and xi.

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seems to have gone astray is in supposing that Locke must have found himself at an impasse because of the incompatibility of this doctrine with any projected theory of the law of nature. There is no reason to believe that this should be so or that Locke perceived it this way. It is evident, of course, that to make a hedonistic theory of value a key part of one’s theory of the law of nature necessarily involves a departure from the classical Stoic theory. If we can take Locke at his word, we may conclude that he did not flinch from such a move. And we may credit his steadfastness to a constructive eclecticism and a freedom from philosophical partisanship. Sometime after 1671, which was when he composed Draft A and Draft B of the Essay, Locke espoused a hedonistic theory of action. There is no trace of a hedonistic doctrine of motivation in either draft. This theory was well established in his mind when he completed the first edition of the Essay, which coincides with the writing of “Of Ethick in General.” It was then and remained thereafter a fundamental part of his moral theory. To summarize, “Of Ethick in General” is a fragment of what was meant to present a system of ethics that was supposed to encompass a theory of the law of nature. The theory Locke presents, if judged according to Stoic criteria, is non-standard. Locke was well aware of Stoic criteria from the time he composed Essays on the Law of Nature, where he acknowledges their contribution.72 But although he held the Stoics in high esteem for this, and although he had by this time schooled himself well in their moral opinions, he did not judge them to be altogether authoritative for him. In another text, composed about the same time as the Essays, Locke vociferously rejects the Stoic idea of happiness.73 In “Of Ethick in General,” Locke begins by clarifying the fundamental themes of his theory. First, that happiness and misery, or what is the same, pleasure and pain, are “the two great springs of humane actions.” Second, that there is a viable idea of the law of nature. Third, that no theory of the law of nature can be adequate unless it adheres to ideas and principles derived from nature and the common life, and therefore is consistent with the method of ideas presented in the earlier parts of the Essay. Finally, a well-founded theory requires that the law of nature be prescribed by a superior power, that is, by God, who has the right and power to reward or punish. The first and last principles set Locke apart from classical Stoic theory. The second and third are quite consistent with it. It is worthwhile, therefore, to examine more closely the arguments that Locke put forward each of them. Locke gives two reasons why we may believe that there is a law of nature. The first is that every nation or society known to us acknowledges standards of right and wrong, virtue and vice, so that “some kinde of morality is to be found every where received.” Moreover, although the “rules and boundarys” of right and wrong that make up these moralities are “very different,” there is enough perfection and exactness among them to warrant concluding that the idea of morality is universal and that it is not an invention of civil society or its magistrates, for standards of right

72

Essays on the Law of Nature, pp. 109, 111.

73

“Oratio Censoria Funebris, 1664,” ELN, 223.

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and wrong are found to prevail even where those who are supposed to uphold them are silent. We may expect that by “perfection and exactness” are meant properties of the various moralities that reason may vouch for. In sum, every nation and society acknowledges some standard of right and wrong that is not comprised of merely positive laws, that is to say, one that is inherently natural and moral.74 The second argument proceeds from the observation that morality generally is regarded as the domain neither of priests nor theologians or even of lawyers but of philosophers primarily, “whose profession it has been to explaine & teach” morality “to the world.” This is clear evidence that there is a law of nature, that it has been discovered and that it represents rules of action to which rational creatures ought to conform.75 The gist of the third principle is this: our knowledge of the law of nature arises from experience. It is a rational law for whose understanding the ideas and common notions that constitute human reason are adequate instruments. It is noteworthy that in “Of Ethick in General,” Locke is critical of philosophers for not paying sufficient attention to the origin of moral ideas, that is, in not tracing them back to their natural beginning but rather constructing a morality of virtue that consists more of artificialities, of affectations rather than of real affects, so that the philosophical law seems a mere law of fashion rather than a law of nature or a divine law.76 The fourth principle seems designed by Locke to set himself apart not only from Stoics but from philosophers in general. In “Of Ethick in General” he criticizes philosophers not only for not paying sufficient attention to the origin of moral ideas, but also for failing to teach morality effectively, although both criticisms point to the same error. The issue here has to do with motivation as well as principle. Philosophers, Locke contends, ought to have “urged” the rules of morality “as the commands of the great god of Heaven & Earth & such as he would retribute to men after this life.”77 Moral Obligation for Locke does not derive from the recognition by a rational agent that a certain action is right or wrong, but from the authority of the divine ruler who prescribes it and the sanctions that apply to it. Such a notion would seem to transport Locke’s theory beyond the boundaries of philosophy and locate it within the domain of Christian theism. But it didn’t seem so to him. Philosophers had failed, because they had not adequately enlarged their reason beyond mundane considerations. Their failure was not a failure of reason, at least not according to Locke’s understanding of reason. Hence, at this point in his text, Locke faced no crisis that might have led him to abandon the philosophical theory he intended at the outset.

74

Locke makes the same argument in ELN, 115.

75

WR, 9.

WR, 9, § 4. See also “Sacerdos,” a manuscript dated 1698, where Locke assigns the teaching of morality to philosophers, who were to be guided only by reason. He makes the same criticism of philosophers’ shortcomings that he does here. Note that it is not due to the incompetence of reason that they failed, but their failure to perfect it in themselves. MS Locke Film 77, p. 93, WR, 17–18. 76

77

WR, 9.

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Rather than hypothesizing that in the last phase of his intellectual life, Locke turned from reason to revelation, it seems more consistent with his intentions to assume that revelation was always within the horizon of his philosophical vision, and that even some aspects of his philosophy, which seem prima facie less attuned to his Christian motives, may have been regarded by him as serving this higher purpose. Three, in particular, come to mind: Locke’s position against innatism, his denial that the mind always thinks, and his hedonistic theory of motivation. The first aligned Locke with the Stoics, the second did not. Could it be that Locke found fault with the doctrine of innate cognition, not just because it seemed a redundant theory and therefore “impertinent” to the issue of how we come to know things, but because it might be used to foster belief that nature by itself is self-sufficient, or less serviceable to advocates of a strong doctrine of providence?78 This may seem far-fetched, but when one considers how, when coupled with Locke’s idea of the enlargement of reason, it leads one almost naturally into revelation, the hypothesis gains a measure of plausibility. Locke’s denial that the mind always thinks correlates with his locating of personal identity in consciousness and his notion of a forensic self and responsibility before God.79 His hedonism and biblical theism also enjoy a curious compatibility. The idea of a god who commands and whose will is enforced by severe punishments and excessive rewards is typically biblical. The pleasure of heaven and the pain of hell are surely more than supplements to the august authority of the divine lawgiver. These considerations seem always to have been present in Locke’s thinking. The combination of Stoicism, hedonism and biblical monotheism must seem strange, but it becomes a matter of the highest curiosity when we find them not just idly present but seriously considered and combined in a mind so acute and so well cultivated. In short, the Christian theological motives in Locke’s philosophy were not late in coming, they were a present force from the beginning, in his recorded earliest reflections. Because he was the sort of Christian he was, he found much that was accommodating in Stoicism. But for the very same reason, he could never be a Stoic.

Reason Enlarged To understand Locke aright it is necessary to comprehend that he was a Christian and a philosopher, and that his way of being a Christian had bearing on how he did philosophy, so that he was properly a Christian philosopher. This seemed possible to Locke, because he believed that there was a continuity between reason and revelation, that reason was enlarged by a truth that it could not on its own discover,

78 “Impertinent” in the sense that it would be vain or silly to suppose that God would have implanted in us sensible ideas, for example, ideas of colours, when he has given us eyes to see them in external objects. Essay I. ii. 1, 48; see also I. i. 5, 45. 79 Locke’s case against the doctrine that the mind always thinks is presented in Essay II. i. 10–19; his reflections on personal identity and the forensic self are recorded in Essay II. xxvii. 9–26.

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but once received, it could find most reasonable to believe, a proper adjunct to all that natural enquiry made known. In this section, I attempt to clarify just what sort of Christian Locke was. This requires much more than providing a summary of his Christian beliefs; one must enter into the Christian world that he inhabited and feel the force of its attractiveness. Locke was a Protestant whose religion was the Bible. He believed that Holy Scripture, and not any dogma or creed or tradition, was the only infallible guide to revealed truth; that its authors were specially chosen to give testimony to this truth; that they were inspired by God, their minds directly infused with the knowledge that they delivered to the world.80 He believed that the supernatural authority of the Bible could be established by reason, and that its meaning could be made clear by using the same rational critical means that one might employ in interpreting any ancient text, although he denied that reason could on its own discover the truth it conveyed. The discovery of it as well as the infallibility of its source were joint products of a critical historical reading of the text, so that it could be said not only that Scripture is its own interpreter but also that it comes armed with its own warrant.81 Nowadays, it is not supposed that the Bible presents its most critical readers with a single or unified doctrine or worldview, unless it be approached from a normative point of view informed with a priori principles capable of imposing harmony on an aggregate of extraneous and incompatible parts. Locke would have disputed this, although he would have readily admitted that Holy Scripture is a collection of texts, written at different times and under different circumstances, compiled and edited by different hands; that it displayed a variety of genre; that some parts of it were abstruse, some plain, some immediately applicable, such as moral precepts, others, prophecies and apocalypses, requiring long and careful study to comprehend and even then not altogether yielding up their mysteries. As his writings about the Bible, published and unpublished, show, Locke achieved a high degree of sophistication as a biblical interpreter.82 He sought to enlarge his reason by becoming a scholar of the Bible. The ease with which he moved among biblical texts, and the steady assurance he possessed that he was dealing with an infallible guide to truth, are evident in everything that Locke has written about the Bible.

80 Among Locke’s manuscripts is one dated 1696 in which Locke recorded the results of a comprehensive biblical study of the various modes of revelation: MS Locke c. 27, fos. 138–42, “Revelation, Its several ways under the old Testament.”

On the infallibility of the Bible, see “Infallibility,” WR, p. 72; A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1697) pp. 339, 334. On revelation and its warrant, see Essay IV. xvi. 14; xviii. 10, pp. 667, 695. On the interpretation of Scripture, see An Essay for the Understanding of St Paul’s Epistles by Consulting St Paul himself,” WR, 51–66. See also my paper, “Locke’s Proof of the Divine Authority of Scripture,” Religion and Philosophy in Enlightenment Britain, ed. Ruth Savage (Oxford, forthcoming), and my Introduction to John Locke: Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity (Oxford, forthcoming).

81

These include The Reasonableness of Christianity, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul. Locke’s literary remains include notes and comments on biblical texts in various manuscripts, commonplace books and interleaved bibles. A collection of these is available in John Locke, WR.

82

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One benefit that Locke derived from the enlargement of reason through revelation was the ability to consider deep speculative questions that were properly beyond the limits of mere reason, those limits narrowly drawn by Locke’s empirical method. Now he could consider such questions as the creation of the world out of nothing, or the existence of spirits and their mode of cognition. These are not, strictly speaking, biblical notions. It is a curious fact that revelation became for Locke a warrant for philosophical and quasi-philosophical reflections about such matters as the creation and fall of angels, the pre-existence of the human soul, its descent and ascent; and divine infusion and truth as contemplation. In short, the appropriation of biblical revelation made it possible for Locke to be not only a Stoic empiricist but also a speculative Platonist. Revelation became his warrant for transcendental reflections.83 Primarily, Locke viewed the Bible as an authoritative account of the history of the world, beginning from the first creation and ending with the second coming of Christ, a period that biblical chronologists estimated would comprise seven thousand years, or a Sabbath of millennia. Viewing the Bible in this way, as a continuous history, was one way of uniting its diverse parts. Chronology and the harmony of the Scriptures was a major enterprise, in which Locke took great interest. 84 Locke believed that God created the world out of nothing probably in September, about four thousand years before the common era.85 He offered a spirited defence of the doctrine in Essay IV. x.86 For him, creation out of nothing was not a mere abstraction, however, but a real event. How did he imagine it? One cannot be sure, but there is an epic account of it that we can be certain Locke read and enjoyed. He did so circa 1655, before or just after he completed his baccalaureate at Oxford, indeed at just about the same time that he was reading Seneca’s De Ira. This is the account of divine creation given in The Divine Weeks of Guillaume de Salluste, Sieur du Bartas.87 Locke’s notes on Bartas are recorded in the same commonplace book in which he wrote his notes on Seneca. They are interspersed among them.88 His

83 A fuller discussion of this theme with proper documentation may be found in my paper, “Reflections on Locke’s Platonism,” Platonism at the Origins of Modernity, ed. Douglas Hedley and Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008). 84 The writings of the great Hebraist and biblical scholar John Lightfoot (1602–75) were most often relied on by Locke; in particular, Lightfoot’s harmonies of the Old and New Testament (Works, 2 vols., ed. George Bright (London, 1684). Especially applicable is Locke’s manuscript “Chronologia Sacra,” probably composed in the late 1680s or early 1690s: MS Locke c. 27, fos. 258–63. 85 This is recorded by Locke in his interleaved Bentley Bible as a note on Gen. 1: 1; he cites as his source John Lightfoot. Bodleian Library 16. 25, p. 18. 86

See above, fn. 13.

87

Du Bartas (1544–90) was a soldier, diplomat and poet. He was also a Protestant of Augustinian and Calvinist persuasion. Les Semaines was intended to be a history of the world, from creation to consummation. He completed only the first “week” and a portion of the second. Locke read Du Bartas in an English translation by Joshua Sylvester (1563–1618). He lists an edition of 1641. 88

MS Locke e. 6, fos. 10 and 12.

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citations include passages from the first day of the first week. There Locke would have read that “this All did once (of nought) begin,” that creation was an absolute beginning; and that before this “once,” God existed by himself in sublime majesty,89 in undifferentiated light; Before all Time, all Matter, Forme, and Place; God all in all, and all in God it was: Immutable, immortal, infinite, Incomprehensible, all spirit, all light, All Majestie, all selfe Omnipotent, Invisible, impassive, excellent, Pure, wise, just, good, God raign’d alone at rest, Himself alone selfes Pallace, hoast and guest.

Further, he would have read that creation was a free action, and not in any way necessitated, rather it was willed in freedom: “Th’immutable divine decree, which shall Cause the Worlds End, caus’d his originall”; “from th’ Ocean of his liberall Bountie, He poureth out a thousand Seas of Plentie”; that God first called forth from nothing all the stuff from which this world would be fashioned, and then created light, so that in its brightness, the splendour of the world being formed might be seen; and that in every respect the product of his easy labour manifested divine wisdom, power and goodness. Thus, the created world is likened to a school, or to a cloud, “through which there shineth cleere” the true Phoebus,” a Stage, where “Justice, Knowledge, Love, and Providence, doo act their Parts,” or a great book “printed all with God’s great Workes in Letters Capitall.” In this connection, it was, in brief, natural revelation. Locke took special note of the creation of night, which “tempers Dayes exceeding drought, Moistens our Aire” so that the earth will sprout; eases our travails, and “buries our cares, and all our griefes appeases.” He would, most likely, also have read in this same narrative that hosts of angels were created, whether on the first day or long before it; that they were creatures of light, little different in essence from God; that some of them in their pride rebelled “without right or reason,” and were cast down into that place to “a lower Cell,” a place “where God is not, and every where is Hell.”90 For the remainder of this sacred history we may turn to Locke himself. Although the main focus of The Reasonableness of Christianity is on the messianic career of Jesus of Nazareth and the presentation of the gospel by him and his Apostles, its narrative encompasses the history of the world from Adam’s sin until the final resurrection.91 Its entire content is summarized by St Paul’s dictum: “as in Adam

89 Not quite by himself, for God had in eternity had occasion to beget a son with whom he joined to generate the Holy Spirit.

I have quoted from a facsimile edition of a 1605 edition of Joshua Sylvester’s translation, Bartas, His Divine Weekes and Works (New York: Octagon, 1977); pp. 2, 3, 6, 7, 19. 21, 22. 90

91 For a full exposition of the Reasonableness, on which this account is based, see my introduction to John Locke: Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity (Oxford, forthcoming).

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all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”92 This text also highlights one of the principal themes of the Reasonableness: the loss and restoration of immortality. Another central theme, closely connected to the former, is justification by faith. Justification by faith has both historical and moral significance for Locke. It is a transaction between God and mankind, a settlement, whereby individuals, those favoured by God’s grace and mercy, are rewarded for their faith, that is, for their accepting something as true, prescribed for them by God. For this they receive a reward, viz. a divine judgement or verdict that they are righteous or upright, notwithstanding that they have not lived perfectly upright lives, that is, lives in perfect obedience to the divine law. Locke takes a rigorist position in the Reasonableness. The smallest offence brings condemnation. The reward has the added benefit that those who receive it escape death, although not immediately. The divinely ordained history of salvation must run its course. Adam’s violation of a single commandment lost immortality for himself and for all of his progeny. This dispensation of death prevailed from Adam until Christ, that is until the messianic tasks, foretold by the Hebrew prophets, were fulfilled by Jesus of Nazareth, and during which certain transactions between God and his Messiah determined a good outcome.93 During this period, the divine law is variously revealed and is the rule of covenants, viz. with Noah, the patriarchs and most fully with Moses, whereby God, as it were, freely enters into a special relation with a family or nation, whom he rules directly, not as an end in itself, but as a moment in the history of salvation, a prelude to the messianic moment. The same law, however, is also revealed by natural means to the rest of mankind, to whom the same rigorous requirements apply. The Messiah initiates a new covenant, not one of works, but of grace. This covenant establishes a new society of people who are justified by their acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah sent from God. The gospel is an invitation to all the world to enter the messianic kingdom by acknowledging the Messiah, with the proviso that they repent of their moral imperfections or sins, which Locke believed were the consequences not of an insurmountable depravity, but of frailty and an acquired stubbornness, and that they endeavour thereafter to conform their lives wholly to the divine law. Sincerity replaces perfect righteousness. The advent of the Messiah and the subsequent propagation of the gospel introduce a new and final historical age. The new society, the universal church of Christ, which is not to be identified with any particular ecclesiastical institution, replaces the people of Israel, as the principal bearer of divine revelation. The messianic age will last until the end of history. Then will come the resurrection and the last judgement, and the redeemed will enter a new spiritual state. The Messiah, now enthroned in divine glory, is in his resurrected body the archetype of what the redeemed shall be

92 93

1 Cor. 15: 22; Romans 6 also seems to have guided Locke’s reflections here.

By his obedience and voluntary sacrifice, the Messiah is assured an everlasting kingdom. These transactions are usually considered under the head of “Satisfaction,” whereby God’s justice and honour are satisfied by the messianic sacrifice. For an account of Locke’s ambiguous stance on this doctrine, see WR, pp. 32, 212–13, 271–72.

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like. The reward of those judged righteous, eternal bliss, is pleasure transfigured.94 The prospect of this reward, now perfectly assured, becomes the only enduring and effective motive to live a virtuous life.95 Morally, The Reasonableness of Christianity represents the enlargement of reason, so far as it offers what is supposed to be a proper comprehension of the divine law, its rigor, and the principle of justification by faith whereby that rigor is relaxed. With respect to the content of faith, it is enough that one accept that Jesus is the Messiah. But the enlargement of reason carries faith well beyond this. Locke supposed that there were two sorts of faith: a justifying faith, which makes one a Christian, and a consummate faith, whereby the whole gospel, the entire divine plan of salvation, is comprehended.96 The exemplar of a consummate faith is St Paul, who achieved this state by a direct and original revelation.97 So Locke believed, and so it is not surprising that, towards the end of his life, he began a careful study of all of St Paul’s writings, to comprehend the Apostle’s mind, and thereby himself to progress towards the perfection of his own faith. In the light of this effort, it should be clear that the attribution of theological minimalism to Locke is almost entirely false. It applies only to that primary doctrine that makes someone a Christian, but this is only the beginning, the threshold, as it were, of Christianity. The minimum is soon surpassed, for the enlargement of reason towards the consummation of faith is a duty that all Christians must fulfill to the best of their individual capacities. In the hereafter, reason and reason enlarged will give way to something more perfect, a “state of accomplishment and perfection”; reason will be replaced by contemplation: all things will be open to view, to an “intuitive comprehensive knowledge.” The redeemed shall have the cognitive power of angels.98

Reason Enlarged or Diminished? The question posed by the title of this section is whether what Locke considered to be an enlargement of reason by revelation was just what he claimed it to be, or whether it was something else, perhaps just the opposite? It is arguable that Locke’s interpretation of the Christian revelation represents not so much an enlargement of reason as a diminishment of Christianity through rationalization, a playing down of

See Locke’s manuscript, “Resurrection et quae sequuntur,” MS Locke c. 27, fos. 213–14; WR, 232–37. See also Locke’s paraphrase and notes on 2 Cor. 3: 18 and 5: 1, A Paraphrase and Notes, 1: 279–80. 94

95

Reasonableness, WR, 204.

On the notion of a consummate faith, see A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1697), 310f. See also my Introduction to John Locke: Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity (Oxford, forthcoming). 96

97 On St Paul’s revelation, see 2 Cor. 12: 2–4, and Locke’s comment on it, Essay IV.xviii. 3, p. 690; also An Essay for the understanding St Paul’s Epistles, WR, pp. 60–64. 98

See Locke’s paraphrase of I Cor. 13: 12, Paraphrase and Notes, 1: 238.

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its transcendental supernaturalism. His claim, asserted in the title of his first theological publication, that Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures is reasonable, can be read in this way, but only if “reasonableness” is taken in a reductive sense. I hope that what has been said in the previous section is sufficient to refute this. Locke was no reductionist. His version of Christianity was mythically rich and eminently supernatural. To his mind, reason was really enlarged by revelation, by truths beyond its ordinary compass. So the question may be asked again. Does Locke succeed in truly enlarging reason by adding the Christian revelation to it? The answer, I think, is No, if the criteria of reasonableness are Stoic naturalism and moral rationalism. In comparison with the latter, the morality of the gospel must seem an oddity. Although the bible teaches some virtues: justice, mercy, fidelity and charity, overall biblical morality is one of law or commandments, and of obedience to the lawgiver. The dominant relation is one of client and patron. Grace and justification are instances of patronage. The patron, in this instance, is God, or his surrogate, the Messiah, who wields absolute power. The messianic kingdom may not be of this world, but it is a kingdom nonetheless, and until the end it is a kingdom engaged in a cruel and violent war. Faith is a form of allegiance or loyalty. How odd to imagine that someone informed by Stoic ideas should believe that this is appropriate material for the enlargement of reason, for the perfection of the mind in this life, not to mention in a future life if one be admitted at all. What Stoicism can bring, indeed has brought, to the mixture of ideas that make up the early modern worldview are thoughts that counteract the effect of Christian supernaturalism and absolutism. Stoic theology renders any notion of the will of God otiose. The Stoic theory of rationalism makes not only all human persons equal, but it renders them also equal to God. The Stoic theory of obligation posits autonomy and rules out all heteronomy. These are philosophical ideas that do not reach fruition in Locke’s thinking even though there is a foundation laid for them by his borrowings from Stoicism. They are also key ideas of the Enlightenment. So in conclusion, one must judge that Locke’s role as a founder of the Enlightenment should be diminished, for the very reason that, in the end, the intellectual program of this almost but not quite Stoic philosopher diminishes reason.

Chapter 2

Hobbes, Locke and the State of Nature Tom Sorell

Hobbes and Locke differ over the state of nature. In Hobbes the state of nature is a state of generalized insecurity. Each person runs the risk of losing everything, and each person has the right of taking anything—another’s life, possessions—whatever seems a help to his own self-preservation and prosperity. In Locke, as Simmons points out,1 it is not easy to say all at once and briefly what the state of nature is. Many different states of nature are recognized. Not all are violent. Not all discourage productive labour. Not all permit wholesale violations in practice of natural law. Not all exist in the absence of some sort of authority or order. Instead, there are a whole range of states of nature, unified not by a set of inconveniences, but by the fact that people stand outside a legitimate political order. It is often thought that Locke’s theory of the state of nature (and of government) not only differs systematically from Hobbes’s, but that it was arrived at in opposition to Hobbes’s. This seems unlikely, for reasons given long ago by Laslett.2 Locke could not be clearer that his target in the Two Treatises is Filmer. And though Filmer’s theory of political power supports a kind of absolutism, as does Hobbes’s, it is Filmer’s sort of absolutism, patriarchal absolutism, and not Hobbes’s, that is at issue.3 Even if the Two Treatises are not directed at Hobbes, they are comparable to Hobbes’s political writings in this respect: they can be understood as having a message for people who believe they are under tyranny and want to escape it. The message of Hobbes’s political treatises is that, unless it puts people at risk of immediate death, they act unjustly if they try to escape or resist tyranny, since

1

A.J. Simmons, “Locke’s State of Nature,” Political Theory 17 (1989): 449–70.

See the introduction to his edition of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 67ff. References to Locke are to this edition, by Book and section number. 2

3 Filmer provides Locke’s main target. I do not mean to deny that at particular points Locke might also have been disagreeing with Hobbes. So David Wootton may be right to say that, when Locke denied that moral knowledge was grounded in self-interest, he had Hobbes in mind. See his Introduction to his edition of Locke’s Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), p. 17 and n. 3. Wootton seems to agree that Filmer is the figure centrally positioned in Locke’s sights (p. 15).

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 27–43. and Legacy, 

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they have bargained for submission. Anyway, it is imprudent to escape tyranny, since one will land back in the state of nature, with all its dangers and deprivations. Locke’s message, on the other hand, is that life under tyranny is a betrayed trust, and that those who suffer it are in the state of nature already—not Hobbes’s state of war, but in a state in which one is free to join another commonwealth or none. Locke’s message is more attractive than Hobbes’s not only because his liberal state is more attractive to modern liberal readers than Hobbes’s illiberal one, but because it is implausible that the state of nature must always, almost as a matter of definition, be worse than any sort of government. Locke’s message is, however, unstable in a way that Hobbes’s is not. This is because the capacity to judge when the government has betrayed its trust through tyranny is held by Locke to reside in the people, which may not have the right sort of unity for judgement, or the right sort of insulation from individual irrationality, to embark on a justified rebellion. In the same way as Locke’s theory allows a people more scope to judge that its trust in government institutions has been betrayed, it gives people less reason than Hobbes’s theory to leave the state of nature, or to form themselves into a state rather than a community. A different problem arises from Locke’s allowance for a variety of states of nature, including states of nature that are relatively harmonious. Locke’s background assumptions make relative harmony without authority unsurprising. People are supposed to have practical rationality in the form of a good native grasp of the law of nature, and in the state of nature many are supposed to be willing to observe the law of nature and see that it is observed. It is mainly to make its observance more efficient, more widespread and more consistent that people agree to pool their individual powers of enforcement. They do not, as in Hobbes, give up the right to be judges of what it takes to observe the law of nature and see it observed. It is rather that they agree to be governed in their enforcement practice by the view of a majority of a community even when it conflicts with the view they would have adopted privately. This deference to the majority view is the kernel of law-abidingness, but it is a plausible view of collective action only for the more or less like-minded. In Hobbes, the meeting of many minds is not to be expected; instead unity is achieved by the many delegating the right to judge to a few or to one. In Hobbes, public practical judgement is highly unified, or else no real departure from the state of nature. What is more, the goal of public action in Hobbes—individual security from attack and access to modestly gainful employment—is far less ambitious than the Lockean one of protecting “property”, that is each person’s means of exercising freedom. Because security is less controversial, judgements for its sake are less likely to be disputed than judgements for the sake of a Lockean public good. I start with Hobbes on the state of nature, and difficulties with his account that are not present in Locke. Then I consider gaps and implausibilities in Locke’s account, and the relative merits of the two as responses to popular perceptions of tyranny. The attractive liberalism of Locke’s account seems to depend on assuming what Hobbes calls into question—human sociability and a disposition in humans

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to behave morally. Hobbes’s theory may be questioned, but he is right not to take human sociability as a datum.

I Hobbes’s concept of the state of nature plays more than one role in his writings. Perhaps its most important role, and the one that is least noticed in discussions of Hobbes and Locke, is that of repudiating Aristotle’s part-definition of man as a political animal. Man is not naturally suited to life in the polis, or more generally a society, according to Hobbes. We all know that people have many extremely widely distributed anti-social impulses. Not only can they sometimes be violent, but they are proud, competitive, and greedy. When they are not trying to outdo one another or doing down one another, they can shrink from one another in fear. And this is how people can be seen behaving when there are laws and they are enforced. If people had nothing to fear from the state, they would behave even worse, as they have been known to do when they loot and assault one another during periods of emergency. In view of these widely observed facts about human behaviour, facts that Hobbes thinks can be confirmed by reasoning from the elements of a scientifically analysed human nature, societies do not exist naturally but artificially. They have to be made, and, once made, kept going, by suppressing what is anti-social in human beings. Or to put it another way, the state is only the artificial suppression of the state of nature—how men are naturally disposed to act in groups. Hobbes’s so-called science of politics is a set of precepts about how societies should ideally be made if their primary purpose is the relatively uncontroversial one of collective and mutual security. He is not unaware that other purposes of the state are conceivable and that they have been proposed by earlier political philosophers; but he denies that they can command wide enough assent to motivate many human beings to come together into some sort of long-term union. He is not unaware that, in fact, people are mostly born into societies without recognizable overall purposes, and that some of these societies survive. But he thinks that when states do endure, it is because their governments have a reasonable number of strictly enforced securitypromoting, and prosperity-permitting laws. Permanently enduring states, he thinks, could be constructed if the things that actually made states last were systematized, and the relevant system is what his political writings, with some variations, unfold. Government for Hobbes is a way people have of organising themselves so as to stifle permanently the causes of war in the state of nature. The key to this organisation is each individual’s laying down the right of self-government. Instead of each deciding for himself what ends to pursue in general, each agrees to act only within bounds determined by an agreed authority, who decides how general contention is to be avoided. The means of avoiding general contention are communicated to each of the many in the government’s binding laws. Citizenship consists of strict obedience to these laws.

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The sovereign power is supposed to be unlimited, permanent, and unitary. Hobbes was no supporter of a separation of powers, still less of rolled-back government, and he thought it was folly for a government to give up any powers or to cease to exercise any. He believed that a sovereign authority in the form of a body of men was open to a sort of divisiveness reminiscent of a war. So he seems to be in favour of a one-man dictatorship, albeit an authorized dictatorship. That is the form sovereignty should take, according to Hobbes. His conceptions of citizenship and sovereignty are alien to those of us who are comfortable with liberal democracy, except perhaps in periods of emergency. In emergencies, liberal democratic governments are given great latitude to act, while the great latitude to act of citizens is taken away. Freedom of movement, property rights, freedom from arbitrary arrest—all of these may be legitimately curtailed or suspended in periods of emergency, it is widely thought, so long as those with emergency powers assume more limited powers as soon as they can. The liberal democratic conception assumes that emergency conditions prevail only exceptionally, and that in these conditions both citizenship and government are deformed. This brings us to the heart of the difference between a familiar conception of citizenship and government, on the one hand, and Hobbes’s on the other. Hobbes claims that government and citizenship are centrally to do with the prevention and curtailment of an emergency waiting to happen, namely the violent contention that human beings are disposed to engage in if nature is allowed to take its course. And he thinks that authorized dictatorship, with its very great scope for limiting individual freedom, is far less dangerous than war, and justified by what makes war so necessary to avoid. In a sense he agrees with the liberal democrat in thinking that only the prevention or curtailment of a major emergency justifies the concentration of power and the limitation of freedom, but he thinks that this emergency is permanently waiting to happen, and therefore that the concentration of government power and the limitation of individual freedom are permanently justified. The measures necessary for the prevention of public emergency must be available to a sovereign—an authorized dictator—whenever he judges that he needs them, and, from the stand point of Hobbes’s civil science, the sovereign ought to judge that he needs these powers all the time. Can the danger of the misuse of these emergency powers really be outweighed by the dangers of extreme emergency? Hobbes’s reasons for thinking so are disputable even within the terms of his theory. After sketching his argument for what I am calling authorized dictatorship, apparently an argument from the inevitability of a certain very serious sort emergency if dictatorship is absent, I shall accuse Hobbes of inconsistency about the rationale for authorized dictatorship, its preferred form, and its effects. Locke’s theory is not open to these criticisms, but it invites other objections that may be more serious than those facing Hobbes.

II To my knowledge, Hobbes does not use the word “emergency” in arguing for strong government or what I have been calling authorized dictatorship. The crucial concept

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is that of war, which, in turn is coextensive with the concept of the state of nature. Hobbes also speaks, though not in the best known of his political writings, of humanly avoidable calamities. He says (De Corpore ch. 1, art. 7) that the greatest avoidable calamities are “slaughter, solitude and the want of all things.” These arise from war, and in particular civil war. War is any period of time in which many human beings living alongside one another show that they are willing to fight.4 Unless people submit in the right way to a sovereign with unlimited power, they face war with its greatest of all calamities; so they should submit. Submission means abiding by a strong sovereign’s well-framed laws. So sovereigns should frame their laws well i.e. with a view to preventing conflict; and subjects should obey those laws. That, in a nutshell, is the message of Hobbes’s political philosophy. Why he thinks that without strong government people will face slaughter, solitude and the want of all things is that without government, in the state of nature, individual people become their own judges of what is for the best, and will pursue goods dictated by their own passions, whatever they are. These passions may not on their own lead to violence; but the knowledge on the part of each individual, even moderate individuals, that some other individuals will resort to violence for anything they want, gives even non-violent people a reason to strike out before they are attacked. In this way, everyone, no matter how mild-mannered, has a reason to adopt an aggressive posture, and to act in the same way as those who are violent and acquisitive by nature. Defensive mistrust in the meek leads to war just as readily as greed in people who are confident that they will always prevail in a fight. And so general aggression is reasonable. It is reasonable, at any rate, if it is never blameworthy to protect oneself, and if the means of self-protection are up to each agent to choose. Hobbes thinks that within a properly functioning state no-one is typically in danger of violent attack. But that is because, in a well-functioning state, the many delegate the business of protecting themselves to an agent they empower to see to the collective security. Each citizen receives protection from a central authority whose ability to enforce its threats of punishment on wrongdoers puts off would-be attackers. The benefit of protection is the other side of the coin of submission, according to Hobbes. It is true that submission is also the loss of freedom, or of the right of self-government, but the other side of the supposed good of freedom is the risk of insecurity and violent attack. Better, then, to trade freedom for security if one has never submitted before, and better to keep on submitting, if one is being encouraged to disobey authority, even for the sake of one’s rights. What form of authority is the citizen to submit to? Any functioning authority is better than none, according to Hobbes, but he thinks that there are problems with forms of government that divide power, or that allow decisions taken today to be reconsidered tomorrow. In these respects, monarchy—sovereignty in one person—is better than democracy or aristocracy, where government is vested in an assembly. Hobbes never pronounces absolutely in favour of monarchy, though he was inclined

4 cf. e.g. Leviathan, ch. 13. All references are to the edition by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 90.

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to prefer it in De cive, but his list of the disadvantages of assemblies always seems to be longer than his list of the disadvantages of one-person rule. Whether vested in one person or one body of people, however, sovereign power must be unlimited and undivided. A division or separation of powers threatens to deprive the sovereign power of reliable means to see to security, while limits on his power empower possible rivals, again with threats to the sovereign’s ability to keep the peace. Hobbes concedes that submission to so concentrated a power goes against the grain, and seems too big a price to pay, but he thinks that people exaggerate the price of submission when the price of no submission is all the calamities that go with war. “[A]ll men,” he says, “are by nature provided of notable multiplying glasses, (that is their Passions and Selfe-love,) through which, every little payment appears a great grievance.”5 If war brings with it solitude, slaughter and the want of all things, then whatever price of preventing war exacted by any form of government is worth paying, Hobbes claims. Concentrated power does not necessarily make life under government worse than life under diluted power, since it is under diluted power that popular disagreement can turn into armed factions, private armies and civil war. In any case, he says, life under such concentrated power, with sovereigns exercising their rights to the full, is unknown, and this explains why the history of commonwealths is the history of relatively short intervals between wars. Although submission to concentrated power—to a kind of dictatorship—is recommended by Hobbes’s political philosophy, it is not supposed to be a dictatorship without consent. Before the creation of a commonwealth people agree amongst themselves to lay down their right of nature—their right to see to their survival and well-being as they see fit—and to let a man or body of men decide on matters of survival and well-being for them all. The many agree amongst themselves—and so consent—to give this man or body of men a nearly blank cheque. He is entirely free to decide the means of security and to require action on the part of the many in keeping with the means—so long as the means do not themselves take away the conditions of security and well-being. Within these unconfining limits, what the sovereign says goes. If the limits were more confining; if subjects could themselves veto the sovereign’s choice of means, or unseat him at an election, or make his choice of means cohere with a bill of rights, then, according to Hobbes, people would not really be taking away the conditions of war—which Hobbes associates with a plurality of passion-ruled practical judgements—for there would still be a plurality of passion-ruled judgements about when people’s rights were being infringed, or whether the means chosen for collective security were the correct ones. For these reasons, entry into the commonwealth is supposed to require total abstention from judgement on these matters on the part of the many. Private judgement of good and evil is the second of the principal causes of break up of commonwealths, according to Hobbes;6 and the way in which the many make themselves one or a real union of people headed by the sovereign is precisely by letting his or her judgement,

5

Ibid., ch. 18, p. 129.

6

Ibid., ch. 29, p. 223.

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if the sovereign is an individual, or its judgement if the sovereign is an assembly, rule them all. Things are more complicated if one is born into a commonwealth one has no hand in forming. In that case there will be customs about the extent of the sovereign power, and customs about the extent of obedience, and these customs may not support dictatorship. Hobbes’s argument applies even here. It provides a theoretical framework which allows people to see what the purpose of government is, and to see whether the customs that a particular government operates by, and the laws it introduces, interfere with or promote that purpose—which is collective security and permanent freedom from war. The theoretical framework is supposed to make submission to dictatorship seem the ideal way for the many and its government to avoid war. The same framework is supposed to make social organisation approximating to obedience under dictatorship seem more reasonable to live under than others, if one’s overriding aim is to live in peace. The theoretical framework itself is supposed to induce consent to the ideal. But in practice people will be obliged to governments that fall well below the ideal, because they have a fearful power over them. Submitting to a de facto ruler out of fear and instituting a ruler is, for Hobbes, still to authorise someone or some assembly to be sole judge of the means to collective security.

III Hobbes’s argument for absolute submission depends on at least two claims: that war is supremely awful, and that anything short of leaving all judgements about security to a sovereign is warlike behaviour, or behaviour that invites war. Both claims are disputable. The disputabilty of the second claim weakens the case for submission to dictatorship; the disputability of the first weakens the case for absolute submission full stop. The second claim is disputable, because it rests on general claims about rationality that are disputable. The first claim is disputable, because Hobbes allows many different things to count as war, not all of which are equally awful, and some of which are liveable with. Let me begin with war. Going by the account in ch. 13 of Leviathan, there are at least three kinds of war that Hobbes thinks have actually occurred in history. One is international cold war. Another is national civil war. The third is the life without government of North American aboriginal people in the seventeenth century. The first kind of war—international cold war—Hobbes thinks is historically pervasive. As soon as there were commonwealths, there was a state of cold war between them, a state of war that he thought had lasted until his own day and might be eternal. But notice that this sort of war could not be presented as supremely undesirable, and as threatening to take away all things. For international cold war was compatible with local peace and with the local enjoyment of the fruits of peace. To take an illustration close to home, when Hobbes fled England in 1640, anticipating the Civil War, he made for Paris. Paris, and other parts of France could be a haven, even

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though, according to Hobbes’s theory, the whole of England and France were parts of a permanent global war-zone. Hobbes travelled frequently through this supposed global battlefield on at least three European grand tours, apparently more fearful of disease than armed attack. Admittedly, the frame of reference for the effects of international cold war is not the individual citizen of a given nation in the war, but the nation itself, personified by the sovereign. International cold war threatens the sovereign with a national life that is solitary, nasty, brutish and short. The person of the nation disappears with conquest, and extreme isolation in the international community as well as impoverishment may precede conquest. It is in this way that Hobbes’s famous formula about the state of nature applies to nations. It applies even if war—hot or cold—happens not to disturb internal life, life at the level of the individual, too much. Nevertheless, the case of international cold war illustrates some tensions in Hobbes’s theory of war. First, it is important to Hobbes’s theory that the concept of war cover cold war, the situation in which there is a widespread disposition to fight, and not just actual fighting. But the disposition to fight has fewer unwanted effects than actual fighting, and may justify less concentration of power and the exercise of less far-reaching powers than actual fighting. For example, a cold war does not seem to justify a permanent mass-mobilisation of troops, even if a permanent mass-mobilization of troops prevents the cold war turning into a hot one. What cold war seems to justify is the minimum measure necessary for preventing the outbreak of the hot war. The permanent mass-mobilization may exceed this minimum. If it does, there is a sense in which the sovereign over-reacts and misjudges the cold war situation if he calls for the mass-mobilization. He makes a mistake even if he has been given a blank cheque by his subjects in matters of protection. For there is such a thing as overspending on a blank cheque, and the colder the war, the greater the chance of overspending. Hobbes tends to argue as if the powers necessary for confronting a cold war are the same as those for a hot war, and he is helped to this conclusion by bringing too closely together hot war and cold, and by the bad argument that no authorized filling in of a blank cheque is better than any other: if the sovereign has been given a blank cheque, then what he thinks is reasonable expenditure is reasonable expenditure. Let us now consider Hobbes’s second and third kinds of war. These are civil war and aboriginal life without government, respectively. It is the third kind of war that is supposed to come closest to the prepolitical version of “the state of nature,” the situation in which a commonwealth would be instituted or constructed from scratch. Hobbes thinks, and expects his readers to agree, that human life along these lines is poorest in the things that civilisation provides: efficient agriculture, architecture, transportation, science, including medicine, and so on. Surely, he argues, life in even the most repressive European state is better than that. Surely, he is saying, no European reader of his books would want to be reduced to the conditions of the Americans. But, he adds, this sort of life is on the cards as soon as one throws over government. Here one comes up against more implausibility in Hobbes’s theory of war, the implausibility, namely, of Hobbes’s running together the effects of civil war in a developed state with the inconveniences of the state of nature. Unless the inconveniences of civil war are very great, they will not necessarily outweigh

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what Hobbes admits are the inconveniences of unlimited government. But for the inconveniences of civil war to be as great as those of a prepolitical situation, either the commodities of the civilised Europe of his time had to be very fragile, or the destructiveness unleashed by civil war had to be total and immediate. To my knowledge, Hobbes never produces an argument for the fragility of the commodities, but he thinks he has an argument for the claim that with government overthrown, people are reduced to the condition of those who have never had government. The argument is that the subjects of civilized Europe and the aborigines of America have their humanity in common, and that the destructive consequences of war are rooted in what human beings are like rather than in what Europeans or Americans are like. The argument also assumes that government does not really alter people but at most keeps under control the ingredients of war in their collective life. As soon as the controls are taken away, natural human impulses reassert themselves, and their effects are the same in Europe as in America, the same in 1651 as in 651. Now this last claim is both implausible on its face, and inconsistent, I think, with what Hobbes implies are the effects of his preferred organisation of commonwealth. The claim is implausible on its face, because it underestimates the effects of custom. For example, Hobbes’s theory implies that middle class people living in the rich Home Counties around London in 2007 would feel no compunction about arming themselves and looting one another’s homes if, for example, the Countryside Alliance started to wage an armed guerrilla war in rural England and London, aimed at toppling the Westminster government. It seems to me just as likely that the middle class people of Surrey or Middlesex would find it very difficult to become looters and vigilantes over night. They might carry on peaceably as long as possible, perhaps going so far as to beef up the Neighbourhood Watch scheme to protect against the depredations of lower class outsiders. But the insurrection in the rest of the country would not necessarily be seized upon as a pretext for a local free-for-all. In short, contrary to what Hobbes sometimes seems to imply, the habit of keeping the peace may take some time to catch up with the fact of insurrection. It might be thought that this objection is based on a misunderstanding, because it mistakes an argument for what people have reason to do or what they can”t be blamed for doing, for an argument about what they will do. Even if, out of habit so to speak, the middle class of Surrey keeps on putting coins in the parking meters while the Countryside Alliance sustains its rebellion, it is arguably unreasonable for them to do so, and they are blameless if they do not do so. It might be said that this is Hobbes’s argument. Hobbes may be saying that there is war when it is more unreasonable to put the coins in the meter than not to, or to pay the council tax than not to, or to refrain from looting one’s neighbours’ houses than not to. There can be war in this sense even if custom prevails and the middle class of Surrey remain unreasonably peaceable. This line of thought hardly gets Hobbes off the hook, however, for whether it is reasonable for the average middle class person of Surrey to turn violent depends on what other members of that middle class are likely to do. If there is a strong custom of not disturbing the peace, if it goes against the grain of most people to turn violent or predatory, then it may be better for everyone to behave the same old way, i.e., in the customary, peaceable way. However one

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looks at it, it seems implausible to claim that long standing traditions of obedience and accommodation will not continue to operate even in the absence of a power able to force shows of such behaviour. Hobbes’s own theory implies that in a well-regulated commonwealth people will not be kept in line only by the threat of punishment for breaking the laws. Hobbes thinks that there has to be an elaborate system of public instruction of people in their civic duties. Special days for learning civic duties have to be appointed, and special institutions, including universities. The point of this instruction, evidently, is to implant a disposition to behave in accordance with the sovereign’s decrees apart from the fear of the sovereign’s punishment. People are supposed to refrain from fraud, rape, and other unjust practices not just because there are laws against those things and punishments, but because they understand that such practices damage things that everyone has reason to find important: their own life and limbs, their loved ones, and their riches and means of living.7 Once the instruction has taken, it can keep people in line even if the coercive power behind the laws wanes. The instruction starts a custom or tradition, which can continue to have a point even when there is no-one around to enforce it. A way of summarising the foregoing is by saying that the longer lived and better entrenched the peace, the less the removal of government means a war that is bound to be palpably awful. Perhaps the better established the peace, the colder the war when the peace is disturbed. But the colder the war, the less awful the war. The less awful the war, the less strong the justification for writing the sovereign a nearly blank cheque. Submission to government may still make sense, but not submission to unlimited government, with maximum room for manoeuvre. Or to put it another way, the longer lived and better entrenched the peace is, the more remote a fullblown public emergency. Collective human life is not everywhere and always an emergency waiting to happen, and so a government does not always have to have available to it emergency powers.8

IV Hobbes seems to have a weak argument for giving governments unlimited powers; he seems to have even weaker arguments for extensive powers concentrated in a single agent. Once again the starting point is the natural condition of human beings. He claims that there is no natural standard of right reason,9 and that people are carried away by their passions even in the defence of their factual beliefs. What is more, he thinks it is rare for people to be acquainted with science, let alone to develop any. This means that people are likely to fall into error, and that they are likely to be stubborn in maintaining their views when others disagree with them. In 7

Ibid., ch. 30, p. 236.

8

Necessary laws and the problem of giving up powers one needs to be able to reseize.

9

Leviathan, ch. 5, p. 33.

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these circumstances, two heads are rarely better than one, according to Hobbes. On the contrary, the more heads, the more natural sources of controversy, and the greater the need for enquirers to be willing to submit to the judgement of an arbitrator (Ibid). In relation to matters of security and well-being, as opposed to the proofs of mathematical theorems or the proposal of hypotheses in physics, individual judgements are likely to be even less authoritative. They are likely to be short-term, geared too much to pleasure rather than other sorts of well-being, and selfish. They will also lead people to go after things that cannot be shared, which will make them fight over them. The remedy for all of this is a better standard of practical guidance than the many conflicting ones supplied by the untutored practical judgements of the many. A better standard of judgment will be more dispassionate than natural practical judgements, and it will be employed by a judge that unites the individuals who make judgements in the state of nature. This is of course Hobbes’s sovereign. The sovereign makes practical judgements on behalf of the many whom he rules, but without being subject to the passions of each of the many. Of course, the sovereign will be a natural person or a body of natural persons, and while he or they will have passions of their own, they have reason not to indulge their own passions at the expense of the safety or security of the many; for the cost of doing so is disempowerment, and probably loss of life if the many take revenge for having their safety compromised. In this respect the private interest of the sovereign is tied to the public interest: the safety and security of the many. Now the key to Hobbes’s preference for monarchy among the forms of sovereignty is connected to the unity of the sovereign power, the reduction of many loci of judgement to just one, and the coincidence of the public with the private interest. For example, he says explicitly that whereas in a monarchy resolutions are only subject to the inconstancy of human nature present in the individual sovereign, in an assembly there is a second source of inconstancy as well: namely, the fact that the number of people in an assembly is more than one. This means that there can be an influential dissenting party that undermines any decision arrived at or that even gets it overturned. Again, . . . where the publique and private interest are most closely united, there is the publique most advanced. Now in Monarchy, the private interest is the same with the publique. The riches, power and honour of a Monarch arise onely from the riches, strength and reputation of its Subjects. For no King can be rich, nor glorious, nor secure; whose Subjects are either poore, or contemptible, or too weak, through want, or dissention, to maintain a war against their enemies: Whereas in a Democracy, or Aristocracy, the publique prosperity conferres not so much the private fortune of one that is corrupt, or ambitious, as doth many times a perfidious advice, a treacherous action, or a Civill warre.10

For these and other reasons one-man sovereignty is better than sovereignty in the form of an assembly. Since the command of the one-man sovereign is law, and since there is very little that the sovereign can command unjustly, according to Hobbes, it

10

Ibid., ch. 19, p. 131.

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is natural to take his argument to support dictatorship. Not dictatorship in the worst of times only, but permanent dictatorship. The argument is only as persuasive as its case for the subjectivity of practical and theoretical judgement, and that case seems to depend on exaggeration. There is no reason to think that the conclusions of arithmetical calculations or scientific demonstrations are to be settled by an arbitrator when disputed; there is some reason to think that Pythagoras’s Theorem or “The earth goes round the sun” is true whether or not an arbitrator or anyone else agrees to it, whether or not it is disputed. In cases like these, the claim that standards of truth or conclusiveness have to be declared or constructed, and that they do not exist independently of conventions, seems false. Nor is Hobbes’s case even plausible for all value judgements or judgements about what people ought to do. On his own showing people can agree to peace, and independently of Hobbes, there can be agreement to the value of certain primary and prudential goods. There is historical evidence in our own day of agreements between states with very different cultural and ideological traditions. There is evidence of people’s ability to negotiate these agreements without submitting to an arbitrator. So Hobbes underestimates the scope for stable collective deliberation, and he makes controversy look like incipient civil war rather than, as it sometimes is, a means of testing positions for plausibility or agreement with the evidence. So he seems not to do justice to the adage that two heads are better than one.

V Now the Locke of the Two Treatises is open to very few of the criticisms that we have been bringing against Hobbes. Locke does not think that human beings characteristically disagree with one another, or naturally maintain their own side in a disagreement just because it is theirs. Although he certainly claims that arbitration is important and morally necessary, that is not because he thinks that people naturally lack any standard of judgement. He thinks that people standardly have a capacity for reason, and that this can be exercised even in the state of nature. He denies that in the state of nature people need be strongly disposed to fight, and he keeps apart the state of nature from the state of war. He does not think that the conditions for moral judgement and action in accordance with it arise only after the formation of commonwealths; and he nowhere implies that life in the state and life in the state of nature that one enters by rebelling are as different as eighteenth-century Europe was from the back woods of Virginia during the same period. Locke’s state of nature is not necessarily fearful. And his commonwealth institutionalizes the division of powers that Hobbes thought was fatal for effective sovereignty. Accordingly, Locke never comes close to making a case for authorized dictatorship. By the same token, however, Locke lacks a ready answer for a rebel who magnifies the costs of government, or someone in the state of nature who asks why he should leave it. Differently, Locke seems to be outlining a politics for people who,

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by being naturally rational and internalizing natural law, are naturally sociable (Two Treatises, II §§ 77ff). This may be an acceptable account of what people must be like if a benevolent God made them (presumably, in his image), but it is hardly a modest foundation for politics. Hobbes starts with much less, makes much more room for conflict, and, as a result, thinks that the ingredients of emergency are far more prevalent than they are. Locke thinks that private judgements in the state of nature are subjective enough to require “umpiring,” but unlikely to be subjective enough to lead either to war or unjustified rebellion under arbitrary power. The truth seems to me to lie between Hobbes and Locke, not in Locke himself. Let us begin by asking why, according to Locke, people generally have reason to leave the state of nature at all. In the state of nature everyone is free to protect his life and property as he thinks fit, and to respond as he sees fit to transgressors of natural law, both where he and where someone else is the victim of transgression (cf. Two Treatises, II § 10). Although the transgression is only supposed to be punished severely enough to deter the offender, and although a natural law that distinguishes appropriate punishments exists, and is more accessible to individuals than a manmade law (Two Treatises, II § 12), there is no general assurance of impartiality in this or other matters in the state of nature without a delegation of the right to judge to the community (Two Treatises, II § 13). In particular, it is not to be expected that offenders will acknowledge the wrong they do or submit to even a proportionate punishment (ibid.). Only when people join together and submit to a judgement of a legislative power in matters of dispute-resolution and punishment do they introduce impartial, proportionate, and reliably enforceable punishment. Jointly submitting to a legislative power, people in a state of nature are turned into a civil or political society (Two Treatises, II §§ 87-89). Such submission makes sense if people are naturally keen on seeing the law of nature upheld, rarely violate it themselves, but do not always see eye to eye about what the law of nature requires in a particular case. It makes less sense if people are mostly irrational and not inclined to uphold the law of nature when others break it, and are quite willing to violate it themselves. There must be some irrational people along these lines for punishment in the state of nature to have a point;11 but if they are in a majority, then it is unclear why the state of nature is not a state of war. Even if the irrational are in a minority, on the other hand, their irrationality needs an explanation on Locke’s assumptions. How can there be human wrongdoers, if human beings are made by God as reasonable beings, and have the law of nature engraved on their hearts? How can some be more rational, better disciplined and public-spirited than others if all are endowed with “like Faculties” (Two Treatises, II §6)? The only room Locke appears to make for inequality is in upbringing. Since human beings after Adam have to attain the use of reason and are not born rational

That there are such irrational people—that the violation of the laws of nature is routine, and that moral disagreement is an everyday phenomenon—both of these things are insisted upon in Locke’s Essay 1. iii. where the fact that moral precepts are disputed is a ground for Locke’s denial of their innateness.

11

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(Two Treatises, II §57), there is scope for failure ever to achieve it—through bad parenting, say. This gives a natural history for a willing wrongdoer. But there is some tension between, on the one hand, failure to achieve rationality—failure to grow up to govern oneself by the law of nature–and, on the other hand, being free (ibid.). Yet the state of nature is the state of perfect freedom (Two Treatises, II §4). This yields a trilemma for Locke: either the state of nature is not the state of perfect freedom, or else it is. If it is, either some people never attain freedom and therefore cannot be parties to the state of nature, or else people are parties to the state of nature and rational. But if they are parties to the state of nature and rational, how can they violate the law of nature? This question does not arise in Hobbes. His theory explains how the passions naturally dominate and distort human valuations. Giving too much weight to the self, the present and pleasure, people all too explicably do what the laws of nature prohibit. When they are able to see that the consequence of acting this way can be war, other, more wholesome passions—the fear of death and the hope of a decent life—motivate peace-seeking and the submission to government that peace-seeking requires. Life under government may in its turn have its costs, Hobbes concedes, but these are as nothing when compared to the insecurity and poverty of the state of nature. Although civil government is supposed by Locke to remedy the inconveniences of the state of nature (II §13), he does not make clear what exactly these inconveniences are. For some varieties of the state of nature—revolutionary periods, or natural disasters, it may not be hard to fill in the details. But what about a pre-political state of nature among people who are a tribute to their Maker? The state of nature is properly “men living together according to reason under no Superior authority” (II § 19), which might take the form of a unanimous observance of the law of nature and therefore might have no obvious inconveniences, or at least no man-made ones. As John Rogers suggests, Locke’s state of nature has about it a utopian air.12 Certainly the state of nature does not by definition involve a willingness of those who are in it to use force against one another without right. Nor does departing the state of nature put an end to war: a government can be in a state of war with the citizens when it perverts the civil law in order to victimize them (I Two Treatises, I § 20).

VI If it is hard to see why people should leave an idyllic state of nature, it is correspondingly hard to see why the dissolution of government should necessarily be a disaster. Locke’s main answer is that, when a community organizes itself under legislative, and law-enforcement institutions, the pooled executive power of a community to enforce the law of nature—specifically, the executive power to protect “property” 12

“John Locke’s State of Nature as a Utopian Ideal,” Anglophonia 3 (1988): 77–87.

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—stands the best chance of being impartially and efficiently deployed against wrongdoers. But it is the executive power that is entrusted—and only conditionally— to a government when a community becomes a state. No-one transfers the right of judgement, as in Hobbes, and the right of judgement may be exercised by the irrational in ways that lead people to think their trust has been betrayed by government. When the routine burdens of life in the state—taxation, military service—seem too great, the impression of a betrayed trust may not be slow to form. As for the extraordinary burdens of life in the state—submitting to incessant security searches and intrusive questioning, even detention, in times of terrorist threat—these can even more clearly and quickly register as oppression, at least in a minority. How does Locke’s theory, which is certainly on its guard against the reality of betrayed trust, control for the illusion of betrayed trust, or for cases where, extraordinarily, protections of life, liberty, and property are weakened or suspended? The short answer is that Locke’s theory does not control for these things. Instead, human nature or custom is relied upon to put a brake on the rebellious impulses of the discontented. Thus, against the objection that no state will last for long if people are able to withdraw their trust on seeing their “property” invaded, Locke insists in the chapter entitled “The Dissolution of Government” that People are not so easily got out of their old Forms, as some are apt to suggest. They are hardly to be prevailed with to amend the acknowledg’d Faults, in the Frame they have been accustom’d to (Two Treatises, II, §223)

It even goes against the grain, Locke immediately adds, for people to go in for reform when everyone agrees that an opportunity for reform has arrived. Inertia overcomes the appetite for changing how countries are ruled. Locke replies in the same vein when he entertains the objection that his own theory of the dissolution of the state will add to pretexts for rebellion. According to Locke’s theory, as soon as a government passes laws which have the effect of endangering people’s property, the government introduces a state of war—shows that it is willing to use force without authority—and therefore loses legitimacy of office. So, might people seize on the theory at every opportunity to claim that a government has overstepped the mark? Locke’s answer is, “Not if actual rebellions are anything to go by”: Revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in publick affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient Laws, and all the slips of humane frailty will be born by the People, without mutiny or murmur (Two Treatises, II §225).

This sounds like sheer assertion, and seems no more or less compelling than Hobbes’s remark about the multiplying glasses applied to every little cost of government. Far from adding to the pretexts for rebellion, Locke says, his theory of the dissolution of states points the people not in the direction of no government, but toward a new government. In any case, Locke’s theory implies that the rebels in cases of dissolution of government are not the people who withdraw trust, but the government that betrays trust, since it is the government that by turning laws against the people introduce a state of war. If anyone is cautioned by the theory against rebellion, it

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is governments, for they are told that they have the people to answer to. On this highly revisionary account of rebellion, Locke may be right, but he does not meet the objection that in the ordinary sense of “rebellion” his theory might provide a pretext for rebellion. This is the objection he is supposed to be confronting. Locke is also in difficulty when it comes to the question of who should judge that the betrayal of trust has taken place. What if the claim that this trust has been broken is spread by “ill affected and factious Men” in cases where “the Prince only makes use of his due Prerogative”? To this I reply, The People shall be Judge; for who shall be Judge whether his Trustee or Deputy acts well, and according to the Trust reposed in him, but he who deputes him, and must, by having deputed him, have still a Power to discard him when he fails in his Trust. If this be reasonable in particular Cases of private Men, why should it be otherwise in that of the greatest moment; where the Welfare of Millions is concerned, and also where the evil, if not prevented, is greater, and the Redress very difficult, dear and dangerous? (Two Treatises, II § 240).

This reply suggests that the analogy between the private judger and the People is unproblematic. But it is not. To the extent that the People—the community without formal government—can produce a judgement, it is that of a majority, which, if it is a small majority, may not be decisive enough to justify anything as momentous as the dissolution of a government. It is because what is being decided in the case at issue is unlike that of the typical private withdrawal of trust, and because the judger has less unity than a private judger, that Locke’s answer is unsatisfactory. It is possible, of course, that in Locke’s favoured case of deciding about the withdrawal of trust—the case where flagrant arbitrariness and brazen invasion of property have tried the patience of a people over such a long period that its wrongness is unmistakeable—the people would have no trouble forming an undivided judgement. The question is whether the favoured case is too easy a case. The current situation in the Western world—where trade-offs between security and liberty are increasingly being settled in favour of security—may look to sections of a community-like movement toward a “police state”—not a Lockean tyranny, perhaps, but perhaps something unsatisfactory enough to some to justify violent reaction. The more impressive and recent the evidence of the threat to security, the more incursions on liberty are borne willingly. But things change, and the spectre of the police state seems to materialize for some people the longer the intervals between terrorist outrages. It is to Hobbes’s credit that he sees security from violent attack (rather than the protection of property broadly speaking) as the undisputed good par excellence, and that he thinks the costs of security become easier to bear, the more lives are palpably threatened. By making the purpose of the state the protection of more than life, Locke’s theory may have to reckon with more public resistance to the costs, and therefore with more obstacles to unanimity when “the people” decide whether trust has been betrayed. Locke shows little awareness of a problem in this area. I suspect that there is a connection between Locke’s brisk handling of the “Who is to Judge?” question, and what we have noticed is his relatively favourable view of the state of nature. The connection is the thought that human beings are naturally reasonable and able to agree over what counts as an incursion on “property” in the

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wide Lockean sense. Since they are able to agree, they are able to judge both laws and the state of nature against the goal of protecting property. The state of nature is ill-suited to protecting property, because of the lack of an umpiring mechanism, and government institutions can be ill-suited to the goal, because of the way that particular people subvert their umpiring capacity. But the source and workings of the capacity for natural reasonableness are obscure in Locke. Even if one brings in the doctrine that moral and political precepts are true by convention, the ability to arrive at the conventions is not unanalysable. Locke, in the Two Treatises at least, gives no analysis. It is as if natural reasonableness is a descendent of Aristotelian natural sociableness—unexplicated but carrying a reasonably heavy burden in Locke’s theory.13 Hobbes is better at anatomizing reasonableness, and better at keeping idealizations out of the state of nature.

13 (Unanalyzed) Human reasonableness, along with God’s existence, seems to be among the givens that make demonstrative moral knowledge possible. Cf. Essay IV. iii. 18.

Chapter 3

The Sovereignty of the People Stuart Brown

It is a commonplace of contemporary European political culture that governments derive their rightful powers from the people or, as it is variously put, that sovereignty belongs to, resides in or emanates from the people.1 That this is so is suggested by the frequent occurrence of such metaphors in the language of modern European constitutions. For instance, the 1949 Grundgesetz of the Federal Republic of Germany states that: “All public authority emanates from the people.”2 The 1947 Italian Constitution says that “sovereignty belongs to the people.”3 The wording of the 1958 French Constitution is nearly identical.4 The 1978 Spanish Constitution elaborates: “National Sovereignty resides in the Spanish people from whom emanate the powers of the state.”5 And the Greek Constitution of 1975 states: “The sovereignty of the People is the foundation of Government. All powers are derived from the People and the Nation.”6

1 This essay originated as a paper presented at a conference in Mussomeli, Sicily, in 1999. This conference would not have happened nor would this paper have been written but for John Rogers, to whom indeed the history of philosophy in Britain is greatly indebted in many other ways. It seemed to me as appropriate a tribute as I could offer to John given the limited overlap of our special interests. I offer it with some diffidence since such a broad topic really needs to be treated in book form and my topic is in some respects dealt with more adequately by, for instance, Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), about which I have more to say.

“Alle Staatsgewalt geht vom Volke aus.” Text and translation from Constitutions of the Countries of the World, ed. Albert P. Blaustein and Gisbert H. Flanz (Bobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana, 1971–), Germany, June, 1995. Italics added.

2

3 “La souvranit` a appartiene al popolo. . .” (Art. 1) Bold added. Text and translation from Constitutions of the Countries of the World: Italy, March, 1987. 4 “La souvraint´e nationale appartient au peuple . . .” (Art. 2). Bold added. Text and translation from Constitutions of the Countries of the World: France, June, 1988.

“La soberan´ıa nacional reside en el pueblo espa˜nol, del que eman los poderes de Estado.” (Art. 1) Text and translation from Constitutions of the Countries of the World: Spain, March, 1991. Bold added. 5

6

Article 1. Translation from Constitutions of the Countries of the World: Greece, December, 1988.

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 45–57. and Legacy, 

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One could go on.7 The fundamental thought seems to be that all authorisation has to begin somewhere with some person or persons in whom it resides naturally and unproblematically and from whom it emanates by their freely giving it—and to whom, therefore, it is said, echoing the words of the Italian Constitution, that sovereignty “belongs.” Such ideas, though now taken up in many other parts of the world, have a particular history and were already reflected in constitutional documents of the eighteenth century. Thus the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 declares that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The phraseology, however, is more reminiscent of the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, where we read: The source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body, no individual can exercise authority that does not explicitly proceed from it.8

Rousseau’s Contrat Social (1762) is often cited as a philosophical source for this doctrine. But Diderot seems to have been the first to say, in so many words, that “There is no true sovereign other than the nation.”9 In the article on “political authority” in his famous Encyclop´edie Diderot writes that “the government . . . can never be taken away from the people, to whom it belongs fundamentally, and as a freehold.”10 But, though there may have been some originality of expression, neither Rousseau nor Diderot was the author of the underlying doctrines, which had been establishing themselves, at least in radical and reformist circles, for some time before. Indeed these ideas go back thousands of years.

The Myth of the People’s Consent The doctrine of the sovereignty of the people has its roots in a myth about the origin of political society—what I refer to, for short, as the myth of the people’s consent. Like other aetiological myths, this one takes a variety of forms and has been elaborated in a number of different ways for different purposes. But here is a fictional formulation that has many points of resemblance to several historical articulations11 of the myth: Before the formation of political societies human beings existed in the state of nature. In this state they were free and subject to the authority of no other people. They lived in isolated but harmonious family groups, taking from the land no more than they needed.

7

For instance, the Belgian, Irish, Portuguese and Swedish Constitutions all contain similar articles.

Article 3. Quoted in translation from The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. D. Van Kley (Stanford, CAL: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1. Italics added. J.K. Wright, in his contribution to Van Kley’s useful collection, explores some of the background to the drafting of this article. 8

9

This is a translation of the formulation to be found in his Observations on the Nakaz (1774).

Quoted from Denis Diderot’s The Encyclopedia: Selections, ed. and trans. Stephen J. Gendzier (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 187. 10 11

Some of these are considered in later sections of this essay.

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But this did not last and, for one reason or another, people came into conflict with their neighbours and this led, if not to a state of war, to a constant fear of the threat of violence and the loss of their livelihoods if not their very lives. As a result they freely agreed to subject themselves to an authority who would maintain peace, resolve disputes between them, establish laws and punish those who broke them. Thus the people, from whom all political authority derives, came to confer that authority on the sovereign who retained a proper claim on their allegiance so long as he or she fulfilled this agreed role.

I have called this story a “myth” for two reasons. One is that, though it seems reasonable to suppose humans once existed in a pre-political state, we know very little about it or how early political societies were formed. More significantly, however, the story has had a hold on the minds of many people who did not have the slightest empirical reason for believing it.12 It is not a mere speculation. It was indeed a philosophical myth in that it embodied or at least came to embody important conceptual or a priori claims for which evidence would actually be irrelevant anyway. Amongst these claims are these two: 1) that the existence of authority—at least authority over people—is not a given but has to be justified or derived from somewhere: and 2) that, in the absence of the consent of the people, a sovereign may compel but has no right to their obedience. To try to justify claims like these would be to engage, not in any empirical inquiry, but in political philosophy. It should not be surprising, therefore, that many of those who elaborated stories about the state of nature and how political societies came into being would be counted as “philosophers.” One such elaboration resulted in theories of the relation between sovereign and people as founded on a contract— a contract that confers rights and corresponding duties on each party in relation to the other: that not only limits the powers of the sovereign but even gives a sense to the suggestion that a king could be in breach of his contract with the people. But this elaboration and this suggestion are quickly accessible to a much wider group than those mainly classified as philosophers and might readily be taken up, for instance, by lawyers13 and any others for whom the idea of making and breaking contracts were familiar. And so, at times of more widespread intellectual crisis, when the ideas of philosophers may be taken up by a wider community of people, the idea that sovereigns were bound by a contract with their people might achieve a currency it would not otherwise have had. In these circumstances the distinction between philosophers and non-philosophers becomes blurred.

12

It should be evident that I am not using the term “myth” here as some historians do, to mean a widespread but false belief to be “exploded” by empirical enquiry. This disagreement is not just about a word. Those who will insist on this other sense as the only proper one will also hold that Hume’s essay “Of an Original Contract” gave the myth of the people’s consent the coup de grace. 13 In the English context lawyers were prominent in the Army Debates. So was the anonymous person who wrote under the name “Eutactus Eudemius” and whose views are discussed below.

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The story of the consent theory of government, were it told in full, would fill several volumes. It was partly told by J.W. Gough in his admirable though now dated monograph The Social Contract: A Critical Study of its Development14 and is one theme of Quentin Skinner’s brilliant two-volume The Foundations of Modern Political Thought.15 The two books represent very different approaches to the history of ideas. Gough’s book perhaps remains the most comprehensive account of the history of thinking about the social contract generally or, more specifically, about the idea that sovereignty is founded upon a contract between the government and the people. Gough traces the sources of the idea in the Greek Sophists, in Roman law and amongst the Stoics. He also traces its use by several medieval philosophers, from Manegold of Lautenbach to the Italian Marius Salamonius and including Aquinas and Nicolas Cusanus. Such range is achieved, however, at a price, one that Skinner is unwilling to pay. Gough, like others who followed what Skinner calls “the more traditional method of studying the history of political ideas,”16 does not pay attention to “the more general social and intellectual matrix” out of which the classic texts of the subject arose. Skinner holds that the history of political theory will lack a “genuinely historical character” so long as the focus is on “those who discussed the problems of political life at a level of abstraction and intelligence unmatched by any of their contemporaries.”17 If, on the contrary, we succeed in surrounding the classical texts with “their appropriate ideological context” we may hope to obtain a more realistic picture of how political thinking was conducted in earlier periods. At the same time it is “no less essential to consider . . . the context of earlier writings and inherited assumptions about political society.”18 This is the approach that Skinner sought to exemplify in his book. Though their methodologies are different Gough and Skinner are in agreement in acknowledging the influence of philosophers on the political ideologies of early modern Europe. Both acknowledge, for instance, the importance of Aristotle and the Stoics on different ways of thinking about the state of nature and both see the early modern period as the time when the idea that the state is based on a contract came into its own. Gough claims that although the contract theory was “widespread” in the Middle Ages, “its modern history really begins in the sixteenth century, when it acquired a wider publicity, and made a fresh start as a commonplace of practical political controversy.”19

14 J.W. Gough, The Social Contract: A Critical Study of its Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. Second edition, 1957). 15

Skinner, Foundations, op. cit. supra at note 1 .

16

Ibid., vol. 1, x. Skinner does not himself expressly criticize Gough but it is clear enough that his objections to the traditional approach should be understood as applying to Gough and indeed most other so-called historians of political theory of the previous generation. 17

Ibid., vol. 1, xi.

18

Ibid.

19

Ibid., 49.

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Gough presents the contract theory as having declined as a result of criticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But, in an age of less rampant philosophical empiricism, contractualist theories generally have undergone a very considerable revival, as is evident, for example, from the reception, at least in the English-speaking world, of the writings of John Rawls. Consent theories of government are once again alive and well, if transformed a good deal, and are regarded by at least some contemporary political philosophers as the most promising.20 The view that sovereignty is ultimately based upon the consent of the people because of some contractual relationship is not, of course, the same as the view that the people are sovereign. In contract theories the “people” do not necessarily exist as a separate political body nor are they represented by a body to whom the monarch might be held to account. Indeed on some theories, such as that of Hobbes, the people are, apart from their incorporation into political society, a mere collection of individuals, indeed a rabble. Usually the terms of the contract were so represented as to make it easy to claim breaches on the side of particular subjects and virtually impossible to substantiate a claimed breach against the king. Nonetheless medieval theorists did usually admit the category of tyrant and might even admit—though usually without emphasis—that it would be right to depose or even assassinate a tyrant.21 These admissions assigned to the people at least reserve rights of sovereignty and opened up at least the theoretical possibility of exercising them. These admissions, though once merely theoretical, became much more prominent in sixteenth century Europe, when the issue of tyrannicide became as topical amongst political theorists as it was contentious. A number of thinkers, known as the monarchomachi, insisted on the limited powers of monarchs and in some of their writings it is possible to detect the beginnings of a doctrine of the sovereignty of the people. Several of these European thinkers had an acknowledged influence on the English scene. But one may be selected for particular attention.

Juan De Mariana : an Early Consent Theorist The Spanish Jesuit, Juan de Mariana (1535-1624) was the author of one of numerous works produced in the turbulent sixteenth century that were intended to provide instruction in the art of kingship.22 His book was appropriately entitled De Rege

20 For instance, Harry Beran, in The Consent Theory of Political Obligation (London, New York, Sydney: Croom Helm, 1987).

For instance, Aquinas gave his approval in principle to tyrannicide in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (Book II, dist. 44, qu. 2, art. 2). 21

22 The work was undertaken at the request of the then tutor to the Spanish infanta and it is idealistic in recommending, for instance, that a king should be “like a father to his people.” But Mariana was also concerned to warn that a king would not be safe on his throne if he forgot that he ruled with the consent of the people.

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et Regis Institutione.23 At the time a particular notoriety attached to the chapter on tyrannicide, where Mariana appeared not only to condone the assassination of the French king Henry III but even referred to the assassin as “an eternal hero of France.”24 A closer examination of his text shows that he did not actually endorse tyrannicide, as his critics claimed, but was only reporting the opinion of “many people,” since he was at that stage presenting the arguments that support tyrannicide in certain circumstances.25 He also presented strong arguments against killing even a tyrant—arguing, with historical examples, that those who overthrow their rulers are likely to bring about even greater evils than those they seek to remedy.26 Nonetheless it was his considered view that, if certain procedures are followed, the people may be right in ridding themselves of their ruler. This is where he brings in his version of the myth of the people’s consent. Mariana pictured political society as having emerged in several stages. Initially, men wandered alone like beasts without fixed homes or laws. The dangers of such a life made them appoint someone of outstanding justice and honesty to be their king. Initially kings ruled according to their discretion, subject to considerations of natural law, but later it proved necessary to introduce laws which restricted their powers. Thus Mariana writes: . . . my view is this: the regal power, if it is lawful, ever has its source from the citizens; by their grant the first kings were placed in each state in the seat of supreme authority. That authority they hedged about with laws and obligations, lest it puff itself up too much, run riot, result in the ruin of the subjects, and degenerate into tyranny.27

If a king persists in breaking these laws and disregarding these obligations then the people—to whom Mariana also refers as the commonwealth or the republic—should not ignore it and, in principle, can take back the “rights to rule’ they have transferred to the king: Assuredly, the republic, whence the regal power has its source, can call a king into court, when circumstances require and, if he persists in senseless conduct, it can strip him of his principiate.28

Mariana’s idea was, in effect, that the king should first receive a formal caution and be given an opportunity to mend his ways. But though, in this respect, he may have been original—anticipating modern disciplinary processes—the underlying thought that the power of the sovereign is derived from the people was not novel. Mariana

Juan de Mariana, De Rege, et Regis Institutione (Toledo, 1599), trans. G.A. Moore as Of the King and the Education of the King (Washington, D.C.: Country Dollar Press, 1947).

23

24 De Rege, I ix, 69; The King, 144. Mariana sought to distance himself from this opinion by adding the diplomatic words “as it seemed to very many.” This was not enough, however, and he was required to delete the offending words “eternum Galliae decus” from subsequent editions. 25

Ibid.

26

De Rege, I ix, 75; The King, 147.

27

De Rege, I viii, 88; The King, 156.

28

De Rege, I ix, 72f.; The King, 146.

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largely followed Aquinas philosophically and similar ideas were voiced in more moderate tones by other Spanish political theorists of the time.29 It has been claimed, however, that the implicit voluntarism of the idea that government is based upon a contract was tempered, for scholastic writers, by the Aristotelian view that political society was natural whereas Mariana anticipated the explicit voluntarism of later contractual theories.30 It is possible, by emphasising certain passages and ignoring others, to read Mariana as a much more modern writer than he actually was: as more individualistic, voluntaristic, mechanistic and secular in his theory than, on balance, he intended. Mariana assumes the existence of certain constitutional arrangements31 in the absence of which it would make no sense to refer to a court to which the “republic” can call the king. Moreover he does not defend his claim that the people, in transferring to the king “the rights to rule,” nonetheless “reserved a greater power to itself.”32 Such arguments would cut no ice with a defender of absolutism. At the same time they were to prove congenial to those who wished to defend the right to depose an unsuitable monarch. Thus Oliver Cromwell, when obliged to defend the execution of Charles I, appealed to the principles of Mariana in what a historian of the times described as “a long discourse of the nature of royal power.”33 Cromwell also appealed to the principles of the French-educated Scottish humanist, George Buchanan, who had written to justify the deposition of Mary, Queen of Scots. Buchanan offered an account of the origin of political society which is comparable to Mariana’s, in which a basically “free people” created monarchs for their own protection.34 Buchanan also made much of the idea that monarchs are bound by laws and that tyrants who are in breach of them release their people from their obligations of obedience.35

See, for instance, Bernice Hamilton, Political Thought in Sixteenth Century Spain: A study of the Political Ideas of Vitoria, De Soto, Su´arez, and Molina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Su´arez and Molina were also Jesuits. The involvement of the Jesuits in radical political thinking is well explained by Skinner. 29

See, for instance, Guenter Lewy, Constitutionalism and Statecraft during the Golden Age of Spain: A Study of the Political Philosophy of Juan de Mariana, S.J. (Geneva: Droz, 1960), especially ch. III.

30

31

Lewy and others have argued that Mariana assumes specifically Spanish institutions, such as the Cortes, which effectively limited the absolute power of the king. See Manuel Colmeiro, Cortes de los antiguos reinos de Leon y de Castilla: Introduccion (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1883). De Rege, 73; The King, 146. His next sentence alludes to two areas where the Cortes enjoyed privileges, in relation to levying taxes and making “permanent laws.” 32 33

Gilbert Burnet, History of my own Time (1724), ed. Osmund Airy, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1897), 1: 71.

34

De Jure Regni apud Scotos (Edinburgh, 1579), 96.

In his Rerum scoticum historia (Edinburgh, 1582), Buchanan claimed that “government is nothing more than a mutual compact between the people and their kings.” (History of Scotland, trans. James Aikman [Glasgow, 1827] Book XX, § 37.) 35

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The Myth of Consent in Early Modern England The period of the Civil War in England and its aftermath was a time of intense debates36 about political matters. Cromwell himself had taken part in these debates, which provided the stimulus for much political pamphleteering and at least some original philosophical theorizing. Though the contract theory could be used in service of absolutism, as Hobbes’s Leviathan showed, it became something of a commonplace of mid-seventeenth century English radicals who favoured a limited monarchy or even a republic. Numerous pamphlets appeared on the subject of the origin and purpose of government whose authors sought to maintain that the people are the source of all just powers.37 For instance, a Gray’s Inn lawyer writing under the pseudonym “Eutactus Philodemius’ wrote a pamphlet on The Original and End of Civil Power 38 in which he sought to maintain that the people “are the original of all just powers.” This claim is one the author sought to amplify in these terms: When they are said to be the Original of all just Powers, thereby is to be understood, Their Act of Consent is the Source and Fountain from whence all Forms of Power and Government flow.39

The author first appealed, in support of this claim, to “an old and true rule, OMNIS POTESTAS FUNDATA IN VOLUNTATE.” But he went further, maintaining that “All Soveraignties [sic] and Royalties are virtually in the People, though they are formally in him whom the People set up over themselves’ (ibid.). His claim was that sovereignty was fundamentally a power that God had conferred on each individual and which therefore exists prior to political society in a dispersed form. When the people consent to be subject to a civil power they bring together this power and “concentrate” it on one or more persons. But they do not thereby alienate their “proper Rights and Interests.”40 This author’s theory about the “broken and scattered Rayes” of power dispersed amongst the community is unlikely to convince anyone who is not already disposed to accept his conclusions. A more promising line of argument was developed by one of the leaders of the radically republican Levellers, Richard Overton (fl. 1642-63), who sought to trace the origin of political power as a kind of property possessed by individuals. In doing so, he provided a philosophical basis for a doctrine that was significantly closer to what would nowadays be understood as the sovereignty of the people. 36 See, for instance, Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents, ed. A.S.P. Woodhouse (1938; 3rd edition, London: Dent, 1986). 37 I discuss only two examples here. Others include the anonymous A brief discourse . . . on the nature, rise and end of civill government (1648) and J. Lilburn’s Regall tyrannie discover’d (1647). 38 London, 1649. Reprinted in Pamphlets on Religion and Democracy: 16th to 19th Centuries (San Francisco, 1940), 180–219. 39

Original and End of Civil Power, 4 (Pamphlets on Religion and Democracy, 189).

40

Original and End of Civil Power, 5 (Pamphlets on Religion and Democracy, 189).

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Overton was the author of a large number of pamphlets, of which one of the most theoretical was written from Newgate Prison in 1646. It was directed against the House of Lords in particular but entitled more broadly as An arrow against all tyrants and tyranny . . . . Despite its brevity, the full title advertising this work claimed that in it were discovered “the original, rise, extent, and end of magisterial power.” Overton argues that sovereign power is not originally in the king—who indeed is no more than “supreme excecutioner of the laws”41 —but ultimately derives from the people. For, he claims: “To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature not to be invaded or usurped by any.”42 Every self, to be a self distinguished from other selves, must have such a property in their own person. “Mine and thine cannot be, except this be.” Otherwise put, “every man by nature [is] . . . a king . . . in his own natural circuit and compass.”43 This “self-propriety” is the root of all (legitimate) political power. For each person possesses in their own “natural circuit and compass” an innate and unique authority. No one can have any right to encroach upon the “natural circuit and compass” of another unless that person has given his “free consent.” Overton holds that individuals become subject to a political power because, for their safety and good, a number of them agree to place their trust in another and so they consent to be governed. If, however, those to whom power is entrusted betray that trust, then it reverts to the hands of those who gave it. As Overton makes clear in another pamphlet: While the betrusted are dischargers of their trust it remaineth in their hands, but no sooner the betrusted betray and forfeit their trust but (as all things else in dissolution) it returneth from whence it came, even to the hands of the trusters. For all just human powers are but betrusted, conferred and conveyed by joint and common consent; for to every individual in nature is given an individual propriety by nature, not to be usurped or invaded by any (as in mine Arrow against Tyranny is proved and discovered more at large); for every one as he is himself hath a self propriety—else he could not be himself—and on this no second may presume without consent; and by natural birth all men are equal, and alike born to like propriety and freedom . . . .44

Overton, in arguing that political power is a property of individuals, was one of the first to try to put what was later to be called “the sovereignty of the people” on a philosophical basis. This project was one that was to be taken further by John Locke in the second of his Two Treatises of Civil Government, described by him as An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government.

41

The English Levellers, ed. Andrew Sharp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 63.

42

From the opening paragraph of the work. See The English Levellers, ed. Andrew Sharp, 55.

43

Op. cit., 55.

From An Appeal from the Commons to a Free People (1647), repr. in Puritanism and Liberty, 327. 44

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John Locke on Political Power Locke wrote his Two Treatises in the early 1680s around the time of the so-called Exclusion Crisis, when he was associated with the unsuccessful attempt to prevent James, Duke of York, from being recognised as heir to the throne. Like Mariana and Buchanan, he insisted on limits to the rights of rulers and defended the right of the people, in certain circumstances, to resist and even overthrow their monarch. Though it is uncertain what Locke’s immediate sources were, the German natural law theorist Samuel von Pufendorf is a likely European candidate.45 Locke also quotes a good deal from the Anglican divine Richard Hooker, though this may have been because he expected his readers to regard Hooker as an authority46 and not necessarily because he was himself much indebted to him. Nonetheless Locke presents the consent theory as if it were the traditional one. His First Treatise attacked Filmer’s theory that “princes . . . have a divine right to absolute power,” which he claimed was a relative novelty. Failing the divine right theory, he argued, we need to return to the old consent theory of government. As he puts it: . . . governments must be left again to the old way of being made by contrivance, and the consent of men . . . making use of their reason to unite together. (Two Treatises I, § 6)

Locke, in other words, presented himself as following in a tradition of thinking about civil government that had been interrupted in “this last age” (Two Treatises I, § 3) by the credence given to the idea that the authority of kings derived directly from God and did not depend at all on the consent of the people. Locke seems to have had both treatises in manuscript form some years before they were published. In 1683, when there was a purge of Whig radicals after an unsuccessful plot against Charles II, Locke fled to the Netherlands, leaving his manuscripts behind him. He did not return to England until after the Revolution that deposed James II and put William and Mary on the throne. His Two Treatises were therefore not published until 1690, by which time justifying allegiance to William would have seemed to be at least as important a part of his project as defending the right of the people to depose their government. For this reason, he expressed the

Locke recommended Pufendorf inter alios as suitable study for the education of a gentleman. Among Locke’s English predecessors Philip Hunton (author of A Treatise of Monarchie, 1643) and George Lawson have been suggested as possible influences. See Gough, Constitutionalism, 91 and 145 and A.H. Maclean, “Lawson and Locke,” Cambridge Historical Journal 9 (1947): 69–77. See also David Wootton, “From Rebellion to Revolution: the crisis of the winter of 1612/3 and the origins of Civil War radicalism,” English Historical Review 105 (1990): 654–69. It is also likely that Locke knew some of the radical literature from mid-seventeenth century England that I have already referred to. His project, if not the details of his arguments, belongs to the same tradition.

45

46

“I thought Hooker alone might be enough to satisfy those men, who relying on him for their ecclesiastical polity, are by strange fate carried to deny those principles upon which he builds it.” (Two Treatises II, § 239)

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hope, in his Preface to the Reader, that what he had written would be sufficient to justify allegiance to William—as he put it, “to make good his title, in the consent of the people, which being the only one of all lawful governments, he has more fully and clearly than any prince in Christendom . . ..” In his Second Treatise, Locke offered a consent theory at two levels, distinguishing between the consent every man must give in order to be incorporated into political society and the majority consent of the people as a corporate body. In the state of nature “the people” are simply a collection of individuals. It requires the agreement of each individual for that individual to quit the state of nature and become a member of the body politic: Men being, as hath been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be . . . subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent. (Two Treatises II, § 95)

Political power, according to Locke, resides originally in the people individually and indeed each one must give his consent in order to become part of political society and be bound by its decisions. Each one needs to resign what he calls the “executive power of the law of nature”—for instance, the right to punish by retaliation those who harm them—which each one has in the state of nature. Each one needs to be incorporated into the body politic by transferring this power to the people, conceived as a corporate entity. Talk about “the consent of the people” in a second, and perhaps the more important sense, is talk about a decision of the corporate entity. A majority decision determines the will of the people and is binding on all those who make up the society: When any number of men have so consented to make one community or government, they are thereby presently incorporated, and make one body politic, wherein the majority have a right to act and conclude the rest. (Two Treatises II, § 95)

Locke seems to think there is something naturally right about a majority, since a body has to move where the “greater force” carries it (Two Treatises II, § 96) and the body politic will naturally move in the direction wanted by the greatest number of individual wills. The consent of the people, in this sense, is the consent of the majority. When individuals consent to be part of a political society, they consent to be bound by the majority will. In one passage, indeed, he writes that they owe “no obedience but to the public will of the society.” (Two Treatises II, § 151) Thus Locke sees political power or authority as residing in each person in the state of nature, as being transferred to “the body of the people” who then, by a majority, entrust their collective political power both to a specific form of government and also to an actual government: . . . political power is that power which every man, having in the state of nature, has given up into the hands of the society, and therein to the governors, whom the society hath set over itself, with this express or tacit trust, that it shall be employed for their good, and the preservation of their property. . . (Two Treatises II, § 171)

If the legislative acts in breach of the trust put in it, then it forfeits the right to make laws and the power conferred by the consent of the body of the people reverts once more:

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Thus Locke developed his own version of the European myth of the consent of the people or, put more abstractly, of the notion that sovereignty emanates from the people. Like Mariana, Buchanan and many others, though unlike Hobbes, he insisted that the people retained their sovereignty and that meant retaining their collective right to overthrow a government that abused its trust. Even an absolutist like William Barclay accepted that a king who allowed his country to be annexed by another would have alienated his kingdom and lost his sovereignty: “. . . this act sets the people free and leaves them at their [own] disposal.”47 Locke agreed, of course, but went much further in limiting the proper powers of government and the range of laws it could introduce without being in breach of its trust. For instance, he stipulated that “. . . these laws ought also to be designed for no other end ultimately than the good of the people . . ..” (Two Treatises II, § 142). Moreover, since sovereignty is always held in trust from the people, if there is any doubt as to whether a government has breached its trust, it is the people who must decide. To the question “who shall be the judge whether the prince or legislative act contrary to their trust?” Locke confidently answered: . . . the people shall be the judge; for who shall be the judge whether his trustee or deputy acts well, and according to the trust reposed in him, but he who deputes him, and must, by having deputed him have still a power to discard him, when he fails in his trust? (Two Treatises II, § 240)

I should conclude by acknowledging that the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, in the formulations I have discussed here, is democratic only in a very broad sense. What makes Locke’s theory (and that of some of the English radicals) democratic in our sense, at least in direction, is the importance it attaches to the idea that political power ultimately resides in the people distributively and not, as with Mariana and perhaps the philosophes, only as a collectivity. If political power ultimately resides in the people distributively, then it is natural to attach importance, as Locke does, to elections and majorities. Locke, of course, did not dream of a universal franchise of all adults.48 But, even though he himself did not develop it, his political theory is democratic in tendency.

47 48

Quoted and translated by Locke in Two Treatises II, § 238.

He assumed, for instance, that politics is only for men, the interests of women being looked after by their fathers or husbands. His rationale was that “the rule [as between husband and wife] naturally falls to the man’s share, as the abler and the stronger.” (Two Treatises II, § 82) Locke remained a man of his time. It was not until the nineteenth century that the untenability of assuming that the interests of women would naturally be represented by men was exposed, by John Stuart Mill, in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861).

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Concluding Remarks In this essay I have attempted to shed a little light on the question whether, and if so, how philosophers have contributed to the intellectual and cultural identity of Europe.49 I have tried to show how a philosophical tradition of thinking about the origin of civil government helped to shape a political culture in which it began to make sense to talk of the sovereignty of the people. Philosophers do not, it seems to me, have much influence when it comes to converting the ideas of a minority culture into the kind of consensus which is constitutive of a common culture. They do nonetheless have a seminal role to play. Without some kind of theoretical background such as philosophers have sought to provide it would make no sense to talk of sovereignty “belonging to”, “residing in” or “emanating from” the people, as we have seen that several European constitutions do. If a consensus about the sovereignty of the people is now constitutive of modern European culture it does not follow that it is uniquely European or that it is in that sense constitutive of European identity in contrast with that of the peoples of any other part of the world. The consensus is by no means uniquely European. Nonetheless it did not arise out of nothing and, I have been trying to show, has its roots in European political history. It is, one might even say, part of the European contribution to world culture.

49 This was the brief given to contributors to the Mussomeli conference in 1999 at which a version of this essay was presented.

Chapter 4

Locke’s Account of Abstract Ideas—Again Michael Ayers

John Rogers’ contribution to the study of early-modern philosophy has taken two forms, scholarly and practical. Much of his scholarly work has been focused on or around the thought of John Locke, and his many organizational achievements include the central role in founding and editing a journal that stands with the best in the world. It may therefore be deemed appropriate both that the present piece should be about Locke, and that it has been stimulated by my rereading of two good articles, published in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy a few years ago,1 the author of which, Jonathan Walmsley, in both cases records his gratitude to John for editorial help received. I should start by explaining that Walmsley and I are agreed on the important point that, for Locke, an “idea,” as “whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding when a Man thinks,” is an “image” in that it is an object of sense or imagination, and never a purely intellectual concept or idea such as was postulated by Platonists, Aristotelians and Cartesians. “Sense” here includes “internal sense” or reflection, and the operations of (external) sense and reflection together constitute “experience.”2 This was a fairly radical move away from the traditional assignment of reflexive awareness of the mind and its operations to pure intellect. Those who purport to find evidence that Locke’s ideas are at least sometimes more like intellectual conceptions (or like “concepts” in a Kantian or even present-day understanding of what a concept is) generally rely on two main arguments. One appeals to ideas of reflection, which is simply to ignore or misconstrue what Locke says about reflection.3 The other appeals to a certain kind of reading of his account of abstraction, which is the topic of the present paper, although that reading will be alluded to only incidentally.

1 “Locke on Abstraction: A Response to M.R. Ayers,” BJHP 7 (1999): 123–134; and “The Development of Lockean Abstraction,” BJHP 8 (2000): 395–418.

Essay II.i.4: “The other Fountain, from which Experience furnisheth the Understanding with Ideas is the Perception of the Operations of our own Minds within us, as it is employ’d about the Ideas it has got; . . . And though it be not Sense, as having nothing to do with external Objects; yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be call’d internal Sense.”

2

E.J. Ashworth, “Locke on Language,” in Vere Chapell (ed.), Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 196–7.

3

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 59–73. and Legacy, 

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In the first of the articles in question Walmsley criticizes a view that I had advanced that to have the abstract idea of (for example) a triangle actually before the mind, as in geometrical thought and reasoning, is to perceive or imagine a particular or determinate triangle, while considering it simply as a triangle. That is to say, it is not to imagine or have an actual image before the mind of a shape that is barely triangular, “neither Oblique, nor Rectangle, neither Equilateral, Equicrural, nor Scalenon.” Walmsley’s main criticism, advanced with some indignant force, is that Locke plainly and unequivocally asserts just what I deny is his view. According to Walmsley, in the passage from which I here quote (Essay IV.vii.9), Locke is “explicitly stating that the particular abstract idea of a triangle is an imperfect image of a general triangle that omits certain features peculiar to particulars of this class.” Notoriously, however, this passage requires careful treatment if we are not to read it, with Berkeley, as Locke’s account of abstract ideas self-consciously self-destructing before our eyes, for after “scalenon” Locke adds “but all and none of these at once,” a point that Walmsley ignores. It therefore seems reasonable to take Locke to be saying, in this odd and rhetorical passage,4 that universal or abstract reasoning, for example about triangularity in general, is not the among the earliest intellectual achievements of children,5 since it requires an idea, formed on the basis of experience of particular triangles, that in a way represents or embraces all possible triangles and yet in another way represents or embraces none of them in particular. That reasonable interpretation avoids the supposition that Locke is telling us that to have an abstract idea is to imagine (have an actual sensory image of) something that both has and lacks every possible determination of triangularity. Indeed, on that reasonable interpretation Locke is not expressly telling us what it is to have an abstract idea before the mind at all,6 and it is noteworthy that, despite Walmsley’s gloss, Locke says nothing here about “images” or “imagining.” It is true that he adds that the general idea of a triangle is (or should Locke have said “is of”?)7 “something imperfect, that cannot exist.” What this seems to mean is that there could not be a particular triangle (and everything that exists is particular) that possessed only triangularity and properties deducible from triangularity.8 Yet, again, that is not to

4

Walmsley objects to my description of this passage as rhetorical, but that is what it undoubtedly is. 5 The immediate point of the argument is that abstract “maxims” do not figure in the first thoughts or reasonings of children, since they only gradually acquire the correspondingly abstract ideas. 6 As noted by R.I. Aaron, John Locke, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 196.

“Is” or “constitutes” is appropriate only if we understand the “idea of x” (in accordance with the traditional notion of a concept or idea taken objectively) to be x as it is conceived of. “Is of” (roughly = “represents”) is appropriate if we take the idea to be whatever mode of thought does the representing (the idea taken formally). Since the “idea of a triangle” in the latter sense undeniably can exist (we can indeed think about triangles as such), it must be that what “cannot exist” is a triangle as a triangle is abstractly conceived of. 7

8 The thought that “one has reason to suspect that such ideas are marks of our imperfection” (as if God and, perhaps, angels would be able to think all truth by having an adequate idea of every

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assert that to have the abstract idea actually before the mind is to form an image of just such an impossible particular triangle, but is entirely compatible with the view that I ascribe to Locke: namely, that when we think and reason about triangles in general we consider some particular or determinate perceived or imagined triangle in a partial way, focusing on its property of being triangular and employing that both as the object of our reasoning and as the standard that determines the class of things represented and being reasoned about. I would suggest that it is by the latter sort of achievement, on Locke’s account, that the child who has learnt to do geometry has advanced beyond infantile ideas of particulars. John Mackie, expressing an interpretation partly similar to my own, called such focusing “selective attention.”9 I have used the expression “partial consideration,” which seems clear enough and was employed by Locke himself. Admittedly, Locke used it in a different context, in an argument that is about the difference between space and body rather than about universal thought. Nevertheless, one of the examples he uses in explanation of “partial consideration” is that of considering one property of a thing while ignoring another, even when it is impossible for the former to exist without the latter: A Man may consider Light in the Sun, without its Heat; or Mobility in Body without its Extension, without thinking of their separation. One is only a partial Consideration, terminating in one alone; and the other is a Consideration of both, as existing separately. (Essay II.xiii.13)

Locke is arguing that body is divisible, space indivisible. Space is only “divisible” in thought in the sense that we can consider one part of a space without regard for other parts—we cannot conceive of (imagine) its actual division by the separation of its parts. The example serves the argument in so far as no one would conceive (or, if they tried, could clearly conceive) of the mobility of body as existing separately from its extension. In spite of this example, however, Walmsley suggests in his first article that the passage is simply irrelevant to the understanding of Locke’s theory of abstraction, since it is concerned with the “unique problem” of the differentiation of the inseparable parts of space that calls for “a unique solution in the form of partial consideration.” Indeed, he suggests that the fact that partial consideration is here distinguished from mental separation supports his supposedly straightforward interpretation of the theory of abstraction, since that theory is often expressed in terms of separation of one part of a complex idea from others. From Walmsley’s point of view, Locke might as well have declared explicitly that abstraction is not partial consideration.

particular thing, without ever needing to generalize) is also hinted at in Essay III.iii.2. But it is particularly relevant to the context of IV.vii.9, namely Locke’s attack on “maxims” and formalism, and so, at least incidentally, on the Platonic-scholastic-Cartesian view that universal ideas are copies of (or, for such as Malebranche, are) divine ideas. 9

J.L. Mackie, Problems from Locke (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976), 109–112.

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After that first article, however, Walmsley came across early versions of this passage, in a journal note (1676)10 and in Draft C (1685), that expressly and firmly assimilate “abstraction” and “partial consideration,” both being opposed to mental separation. He does not, however, take these passages as an indication of how Locke thought and maybe continued to think about abstraction. On the contrary, in his second article, “The Development of Lockean Abstraction,” Walmsley constructs an ingeniously plausible story of how, in the course of writing the drafts of the Essay, Locke developed a more determinate, worked-out theory of the objects of universal knowledge and reasoning, moving from a Hobbesian nominalist position, through a somewhat indeterminate recognition of the role of ideas corresponding to general terms, to a final endorsement of an account of abstraction as mental separation as distinguished from partial consideration. So Lockean abstract ideas, according to this account, eventually became just the kind of things that earned Berkeley’s scorn. I will come back to that story of progress (if that is what it is supposed to be), but would like now to consider the end-product as allegedly set out in a passage in the Essay that might be taken to deliver the killing blow on behalf of Walmsley’s interpretation, namely II.xi.9, a passage that Walmsley thinks I have simply ignored: The use of Words then being to stand as outward Marks of our internal Ideas, and those Ideas being taken from particular things, if every particular Idea that we take in, should have a distinct Name, Names must be endless. To prevent this, the Mind makes the particular Ideas, received from particular Objects, to become general; which is done by considering them as they are in the Mind such Appearances, separate from all other Existences, and the circumstances of real Existence, as Time, Place, or any other concomitant Ideas. This is called ABSTRACTION, whereby Ideas taken from particular Beings, become general Representatives of all of the same kind; and their Names general Names, applicable to whatever exists conformable to such abstract Ideas. Such precise, naked Appearances in the Mind, without considering, how, whence, or with what others they came there, the Understanding lays up (with Names commonly annexed to them) as the Standards to rank real Existences into sorts, as they agree with these Patterns, and to denominate them accordingly. Thus the same colour being observed to day in Chalk or Snow, which the Mind yesterday received from Milk, it considers that Appearance alone, makes it a representative of that kind; and having given it the Name Whiteness, it by that sound signifies the same quality wheresoever to be imagin’d or met with; and thus Universals, whether Ideas or Terms, are made.

Walmsley asserts that it is “quite plain” that “Locke was not putting forward a partial consideration account here,” and that Locke’s “theory” was “one of mental separation.” He bases this claim on the phrases “separate from . . . any other concomitant Ideas”, “precise,11 naked Appearances,” and even “taken from.” However, is it all so plain? What is plain, since the verb “consider” appears three times, is that Locke 10 Bodleian Library Locke MS f.1, p. 293; R.I. Aaron and Jocelyn Gibb (eds), An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay: together with Excerpts from his Journals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 79: “I think noe body says that abstracting (i e considering light alone) light from heat in the sun is separating light from heat, one is only a partial consideration of one only the other is a consideration of both & lookeing on them as existing separately.” 11 Walmsley suggests that even the word “precise” carried overtones, at that time, of actual separation. Locke was probably just following Port Royal (and more general) usage, however—in the Logic “precision” is employed as a synonym for “abstraction” (“abstraction ou pr´ecision”).

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is putting forward a “consideration” account. Abstract ideas are considered separate from concomitant ideas, are considered alone, and are precise and naked because the mind uses them “without considering” their particular associations. Now “consider” (as is reflected in Locke’s phrase “partial consideration” itself) was commonly employed to mean something like pay attention to or take into account, as when the Port Royal Logic states in its explanation of abstraction that geometers, so far from postulating lines without breadth, “consider length without paying attention to breadth.”12 But is the “consideration” of II.xi.9 of the same kind as the “partial consideration” of body of II.xiii.13—that is, for example, consideration of body’s mobility without its extension? Well, why not? For a further use of the term “partial” we may turn to another account of abstraction in the chapter “Of General Terms” (Essay III.iii), where Locke is attacking Aristotelian forms and “this whole mystery of Genera and Species.” He appeals to the way in which abstract ideas are formed from experience: “And he that thinks general Natures and Notions are anything else but such abstract and partial Ideas of more complex ones, taken at first from particular Existences, will, I fear, be at a loss where to find them” (III.iii.9). All this surely suggests that “partial consideration” has to be at least the first step in abstraction, and that the difference between Walmsley’s view and mine must relate to what follows partial consideration. Is it Locke’s view, as Walmsley supposes, that such partial consideration leads on to the formation of actual images correspondent to the considered “parts” of the complex ideas, entirely cut away from any other ideas (even from necessarily concomitant ideas)? Did Locke think, for example, that we can and do form images of determinable properties involving no determinate property, and that just such an image must be before the mind when we perceive some necessary truth about triangles in general, whether axiom or theorem? It is clear that Locke assumed that we can consider a determinate (e.g., isosceles) triangle barely as triangular, mentally abstracting from its determinate form. But did he also think that we can, do, and, if we are to engage in universal reasoning, must form actual images of barely triangular figures, lacking more determinate form? I will come back to my reasons for believing that he thought no such thing, but I want first to discuss a prominent feature of the chapter on general terms that Walmsley thinks settles the issue in favour of his interpretation. Because of the central role of the verb “consider” in the explanation of abstraction at Essay II.xi.9, the terms that imply the “separation” of the abstracted idea from others can easily be read, and are arguably most naturally read, as a matter

12

“Car les G´eometres ne supposent point qu’il y ait des lignes sans longueur ou des surfaces sans profondeur; mais ils supposent seulement qu’on peut considerer la longueur sans faire attention a` la largeur.” (La Logique ou l’art de penser, Paris 1662; facsimile edition, B. von Freytag L¨oringhoff and H.E. Brekle, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Fromann Verlag, 1965), p. 47. There is also “considering as,” so that at Essay II.vii.7, in dealing with (for a concept-empiricist) awkwardly abstract concepts (in the modern sense of “abstract”), Locke proposes that “whatever we can consider as one thing, . . . suggests to the Understanding, the Idea of Unity,” with similar treatment for the idea of existence.

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of selective attention—selective attention is, after all, selective. As will be seen, I do not think that that is the whole story, although it is a large part of it. But first I want to consider the suggestion that such a reading is ruled out by other parts of the account of abstraction in Book III, Chapter iii, “Of General Terms.” Children, Locke tells us, note a resemblance between particular individuals with whom they are acquainted, and of which they have ideas, whereupon they frame an Idea, which they find those many Particulars do partake in; and to that they give, with others, the name Man, for Example. And thus they come to have a general Name, and a general Idea. Wherein they make nothing new, but only leave out of the complex Idea they had of Peter and James, Mary and Jane, that which is peculiar to each, and retain only what is common to them all.

Similarly, the idea of a genus is formed from ideas of its species by “leaving out but those particulars wherein they differ, and retaining only those wherein they agree.” In this way more and more comprehensive terms are introduced, right down the tree of Porphyry to “Being, Thing, and such universal terms, which stand for any of our Ideas whatsoever.” All this talk of leaving out and retaining, Walmsley argues, makes it quite plain that Locke is postulating indeterminate images, since ideas are images for Locke—a point on which Walmsley rightly takes it that we are agreed. Walmsley does not, however, explain what Locke thought it would be like to have an image that is barely of a being. Several things need saying here. First, given Locke’s very natural (if unsatisfactory) guiding model for the relation between more general and less general ideas– that is, the simple-complex model—it simply follows that if more general ideas are in some sense formed from less general ideas, and ultimately from ideas of particulars, they will be formed by, in some sense or other, “leaving out” elements of the less general ideas, and “retaining” others. That is so whether ideas actually before the mind (the ideas between which we “perceive” relations) are taken to comprise the “immediate” objects of sense and imagination only, or whether all universal ideas are supposed to be the products and objects of a quite different and superior faculty, intellect. This point can be underlined by considering the close analogy between what Locke has to say about abstraction and the account of abstraction in the Port Royal Logic, a work with which Locke was palpably familiar, and of which he owned both the French and Latin versions, acquired a few years after the writing of Drafts A and B in 1671.13 The Logic tells us that we achieve understanding by means of abstraction when a thing has various attributes, but we consider just one of them, setting aside the others (in the Latin version, cognoscimus per Abstractionem, quando res varia attributa habet, nos tamen illorum unum, reliquis praetermissis, consideramus). The examples are interesting. I have the idea of myself thinking, but I can consider within this idea the idea of a thing thinking, an idea that can represent, not just me, but all thinking things. More relevantly to Locke’s argument, it is said that if I consider an equilateral triangle as it is drawn on paper before me,

13 The copies listed in Locke’s library catalogue are both editions of 1674, when he may have read Latin more fluently than French. Locke recorded that the French version was acquired in that year.

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it appears with other determining circumstances, and my idea will represent for me just this triangle. But if I pay attention to certain of its properties, withdrawing my mind from the consideration of others, it can represent all equilateral triangles, or all triangles, or all rectilinear figures—“and so, by degrees, I can ascend to naked extension” (sicque possum ad nudam extensionem gradatim ascendere).14 Arnauld, as a good Cartesian, was one of those who saw such properly directed ascent Platonically, as analytic progress from sense experience to the simplest principles of all rational thought and understanding of the world. For Locke the endproducts of analytic abstraction are typically just the simple constituents of experience. The ideas of being, unity, substance, power, cause and the like, on the other hand, the constituents of the most general “eternal truths” or “maxims,” he usually represents as constructions that are not so much “in” the ideas acquired in experience and considered in thought as in one way or another suggested by them.15 But the two philosophers assign a closely similar role to abstraction, understood as the consideration of parts of complexes without considering the other parts. The considered parts may not be capable of existing on their own—or, as the Logic has it, there may only be a distinction of reason between what is considered and what is not considered. Nevertheless, the question remains, if ideas are for Locke essentially sensory (that is, broadly, are sensations or images), how can he adopt such a conception of abstraction without abstract ideas ending up as abstract, partial images? On the other hand, how could he have been consciously adopting the “separation” model ascribed to him by Walmsley, where “separation” is not focused consideration of one part of a complex separately from the other part, but “a Consideration of both, as existing separately.” Was he really saying that, in order to reason about triangles in general, we need to have before the mind a representation of the triangularity of some triangle as existing separately—as literally cut off from any more determinate attributes, such as being obtuse or scalenon, that the perceived triangle may possess? It is understandable that some commentators have here reached, if not for a clearly unLockean, quasi-Platonic or rationalist notion of intellect and its purely intellectual ideas, then at least for the view that it is a mistake to read Locke simply as an

Logica, sive ars cogitandi, I. v. (London, 1724). Chapter vi states that some ideas can be used either to represent one particular thing or many—in the French of the edition I have to hand (see note 12), “comme lors que quelqu’un conc¸oit un triangle sans y considerer autre chose sinon que c’est une figure a` trois lignes et trois angles, l’idee qu’il en a form´ee luy peut servir a` concevoir tous les autres triangles” (49–50). This is in effect the view I am attributing to Locke. Note that the general idea is here not only identifie with the idea that can equally serve as the idea of a particular triangle (but with just certain features or elements considered), but is also treated as a distinct idea “formed” by abstraction. Both ways of thinking of abstract ideas are present in Locke’s Essay. Elsewhere, in his debate with Malebranche on the nature of ideas, Arnauld makes his view clear that a diagram serves to prompt the formation of a purely intellectual concept “even though it is accompanied by an image in the brain” (Des vrayes et des fausses id´ees, Cologne 1683). 14

15

Cf., e.g., Essay II.vii.7–10.

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imagist (or “sensationist”), and that his “abstract ideas” should be interpreted as abstract concepts rather than as sensory images.16 According to Richard Aaron, for example, Locke progressed in the Drafts and the Essay through three types of theory, the first two of which, although replaced, left significant traces in the final account. A “first crude thought” was that a universal is a particular idea or image that represents many other particulars; secondly, feeling the need for an explanation of which particulars the chosen particular idea represents, Aaron’s Locke came to interpret the latter as “something abstracted from that particular image”—something not a particular image, but still of the nature of an image; thirdly, he arrived at a conception of a general idea as the precisely understood, fixed meaning or essence in the mind, marked by a general term—no mere image but “what we decide [the general term] to mean, using experience as a guide.”17 John Mackie, with acknowledgement to Aaron, develops a related line of interpretation. He understands abstraction in terms of selective attention, but explains the possession of abstract ideas that is the consequence of selective attention in terms of capacities for recognition. Aaron’s account of three distinct theoretical “strands” all present in the Essay strikes me as fantasy. The allegedly disparate strands are aspects of the same model. Nevertheless, I believe that both he and, rather more clearly, Mackie were onto something. To set out what I think that is, I must reformulate an argument advanced in Locke that Walmsley found to be probably confused and at best opaque, a judgement that I am now inclined to accept. I will now try to express my interpretation more clearly. Walmsley and I are agreed, I think, not only that Locke was an imagist, but that when he talks, for example, of all the ideas the understanding has, or of people having or lacking this idea or that, he freely operates with a dispositional notion of an idea, and of having an idea. Locke is explicit that the only way to have a truth in the mind that is not consciously before the mind is to have it stored in the memory: that is, it must once have been consciously before the mind, and perceived (Essay I.ii.5). The same goes for ideas, “the parts, out of which . . . Propositions are made” (Essay I.iv.1 and 20). Now abstract ideas, apparently as part of the process Locke calls “abstraction,” are “laid up” by the understanding “with names commonly annexed to them.” I take it that this means that a general name is associated with the memory of a particular feature of some experienced object or resembling objects, a feature that the mind had considered apart from all other features of the object or objects as well as from the circumstances in which the feature was perceived. The name is thenceforth applied to that feature (or to whatever has that feature) “wheresoever to be imagin’d or met with.” Whatever is “laid up” with the name “triangle” annexed to it therefore has to be an idea of what it is to be a triangle, and of nothing else. But for the idea of a triangle to be actually present for the

16 Cf. Yasuhiko Tomida, “Separation” of ideas reconsidered: a response to Jonathan Walmsley,” Locke Studies 5 (2005): 39–56. 17

John Locke, 197–207.

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purpose of being committed to memory, I would suggest, nothing more is required than that the subject (or “mind”) perceives or imagines a triangle of some determinate form or other, and then “considers” it purely as a triangle, without regard to its particular form or other properties—which does not mean that a pure, indeterminate triangle is considered “as existing separately” from that form or those properties. Whether the “naked” triangularity (or whiteness or whatever) that is “laid up” is or is not an image is a question that simply does not arise, since it is not something actually before the mind: it is the (dispositional) memory of a perceived or imagined property. Here it is worth paying close attention to a well-known passage in the chapter “On Retention,” as expanded in the second edition. After mentioning that an idea of sensation or reflection may be kept “for some time actually in view,” Locke continues: The other way of Retention is the Power to revive again in our Minds those Ideas, which after imprinting have disappeared . . . And thus we do, when we conceive of Heat or Light, Yellow or Sweet, the Object being removed. This is Memory, which is as it were the Storehouse of our Ideas. . . .<But our Ideas being nothing, but actual Perceptions in the Mind, which cease to be any thing, when there is no perception of them, this laying up of our Ideas . . . signifies no more but this, that the Mind has a Power . . . to revive Perceptions, which it has once had . . . And in this sense it is, that our Ideas are said to be in our Memories, when indeed, they are actually no where, but only there is an ability in the Mind . . . to revive them again . . .> And thus it is . . . that we are said to have all those Ideas in our Understandings, which though we do not actually contemplate, yet we can bring in sight, and make appear again, and be the Objects of our Thoughts, without the help of those sensible Qualities, which first imprinted them there. (Essay II.x.2: sentences added to the second edition are indicated.)

In the light of this passage, one could take a line rather like Aaron’s and say that what is “laid up” is not a determinate image, but just enough remembered content to determine the meaning of the general term in question. Or one could say, like Mackie, that Locke is offering an account of the psychological process involved in the acquisition of those recognitional capacities that permit the use of general terms. Neither comment is inapposite, but neither commentator moves on to a satisfactory explanation of the positive function of Locke’s account of abstraction within his theory of knowledge. Both relate it, quite properly, to the issue between nominalism, conceptualism and realism with respect to universals and universal properties. But neither relates it at all clearly to the combination of intuitionism and empiricism that is the driving force in Locke’s argument. If knowledge is, as Locke asserts, the “perception” of a relation between ideas, just what are the ideas actually before the mind in universal reasoning and the actual perception of universal truth? Aaron seems to think that, with the identification of the alleged “third strand” of Locke’s thinking about general terms, there is no problem with the suggestion that, for Locke, the entities between which we “perceive” relations are not objects of sense or imagination, but abstract “meanings.” Mackie, with his emphasis on recognitional capacities, says little or nothing about intuition and its objects. Walmsley, if I understand him, ascribes to Locke the bizarre view that universal knowledge, belief and reasoning requires the perception or presumption of relations between

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indeterminate images. My own understanding of Locke’s account has been, and remains, that what is before the mind in universal reasoning is for Locke simply the same kind of thing as what was before the mind in the process of abstraction involved in the acquisition of the general terms in question: that is to say, determinate objects of sense or imagination, “partially considered” with respect to the features marked by those terms. Actual or particular abstract ideas are the same sort of thing both before their “laying up,” or commitment to memory, and after their “revival” or recall (or, for that matter, their recognition in reality). They are “parts” of determinate ideas—features or aspects of determinate objects of experience or imagination. They are characteristically to be found “in” perceived things: “what is known of such general Ideas will be true of every particular thing in whom . . . that abstract Idea is to be found” (Essay IV.iii.31). To repeat a point that I made in Locke, this reading is strongly supported by a number of passages in the Essay that assume that the objects of general reasoning can be, and often usefully are, objects of current sense-perception. The Lockean child can perceive a relation between ideas received in sensation even before speech, knowing, for example, “that Sweet is not Bitter.” And the child comes to know the truth that three and four make seven “upon the same Grounds, and by the same means, that he knew before, That a Rod and Cherry are not the same thing.” The latter, at least, as it is surely safe to presume, is by perceiving a relation between ideas of sensation—that is, between objects of sense experience.18 But the most telling examples concern geometrical reasoning. It is true, Locke tells us, that “[Mathematicians’] Demonstrations, which depend on their Ideas, are the same, whether there be any Square or Circle existing in the World, or no,” since they “concern not the Existence of any of those Figures” and so “depend not upon sense” (Essay IV.iv.8). That is to say, we can reason as well about possible, imagined (and perfect) circles and squares as about actual, perceived (and probably imperfect)19 ones. Nevertheless Locke more than once suggests that there are advantages in adverting to reality in mathematical reasoning. One reason is that people may be confused by different names for the same figure, “but as soon as the figure is drawn, the Consequences and Demonstration are plain and clear” (Essay IV.iv.9). Another is that the employment of sensible figures in demonstration supplies greater clarity and stability than imagined figures: Diagrams drawn on Paper are Copies of Ideas in the Mind, and not liable to the Uncertainty that Words carry in their Signification. An Angle, or Circle or Square drawn in Lines, lies open to the view and cannot be mistaken: It remains unchangeable, and may at leisure be

Locke’s explanation of arithmetic in Essay II.xvi postulates a basic understanding of addition drawn from experience (most simply, the apprehension of what it is to add one more thing to a set of things), together with the ability to count employing numerals, when the complexity of the case calls for calculation. In the quoted remark he is probably thinking that the child can directly perceive the evident difference made by adding three things to four, but he may be alluding to the basic capacity to perceive the difference involved in adding one more, which, together with the memory of the series of “names or signs,” makes counting possible. 18

19

Cf. Essay IV.iv.6.

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considered, and examined, and the Demonstration be revised, and all the parts of it may be gone over more than once, without any danger of the least change in the Ideas. (Essay IV.iii.19)

Conversely, Locke argues that the employment of diagrams in demonstrations of certain truths lends a sort of additional authority to sensitive knowledge: And though mathematical demonstrations depend not upon sense, yet the examining them by Diagrams, gives great credit to the Evidence of our Sight, and seems to give it a Certainty approaching to that of the Demonstration it self. For it would be very strange, that a Man should allow it for an undeniable Truth, that two Angles of a Figure, which he measures by Lines and Angles of a Diagram, should be bigger one than the other; and yet doubt of the Existence of those Lines and Angles, which by looking on, he makes use of to measure that by. (Essay IV.xi.6)

All this seems to make it pretty clear that Locke sees the potential objects of geometrical reasoning as comprising ideas of sense as well as of imagination—that is, figures not only as constructed by the imagination, but also as perceived by the senses.20 Sensible particulars can be made use of in determining universal relations. The same goes for a priori reasoning generally (Locke seems to assume) and it is just unfortunate that we can’t draw diagrams in ethics “because of the many decompositions that go to the making up the complex Ideas of these [moral] modes” (Essay IV.iv.6–9). (He might have added, of course, that they involve ideas of reflection, indeed not easily presented in physical form.) What makes the reasoning universal is that the perceived objects are abstractly considered in some respect, and employed as representatives of a corresponding class.21

20 Walmsley comments at one point (“Locke on Abstraction,” 128): “Locke does not say that we use different ideas of particular things at different times, as Ayers asserts. If Locke had a theory of abstraction where different ideas of particular things can be general at different times, it seems plausible that he would have said so. It also seems plausible that he would not have insisted that these abstractions are ‘single numerical things’.” Well, diagrams, and perceivers’ ideas of them, are single numerical things, and geometers do not all and always use the same diagram of a triangle—any diagram can serve to demonstrate a general truth. If Locke had believed that geometrical thought could not have diagrams as its direct objects, it seems plausible that he would have said so. 21 An extreme version of this kind of view of the role of perceived diagrams as objects of intuition finds expression early in Draft A, before Locke had moved entirely from his previously comprehensive knowledge-empiricism to an improved explanation of knowledge of necessities as capable of being acquired through the consideration of imagined as well as perceived cases: “the foundation [of geometry] being all laid in sense viz. sight, the certainty thereof however looked on as the greatest we can or expect to have can be noe greater than that of discerning by our eyes, which the very name Demonstration how highly soever magnified for its certainty doth signifye” (sect.11, Drafts p.22). Later (sect.27, Drafts p.51), it is said that “certain knowledge or demonstration makes itself clearly appeare and be perceived by the things them selves put togeather before our senses or their clear distinct Ideas put togeather and as it were lyeing before us in view in our understandings.” Draft A casts a good deal of light on the origins and nature of Locke’s empiricist intuitionism. For some discussion, see M.R. Ayers, “The Foundations of Knowledge and the Logic of Substance: the Structure of Locke’s General Philosophy,” in Vere Chappell (ed.), Locke: Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), 29–34.

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I suggested in my book that Locke was saying just this in several passages in which he insisted that general ideas are in themselves particular. For example, he attacked the view that all reasoning must involve at least one general proposition: As if we could not reason, and have Knowledge about Particulars. Whereas, in truth, the Matter rightly considered, the immediate Object of all our Reasoning and Knowledge, is nothing but Particulars. Every Man’s Reasoning and Knowledge is only about the Ideas existing in his own Mind, which are truly, every one of them, particular Existences . . . So that the Perception of the Agreement, or Disagreement of our particular Ideas, is the whole and utmost of all our Knowledge. Universality is but accidental to it, and consists only in this, That the particular Ideas, about which it is, are such, as more than one particular Thing can correspond with, and be represented by. (Essay IV.xvii.8)

Locke’s argument here requires that abstract ideas are particular in just the same sense as he is claiming the premise of a syllogism can be particular, and that claim is not the truism that if one thinks the premise, the thought will be a particular mental act. Nevertheless, Walmsley argues that this passage is compatible with the view that the particular ideas before the mind are fully separated abstract images (e.g., presumably, such things as an image of a shade of yellow that has no extension, or an image of indeterminate triangularity). That may just be so, assuming yet more confusion on Locke’s part, but (apart from the intrinsic absurdity of the view being attributed to Locke) put the passage together with Locke’s view of the role of geometrical diagrams, and such an interpretation is implausible. Another, more famous passage seems most reasonably interpreted as emphasizing the point that there is nothing intrinsic to ideas before the mind in virtue of which they are used as general signs—universality is a purely relational property of ideas, conferred by the use to which they are put. General and Universal belong not to the real existence of Things; but are the Inventions and Creatures of the Understanding, made by it for its own use, and concern only Signs, whether Words or Ideas. Words are general, . . . when used, for Signs of general Ideas; . . . And Ideas are general, when they are set up, as the Representatives of many particular Things: but universality belongs not to things themselves, which are all of them particular in their Existence, even those Words, and Ideas, which in their signification, are general. When therefore we quit Particulars, the Generals that rest, are only Creatures of our own making, their general Nature being nothing but the Capacity they are put into by the Understanding, of signifying or representing many particulars. For the signification they have, is nothing but a relation, that by the mind of Man is added to them. (Essay III.iii.11)

Walmsley’s interpretation is again, perhaps, just possible, but the “partial consideration” interpretation fits what Locke says better than does any understanding of the passage that takes abstract ideas to be intrinsically different from ideas of particulars, as Walmsley’s seems to do.22

22 For another opinion that, despite what Locke says here and at IV.xvii.8, abstract ideas are indeterminate and “general in themselves and of their own nature,” see Vere Chappell, “Locke’s Theory of Ideas,” in V. Chappell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994).

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All this, of course, raises the general question of what are denoted by Locke’s expression “particular ideas,” and of how the class of “particular ideas” is related to that of “ideas of particulars.” Now in general, at least in the context of his discussion of universal knowledge, it makes more sense to take Locke’s “ideas” to be ideas taken “objectively.” They are things (qualities, etc) as they appear to the senses or to reflection (“appearances” in that sense), or as they are imagined.23 To perceive a relation between the idea of the angles of a triangle and the idea of the angle on a straight line is to perceive a relation between two objects of thought, not two acts of thought. On that understanding of what an idea is, a particular idea is a particular object of thought. (Even a rampant Platonist would presumably regard the act of cognizing a real universal as a particular act of thought.) So on that understanding, a particular idea is the idea of a particular. On the other hand, a “particular idea” does not have to be the idea of a particular existent thing, since it may be the idea of an imagined thing. So it is the idea of a particular only in the sense in which a picture of an imaginary horse is the picture of a particular horse, even if, as we might put it, it is not the picture of any (actual or existent) horse in particular. The imaginary horse is “particular” in that its picture includes particularities—for example it is grazing or jumping, is piebald or dun, and so forth (although the question whether it has a black patch on its other side, for example, may have no answer).24 Walmsley, however, brings to bear an interesting point drawn from Draft B. In passages that are antecedents to those in the Essay that insist on the particularity of all ideas, Locke expresses that point in ways that might seem simply to assume that simple ideas or combinations of simple ideas are elements of thought that can stand alone, as mental particulars, so to speak, even if the qualities they are ideas of could not possibly exist alone. Walmsley discusses a passage from section 59: There is one thing more to be remembered about these simple Ideas that though that Idea v. g. of blew or bitter which exists in any ones understanding be but one single numericall thing, yet as it agrees to & represents all the qualities of that kinde where soever existing it may be considered as a Specific Idea & the word that stands for it a Specific word comprehending many particular things. Soe that the Idea of white in the minde which stands for all the white that any where exists. & the word white stands for that Idea, though both these in their existence be but particular things, yet as representatives or in their significance are universalls.25

Walmsley, if I understand him, believes that this passage fits seamlessly in with the later explanation of abstraction, which he takes to be an explanation of how it is that representative simple ideas can stand absolutely alone in the mind. While I find

23 “Image,” as it should be recognized, also enjoys the ambiguity between act of thought and intentional object or content. 24

Hobbes remarks in this connection, “philosophers err, who say the idea of anything is universal; as if there could be in the mind an image of a man, which was not the image of some one man, but a man simply, which is impossible; for every idea is one, and of one thing.” (De corpore I.v.8) Locke differs from Hobbes in allowing a relational sense to “universal” as applied to ideas, and in laying somewhat less stress on the role of names, which Hobbes regards as essential. 25

Drafts, p. 163.

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that implausible, at least the passage shows that a conception of the particularity of general ideas was a part of Locke’s thinking before he had associated generality with “abstraction,” however understood. To judge the significance of that, however, raises the whole question of the development of Locke’s account of abstraction, and I will end by sketching, very briefly, an alternative to the latter part of Walmsley’s story. I take it that the crucially relevant questions are those of why Locke felt the need to set out an account of abstraction by the time of Draft C (in which Draft he also repeated, with some emphasis, the earlier Journal note’s identification of abstraction with “partial consideration”), and of why he then changed the “partial consideration” passage before the first edition of the Essay, removing the term abstraction. Walmsley’s view, as I understand it, is that Locke saw the need for an account of abstraction, that explained how there could be single simple, or less than fully determinate, ideas serving as representatives of many particular ideas and as the objects of universal reasoning. Having arrived at the notion that abstraction involves the formation of bare images of the properties in question, indeterminate in all other and irrelevant respects, he came to realize, as he had not in writing Draft C, that he could no longer identify abstraction with partial consideration, since his notion of abstraction was better understood precisely in terms of the “separation” that he had contrasted with, and opposed to, partial consideration: that is, consideration of the separated properties “as existing separately.” Here is another possibility, one that, although to an extent speculative, seems to me very much more likely than Walmsley’s speculation. Locke realized, some time after 1671, that there remained unanswered questions about general ideas, not so much with respect to their role as standards and representatives, already set out in Draft B, but with respect to what they are. He was not, of course, disposed to give up his empiricist thesis that all the objects of thought, including universal thought and knowledge, can be explained in terms of ideas of sense and reflection, together with memory and operations on those ideas. He could therefore have no recourse to a separate faculty of intellect and purely intellectual notions. But the na¨ıve assumption (or what reads as a na¨ıve assumption) in the early Drafts that all ideas, both simple ideas and ideas possessing various degrees of complexity, can stand alone in the mind as the objects of essentially sensory intuition understandably appeared unsatisfactory to him. It is likely that both the need for an explanation and the form of an explanation were suggested by his reading of other philosophers, above all by his reading, in 1674 or soon after, of the Port Royal Logic, of the influence of which there are many other signs in the Essay, not least in the late-coming Book III. Early consequences of this turn of thought were the references to “abstraction” inserted in Draft A, no doubt some years after 1671, and the reference in the 1676 Journal note. These were further developed in (or before) Draft C, both with the account of abstraction that was the antecedent of Essay II.xi.9, and with a revised version of the Journal’s argument for distinguishing space from body. With respect to the latter, however, Locke came to feel that, since his official account of abstraction, as he wished to use the term, included both commitment to memory and the employment of abstract (i.e. abstractly considered) ideas as representatives in universal thought,

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it would be inappropriate to employ the term for the kind of partial consideration of an indivisible whole that was involved in the measurement of space. Such partial consideration was indeed involved in the process he now described as abstraction, but there was more to the process than that. So he removed the reference to abstraction from the equivalent passage in the Essay, II.xiii.13. At the same time, however, he retained in that passage an example of partial consideration in Draft C that more clearly than any other example in the whole passage linked it to the kind of separate consideration of a part of a complex idea involved in what he now officially called “abstraction”: namely, the consideration of “the mobility of body without its extension, without thinking of their separation”—without thinking of them, as he goes on to say, “as existing separately.” 26 This last gloss distinguishes the conception of mental “separation” he was opposing to partial consideration from the conception employed just before, in section 11. For there, having remarked that “solidity cannot exist without extension,” he had said that they are nevertheless “wholly separable in the Mind one from another.” What Locke said about abstraction makes coherent sense if, and only if, what he had in mind as “separating” was simply this latter notion of considering distinct ideas separately, without thinking of their objects “as existing separately.”

26 Walmsley offers no comment on this example, beyond the rather hopeful suggestion that no conclusions can be drawn from it. But if Locke really did intend a sharp contrast between “abstraction” and “partial consideration,” the example (not in the 1676 journal note, but included in Draft C, presumably consciously) evidently calls for explanation.

Chapter 5

Descartes and Locke on the Nature of Matter: a Note Shigeyuki Aoki

G.A.J. Rogers has written extensively on Locke’s thought in natural philosophy. It is this aspect of Locke’s philosophy that he first worked on, and further explored in a series of seminal papers.1 A frequently occurring theme in Rogers’s work is Locke’s substantial contribution in defence of the experimental philosophy in England, as opposed to the a priori, “armchair” natural philosophy of Descartes: the Essay was taken to supply the philosophical bedrock of Newtonian science. . . . Newton’s work had to be defended against the charge that, unlike its continental rival, the Cartesian system, it was insecurely based in metaphysics. The Essay was seen as fulfilling for Newton’s physics the role of the Discourse on Method played for the science of Descartes.2

This project of establishing “the system of Locke and Newton” looks of great significance to me. Yet I find one piece of the jigsaw missing in Rogers’ argument– Locke’s rejection of the Cartesian conception of matter, i.e. the Cartesian identification of extension with the essence of matter.3 As I shall show in the course of this essay, the nature of matter and the consequent question over the existence of a vacuum were a subject of hot debate before and during Locke’s time, and thus we

1 The following are particularly relevant: “Boyle, Locke and Reason,” Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966): 205–216; “Descartes and the Method of English Science,” Annals of Science 29 (1972): 237–255 ; “Locke’s Essay and Newton’s Principia,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 39 (1978): 217–232; “The Empiricism of Locke and Newton,” reprinted in Locke’s Enlightenment (Hildesheim: Geolg Olms, 1998): 93–111; “The System of Locke and Newton” in Contemporary Newtonian Research, ed. Z. Bechler (Boston: Reidel, 1982), 215–238. 2

Rogers, “The System of Locke and Newton,” 222.

3

Rogers surely recognizes the importance of this topic, though apparently he has not provided detailed analyses on this. See Rogers “Boyle, Locke and Reason,” 209–210; “The System of Locke and Newton,” 229–230; “Descartes and the Mind of Locke. The Cartesian Impact of Locke’s Philosophical Development” in Locke’s Enlightenment, 29–30. Perhaps the most elaborate analysis is given in “Descartes and the Method of English Science,” 250–255. Here, he discusses Boyle’s rejection of a priori methodology at length, but the discussion leaves the problem of the Cartesian extension unmentioned. Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 75–88. and Legacy, 

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find diversity, not to say confusion, among English corpuscularian philosophers.4 Locke developed a series of radically critical arguments against Cartesian extension and this aspect of Locke’s philosophy is what I wish to explore and analyse in this essay. It will take the following course. First, I will introduce the textual information with regard to Locke’s reading of Descartes. Next, I will lay out Descartes’ epistemological and metaphysical arguments for equating extension with matter in his Principles of Philosophy. Thirdly, I will briefly outline the theory of matter in England before Locke. Lastly, I will show how Locke criticised Cartesian extension and offered his own alternative.

Locke’s Reading of Descartes Locke is known to have read Descartes seriously around 1660. A famous phrase, which has often been quoted in this connection, is from Lady Masham, who wrote that it was Descartes who first gave him “a relish of philosophical studies,” especially with regard to intelligible philosophy.5 For too long the detail of that reading has been unexamined, but thanks to recent studies on Locke’s early manuscripts, we are now in a better position to grasp the nature of Locke’s reading of Descartes. According to Rogers, who consulted the manuscript sources, what is most interesting in it is that the notes that Locke took are mostly, though not exclusively, from the Principia Philosophiae and not either the Discours or the Meditationes. Furthermore the entries are almost all of a purely factual kind, recording Descartes’s words on some part of his physical theory, not his epistemology or metaphysics.6

A similar observation was made by J.R. Milton, who gives us more detailed information on Locke’s reading of Descartes.7

4 As is well-known, the debate over the existence of a vacuum has a long history going back to the tradition of ancient atomism. Locke’s position, in line with that of Boyle and Newton, is clearly atomism in that he accepted the existence of a vacuum. For the most comprehensive account of the history of vacuum from the ancient to the modern period, see Andrew Pyle, Atomism and its Critics (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), esp. 437-440, 459-464 for the roles played by Descartes and Locke in the history. 5 Maurice Cranston, John Locke: a Biography (London: Longman, 1957), 100. The whole passage is published by R.S. Woolhouse, “Lady Masham’s Account of Locke,” Locke Studies 3 (2003): 167–193. 6

Rogers, Locke’s Enlightenment, 4.

J.R. Milton, “Locke, Medicine, and the Mechanical Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (2001): 226. 7

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The influence of the Principles is also obvious in Locke’s posthumously published Elements of Natural Philosophy.8 There is a striking similarity in the order of exposition, although there are also considerable differences: Locke carefully eschewed commitment to Descartes’ a priori metaphysics of nature. For one thing, Locke never subscribed to the idea that the laws of nature can be established a priori, without referring to the empirical findings. We find him rather emphasising the essential role of experience. For example, Locke introduced Newtonian universal gravitation as follows: It appears, as far as human observation reaches, to be a settled law of nature, that all bodies have a tendency, or gravitation towards one another. . . . Two bodies at a distance will put one another into motion by the force of attraction; which is inexplicable by us, though made evident to us by experience, and so to be taken as a principle in natural philosophy.9

Thus, according to Locke empirical support was necessary to establish the law of nature. Although the exposition looks quite similar to Descartes’ Principles, the Elements in fact contain several anti-Cartesian remarks in favor of the experimental philosophy.10

Descartes’ a Priori Inquiry into the Nature of Matter—Extension as the Essence of Matter As is well-known, through methodical doubt Descartes discards what he has believed about the senses since infancy and establishes the certainty of the Cogito. Descartes calls the thinking subject within himself a mind, or thinking substance,11 which is distinguished from a body, or corporeal substance. These two are really distinct since we can clearly and distinctly conceive one without the other.12

The work is now included in the third volume of in The Works of John Locke, reprint of 1823 edition (Aalen, Germany: Scientia Verlag, 1963).

8 9

Works, 3: 304–5, My italics.

Similar remarks emphasizing on the importance of experience are found elsewhere in the Elements. cf. The Works, 3: 306, 313, 318. In addition, we notice that several important Cartesian themes have no places in the Elements. Such themes include: Descartes’ equation of extension with body, its consequential theses—plenism or no voids in nature, and the vortex theory. 10

Principles, I.48 (CSM, 1: 208; AT, 8.1: 22–23.) Quotations from Descartes are from John Cottingham, Robert Stoohoff, Dugland Murdoch (ed.), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 1985–1991) with the standard Cottingham, et.al pagination (CSM), followed by Adam and Tannery pagination (AT). 11

12 For Descartes’ view on a real distinction, see Principles, I.60 (CSM, 1: 213–214; AT, 8.1: 28–29.)

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Up to this point Descartes clearly makes use of a priori argumention.13 In fact, according to him, our sense experience does not tell us the real nature of material things; it just tells us what is beneficial or harmful to our existence.14 But how can we acquire knowledge without sense experience? Descartes answers that the true source of knowledge are “common notions or axioms”, which God implanted in human beings from the time of birth (examples being “It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time”, “He who thinks cannot but exist while he thinks,” and many others.) These are listed as eternal truths, which Descartes thinks we cannot fail to know once the occasion for thinking about them arises.15 Thus, in Descartes’ philosophical system pure intellect plays a vital role in arriving at various truths. All we have to do, is to look inside our mind to find the seeds of several truths and derive propositions in accordance with the criterion of clear and distinct perception (God guarantees that we do not err as long as we perceive clearly and distinctly16 ). With these Cartesian conditions for truths in mind, let us take a closer look at his arguments relating to the nature of matter.

13 There is a wide range of the literature on a priori and a posteriori characters in Descartes’ philosophy of science. Desmond M. Clarke gives a nice survey of four possible interpretations on Descartes’ actual method and his alleged methodology in Descartes’ Philosophy of Science (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 9–14. Clarke, through the examination of Descartes’ scientific works and correspondence, even goes so far to claim that Descartes was “consistently empiricist.” However, the question still remains as to how far Descartes was empiricist; in fact, Clarke himself concedes that “[Descartes] certainly does construct more or less a priori arguments—that matter is extended, and divisible, and that empty space is impossible, is an obvious example of such a priori reasoning (ibid, 62).” My answer to the question is that Descartes employed an a priori method in obtaining or deriving fundamental concepts and laws of nature, and allowed the use of experiments to narrow down possible explanations. Descartes famously uses a metaphor of a clock to illustrate that the outward phenomenon can be explained by way of different causes, while the general ways of the operation are limited within the laws of mechanics known a priori. See Principles, IV.203–204 (CSM, 1: 288–289; AT, 8.1: 325–327.) This line of interpretation is in line with more recent literature: Margaret J. Osler, “Eternal Truths and the Laws of Nature: the Theological Foundation of Descartes’ Philosophy of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985), 352–359; Daniel Garber, “Descartes and Experiment in the Discourse and Essays,” in Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Rene Descartes, ed. Stephen Voss (New York: OUP, 1993), 293–4; Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes’ System of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 68–71. For a criticism of such “weakened version of the traditional view” see J.L. Bermudez “Scepticism and Science in Descartes”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (1997): 751–2. However, his discussion of fundamental principles of physics is limited to Meditations and fails to examine Principles. 14 Principles, II.3 (CSM, 1: 224; AT, 8.1: 41–42).

Principles, I.49 (CSM, 1: 209; AT 8.1: 23–24.) For a discussion of the role of eternal truths in Descartes’ laws of nature, see Osler, “Eternal Truths and the Laws of Nature,” 352–354. For what Descartes means by “innate,” see Clarke, Descartes’ Philosophy of Science, 52–3. 15

16

Principles, I.30, 33, 43, 44 (CSM, 1:203–204, 207; AT, 8.1: 16–18, 21).

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First Argument Modal Distinction between Shape, Motion, etc. and Extension Descartes offers at least two different a priori arguments to identify the nature of matter. The first argument focuses on the nature of modal distinction between shape, motion, etc. and extension. According to this argument, there are particular modal relations between qualities of a corporeal substance, and in the end all the other qualities are reduced to extension. Descartes lists a number of qualities of corporeal substance, or matter, such as extension, size, shape, motion, position and divisibility of its component parts,17 but he argues that matter has only one principal quality: each substance has one principal property which constitutes its nature and essence, and to which all its other properties are referred. Thus extension in length, breadth and depth constitutes the nature of corporeal substance, and thought constitutes the nature of thinking substance. Everything else which can be attributed to body presupposes extension, and is merely a mode of an extended thing; and similarly, whatever we find in the mind is simply one of the various modes of thinking. For example, shape is unintelligible except in an extended thing; and motion is unintelligible except as motion in an extended space; while imagination, sensation and will are intelligible only in a thinking thing. By contrast, it is possible to understand extension without shape or movement, and thought without imagination or sensation, and so on; and this is quite clear to anyone who gives the matter his attention.18

In this argument, extension is considered as the essence of matter, since all other qualities of matter are referred to extension, i.e. they all presuppose extension. As a proof of this, Descartes argues that the other qualities would be made unintelligible without extension. For example, shape is a property of something extended and therefore presupposes extension, but without being extended something could not have a shape. In the same manner, size and divisibility are qualities of an extended thing, and without extension they would be made unintelligible. As for motion and position, they both presuppose an extended space; being in motion and in a particular position only makes sense in an extended space. Hence, the argument says that for size, shape, motion, position and divisibility, each of them may be merely regarded as “a mode” of an extended thing. They are all modally reduced to extension.19 Thus, Descartes thought that the nature of matter could be identified a priori by examining our intellectual ability to grasp qualities of matter. Clear (and distinct) perception plays an important role in this modal distinction, as Descartes says,

17

Principles, I.48 (CSM, 1: 208; AT, 8.1: 22–23).

18

Principles, I.53 (CSM, 1: 210–211; AT, 8.1: 25). My italics.

Descartes introduces a modal distinction at Principles, I.61 (CSM, 1:213–214; AT, 8.1: 29–30). What the distinction says is that we can clearly perceive a substance (e.g. corporeal substance as something extended) without its modes, but not vice versa. 19

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“This is quite clear to anyone who gives the matter his attention.”20 In Descartes’ metaphysical system, not only the two classes of substances but also their respective natures are identified by way of clear and distinct perception of the pure intellect.

Second Argument Thought Experiment to Strip Matter of its Non-essential Qualities The second argument that we are going to examine is closely linked to the first, but, not identical.21 According to the second argument, other qualities of matter than extension could be eliminated to be non-essential to matter through thought experiment and thus they could be proven irrelevant to the nature of matter: we shall perceive that the nature of matter, or body considered in general, consists not in its being something which is hard or heavy or colored, or which affects the senses in this way, but simply in its being something which is extended in length, breadth and depth. For as regards hardness, our sensations tell us no more than that the parts of a hard body resist the motion of our hands when they come into contact with them. If, whenever our hands moved in a given direction, all the bodies in that area were to move away at the same speed as that of our approaching hands, we should never have any sensation of hardness. And since it is quite unintelligible to suppose that, if bodies did move away in this fashion, they would thereby lose their bodily nature, it follows that this nature cannot consist in hardness. By the same reasoning it can be shown that weight, colour, and all other such qualities that are perceived by the senses as being in corporeal matter, can be removed from it, while the matter itself remains intact; it thus follows that its nature does not depend on any of these qualities.22

One might wonder whether what Descartes has shown here with regard to hardness is a result of an actual experiment or a thought experiment. I am inclined to the latter view, for it is hardly likely that Descartes actually performed such an experiment. Instead, here we find Descartes appealing again to our intellectual grasp of the concept of matter (he says it is quite unintelligible to suppose that matter would lose its nature if it lost hardness). In parallel with this, we find a striking contrast between the intellect and the senses. In fact, the passage as a whole tries to persuade us that bodily qualities perceived through senses—hardness, weight, color, etc—could be removed by various thought experiments.23 Thought experiments are employed 20 That we have a clear and distinct understanding of matter as being extended is expressed more explicitly at Principles, I.63 (CSM, 1: 215; AT, 8.1: 30–31). 21 Both arguments stand on the idea that our intellectual or intuitive grasp of matter reveals that the notion of corporeal substance as something extended is the most basic and irreducible. However, I think they are not identical in that the former explicitly resorts to our intellectual grasp while the latter implicitly does it through the illustration of the thought experiment. 22 23

Principles, II.4 (CSM, 1: 224–225; AT, 8.1: 42). My italics.

One could naturally doubt if Descartes is really able to remove weight, coluor and all other such qualities “by the same reasoning.” Principles II.11 (CSM, 1: 227; AT, 8.1: 46). could be read to supply such details. There Descartes argues that we sometimes see stones that are so transparent as to lack color and fire so light as to lack weight; but each of them is still a body and so color and weight cannot constitute the essence of matter. I guess we can turn these empirical claims into

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to clear our prejudiced sense judgments and grasp the essence of matter by the pure intellect. Descartes equates corporeal substance with extension. Once we accept that corporeal substance is something extended, we are compelled to deny the possibility of a vacuum since there is no real distinction between the extension of a space and the extension of a body.24 The consequence of this is his famous plenism (the impossibility of a vacuum). In the next section, I will briefly discuss two natural philosophers, Henry Power and Robert Boyle, who worked in support of the experimental philosophy of the early Royal Society. Their reactions to Cartesian extension and plenism merit our attention since they typically show ambivalent attitudes toward Descartes among English natural philosophers before Locke.25

Reactions to Cartesian Extension: Power and Boyle It is widely known that natural science or “natural philosophy” in England began to flourish with the formation of the Royal Society. However, in spite of its unifying motto “nullius in verba,”26 the fellows of the early Royal Society did not subscribe to a homogeneous Baconian idea of experiment. There was not only a rich diversity among the fellows but also a lack of a firm philosophical bedrock on which to found their empirical findings. The nature of matter in Power and Boyle exemplifies this. Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy (1664), as the title itself indicates, was one of the principal works of natural history in defense of experimentalism. It aimed to broaden the reader’s mind to the micro-world with many descriptions of minute things—fleas, bees, flies, lice, mites, etc—through the microscope. Although assuming a strong experimental character, it nevertheless shows an ambivalent attitude towards experiment. In the preface of the work, Power specifically mentions Descartes as well as Boyle for supposing the nature of fluidity to consist in the motion of the parts.27

thought experiments by gradually shifting to extreme cases (until there are absolutely “no colour” and “no weight”). 24

Principles, II.16 (CSM, 1: 224–225; AT, 8.1: p. 49).

See Robert H. Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 54-62, 69–92, for a discussion of Hobbes and other less-known figures such as Petty, Digby, Cavendish and Charleton.

25

R.S. Woolhouse, Locke (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983), chapter 4 gives a nice survey of the philosophers around the early Royal Society. 26

See Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy, in Three Books: Containing New Experiments Microscopical, Mercurial, Magnetical. (reprinted with an introduction by Marie Boas Hall, New York: Johnson, 1966), Preface, p. 11: “And indeed, if the very nature of fluidity consist in the Intestine motion of the parts of that Body call’d fluid, as Des-Cartes happily supposed, and Mr. Boyle has more happily demonstrated, Why may we not be bold both to think and say, that there is no such thing in the World as an absolute quiescence?”

27

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More importantly in our context, Power appeals elsewhere in the Preface to Cartesian extension: Now as Matter may be great or little, yet never shrink by subdivision into nothing; so, is it not probable, that Motion also may be indefinitely swift or slow, and yet never come to a quiescency? and so consequently there can be no rest in Nature, more than a Vacuity in Matter. The following Observations seem to make out, that the Minute particles of most (if not all) Bodies are constantly in some kind of motion, and that motion may be both invisibly and unintelligibly slow, as well as swift, and probably is as unseparable an attribute to Bodies, as well as Extension is.28

Several Cartesian propositions are prominent in this passage: extension as the principal attribute of matter, and consequently denial of a vacuum. Here, Power argues that as long as matter retains some extension and is never annihilated even after subdivisions, motion in the same way will never be entirely lost. Motion is as inseparable from matter as extension. Power’s appeal to the essentiality of extension to prove his case concerning motion is clearly Cartesian.29 Thus, Power is susceptible to Cartesian a priori propositions in spite of his alleged experimentalism. To be fair to Power, it must be said that his Experimental Philosophy is mainly concerned with factual investigations, rather than with theoretical ones. So it is unfair to accuse him of incomplete theorizing about the essence of matter. And yet, Power’s discussion of the nature of matter deserves our attention, since it shows us that the concept of matter was a controversial topic and was being formulated then. Next we will look at Robert Boyle, who was then the central figure of the experimental philosophy in England.30 The difference between Power and Boyle is that unlike Power, who was an ardent admirer of Descartes, Boyle eschewed such an explicit commitment to Cartesian metaphysics. Boyle always keeps a certain distance from Cartesianism and reserves a judgment on the Cartesian notion of matter. Such a reserved attitude is already found in his writings around the 1660s,31 and he

28

Power, Experimental Philosophy, Preface, 10–11.

29

Moreover, Power draws on Descartes’ law of conservation of momentum to justify the claim that motion is inseparable from body: “Hence wil unavoidable follow some other Principles of the everto-be-admired Des-Cartes . . . As the parts of Matter can be transfer’d from one Body to another, and as long as they remain united, would remain so for ever : so Motion may be translated from one Body to another; but when it is not transfer’d, it would remain in that Body for ever.” Experimental Philosophy, Preface, p. 14. The corresponding law is found at Principles, II.37 (CSM, 1: 240–241; AT, 8.1: 62–63). 30 Since epistemological considerations are the main focus of this essay, such external or social factors as studied by sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) fall outside the scope of the present discourse, though, of course, I do not mean to undervalue it. For an influential account of Boyle’s three technologies or knowledge-producing tools (p. 25.), see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 25, 30-35, 55-79. 31 For example, as Rogers has argued Boyle is “agnostic on this metaphysical question” of whether or not a space is empty by accepting Descartes’ definition of matter. Boyle says such a question is “rather a metaphysical, than a physiological, question” in his New Experiments PhysicalMechanical, touching the Spring of the Air (1660). See Rogers, “Boyle, Locke, and Reason,” 209.

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continued to espouse that agnostic stance until the 1680s. Here is a passage from his Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1686): I have refus’d to declare myself, either Pro or Contra, in that Dispute. Since the decision of the Question seems to depend upon the stating of the true Notion of a Body, whose Essence the Cartesians affirm, and most other Philosophers deny, to consist only in Extension, according to the three Dimensions, Length, Breadth, and Depth or Thickness: For, if Mr. Des Cartes’s Notion be admitted, ’twill be irrational to admit a Vacuum, since any Space, that is pretended to be empty, must be acknowledg’d to have the three Dimensions, and consequently all that is necessary to Essentiate a Body. And all the Experiments, that can be made with Quicksilver, or the Machina Boyliana (as they call it,) or other Instruments contriv’d for the like Uses, will be eluded by the Cartesians, who will say, that the space deserted by the Mercury, or the Air, is not empty, since it has Length, Breadth, and Depth, but is fill’d by their Materia Subtilis, that is fine enough to get freely in and out of the Pores of the Glasses, as the Effluvi of the Loadstone can do. But though, for these and other Reasons, I still forbear (as I lately said I have formerly done,) to declare either way in the Controversie about Vacuum . . .32

As Boyle was well aware, Descartes’ denial of a vacuum is tightly interwoven with his metaphysics. Boyle preferably wanted to step away from this sort of metaphysical debate.33 However, as also noted by Boyle himself, there was some danger that his experimental findings could be nullified by Cartesians’ elusive arguments that the space left by the mercury is still full of matter, whose essence consists only in extension. Thus, it looks as if Boyle definitely lacked a well-grounded alternative conception of matter.34 This is the “blank” that, I believe, Locke was to fill in with his epistemological and metaphysical arguments in his Essay concerning Human Understanding.35

Later in his Origin of the Forms and Qualities (1666), Boyle echoes the same strand of statement: “The most Ingenious Des Cartes has something concerning some Qualities; but though for Reasons elsewhere express’d, I have purposely Forborn to peruse his System of Philosophy . . . Besides, that his Explications, do many of them depend upon His peculiar Notions, (of a Materia Subtilis, Gloubuli Secundi Elementi, and the like) and These, as it became so Great a Person, he has so Interwoven with the rest of his Hypothesis, that They can seldome be made Use of, without Adopting his whole Philosophy.” (The Works of Robert Boyle (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), 5: 299.) 32

The Works of Robert Boyle, 10: 534.

33

Boyle’s strategy was, in effect, to change the subject of the debate by giving a new meaning to the term “vacuum”. See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, p. 46. Hobbes’ objection to Boyle’s experimentalism and Boyle’s reaction is discussed in chapter 4 and 5, esp. 111-112, 173-74. Boyle has just a few words on his concept of matter in his Origin of Forms and Qualities: “I agree with the generality of Philosophers so far, as to allow, that there is one Catholic or Universal Matter common to all Bodies, by which I mean a Substance extended, divisible and impenetrable.” The Works of Robert Boyle, 5:305. 34

Locke’s famous “under-labourer” metaphor supports this reading of Essay. Nicholas Jolley gives a similar interpretation in Locke: his Philosophical Thought (New York: OUP, 1999), 56–57.

35

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Locke’s Empirical Inquiry into the Nature of Matter—Solidity as “Most Intimately Connected” Quality of Matter Unlike Power and Boyle, who either subscribed to Cartesian extension or refrained from entering into a metaphysical debate, Locke undertook a full-scale criticism of Cartesianism as well as offering a systematic alternative to Descartes’ philosophical system. Reading the Essay, it seems obvious to me that Locke responded point-bypoint to matters raised in Descartes’ Principles. Before examining Locke’s criticisms of Descartes, a preliminary comment on the nature of Locke’s arguments might be useful. Just as Descartes’ empiricism is sometimes emphasized in the literature, Locke’s a priori argument is often mentioned. For instance, Aaron commented that “His [Locke’s] examination of ideas is a curious mixture of psychology and logic, together with the introduction of some metaphysics.”36 I will argue that Locke employed a priori or conceptual arguments to deny Descartes’ modal distinction, and that he employed a posteriori arguments in place of Descartes’ thought experiments, to identify solidity, not extension, as the key attribute of matter. Locke starts his rejection of the first argument, the modal distinction, with the following reference to Descartes: There are some that would persuade us, that Body and Extension are the same thing . . .37

Locke enumerates several bodily properties in the ensuing passage: solidity, extension, divisibility (separability) and mobility of parts. However, just because solidity presupposes extension, it does not follow that they are the same thing. So the Cartesian claim that body and extension are the same thing, cannot be right. they confound very different Ideas one with another. For I appeal to every Man’s own Thoughts, whether the Idea of Space be not as distinct from that of Solidity, as it is from the Idea of Scarlet-Colour? ’Tis true, Solidity cannot exist without Extension, neither can Scarlet-Colour exist without extension; but that hinders not, but that they are distinct Ideas. Many Ideas require others as necessary to their Existence or Conception, which yet are very distinct Ideas. Motion can neither be, nor be conceived without Space; and yet Motion is not Space, nor Space Motion: Space can exist without it, and they are very distinct Ideas; and so, I think, are those of Space and Solidity. Solidity is so inseparable an Idea from Body, that upon that depends its filling of Space, its Contact, Impulse and Communication of Motion upon Impulse. And if it be a Reason to prove, that Sprit is different from Body, because Thinking includes not the Idea of Extension in it, the same Reason will be as valid, I suppose, to prove, that Space is not Body, because it includes not the Idea of Solidity in it . . .38

Locke’s distinction between body and mere extension is based on the observation that solidity is an essential part of body but not of extension. Locke’s use of solidity

36

Richard I. Aaron, John Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 78.

37

Essay II. xiii. 11.

38

Ibid.

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marks a key point in a series of his criticisms, so I want to add some considerations on Locke’s idea of solidity.39 Solidity, according to Locke, is that which “hinders the approach of two Bodies, when they are moving one towards another.”40 In this way Locke loosely admits that solidity is the same as impenetrability. However, Locke says later that strictly, impenetrability is “more a consequence of Solidity, than Solidity itself”; the genuine notion of solidity consists in its role of filling pure space,41 and as a consequence of a solid body filling pure space, it will exclude all the other solid bodies. This exclusion or resistance, Locke argues, makes it possible for bodies to interact with each other. Locke says, “Upon the Solidity of Bodies also depends their mutual Impulse, Resistance.”42 Thus, Locke thinks that solidity is so essential a quality of body that without it two bodies would penetrate each other. This will be made clear to us if we consider that bare extension without solidity could no more hinder the approach of other bodies than a ghost in a commonplace film could. What does this amount to? If Locke is right in claiming that the idea of extension does not include the idea of solidity in it,43 I think this will, in effect, destroy Descartes’ idea of modal distinction. Remember, modal distinction entails that extension constitutes the essence of matter since all other qualities of matter presuppose extension. However, as Locke demonstrates, extension cannot be the essence of matter even if all other qualities (including solidity) presuppose extension—in addition to extension, solidity is essential to body. Otherwise, we would have to accept the unacceptable consequence that bodies are incapable of resistance and communicating impulse. Thus far, we have examined Locke’s a priori or conceptual arguments against the Cartesian position. Now it is important to understand how Locke conceived of the role of such a priori theorizing. In rejecting Descartes’ plenism, Locke merely shows the possibility, not the actuality of a vacuum. For example, Locke appeals to God’s power to annihilate body in order to show that space without body is possible,

39

Locke’s treatment of solidity has received undeservedly little attention from scholars. For example, Rogers, though taking up various aspects of Locke’s critical attitudes against Descartes, hardly discusses the issue of solidity (Locke’s Enlightenment, 25–31, 46–60, 83–91.); the same can be said of Jolley’s exposition (Locke: his Philosophical Thought, 19–27, 32–38, 49–50, 55–57, 80–95). More recently, R.S. Woolhouse has given a detailed analysis, though with little interest in the methodological issue, on Locke’s conception of solidity in contrast to Descartes (“Locke and the Nature of Matter,” in Christia Mercer and Eileen O’Neill (ed.), Early Modern Philosophy (New York: OUP, 2005), 142–60). 40

Essay II. iv. 1.

41

The difference between solid body and pure space devoid of solidity is repeatedly stated by Locke. cf. Essay II.iv.3,5; II.xiii.11–14,21–26. 42 43

Essay II. iv. 5. A similar statement is found at Essay, II. xiii. 11, from which I quoted above.

One probable objection to Locke’s argument is that Descartes’ pure extension includes impenetrability in it. See Daniel Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 144–155. However, Locke would surely object that extension and solidity are certainly distinct ideas.

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i.e. we can conceive such pure space.44 Moreover, the next passage is illustrative in that it shows a contrast between a priori and a posteriori inquiries as understood by Locke:45 And indeed the necessary motion of one Particle of Matter, into the place from whence another Particle of Matter is removed, is but a consequence from the supposition of Plenitude; which will therefore need some better proof, than a supposed matter of fact, which Experiment can never make out; our own clear and distinct Ideas plainly satisfying us, that there is no necessary connexion between Space and Solidity, since we can conceive the one without the other.46

The point of this passage is this: the Cartesian supposition of plenism, which is a natural consequence of Descartes’ conception of matter, cannot be necessarily true since by conceptual analysis it becomes obvious that a vacuum is possible (by “clear and distinct ideas” we can conceive pure space). Thus, a priori or conceptual analysis just guarantees the possibilities. In contrast, in investigating the actual nature of matter we need experiment or actual sense experience. This brings us to the role of sense experience and also that of clear and distinct perception in Descartes’ and Locke’s philosophical systems. In Descartes’ system sense experience does not play any crucial role in determining the nature of matter. Instead, we need to attend carefully to the common notions or axioms (innate propositions such as “It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time” and “He who thinks cannot but exist while he thinks”), discover the certainty of the Cogito as the starting point of philosophizing, and then clear and distinct perception (whose reliability is guaranteed by God) will lead us to the real distinction between mind and matter, and the modal distinction between extension (thought) and other qualities of matter (mind). Locke rejects all of this. He rejects those allegedly innate principles at length in book I of his Essay,47 and he also rejects the privileged status of the Cogito as the first truth (although he does not deny its truth). In some places Locke even seems to imply that the Cogito can be reduced to the certainty of particular sense

44

Essay II. xiii. 21[bis].

See also Essay II. xiii. 26, where Locke says “To conclude, whatever Men shall think concerning the existence of a Vacuum, this is plain to me, That we have as clear an Idea of Space distinct from Solidity, as we have of Solidity distinct from Motion, or Motion from Space.” As is obvious from this passage, Locke holds the view that conceptual analysis alone cannot settle the problem over the existence of a vacuum. For a similar view that the role of Lockean imagination is to open up possibilities, see James G. Buickerood, “Empiricism with and without Observation: Experiments secundem imaginationem in Experimental Philosophy and Demonstrative Science in Seventeenth-Century Britain,” in Robert C. Leitz III and Kevin L. Cope (ed.), Imagining the Sciences: Expressions of New Knowledge in the “Long” Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS Press, 2004), 327. I owe this reference to the editor. 45

46 47

Essay II. xiii. 21[bis]. My italics.

It is noteworthy that Locke takes up the same proposition, “It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time,” as the typical example of his target of criticism. See Essay I.ii.4.

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experiences.48 Locke bases the first and most certain source of knowledge on the discerning faculty of human beings. For example, children know white is not black much earlier than they know those axioms or Cogito.49 Locke also rejects Descartes’ use of clarity and distinction. Locke surely makes heavy use of these concepts throughout his Essay. However, Locke rejects the Cartesian thesis that clear and distinct perception alone can establish anything at all about the existence or nature of substances.50 In Locke’s epistemology, the existence and nature of external things can only be known through sense experience.51 Our simple ideas of sensation are real and adequate, answering exactly to the qualities of bodies in the external world.52 Then, in his attempt to establish that solidity is the essence of matter, Locke appeals to experiment or actual sense experience instead of Descartes’ thought experiment: There is no Idea, which we receive more constantly from Sensation, than Solidity. Whether we move, or rest, in what Posture soever we are, we always feel something under us, that supports us, and hinders our farther sinking downwards . . . This of all other, seems the Idea most intimately connected with, and essential to Body, so as no where else to be found or imagin’d, but only in matter: and though our Senses take no notice of it, but in masses of matter, of a bulk sufficient to cause a Sensation in us; Yet the Mind, having once got this Idea from such grosser sensible Bodies, traces it farther; and considers it, as well as Figure, in the minutest Particle of Matter, that can exist; and finds it inseparably inherent in Body, where-ever, or however modified.53

It should be remarked that when Locke mentions “essential,” we should not take it to mean that we grasp the essence of matter a priori by means of pure intellect. On the contrary, Locke is explicitly appealing to our plain sense experience and showing that we constantly receive solidity from bodies. Therefore, “essential” in this context means “most intimately connected” through sense experience. Moreover, although Locke says “the Mind . . . finds it inseparably inherent in Body, whereever, or however modified,” this should not be taken to suggest some a priori or conceptual operation, either.54 Locke clearly says that “having once got this Idea from such grosser

48 Against the total skeptics who even doubt the existence of themselves, Locke argues that hunger or pain will make them realize the existence of themselves. See Essay IV.x.2; and also IV.ix.3. 49

Essay I. ii. 15–16, 25; I. iv. 2–3; II. xi. 1,3; IV. ii. 1; IV. vii. 4, 9–10.

Essay IV.vii.13–14. See also Rogers, Locke’s Enlightenment, 27–29 for Locke’s view on the Descartes’ proof of the existence of God. 50 51

Essay IV. xi. 1–7.

52

Essay II. xxx. 2; II. xxxi. 2. See also II. i. 25; IV. iii. 15.

53

Essay II. iv. 1.

54

The wording here well reminds us of the conditions Locke required for primary qualities in drawing his famous distinction between primary and secondary qualities at Essay II.viii.9. I guess that the arguments concerning solidity at this book II, chapter iv of Essay, had deep implications for Locke’s primary qualities. Peter Alexander, in Ideas, Qualities, and Corpuscles (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), 119 argued that Locke’s use of “inseparable” makes a conceptual point on matter as such, and that Locke’s primary qualities are “defining properties of body.” Rogers once told me that

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sensible Bodies” we can trace solidity to the minutest particles of matter. So, before attributing solidity to corpuscles, we need to carry out experimental investigations on observable bodies. Locke actually reports an experiment performed in Florence so as to vindicate his view that solidity is so inseparable from matter “where-ever, or however modified”: The Experiment, I have been told was made at Florence, which a hollow Globe of Gold fill’d with Water, and exactly closed, farther shews the solidity of so soft a body as Water. For the golden Globe thus filled, being put into a Press, which was driven by the extreme force of skrews, the water made it self way through the pores of that every close metal . . .55

So, Locke thought that solidity was intimately connected to matter, totally inseparable even by the extreme force. In Locke’s view, the nature of matter is not known by a priori reasoning but by this sort of careful and piecemeal experimental investigations. His spirited defence of solidity against plenism, arguably one the weakest links in Descartes’ system,56 is one of several attacks which, taken together, form a comprehensive empiricist alternative to Descartes’ system in England.57

he was inclined to agree with such “defining properties” (in a personal conversation). However, I believe they miss the point, as the present discussion shows. 55

Essay II. iv. 4.

56

Both in the modal distinction and the thought experiment, we find that Descartes failed to address and discuss the problem of impenetrability (solidity). See the passages I quoted from the Principles, I.53 and II.4. Garber also says that “Descartes manages to pass through the entire Principles without even once confronting the issue of impenetrability directly” (Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics, 146). 57

See also Rogers, “The System of Locke and Newton,” esp. 223–230.

Chapter 6

Personal Identity and Human Mortality: Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz Luc Foisneau

Leibniz made an important contribution to modern thinking about personal identity through his treatment of chapter xxvii of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding.1 Reflecting as Locke had done before him on “the question of identity and diversity” he developed his conceptions of the principle of individuation and of the basis of the identity of the human person as a direct reply to his predecessor’s arguments.2 It would, however, be unwise to try to interpret Leibniz’s argument only from this point of view, since that would be to forget what chapter xxvii of the Essay in turn owes to chapter xi of Hobbes’s De Corpore—in addition to its title, of which it provides the most exact English translation.3 Indeed, the end of Locke’s chapter appeals to the method adopted by Hobbes for dealing with the thorny question of the principle of individuation. When Locke affirms that the solution to the problem of individuation depends on the choice of terms, he faithfully repeats the principle formulated by Hobbes according to which, “it is necessary to consider the name

1

English translation by Christopher Brooke, who thanks Katherine Ibbett, Margaret Pˆaques and the author for their assistance. A first version of this essay appeared in French as, “Identit´e personnelle et mortalit´e humaine. Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz,” Archives de Philosophie 67–1 (2004): 65–83. The author thanks Guy Petitdemange for allowing him to have this essay republished in an English version. A few modifications have been introduced in the present version according to suggestions made by the two anonymous reviewers of this volume, whom the author would like to thank for their careful reading.

Leibniz almost always follows the translation that Pierre Coste made of Locke’s Essay. “I used your French version because I felt it appropriate to write my comments in French,” he wrote to Coste. “These days this sort of research is hardly fashionable in the world of Latin” (Letter to Coste, 16 June 1707, in Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C.I. Gerhardt (repr. Hildesheim and New Yor: Olms, 1978) (hereafter GP followed by volume number) GP III, p. 392. 2

3 The title of chapter xxvii of the Essay concerning Human Understanding, “Of Identity and Diversity,” gives a more literal translation of the title of chapter xi of De Corpore (“De eodem et diverso”) than the English translation of De Corpore (“Of Identity and Difference”). The references to De Corpore, abbreviated to DCo, are to Karl Schuhmann’s critical edition, De Corpore, Elementorum Philosophiae sectio prima (Paris :Vrin, 2000); the pagination indicated is that of the Molesworth edition (Opera latina, vol. I. (Cited hereafter as OL).

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 89–105. and Legacy, 

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by which a thing is designated, when one enquires after its identity.”4 For it is not, he said, “Unity of Substance that comprehends all sorts of Identity. . . But to conceive and judge of it aright, we must consider what Idea the Word it is applied to stands for.”5 This borrowing of the method of De Corpore, however, can seem only marginally important, as Locke’s reflections on personal identity take place in a context that is not that of De Corpore but rather that of theorising a post-Cartesian theory of consciousness. It could be argued, then, that Leibniz’s commentaries on Locke’s theory of personal identity owe as little to Hobbes as Locke’s theory itself. But that would seem to me to be a mistake. For, on the one hand, the identity that is in question for these two authors is personal identity, and on the other hand, the concept of the person lies right at the heart of Hobbes’s thinking. The importance of chapter XI of De Corpore ought not to be over-emphasised, but we should still pay close attention to Hobbes’s theory of the person and its contribution to the reply which Leibniz offers to Locke’s theory of personal identity. Owing to the tight connection which he establishes between the natural and the moral dimensions of human personality, Hobbes’s concept of a natural person anticipates, even if only in a programmatic way, the objections which Leibniz will later address to Locke’s theory. If Locke had failed, in Leibniz’s eyes, it was because he had forgotten that the human person would not be a moral person if it were not also a natural person. In order to understand Leibniz’s verdict, therefore, it is important to go back to the theory of the natural person as it had been formulated by Hobbes, and to show just how this theory could contribute to the emergence of the modern problem of personal identity. It is advisable, however, not to narrow our perspective too much. The problem of personal identity was no more born with Hobbes than with either Locke or Leibniz. Each of these three authors contributed to it in a more or less decisive way, to be sure, but all three wrote in a well-established tradition of enquiry that had at least two essential dimensions. First of all, the problem of personal identity possessed an ethical dimension, as it was tied to the problem of individual moral responsibility. So, Hobbes stressed that the identity of a man depends on the matter of which he is made, so that the one who sins and the one who is punished will not be the same man, in virtue of the perpetual flux of the human body;6 Locke wrote that, “In this personal Identity is founded all the Right and Justice of Reward and Punishment”;7 and Leibniz made clear that it is “the moral identity which makes the same person.”8 “Sed considerandum est, quo nomine dicatur res quaeque, quando de identitate ejus quaeritur” (DCo, XI, 7, OL I, p. 122). For a study of Hobbes and individuation, see M. P´echarman, “Hobbes et la question du principe d’individuation”, in L’individu dans la pens´ee moderne (XVIe-XVIIIe si`ecles), ed. G.M. Cazzaniga, Y.C. Zarka (Pisa : Edizioni ETS, 1995), 203–222.

4

5

Essay II. xxvii. 7, p. 332. See also Essay II. xxvii. 28, 29, pp. 347–348.

“Juxta sententiam primam non esset idem homo qui peccat et qui plectitur, propter perpetuum corporis humani fluxu ” (DCo, XI, 7, OL I, p. 121). 6 7

Essay II. xxvii. 18, p. 341.

Nouveaux essays sur l’entendement humain (hereafter NE), II. xxvii, 9, in Leibniz S¨amtliche Schriften und Briefe, Reihe VI, Band VI (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1962), 237, l. 4. English

8

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Secondly, the problem of personal identity had a theological dimension, as it was linked to the question of the identity of the person after death. This question is in fact a continuation of the previous one, for it is a matter of knowing whether or not it is possible to impute to somebody who had been resurrected the words uttered and the actions performed before death—which is to say, of whether it is possible to consider human mortality as a matter of indifference from the moral point of view. This twofold concern helps to underscore the way in which the problem of human mortality stands at the heart of modern reflection about personal identity. Indeed, the absence of a developed theory of personal identity in Hobbes is in large part owing to his insistence on considering death in its finality, rather than an event that has no effect on the person’s identity (as Locke argues), or (with Leibniz) as an only apparent discontinuity. In order to show this, I shall insist first of all on the importance of the Hobbesian theory of the natural person as the basis of the modern problem of personal identity; then I shall show how Leibniz’s critique of the Lockean theory of the person makes possible a rigorous account of the natural dimension of human personality; and finally, I shall endeavour to establish that Leibniz drew on certain elements of Hobbes’s philosophy in order to call into question the privilege that Locke granted to consciousness, when he made it the sole criterion of personal identity.

The Problem of Personal Identity and the Notion of the Natural Person: Locke as Reader of Hobbes The legitimate interest that Hobbes’s commentators have had in his theory of the artificial person has had the effect of pushing his theory of the natural person into the shadows. This latter theory nevertheless deserves a searching examination, not only because of the place it occupies in the history of thinking about political representation9 , but because of the place it occupies in the history of the personal identity problem. We find the first occurrence of the expression “natural person” in The Elements of Law, where it appears as a synonym for “particular”10 and also in the

translations are taken from the translation of Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, New Essays on Human Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 9 For a critique of some of the confusions made by commentators and for a more robust interpretation of the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” persons in Hobbes’s political thinking, see Q. Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State”, The Journal of Political Philosophy 7(1999): 1–29, reprinted in Id, Visions of Politics (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 3:187–92. For an analysis of the context, see Skinner’s, “Hobbes on Representation”, European Journal of Philosophy 13(2005): 155–84. Reprinted as “Hobbes on Persons, Authors and Representatives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. P. Springborg (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), 157–80. 10

“And lastly how a multitude of persons natural are united by covenants into one person civil, or body politic” (Elements of Law, hereafter EL, II, i, 1, ed. F. T¨onnies (London: Sinkin, 1889), reissued by Frank Cass, 1969, p. 108). As a matter of fact, the distinction between natural and civil

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expression “person natural or civil.” The natural person thus designates the man or woman considered from the point of view of their membership in the human species, so neither God nor (non-human) animals could be considered as natural persons. These uses of the term, however, along with those that we find in De Cive, are not the object of a specific theoretical elaboration, but part of a very ordinary lexical register. This is no longer the case in Leviathan, and especially in the English Leviathan,11 for Hobbes there presents his conception of the natural person in relation to a new conception of the fictive or artificial person, and the same general definition covers both kinds: A Person is he, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of an other man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether Truly or by Fiction.12

What makes an individual a natural or fictive person is the way his or her actions or words are being attributed. We can say that someone is a natural person when the words and actions that physically proceed from him or her can be considered as being morally his or her own. Far from being founded on the obviousness of an immediate relationship to himself or herself, the idea of the natural person requires the kind of mediation which is constitutive of the fictive person. Just as a fictive person is the person when it is represented by another, so the natural person is the person when it is represented by him- or herself. It is in this sense that Cicero could say in a letter to Atticus that he represents his own person as well as his adversary’s, and the judge’s too.13 In the case of the natural person, the conceptual pairings that were forged in order to theorise the artificial person also apply. As a natural person, I am both the author and the actor of my words and actions, the actor, as I am the representative of myself in the world under the eyes of others, and the author, as I am represented by myself. Although the concepts of actor, author and persons were introduced in order to resolve problems of political and legal theory, I want to suggest here that they also play a role (if only inadvertently) in the development of the problem of personal identity, which might seem to be, and no doubt is, quite different. Indeed, since it is being used as a term of attribution, as is the case in Leviathan, the question of the natural person loses the straightforwardness that it still assumed in The Elements of Law. The use of the word person in its juridical sense complicates persons comes from the corporation law tradition. It is explicitely in Edward Coke : “Persons are natural, created by God, and incorporate created by the policy of man, and these latter are either sole or aggregate of many” (C.F. Padfield, Law Made Simple (London: Heinemann, 1988), 101); for a comment, see F. Lessay, “Le vocabulaire de la personne”, in Hobbes et son vocabulaire, ed. Y.C. Zarka (Paris: Vrin, 1992), 175. 11 The Latin Leviathan gives the person a more succinct and less innovative definition: “Persona est is quo vel alieno nomine res agit: si suo, persona propria, sive naturalis est; si alieno, persona est ejus, cujus nomine agit, repræsentativa” (Leviathan. XVI, § 1, OL III, p. 123). The natural person is in this instance the one who acts in his own name.

Leviathan, XVI, 1, p. 80 (in the original edition of 1651), p. 111 (in the 1996 Cambridge edition by Richard Tuck). 12 13

Cf. Leviathan, XVI, 3, pp. 80–81 (1651), p. 112 (1996).

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the identity of the natural person with itself and raises the key question of the criterion for the appropriation of words and actions that anyone could spontaneously tend to consider as his or her own. Because the situation of representation squarely places the artificial person in exteriority in relation to itself, that which represents not being that which is represented, so too the natural person finds itself placed in a position of exteriority in relation to itself. That which is my own thus finds itself considered from an exterior point of view: “When they [i.e. his words and actions] are considered as his owne, then is he called a Naturall Person.”14 This approach tends to underline that the person called natural cannot also be assured of its naturalness as one might wish. In consequence, and not without paradox, the definition of the natural person in chapter XVI of Leviathan tends to call into question the natural character of the attribution to the same person of actions and words which are the physical emanations from it. It is in this sense that one can think that the Hobbesian definition of the natural person plays a role in the emergence of the problem of personal identity in emphasizing the fictive character of certain attributions; this definition indeed results in wondering about the nature of the criterion which makes it possible to consider that words and actions belong to the same person. This is the problem that spills over from the question of identity as posed by Hobbes in chapter XI of De Corpore. Although he remarks that it is one thing to ask whether Socrates is the same man and another to ask whether he is the same body, Hobbes does not establish in this text—any more than he does in any other—a direct link between the problem posed by his definition of the natural person and his theory of the principle of individuation. So it is to Locke, in his chapter entitled Of Identity and Diversity, that the credit should go for presenting the modern problem of personal identity through his audacious conjunction of the theory of the person and the theory of identity. Locke begins from an acknowledgment that the unity of substance, whether material or immaterial, does not make it possible to solve the problem of personal identity, for it being one thing to be the same Substance, another the same Man, and a third the same Person, if Person, Man and Substance, are three Names standing for three different Ideas;—for such as is the Idea belonging to that Name, such must be the Identity.15

In order to determine the criterion of personal identity, it is therefore advisable to be attentive to the relation that unites the name “person” to its idea. It is equally advisable, for those of us who read it today, to be attentive to the way in which this relation has been rendered in Pierre Coste’s French translation, as we know that this is the version that Leibniz had before his eyes when he wrote his New Essays. The examination of Coste’s translation matters in this instance to the extent to which it has helped to forge the concept of consciousness as the knowledge of oneself (La Forge, Locke) in contradistinction to consciousness as a limit to the knowledge of

14

Leviathan, XVI, 2, pp. 80–81 (1651), p. 111 (1996).

15

Essay II. xxvii. 8, p. 332.

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oneself (Malebranche). The long note in which Coste justifies his choice of the word con-science (with a hyphen) in order to translate into French the Lockean consciousness has certainly contributed to the clarification of this distinction.16 But there is also another dimension to Coste’s interpretation, since no parallel note enlightens us about the difficulties attached to the concept of the person and the self. This might not itself be especially serious, if the exact wording of the Lockean definition had not been modified by the translator in a way that generated distortion. Here is Coste’s translation of Locke’s definition: C’est [i.e., the person], a` ce que je crois, un Etre pensant & intelligent, capable de raison et de r´eflexion, & qui se peut consulter soi-mˆeme comme le mˆeme, comme une chose qui pense en diff´erens tems & en diff´erens lieux; ce qui se fait uniquement par le sentiment qu’il a de ses propres actions, lequel est ins´eparable de la pens´ee, & lui est, ce me semble, enti`erement essentiel, e´ tant impossible a` quelque Etre que ce soit d’appercevoir sans appercevoir qu’il apperc¸oit.17

This feeling (“sentiment”) which one has of one’s own actions, a feeling which accompanies all our representations, Locke called Consciousness, and Coste translates the term as “con-science,” following the lead of Malebranche, but adding an hyphen to indicate that the meaning of Lockean consciousness is opposed to Malebranchian “conscience.”18 It is in this consciousness, “which makes every one to be, what he calls self.” that “personal Identity” consists, “i.e. the sameness of a rational Being.”19 Such, as is well known, is the solution that Locke offers to the problem

16 For the history of the notion of consciousness in modern French philosophy, see Catherine Glyn Davies, “Conscience” as consciousness: the idea of self-awareness in French philosophical ´ writing from Descartes to Diderot (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1990). Etienne Balibar has made valuable comments on Coste’s translation of consciousness by con-science in J. Locke, Identit´e et ´ Balibar (Paris: Seuil, 1998); diff´erence. L’invention de la conscience, trans. & commented by E. see also the first formulation of Balibar’s analysis in his “L’invention de la conscience: Descartes, Locke, Coste et les autres”, in Traduire les philosophes. Actes des journ´ees d’´etudes organis´ees en 1992 a` l’universit´e de Paris 1, ed. J. Moutaux, O. Bloch, 289–303. For the discussion that followed, see ibid., 303–308. 17 From Pierre Coste’s translation of Locke, Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement humain (1700), 5th edition, Amsterdam and Leipzig, 1755, reprint (Paris: Vrin, 1989), II. xxvii. 9, p. 264. Locke’s original words are these: “. . . we must consider what Person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it: It being impossible for any one to perceive, without perceiving, that he does perceive” (Essay, p. 335.) 18 “Finally, I see that I could without so much fuss use the word ‘conscience’ in the sense in which Mr Locke used it in this chapter and elsewhere, since one of our best writers, the celebrated Father Malebranche, had no difficulty in using it in the same way in several places in his Search after Truth” (Coste’s Essai II. xxvii. 9, translator’s note 2, p. 265). See Malebranche, The Search After Truth, III, VII. Balibar comments that this reference to Malebranche comes late in the note, since Malebranche’s “conscience” points to the fact that the knowledge of oneself is always obscure, whereas Locke’s consciousness is an immediate knowledge of oneself. See Locke, Identit´e et diff´erence, Introduction, 26. 19

Essay II. xxvii. 9, p. 335.

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of personal identity. Nevertheless, the fame of this solution meant that as a result the real nature of the problem that it was meant to solve was obscured, and Coste’s translation itself contributed to this obscuring. First of all, in putting forward the concept of consciousness, the Lockean solution to the problem of personal identity tends to forget that the very origin of this problem was linked to the usage of the concept of the person, since this concept rendered problematic the thought of self-identity. If a natural person is defined as a person whose actions and words are considered as belonging to itself, it is important to determine the criterion of this consideration, that is to say, the criterion for attributing these actions and these words to the same person. In a significant way, the verb consider is taken up by Locke in his definition of the person, since he defines this as “a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self.”20 The criterion of self-consciousness is therefore Locke’s precise answer to the question implicitly posed by the Hobbesian definition of the natural person, which, as we saw, itself rested on the concept of “consideration.” But the verb consider, which makes the link between the definition of Leviathan and that of the Essay, surreptitiously disappears from the French translation, with Coste improperly rendering “consider” as “se consulter.” for to “consider it self as it self” is not the same thing as “se consulter soi-mˆeme comme le mˆeme.”21 This is also something that Leibniz understood perfectly well, attributing to Philalethes, Locke’s spokesman in the New Essays, a correct translation of the text of the Essay.22 The first definition of “person” in chapter xxvii of Book II of the Essay thus includes a reference to Hobbes, which, despite Coste, was nevertheless able to reach Leibniz. This proof could appear fragile, except that Locke himself provides striking confirmation, at the end of his analysis of the problem of personal identity: the term “person” is a Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents, capable of a Law, and Happiness, and Misery. This personality extends it self beyond present Existence to what is past, only by consciousness, whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to it self past Actions, just upon the same ground, and for the same reason, that it does the present.23

This developed definition of the person shows in a perfectly clear way the articulation of a problematic of Hobbesian origin and of a solution of Cartesian origin. If Locke does not directly cite chapter XVI of Leviathan, it is nonetheless the case that the definition that he gives of the person as a juridical term owes a lot to the definition that Hobbes gives of the natural person. The person has as its function to “appropriate” actions; thanks to consciousness, the person “owns” past actions. If the verb “appropriate” isn’t a part of Hobbes’s vocabulary, this is not the case for the verb “own” which plays a considerable part in the putting together of the theory 20

Ibid. Italics are mine.

21

Ibid.

22

NE II. xxvii. 9, Ak VI-6, p. 235, l. 13.

23

Essay II. xxvii. 26, p. 346.

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of the person in chapter XVI of Leviathan. This word indeed combines the meaning of “my own,” which refers back to the question of self-identity, the meaning of “property,” with owner designating the proprietor, and the meaning of recognition, almost in the sense of “avow,” since “to own” can equally mean to recognize or to avow.24 Locke’s originality is therefore to have presented the question of identity in juridical terms, starting from the concept of person, and not in metaphysical terms, starting from the concept of substance—alternatively, to have distinguished, as Hobbes had not, the problem of personal identity and the problem of the individuation of substance. In saying that what makes the identity of the “natural” person is not substantial identity, whether material or immaterial, but the identity of consciousness, Locke was simultaneously Hobbes’s heir and his critic, inheriting his definition of the natural person, but rejecting his materialistic approach to the question of identity in De Corpore. This sharp rejection of the determination of personal identity through the individuation of substance corresponds to a considerable uncertainty concerning the nature of substance. Rather than compromise the foundation of morality in a metaphysical discussion of the relations between person and substance, moral identity and physical identity, Locke preferred to show that one can think about moral identity independently of physical identity. Not without paradox, Locke leant on the materialist thesis which made thought an accident of matter, in order to show that the impossibility of proving the identity of the person when you start from the identity of necessarily fluctuating material substance forces you to “conceive personal Identity preserved in something else than Identity of Substance; as animal Identity is preserved in Identity of Life, and not of Substance.”25 A consistent materialist and partisan of personal identity, such as Hobbes, is therefore obliged by the logic of Locke’s argument to recognize the independence of personal identity in relation to substantial identity. Locke here indicates to Hobbes how he could have reconciled his theory of the person and his materialism by separating what he wanted to combine in the same concept: the person and nature.26 The major objection to the independence of the consciousness criterion thesis is not likely to come from the materialists, according to Locke, but from those who hold to an immaterial thinking substance, for such people could indeed be tempted to make the identity of the moral person depend on the identity of thinking substance. If the person rests on the criterion of consciousness and if consciousness is the expression of a thinking substance, it seems quite natural that one might make the identity of the person depend on the identity of the thinking thing—and the link established by Descartes 24 Concerning the link between the two meanings of “to own” in Leviathan, see L. Jaume, “Le vocabulaire de la repr´esentation politique de Hobbes a` Kant”, in Hobbes et son vocabulaire, 235–238. 25 Essay II. xxvii. 12, p. 337. He also writes that “the more probable Opinion is, that this consciousness is annexed to, and the Affection of one individual immaterial Substance” (Ibid., 25, p. 345). 26 For stimulating comments on the possibility of a link between materialism and the theory of ´ repr´esentatif moderne (Paris: Presses the natural person in Hobbes, see L. Jaume, Hobbes et l’Etat Universitaires de France, 1986), 95–97.

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between the cogitatio and the res cogitans only encourages this conclusion.27 But we might wonder why Locke does not want this Cartesian solution, when he has already adopted a Cartesian criterion in order to think through the question of personal identity. The reason for this refusal seems to me to owe, on the one hand, to the nature of the problem which drove Locke to have recourse to the criterion of consciousness, that is, the juridical character of the concept of the person, and, on the other hand, to the Hobbesian thesis concerning the mortality of the natural human person. In simultaneously holding that the natural person was mortal, body and soul, and that it will be judged after the resurrection, Hobbes made problematic the possibility of thinking naturally (i.e. without recourse to grace) about the identity of the person in this life and on the day of the last judgment.28 In doing so, he obliged his successors—Locke and Leibniz—to think about the disappearance of a man or woman’s physical person and of the permanence of the moral person together. It is in relation to this Hobbesian problem—which is also a Socinian problem, and we know that Locke was very close to Socinianism—that we must understand Locke’s solution, and Leibniz’s subsequent criticisms. Indeed, Locke considered that in order to remove the mortalist obstacle (to use the theological term corresponding to Hobbes’s position) it was necessary to accept that the one who gives an account of him- or herself in the hereafter is not necessarily the same, from the point of view of substance, as the one who had committed the offences here below. Paradoxically, then, it is the thesis of those who hold to immaterial thinking substance—apparently in conformity with the afterlife in the hereafter—which poses greater difficulties for the theorist of personal identity. Before being able to attack the materialist Hobbesians, Locke tells us that the spiritualist Cartesians must demonstrate that personal identity “cannot be preserved in the change of immaterial Substances, or variety of particular immaterial Substances.”29 It might seem surprising that the burden of proof falls on the partisans of the immortality of the human soul, but this is because of their tendency to mix up the problem of the identity of the person and with that of the identity of the thinking immortal substance—whereas those who hold to mortalism are naturally protected against a similar illusion.

27 “Hic invenio, cogitatio est, haec sola a me divelli nequit, ego sum, ego existo, certum est. [. . .]. Sum igitur praecise tantum res cogitans, id est, mens, sive animus, sive intellectus, sive ratio, voces mihi prius significationi ignotae” (Meditationes, AT, VII, 27, 7–15). Hence the necessity to distinguish between Descartes’s contribution to the consciousness debate and the transformations of the notion among the Cartesians. Cf. Locke, Identit´e et diff´erence, 24–26. 28 Hobbes considers that God is able to resurrect a man who has been dead, body and soul: “For supposing that when a man dies, there remaineth nothing of him but his carkasse; cannot God that raised inanimated dust and clay into a living creature by his Word, easily raise a dead carkasse to life again, and continue him alive for Ever, or make him die again, by another Word?” (Leviathan, XLIV, 15, p. 425). On the consonance of this stance with Hobbes’s position on the identity of substance, see A.P. Martinich, A Hobbes Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 257–8. 29

Essay II. xxvii. 12, p. 337.

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Locke’s priority, therefore, was to uncover the illusions which necessarily accompany the spiritualists’ approach to the problem of personal identity. He needed to show that one might plausibly reason that the same soul could assume several personalities, or that the same person could be united to several souls. We don’t need to enter into detail concerning this reasoning here, and can conclude that if it were necessary to follow the argument of those who identify the person with thinking substance, then God, on the day of the last judgment, would be judging souls for sins for which they would not be morally responsible, their moral personality having left them for another soul. All in all, Hobbes’s position is the more coherent one, since it sharply dissociates the natural person of the man or woman, which is condemned to disappear at the moment of death, from the issue of moral responsibility, which will be that of the resurrected being at the end of time. By saying that it is consciousness which makes personal identity, Locke gives himself the means of resolving the theological problem of personal identity, which had been raised among philosophers concerned by the identity problem of Hobbes’s mortalism: And thus may we be able without any difficulty to conceive, the same Person at the Resurrection, though in a Body not exactly in make or parts the same which he had here, the same consciousness going along with the Soul that inhabits it.30

Even if he recognises that he takes, “as we ordinarily now do [. . .] the Soul of a Man, for an immaterial Substance,”31 Locke has not made the mistake of emphasising the weaknesses of this thesis with regard to the question of man’s personal identity. Whether one considers someone’s identity to be founded on the identity of the soul, taken as a thinking immaterial substance, on the identity of the animal body independently of the immaterial soul, or in the union of the immaterial soul and the body, “it is impossible to make personal Identity to consist in any thing but consciousness; or reach any farther than that does.”32 Despite its spiritualist fac¸ade, this claim, which relates moral identity to consciousness alone, independently of substance, owes much to the improbable synthesis—though one realised by Hobbes—between a radical materialism, a theory of the natural person and an uncompromising mortalism. In choosing consciousness as the criterion for personal identity, Locke in fact saved the person from the metaphysical uncertainties that weigh on the status of thinking substance, but at the same time he carved out a significant gap between the physical dimension and the moral dimension of that same person. In affirming in a striking formula that “a Carcase may be a Person, as well as any sort of Substance be so without consciousness,”33 Locke straightforwardly showed that he could only manage to think moral identity at the price of the sacrifice of physical identity. On a theoretical level, this sacrifice very precisely echoed the mortalism of Hobbes and, on a more general theological level, that of Socinians. In consequence, we can

30

Ibid., II. xxvii. 15, p. 340.

31

Ibid., II. xxvii. 27, p. 347.

32

Ibid., 21, p. 343.

33

Ibid., 23, p. 344.

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better understand why Locke’s solution to the problem of personal identity could not be at all suitable for Leibniz, the great partisan of immortality. In fact, we might say that the Leibnizian critique of Locke is, when all is said and done—and more fundamentally—a critique of Hobbes34 .

The Leibnizian Refoundation of the Theory of the Natural Person: Leibniz as Critic of Hobbes The criticisms that Leibniz addressed to the Lockean theory of personal identity proceeded, first of all, from an original metaphysical conception which was no more that of Locke than that of Hobbes. In particular, the conception of a substantial individuality that would be “a separate world, independent of every other thing except God”35 finds only the faintest echo in the two English thinkers. And Leibniz’s solution to the problem of individuation through recourse to an “internal principle of distinction,”36 or principle of indiscernibles, which depends itself on the absolute singularity of the point of view adopted by God for creating each substance, finds no echo at all in his two predecessors. The interest of the criticisms that Leibniz addressed to the Lockean theory of the person resides elsewhere. It lies in his calling into question the radical distinction made by Locke (and suggested by the mortalism thesis) between personal identity, which resides in the unity of consciousness, and physical identity, which rests on the unity of substance. At bottom, Leibniz denied that it was possible to think that there could be a moral person who would not also be a physical person—that is to say, a real person. Although he did not use the expression, we could just about say that Leibniz intended to rehabilitate the Hobbesian concept of the identity of substance even while he transformed the metaphysics and theology in which this concept had previously been embedded. Leibniz’s criticisms had as their goal the restoration of the link between the moral dimension of the person and its physical dimension, a link that had been loosened by Locke. While Leibniz agreed with Locke in recognizing in man a moral personality, which resides in the fact that the soul of man is conscia sui,37 he refused to consider that “this apparent identity could be preserved in the absence of any real identity.”38 As he wrote in his Principles of Philosophy, Leibniz thought that

34

For another perspective on Leibniz’s critique of Locke’s theory of consciousness, see J. Locke, Identit´e et diff´erence, op. cit., introduction by Balibar, p. 26–7. 35 Discours de m´etaphysique, XIV, GP IV, p. 439. English version by Jonathan Bennett, Discourse on Metaphysics, presented at www.earlymoderntexts.com. 36

NE, II. xxvii. 2, VEVI-6, p. 230, l. 2.

Correspondance avec Arnauld, XVI, draft of letter from Leibniz to Arnauld (Paris : Vrin, 1984), 141. 37 38

NE, II. xxvii. 9, Ak VI-6, p. 236, ll. 7–8.

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there existed a harmony between nature and grace39 such that “things lead toward grace by the paths of nature herself.”40 The hypotheses formulated by Locke were fictions, which had significance only from the point of view of the “absolute power of God”: Even if God were to change the real identity in some extraordinary manner, the personal identity would remain, provided that the man preserved the appearances of identity—the inner ones (i.e. the ones belonging to consciousness) as well as outer ones such as those consisting in what appears to other people...41

In this text Leibniz emphasised the fictive character of Locke’s position and recalled in passing the similar fiction inscribed in the long tradition of arguments de potentia absoluta Dei.42 He added, however, that the problem of personal identity needed to be resolved preferably solely from the point of view of the ordinary power of God—which is to say, also from the point of view of the ordinary course of nature. But, from this last point of view, “an identity which is apparent to the person concerned—one who senses himself to be the same—presupposes a real identity obtaining through each immediate [temporal] transition accompanied by reflection, or by the sense of I.”43 In short, there would not be a moral person without the physical person, for self-consciouness is not independent of the real substance, as it might be if “a man could be a mere machine and still possess consciousness.”44 This strong determination of the person as a natural and moral person, however, presupposes a theory of human immortality, which means that the moral problem that arose when Hobbes took human mortality into account gets occluded. The Leibnizian desire of founding human personal identity on a real basis must have as its condition the resolution of the moral problem posed by human mortality through a metaphysical theory of immortality. In the absence of such a theory, Leibniz’s requirement of a substantial determination of the moral person leads inevitably to the disappearance of the moral person at the moment of the disappearance of the physical person. It was this eventuality, as we saw earlier, which had led Locke to affirm the independence of the moral person in relation to its natural support 39 “[I]t is of the essence of God’s wisdom that all should be harmonious in his works, and that nature should be parallel with grace” (Essais de th´eodic´ee, I, 91, GP VI, p. 152, transl. by E.M. Huggard as Theodicy (London: Routledge, 1951 [1952]), 172). 40 Les principes de la philosophie ou la monadologie, 88; GP VI, p. 622. English translation, by Jonathan Bennett, The Principles of Philosophy, or Monadology, presented at www.earlymoderntexts.com. 41

NE, II. xxvii. 10, VEVI-6, p. 237, l. 16–19.

On the history of those arguments in the Middle Ages, see W.J. Courtenay, Capacity and Volition. A History of the Distinction of Absolute and Ordained Power (Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina, 1990). For their implications in Hobbes, see my article, “Omnipotence, Necessity and Sovereignty. Hobbes and the Absolute and Ordinary Powers of God and King,” in Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’, 271–290. 42

43

NE, II. xxvii. 9, VEVI-6, p. 236, l. 9–11.

44

Ibid.

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and to propose that only the witness of consciousness might justify the imputation to the same person of an action performed before death on the day of the last judgment. Moreover, the Lockean fiction that the same substance could be bearing several personalities—one after the other—implies that it is not possible to ground moral imputation on substantial permanence. In assuring the uniqueness and immortality of the person, Leibniz’s theory of substance permits the reverse: on the one hand, he can dismiss the hypothesis of the dissociation of the person from its substance; on the other hand, he avoids the hypothesis that a total destruction of the real person could have any bearing on the identity of the moral person. Having said that nothing determines a substance “except God alone,” Leibniz adds: Nothing can make us understand immortality better than this independence and extent of the soul, which absolutely shelters it from everything external, since it alone constitutes its whole world, and together with God is sufficient for itself. It is possible for the soul to come to an end through absolute annihilation; but its coming to end in any other way—being destroyed by dissolution, through damage, like a machine—is just as impossible as it is that the world should destroy itself unaided. Changes in the extended mass we call our body could not have any effect on the soul, nor could the dissolution of that body destroy what is indivisible, namely, the soul.45

The dissipation or dissemination of the body doesn’t jeopardise the immortality of the soul, “for no substance ever comes to an end, though a substance may greatly alter.”46 Leibniz thus agreed with Locke in recognizing that my personality also extends as far as the consciousness that I have of my past actions, or as far as my memory extends, but he was opposed to Locke’s contention that my personality cannot be extended beyond my actual memory. Leibniz refused to accept this limitation, as it made a theory of the immortality of the moral person founded on memory quite impossible. In place of Locke’s actual memory, he therefore opposed a theory of virtual memory, which allowed him to say that the human soul “keeps always in its nature the traces of all its preceding states with a virtual memory which can always be stimulated, since it has a consciousness or knows in itself that which each one of us calls the self.”47 It is therefore this virtual memory, as it can be actualised by consciousness, and not consciousness alone, which constitutes the moral person. Thanks to the theory of substance and the theory of virtual memory, Leibniz could conceptualise the unity of man’s moral and natural person in a coherent way, without need of Locke’s recourse to divine omnipotence. But this theory presupposes a critique of consciousness considered as a unique criterion of moral identity, as the theory of virtual memory indicates; 45 Discours de M´etaphysique, XXXII, GP IV, p. 458. Translation as Discourse of Metaphysics, by Jonathan Bennett, www.earlymoderntexts.com. 46 Discours de m´etaphysique, XXXIV, GP IV, p. 459. English version by Jonathan Bennett presented at www.earlymoderntexts.com. Leibniz’s position is perfectly illustrated by the words that Ovid gives to Pythagoras: “Morte carent animæ.” ( Metamorphoses, XV, 158, quoted by Leibniz, Th´eodic´ee, I, 89, GP VI, p. 152). 47

Leibniz to Arnauld, 14 July 1686, GP II, p. 57.

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and the last thing this article will attempt to show is the way in which this critique itself rests on Leibniz’s appropriation of various anti-Cartesian elements in Hobbes’s philosophy.

The Insufficiency of the Consciousness Criterion: Leibniz as Reader of Hobbes If Leibniz readily recognized that self-consciousness is a criterion of a human being’s moral identity, he also intended to show that it was not the sole criterion,48 and he sought to widen reflection on the criteria of personal identity by means of three arguments, respectively legal (natural law), ontological and theological. We will emphasise what these first two kinds of argument owe to Hobbes, before making clear as to why this debt does not obtain when it comes to the theological argument. When Leibniz reminded Locke that the consciousness that an individual has of his actions is not the unique criterion permitting their attribution, he evoked a criterion, that of the concurring testimony of others, which recalls the legal definition that Hobbes had given of consciousness in Leviathan. Any breakdown in one’s consciousness of the past—whether partial, as in the case of a coma, or total, as in the case of certain kinds of amnesia—is not enough, Leibniz thought, to call one’s moral identity into question. In both cases, “the testimony of others could fill in the gap in my recollection,”49 whether in re-establishing “the continuity of my bond of consciousness” in the case of some partial breakdown, or, in the case of total amnesia, in letting me “have myself taught all over again, even my name and how to read and write.”50 In this last case, “I could still learn from others about my life during my preceding state; and, similarly, I would have retained my rights without having to be divided into two persons and made to inherit from myself.”51 It might be objected that the witness of others can be deceptive, but Leibniz insists that there are cases where “we can be morally certain of the truth on the credit of others’ reports.”52 And if others can deceive me, then I can also deceive myself. Ultimately there is only God’s witness that can absolutely exclude error, enjoying a certainty that is both moral and metaphysical. When concordant, the testimony of others makes it quite possible to offset the deficiencies of the Lockean consciousness criterion. This concordance of witnesses, however, is precisely what Hobbes for his part calls consciousness: “When two, or more men, know of one and the same fact, they are said to be CONSCIOUS of it one to another; which is as much

48 “Thus, consciousness is not the only means of establishing personal identity. . .” (NE, II. xxvii. 9, Ak VI-6, p. 237, l. 19–20). 49

NE, II. xxvii. 9, Ak VI-6, p. 236, l. 22.

50

Ibid.

51

NE, II. xxvii. 10, VEVI-6, p. 237, l. 1–3.

52

NE, II. xxvii. 9, VEVI-6, p. 237, l. 8–9.

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as to know it together.”53 Starting with this definition, Hobbes emphasises, on the one hand, the legal and moral value of the testimony of others, and also shows, on the other hand, how the commonly admitted conception of consciousness as knowledge of one’s “own secret facts, and secret thoughts” proceeds from consciousness understood as the knowledge that witnesses have “of the facts of one another, or of a third.”54 The intimate consciousness is in this way a figure of rhetoric, since it metaphorically designates self-knowledge as the knowledge of oneself by oneself as by another self. And from these considerations we can see how Leibniz could have judged it necessary in certain cases to offset the practical insufficiency of the Cartesian consciousness criterion (understood as immediate knowledge of oneself) with an appeal to a Hobbesian consciousness criterion (understood as the concordant witness from different points of view). In order to underline the insufficiency of the Lockean consciousness criterion, Leibniz develops a second argument to establish the continuity of personality beyond states of unconsciousness. This argument rests on the distinction between perception and awareness (apperception), perception being “the internal state of a monad that represents external things” being distinguished from “awareness [which is] consciousness, or the reflective knowledge of that internal state.”55 Armed with this distinction, it becomes possible to conceptualise the identity of the moral person that does not rest only on self-consciousness or awareness, but on the continuum of small perceptions (“petites perceptions”). Whether they are aware of it or not, the infant Socrates and the philosopher Socrates make up only one person, for there is from one to the other an unbroken continuity of small perceptions. And being unaware of this critical distinction, the Cartesians have revived the prejudice of “folk who regard imperceptible bodies as nothing.”56 That a man loses consciousness during a blackout does not imply at all that he ceases to be identical with himself, for an interruption in awareness does not at all imply any discontinuity in the flux of perceptions. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between a “long stupor” and “death strictly so-called . . . involv[ing] the stopping of all perceptions.”57 The distinction is critical for Leibniz, for it permits him to escape from the aporias of mortalism, into which the Cartesians had fallen, despite their best efforts to reject mortalism, for this rejection “confirmed people in their ill-founded belief that some souls go out of existence, and also confirmed the so-called “free-thinkers” in their miserable opinion that our own souls are not immortal.”58 Once again, his anti-Cartesianism brings Leibniz close to Hobbes, as it led him to attribute the theoretical responsibility for mortalism, not to Hobbes, who professed it overtly, but to Descartes, 53

Leviathan, VII, p. 31 (1651), p. 48 (1996).

54

Ibid.

Principes de la Nature et de la Grace, 4, GP VI, p. 600. Translated as Principles of Nature and Grace by Jonathan Bennett, at www.earlymoderntexts.com. 55 56

Ibid.

57

Ibid.

58

Ibid.

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who intended to put his metaphysics in the service of the soul’s immortality. If Hobbes did not explicitly distinguish between perception and awareness, he nevertheless developed the theory of the conatus, which made the distinction possible. In recognizing the existence of imperceptible movements at the start of perceived movements, he authorised a theory of unconscious perception, relating the smallness of movement to its imperceptible character.59 The Hobbesian origin of the theory of small perceptions is moreover confirmed by the use Hobbes makes of the famous image by which Leibniz introduces the theory in the preface of the New Essays. The “example of the roaring noise of the sea that acts on us when we are standing on the shore”60 seems to come straight out of chapter VIII of Leviathan, as is suggested, on the one hand, by the fact that both authors use the maritime metaphor, and, on the other hand, Leibniz’s use of the term “crowd” to designate the ensemble of small perceptions. Such usage recalls to the reader of Hobbes the crowd of individuals whose individual madness, although imperceptible, constitutes nevertheless a real threat to the state.61 Leibniz’s recourse to Hobbesian argument must not, however, allow us to forget the distance that separates the two philosophers on the matter of the identity of the moral person, and this gap becomes wholly apparent at the point where Leibniz presents his third argument to restrict the range of the consciousness criterion. This theological argument runs as follows: if consciousness is not the unique means of establishing personal identity, this is because this identity constitutes itself more fundamentally through its relationship with God, “whose social bond with us is the cardinal point of morality.”62 Although he does not reduce moral personality to metaphysical identity, the social bond that unites human beings to God cannot be understood by Leibniz independently of immortality. On the contrary, by refusing any metaphysical theory of immortality, Hobbes could not conceive the kingdom of God by nature as the place where human moral identity constituted itself. Hobbes’s conception of divine royalty by nature does not rest on God’s love of humankind, but rather on the absolute superiority of divine power, in comparison to human beings. This domination by power expresses human mortality; the weakness of human beings by nature corresponds strictly to their condition of being mortals.63 Whereas

59 “And although unstudied men, doe not conceive any motion at all to be there, where the thing moved is invisible; or the space it is moved in, is (for the shortnesse of it) insensible; yet that doth not hinder, but that such Motions are” (Leviathan, VI, p. 23 (1651), p. 38 (1996)). 60

NE, Preface, VEVI-6, p. 54, l. 13–14.

61

“For as in the middest of the sea, though a man perceive no sound of that part of the water next him; yet he is well assured, that part contributes as much, to the Roaring of the Sea, as any other part, of the same quantity: so also, though wee perceive no great unquietness, in one, or two men; yet we may be well assured, that their singular Passions, are parts of the Seditious roaring of a troubled Nation” (Leviathan, 36 (1651), p. 55 (1996)). NE, II. xxvii. 9, Ak VI-6, p. 237, l. 8–9. See on this point the analyses of Martine de Gaudemar, Leibniz. De la puissance au sujet (Paris: Vrin, 1994), p. 188. 62

On the significance of mortality in Hobbes’s thought, see my own Hobbes et la toute-puissance de Dieu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 233–236.

63

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Leibniz, then, extends nature towards grace, by making the immortality of spirits a condition of divine love, Hobbes radically separates nature from grace, in thinking human nature without immortality and without divine love. The opposition between the Leibnizian theory of immortality and the Hobbesian theory of mortality is, therefore, much more than a doctrinal opposition; it makes it possible to understand why Hobbes did not transform his theory of the natural person into a theory of the moral person. In order for such a transformation to be able to take place, it was important to conceive, as Leibniz did, of a metaphysical guarantee of the permanence of the moral person. This, however, is precisely what Hobbes did not want to do, owing to his radical attachment to a theory of natural mortality. The failure of Hobbes to theorise human moral identity thus proceeds less from incapacity than from a refusal.

Chapter 7

Locke and Leibniz on the Structure of Substance and Powers: The Metaphysics of Moral Subjects Martha Brandt Bolton

As Leibniz’s Preface makes clear, the New Essays advocates many positions opposed to those found in Locke’s Essay. But it proves difficult to give a definitive overall account of the opposition between the greatest empiricist and the archrationalist of the early modern period. The dispute defies reduction to a few fundamental points of disagreement. Of the many reasons for this, we might mention that Leibniz drafted his response to the Essay with some knowledge of rising British suspicions that it lent comfort to Hobbesian, Epicurean, Socinian, and skeptical challenges to established truths of religion and morality, a fear Leibniz shared. Moreover, Leibniz’s innovative use of dialogue to engage the Englishman’s philosophy makes it difficult to capture their differences in a succinct formula. The pair of works validates any number of accounts of the contested views. This paper concerns their competing theories of substance and powers, and examines them from the perspective of an aim both parties shared. Let me start with one abstract characterization of the difference. Locke intends his empirical investigation of how human understanding operates to proceed with minimal metaphysical commitment. The assumption is that our ideas are faithful to reality only if they are ultimately caused by things that really exist, and our beliefs are assured of being truths about what is real only if our ideas are real; since our ideas are limited by our narrow sphere of causal interactions, the result is a limited but principled skepticism on metaphysical topics. By contrast, Leibniz contends that we could not acquire ideas from causal interaction with the world, or acquire the knowledge we have, if our minds were not innately provided with some fundamental ideas and principles, including those central to the science of metaphysics; the nonskeptical result is that we can attain metaphysical knowledge by identifying and clarifying innate principles and using them to explicate what we experience. This abstract partial characterization of the opposition between the two philosophers sets the stage for their opposite views on more particular issues about the structure of substances, powers, and moral subjects which were much in dispute at the turn of the eighteenth century. According to Locke, human understanding is limited in such a way that although it is reasonable for us to infer that material substance exists and that spiritual substance exists, we cannot strictly know whether spiritual substance is, or is not,

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 107–126. and Legacy, 

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identical to a certain system of matter.1 The immaterialist theory is more probable, says the Essay, but many scholars do not take Locke at his word here.2 At the least, they maintain, he thought the probabilities were reversed, if he did not privately side with the materialists. Whatever the truth on this, Locke plainly did think it important to show that the metaphysical doctrines essential to the sort of divine-natural law morality, he regards as necessary for eternal personal happiness is compatible with the hypothesis that created sprits are material, naturally perishable substances.3 This may have been a strategy for reconciling human morality with his belief that spirits are material substances with distinctive powers or it may just have been an effort to safeguard morality in the face of what was, to his mind, the rationally unpersuasive dogma of the soul’s immateriality. A passage in his attack on innate practical principles shows one way the project presented itself to Locke. Urging that we lack the sort of explicit knowledge of a unique set of moral principles implied by the doctrine that such injunctions are innate, he observes: Nay, a great part of Men are so far from finding any such innate Moral Principles in themselves, that by denying freedom to Mankind; and thereby making Men no other than bare Machins, they take away not only innate, but all Moral Rules whatsoever, and leave not a possibility to believe any such, to those who cannot conceive, how any thing can be capable of a Law, that is not a free Agent: And upon that ground, they must necessarily reject all Principles of Vertue, who cannot put Morality and Mechanism together; which are not very easy to be reconciled, or made consistent. (Essay I.iii.14)

Mechanism is a materialist view. The striking point is that the denial of human freedom is linked to mechanism, and the conjunction poses a threat to morality. A necessary condition of reconciling materialism and morality is having the right account of human freedom, an account that is perforce compatible with materialism. The metaphysical prerequisites of human freedom are, then, directly relevant to the conditions necessary for morality. According to Locke, humans are moral subjects only if they have liberty in acting and only if they have an afterlife, but neither requires the immaterialist doctrine.4 Although Leibniz agrees on the two conditions, he contends that morality is not properly served unless humans satisfy them by nature, not by miracle, which requires that they be endowed with immaterial souls.5 The question, whether we have evidence for an account of substance adequate to support moral attributes, is important to both philosophers. Yet their respective core metaphysical theories, although widely studied, are seldom considered in light

1

Essay IV. iii. 5.

2

Essay II. xxvii. 25; also letter to Stillingfleet in Locke, Works 4:33.

3

See especially Essay II. xxviii. 5–13.

4

Essay IV. iii. 5, p. 542, ll. 6–13; letter to Stillingfleet, Locke, Works, 4: 34.

Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais concernment l’Entendement Humain, in S¨amtliche Schriften und Briefe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1990), VI.6; English translation by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, New Essays concerning Human Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 68. Cited hereafter as NE. 5

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of this particular problem. As I hope to show, this brings out the significance of some doctrines of Locke, and it highlights specific theoretical demands placed on the metaphysical theories advocated in New Essays. This interpretative framework is especially welcome in the latter case, because the work itself gives so few clues to the overall aim of the various points and doctrines urged in disparate parts of the text.

Locke on Ideas of Powers in General and the Idea of Active Power Freedom is a power belonging to rational spirits, a causal disposition inhering in spiritual substances, according to Locke. Our ideas, or ways of conceiving, of causal powers and our ideas of the substances in which they inhere are both formed by the mind from ideas it receives from the senses and inner reflection. The mind first forms ideas of powers by a simple inference, and then forms ideas of substance by an inference performed on its ideas of powers. At the first stage, our senses constantly inform us that “one [thing] comes to an end, and ceases to be, and another begins to exist,” and we find the same by inner reflection. It is not just that ideas come and go, but more important, we observe that these events are changes made by agents: The Mind . . . [observes] a constant change of its Ideas, sometimes by the impression of outward Objects on the Senses, and sometimes by the Determination of its own choice, . . . and [concludes] from what it has so constantly observed to have been, that the like Changes will for the future be made, in the same thing, by like Agents, and by the like ways . . . (Essay II. xxi. 1; also II. xxvi. 1)

Direct experiences of particular agents making changes are assumed as experiential data.6 The idea of a power is not just the idea of a cause, but rather that of a readiness to cause a specific effect. The modal notion is formed when one “considers in one thing the possibility of having one of its simple Ideas changed, and in another the possibility of making that change and so comes by that Idea which we call Power” (Essay II. xxi. 1). The idea of the power to cause a certain sort of effects contains the assumption that things similar to those known to produce such effects have the potential to produce similar effects. Similarity to a known agent signals the presence of an unexercised power, and similarity defines what it is the power to do.

6 Ruth Mattern, “Locke on Active Power and the Obscure Idea of Active Power from Bodies,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 11A (1980): 39–77; Michael Jacovides, “Locke’s Construction of the Idea of Power,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 34A (2003): 329–50.

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Sometimes Locke echoes Aristotle’s definition of power, which was familiar to everyone in his time.7 “Power being the Source from whence all Action proceeds, the Substances wherein these Powers are, when they exert this Power into Act, are called Causes; and the [substances or ideas] which thereupon are produced. . .by the exerting of that Power, are called Effects” (Essay II. xxii. 11; also II. xxvi. 1). Here a power is identified with a source of change without regard for its actual or potential exertion. For Locke, the power of fire to melt wax is not quite what we now call a “dispositional property,” that is a capacity defined entirely by its effect. Rather, a Lockean power is defined by reference to what actually produces the effect; it is a trivial consequence that a power carries the capacity to do this. Still, this identification of causal power with what does the causing, as opposed to its capacity to cause, is unstable. Often powers are treated as capacities. All things considered, it seems that, for Locke, a power is the cause of a certain effect considered with regard to its ability to cause it.8 There are, Locke finds, two agents of change whose efficacy we directly experience—motion and thought (or volition). But motions and thoughts are fleeting events which do not lie deeply within the causal structure of things. Although we observe some agents at work, we do not understand how they produce their effects; 9 and we observe a great many changes without observing their causes at all. Nevertheless, Locke inclined toward the mechanist hypothesis that the causally efficacious powers of bodies (here regarded as causes, not mere capacities) are the primary qualities—extension, solidity, motion or rest, size, shape, position—of the micro-particles that compose all other material things.10 Locke adheres to the Aristotelian distinction between active and correlative passive powers: “Power thus considered is twofold, viz. as able to make, or able to receive any change: the one may be called Active, and the other Passive Power” (Essay II. xxi. 1). But while he accepts the power-to-make/power-to-receive distinction, he objects to calling a power “active” simply because it makes a change, because the making may not originate in the agent. He has in view a more elevated notion of acting. He suggests that, in this sense, perhaps matter has merely passive powers; pure spirit, or God, is purely act; and created spirits have active and passive powers (Essay II. xxi. 2; also II. xxiii. 28). In any case, he argues, bodies give us no clear and distinct idea of active power. This elevated notion of active power appears in the Essay at the beginning and end of the long chapter on power most of which is given

Power is “a starting point of change in another thing or in the thing itself qua other.” Metaphysics 7, 1046a: 9–19, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2: 11651. 7

8 Accordingly I will sometimes speak of powers as causing effects (as does Locke, e.g. Essay II. viii. 25). I do not mean to imply that a capacity, as such, produces an effect. 9

Essay II. iv. 1; II. xxiii. 28; IV. iii. 29.

10

Essay II.viii; III.vi; IV.iii.11–16, 25–29.

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over to the topic of human freedom.11 In effect it defines the category of power to which liberty, the power to control one’s acts, belongs. The remark that matter might be thought to lack active power, perhaps, gestures to mechanists who misconstrue human liberty. Without endorsing the remark Locke insists on an epistemic point: bodies “afford us not any Idea in themselves of the Power to begin any Action, either motion or thought” (Essay II. xxi. 4; also 72). We see a moving billiard ball set another ball in motion by impact, but there are several reasons this is not a genuinely active power. One is that we observe the ball “only to transfer, but not produce any motion.” It “only communicates” motion to the second ball and “looses as much in itself” (Essay II. xxi. 4), so the effect is “nothing new.” There are at least two ways we might understand the relevant notion of nothing “new”—(i) no different kind of modification is produced (motion causes motion); (ii) no different particular instance of any kind is produced (numerically the same motion exists successively in two balls).12 I won’t linger over this, because the produces-nothing-new criterion for passivity drops out of the picture.13 The second reason for denying that a billiard ball’s causal powers are genuinely active is more important: the causally efficacious motion of the first ball does not arise in it, but is rather the effect of a different body, such as a moving cue stick. The motion in the ball, although efficacious, is “borrowed” (Essay II. xxiii. 28). Such operations of bodies give an “Idea of Power, which reaches not the Production of the Action, but the continuation of the Passion” (Essay II. xxi. 4; also 72). Inner reflection, by contrast, provides a clear and distinct idea of active power, because “barely by willing it, barely by a thought of the Mind, we can move the parts of our Bodies, which were before at rest” (Essay II. xxi. 4, 72). What is crucial, for Locke, is that a mind’s choices, which are casually efficacious modifications, are not caused by an external agent, but rather originate in the very mind that chooses and thereby causes bodily motion. There are two conspicuous features of active powers: (i) the exercise of an active power involves volition or something like it and (ii) the exercise of an active power is caused by an event originating in the substance that has the power, as opposed to an event in that substance caused by an external agent. Conditions (i) and (ii) are, I take it, singly necessary and jointly sufficient for a power’s being active. How do we acquire clear and distinct ideas of active powers? One knows one’s active powers by reflecting on the train of events that causes volition and subsequent bodily movement. One cannot reflect on the volitions of someone else, but of course Locke does not mean to deny that other people act from choices caused by their thoughts 11 A similar notion of active power appears in the three extant drafts of the Essay; an account of the texts and an analysis can be found in Ruth Mattern, “Locke on Power and Causation: Excerpts from the 1685 Draft of the Essay,” Philosophy Research Archives 7 (1981): 835–995. 12 Essay II. xxii. 13; p. 338, ll. 22–4 counts against (i). NE 172 takes Locke to mean (i) and faults him for supposing the numerically same motion passes from one body to another. NE 231 implies there is a similar error in Locke’s theory of the identity of plants and animals; see below.

Primary qualities of insensible particles cause ideas which are “new” in both senses; see Essay II. viii. 8–14; also see II. xxii. 11; p. 294, l. 6. 13

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and desires. Perhaps this is why he allows that we may derive an imperfect and obscure idea of active power by observing the motions of bodies, and only claims that reflection provides a better idea.14 Non-human animals, too, might provide some minimal idea of active power. In a letter to Stillingfleet, Locke ascribes powers of “spontaneous motion” and “self motion” to animals,15 evidently alluding to the Aristotelian view that the differentia of living, as opposed to non-living, substances is capacity for self-change.16 The relevant notion of self-change is, roughly, that of bodily movements caused by some species of desire; living things “move themselves” insofar as they have species of desires which arise from internal causes and produce movements in parts of their bodies. Locke does not hesitate to ascribe low-grade cognitive and conative states to non-human animals. Here, again, the idea of active power the observation of animals might give us would be inferior. To begin to grasp why liberty must be classed as an active power, we need to say something about Locke’s account of liberty. It involves a more developed psychological theory, but the following overview will suffice for our purpose: Liberty is a power to act or not to act according as the Mind directs. A power to direct the operative faculties to motion or rest in particular instances, is that we call the Will. That which in the train of our voluntary actions determines the will to any change of operation, is some present uneasiness, which is, or at least is always accompanied with . . . Desire . . . . [A]ll that we desire is only to be Happy. But though this general Desire of Happiness operates constantly and invariably, yet the satisfaction of any particular desire can be suspended from determining the will to any subservient action, till we have maturely examin’d whether that particular apparent good, which we then desire, makes a part of our real Happiness, or be consistent or inconsistent with it. The result of our judgment upon that Examination is what ultimately determines the Man, who could not be free if his will were determin’d by anything, but his own desire guided by his own Judgement. (Essay II. xxi. 71; also II. xxi. 56)

Desire for some particular thing produces bodily movement unless checked. It can be checked, because humans have a constant desire for happiness in general. This general desire, Locke seems to think, can suspend a present particular desire, forestalling its effect long enough for one to consider whether gratifying this desire would conflict with goods one desires more; one’s judgment then causes the preferred course, either action or forbearance.17 An exercise of liberty is a causally related sequence of mental acts which typically produces a voluntary action. Liberty qualifies to be an active power just in case (i) it is a power to perform actions that are caused, at least in part, by desires and (ii) it is a power put into action by causes that arise in the actor herself. The first condition is plainly met.

14

Cp. Mattern, “Locke on Active Power,” 55–75 and “Locke on Power and Causation,” sect. II.

15

Locke, Works, 4: 460, 463; also Essay II. xxvii. 5.

De Anima 2c1, 412a13. On late Scholastic treatments, see Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 55–66.

16

17 There are some important questions, e.g. regarding the cause of suspense and cause of action, but no attempt is made to resolve them here.

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The second would seem to be met, because the train of events through which an agent’s liberty is exerted originates in the agent’s mind, beginning with a general desire for happiness and culminating in voluntary action (forbearance). Consider a case that satisfies condition (i), but not (ii). A subject looks at a glass of wine, which directly causes a desire to drink it; the desire goes unchecked and causes the subject to imbibe. The desire is a passive cause of the subject’s behavior, and it is plausible to say that the subject exercises no control over this motion. This case stands in notable contrast to an exertion of Lockean liberty, a causally related sequence of thoughts originating from the agent’s general desire for happiness and deliberation about the consequences of the prospective act. In view of this, the notion of active power assumes some importance in the effort to make substance-materialism consistent with morality. Those who deny human freedom and take humans to be machines are led to deny morality. Perhaps they go wrong in their view of what men are, but certainly they mistake in their view of human freedom. A likely source of the latter error is the assumption that a material system has no active powers, that it is incapable of generating the causes that move its functional parts; instead motion of its parts is contingent on the regular operations of external causes. This would seem to relegate a human being to the status of a wind-up clock or a windmill. This is an error, in Locke’s eyes. Animals have a more elevated status precisely because they can put themselves in motion: ’Tis plain [a watch] is nothing but a fit Organization, or Construction of Parts, to a certain end, which, when a sufficient force is added to it, it is capable to attain. If we would suppose this Machine one continued Body, all whose organized Parts were repair’d, increas’d or diminish’d, by a constant Addition or Separation of insensible Parts . . . we should have something very much like the Body of an Animal, with this difference, That in an Animal the fitness of the Organization, and the Motion wherein Life consists, begin together, the Motion coming from within . . . (Essay II. xxviii. 5, emphasis added)

Animals may be entirely material substances, but they are not bare passive machines, as those who think materialism inconsistent with morality may have assumed.

Strains in Locke’s Reconciling Program Locke should not be taken to mean that the exertion of an active power arises in a substance in such a thorough-going way that none of the causal antecedents of this event originate from powers of other substances. It is not essential to any substance to act, according to Locke; rather, a created substance is put into action by its creator.18 Moreover, human minds may well exist during periods of inactivity in the tabula rasa stage and probably in dreamless sleep. Because everything that begins to exist must have a cause (Essay IV. x. 3), any change in an inactive substance must be the effect of an external cause. But although humans have to be roused

18

Letter to Stillingfleet, Locke, Works, 4: 464.

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from dreamless sleep by the operations of surrounding bodies on the sensory organs, they enjoy Lockean liberty. A use of this power consists of several causally related events in the same human substance. It is irrelevant that the causal antecedents of this sequence are traced back to operations of substances individually different from the human being who chooses and acts. For Locke, the important point is that only a substance that can execute a series of operations within itself, each performed by the same substance, satisfies condition (ii) for having an active power, such as liberty. Liberty, then, does not require the strong claim that a human substance is a closed causal system, but it does hang on the doctrine that one and identically the same substance has and exerts several powers at a time and over time. To explicate the “identity” of a substance is to state explicative necessary and sufficient conditions for the substance that has (exerts) power p to be identical to the substance that has (exerts) power q. A satisfactory account of the identity of substances that are living systems of matter would thus seem to be crucial in the effort to show how such a system can have the liberty required of a subject of moral law. It is not a task Locke neglects. The chapter “Of Identity and Diversity” provides an account of the identity of plants and animals, in general, which applies to humans, on the assumption that they have no immaterial souls.19 By his own showing, the identity of a living thing is not as clear as that of a material particle. A particle is simple, that is has no parts, whereas a living thing is a “compounded substance” composed of many particles, and individually different ones at different times.20 An organism remains the same compound substance even if none of its components remains identically the same. According to Locke, this is implied by what a living thing is, namely, a “cohesion of particles of Matter” with “such a disposition of them as constitutes the parts” of a living thing of some species, “such an Organization of those parts, as is fit to receive, and distribute nourishment, so as to continue and frame” a body proper to the species, “in which consists the . . . Life” (Essay II. xxvii. 4). Life is the continued execution of a species of vital functions; the spatial-temporal continuity of such a process is necessary and sufficient for the identity of a living thing. Similarly for a human animal: “the Identity of the same Man consists . . . in nothing but a participation of the same continued Life, by constantly fleeting Particles of Matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized Body” (Essay II. xxvii. 6). Material particles, or simple substances, have substantial identity in the first instance.21 A human animal has identity of a secondary sort, because its identity depends on accidental features of many simple substances. The identity of a man may seem somewhat compromised by this; a human animal is not, in the strictest sense, a single substance that engages in a sequence of vital operations, but rather

19 Essay II.xxvii was added in the second edition, as was the significantly revised account of liberty. II.xxvii.72 was added in the fourth edition. 20 Organisms are classed as substances; see Essay II. xvii. 3; p. 330, l.7; also e.g. II. xxiii. 14; II. xxiv. 1. 21

See Essay II. xxvii. 3 on the identity of a material particle.

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a succession simple of substances, each generating some segment of the series of operations.22 The difficulty is not mentioned in connection with liberty,23 but it is much in evidence in Locke’s theory of persons. This theory is that persons, not substances, are proper subjects of legal-moral accountability;24 moreover the identity of a person is constituted by memory abilities that secure the “same consciousness,” without regard for identity of substance. It seems a person is always attached to some substance, but the substance may change over time. A controversial doctrine, this is surely motivated, in part, by the aim of protecting morality against threats due to our ignorance about the nature of the “substance that thinks in us.”25 It is not just that we cannot be certain that we have naturally indestructible souls. More important, we cannot know whether one substance or a succession of different substances, of whatever nature, thinks in us: . . .why one intellectual Substance may not have represented to it, as done by it self, what it never did, and was perhaps done by some other Agent, why I say such a representation may not be possible without reality of Matter of Fact, . . .will be difficult to conclude from the Nature of things. And that it is never so, will by us, till we have clearer views of the Nature of thinking Substances, be best resolv’d into the goodness of God, who as far as the Happiness or Misery of any of his sensible Creatures is concerned in it, will not . . . transfer from one to another, that consciousness, which draws Reward or Punishment with it. (Essay II. xxvii. 13)

The theory of persons assures the legal accountability required for morality despite our incurable inability to argue from the nature of things.26 A person’s substance in the hereafter may, or may not, be identical to the person’s substance here and now; still identity of person suffices for moral accountability in this life and the next, Locke contends. By the same token, on the assumption that men are compound material substances, accountability remains in tact despite the secondary status of a man’s identity. A person’s consciousness-based identity and an animal’s life-based identity are

22 Harold Noonan, “Locke on Personal Identity,” Philosophy 53 (1978): 343–53 and Matthew Stuart, in a paper presented at the Locke Conference, Oxford, 2004 argue that Locke holds a “relative theory” of identity, like that of Peter Geach. Because this view allows that individual A and individual B may be the same organism and also different collections of particles, the (relative) identity of an organism is not compromised on this view. Cf. Vere Chappell, “Locke and Relative Identity,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 6 (1989): 65–84 and “Locke on the Ontology of Matter, Living Things and Persons,” Philosophical Studies 60 (1990): 19–32; Martha Brandt Bolton “Locke on Identity: the Scheme of Simple and Compound Things” in Individuation and Identity in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Kenneth Barber and Jorge Garcia (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 103–31. 23 The last letter to Stillingfleet explicitly states that liberty and spontaneous motion can be superadded to matter by divine power; Locke, Works, 4: 465–8, passim 460–70. 24

Especially Essay II. xvii. 26.

25

Other motivations are at work, as well, including questions about resurrection; see Bolton, “Locke on Identity”. 26

The last quoted sentence, as I read it, imputes divine justice on the condition that consciousness is transferred among substances and substances bear moral accountability. Far from retreating from the doctrine that persons bear accountability, as some scholars have said, the sentence assumes it.

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structurally alike; as a result, the problematic status of the latter need pose no problem for moral accountability: Different Substances, by the same consciousness (where they do partake in it) being united into one Person; as well as different Bodies, by the same Life are united into one Animal, whose Identity is preserved, in that change of Substances, by the unity of one continued Life. (Essay II. xxvii. 10)

Here the status of an animal’s identity is presented in its most problematic form: a human animal is composed of a succession of different simple substances, united only by a certain relation. It is out on the table again, when the text questions whether the same person can be present in a succession of individually different thinking substances: . . . this can be no Question at all to those, who place Thought in a purely material, animal, Constitution, void of an immaterial Substance. For, whether their Supposition be true or no, ’tis plain they conceive personal Identity preserved in something else than Identity of Substance; as animal Identity is preserved in Identity of Life, and not of Substance. (Essay II. xxvii. 12)

Some might use this very point, namely the supposed change of substance to argue against the soul’s materiality, as Locke observes. In order to make this case, however, an advocate of immateriality would have to make out that memory abilities are never transferred in tact from one immaterial substance to another—a challenge not to be met by human ways of acquiring knowledge, as he sees them. Again, as in a passage quoted already, if consciousness is transferred among substances, then one substance may represent itself as having done something which was, in fact, done by a different substance. Indeed this does happen if a man is nothing but a system of fleeting particles. Yet it is no “argument against those who would place Thinking in a system of fleeting animal Spirits,” if Locke’s theory of persons is correct (see Essay II. xxvii. 13; 338:19-20). But all questions about human moral agency raised by the peculiar status of an animal’s identity are not resolved by this theory. If substances are not the subjects of moral accountability, for Locke, they are nevertheless the entities that have and exercise active powers. As a result, the substance that possesses liberty and exerts it in a voluntary act is not the subject morally accountable for this (its?) voluntary act. Liberty is an active power, which inheres in certain substances. Since a person is not a substance—its identity conditions are not those of any sort of substance—it would seem that moral subjects, or persons, cannot have liberty, after all.27 The theories of substance, active power, and an animal’s identity generate some unresolved difficulties in the reconciling program.

27 Locke seems to be committed to saying that both substances and persons are thinking, reflective beings, which raises questions about the ownership of thoughts and acts (see E.J. Lowe, Locke on Human Understanding (London, and New York: Routledge, 1995), 107–18; I once attempted to unravel some of the resulting complexities in Bolton, “Locke on Identity,” 117–24 . But the present point is that persons cannot have active powers, because condition (ii) specifies substance as the subject that has and exerts such powers.

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The Essay appeared in this light to the author of the New Essays. Leibniz (speaking in the voice of Theophilus) observes that “. . . in relation to God, whose social bond with us is the principal point of morality, error cannot occur. Concerning that which is the self, it is good to distinguish it from the appearance of self and consciousness.” (NE 237).28 Suppose a man, on the day of judgment, wrongly appears to himself to have been wicked, “. . . dare one say that the supreme and just judge who knows the contrary, would damn this person and judge against what he knows? It seems, however, that this would follow from the notion of moral personality you would provide” (NE 244). To be sure, persons will be judged, not men, according to Locke; but this supposed distinction conflates real and apparent self-identity, Leibniz contends. In his eyes, the attempt to pry the subject of morality apart from a substantial subject is an unpersuasive failure; morality cannot be adequately founded without confronting and resolving problems about human substantiality. New Essays is, in part, meant to solve them from the ground up.

Leibniz on Substance, Powers, and Truly Active Powers As Leibniz sees it, Locke’s difficulties can be traced to a misguided account of the idea of substance, which in turn reflects the abstract controversy mentioned at the start of this paper. Locke maintains that a human mind cannot have the idea of substance unless it has ideas of several causal powers, or what he calls “qualities” (see Essay II. viii. 8–10, 24; II. xxi. 3). The idea of substance is subsequently attained by an inference from the observation that several ideas of qualities are regularly observed together and presumed to belong to the same thing: for “not imagining how these simple Ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom our selves, to suppose some Substratum, wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result, which therefore we call Substance” (Essay II. xxiii. 1). Several functions are ascribed to substratum: the qualities that go together “inhere in and result from” substratum and it is the “cause of the union” of these qualities (Essay II. xxiii. 1, 6). The passage goes on to suggest that the unknown substratum plays, with respect to individual particles, a role analogous to that played by the insensible particles that compose a sensible body on which its color and weight depend. Substratum is, then, that in virtue of which all insensible particles of matter are solid, extended, and moveable; particles with these qualities, in turn, give rise to the powers of the larger bodies they compose. When Locke turns to the operations of spirits—thinking, willing, perceiving, and the power of moving a body—the same pattern of reasoning applies (Essay II. xxiii. 5, 15). A spiritual substance has the powers it does largely in virtue of a substratum intrinsic to it, but the character of the dependence relation is left somewhat vague, and the nature of the substratum is said to be beyond our ken. A substance with

28 G.W. Leibniz, S¨ amtliche Schriften und Briefe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1923– ), 6: 6 (1990). Translations in this paper mainly follow Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, New Essays.

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appropriate intrinsic character is required for the existence of a power of any sort. Still Locke argues, we have no basis on which to reach a conclusion about the nature of substratum, nor how powers result from and are united by it, nor whether the substratum of physical powers is, or is not, identical to that of mental powers. Responding to the declaration that substratum is “something I know not what,” Leibniz says: If you distinguish two things in a substance—the attributes or predicates, and their common subject—it is no wonder that you cannot conceive anything special in this subject. . .because you already set aside all the attributes through which details could be conceived. Thus, to require of this pure subject in general anything beyond what is needed for the conception of the same thing—e.g. it is the same thing which understands and wills, which imagines and reasons—is to demand the impossible; . . . Yet this conception of substance, for all its apparent thinness, is less empty and sterile than it is thought to be. Several consequences arise from it; these are of the greatest importance to philosophy. (NE 218)

This is not a reproach for positing a substratum, distinct from all qualities, in the constitution of a substance.29 Leibniz finds nothing wrong with Locke’s procedure, because he understands that the abstraction is only in thought. His criticism is instead directed to the presumption that metaphysical inquiry comes to a halt at this point. On the contrary, he urges, the abstraction isolates a metaphysical question about the identity of a substance—how one substance unites many powers and actions. Addressing it involves analyzing notions implicit in the presumption that several qualities perceived by sense or reflection belong to “one thing.” Following the Essay, Leibniz starts by explicating the notion of a power and its exertion, and then constructs the general idea of substance from that. He, too, takes Aristotle’s notion of power as a starting point. Power, potentia in scholastic Latin, is opposed to act, and the transition from power to act is change.30 A change is an action in one subject and a passion in another; every active power has a correlative passive power. But Leibniz eliminates the polarity of power and exertion, being in potentia and being in actu. Powers are not exerted intermittently depending on conditions.31 Active power should instead be understood in a more complete sense [plus parfait]: not just an actual being with a capacity realized only if circumstances are right (an entelechia, for Aristotle), but rather an endeavor [tendence].32 An endeavor is both an actual and acting being. Leibniz explains that the

Cf. Jonathan Bennett, “Substratum,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 4 (1987): 197–215, see 202; Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz and Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 91–3. 29

30 Leibniz notes that this clarifies Aristotle’s definition of motion, often translated: “Motion is the actuality of a potential being in so far as it is potential”. As he explains, this is meant to describe the on-going actualization of a potential not yet fully realized, but the formula was widely regarded as laughable. 31

Also see NE 111, 216.

Leibniz apparently means to contrast Aristotle’s use of entelechia, meaning actual as opposed to potential being, with his use of energia, which sometimes means (i) an activity, i.e. use of an ability to do something, and sometimes (ii) an actual being, or realization of a potential to be something; entelechia always means the latter. (See Steven Menn, “The Origins of Aristotle’s Concept 32

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notion of endeavor is central in his theory of dynamics33 and introduces the word “force” to stand for it. The point is that active physical forces exist only if, only as long as, they are acting in, or upon, bodies: “. . . endeavors are never without some effect” (NE 110). Active forces are always exerted with some effect. Opposed to active power is a passive power, which is more real [plus charg´ee de realit´e] than Aristotle’s receptivity. For instance physical forces, tending toward motion, always encounter resistance. Matter exhibits passive power, because it has not only mobility, but also impenetrability and inertia.34 With these enhanced notions of power in hand, Leibniz distinguishes two sorts of active powers/forces: (i) entelechy, which he also calls “primary active force” or activit´e and (ii) effort, conatus, or “derivative active force.”35 These derivative forces include physical efforts/forces which cause bodily motion; they also comprise psychological efforts/forces, namely, conscious desires and non-conscious appetitions (NE 172–3). Further primary and derivative forces—activity and effort/conatus— are related as a substance’s nature and its transient modes: “Primary [sc. active and passive] powers are what make up the substances themselves; derivative powers . . . are merely ways of being [fac¸on d’etre]—and they must be derived from substances. . ..” (NE 379). Still within this structure, the primary active force, or activit´e, is said to be substantial (NE 170). It is the constituent in the make-up of a substance that makes it a substance. That is it explains how a substance manages to play the role that defines a substance, the role Locke described as supporting, giving rise to, and uniting several powers. Notice that a substance is made up of nothing but forces/powers—active and passive, primary and derivative. In Leibniz’s ontology, powers do not exist in a distinct mode, nor in a distinct category. Powers in general are not reduced to, or even

of ’E␯´␧␳␥␧␫␣: ’E␯´␧␳␥␧␫␣ and ⌬´␷␯␣␮␫␵,” Ancient Philosophy 14 (1994): 73–114.) Scholastics distinguished the “first actuality” that is achieved, e.g., when a human has acquired the ability to speak Greek with the “second actuality” achieved when, desiring to use the ability, she speaks Greek. The “first actuality,” an actual being with a simple faculty, is the entelechia that Leibniz eliminates, saying instead that all powers are energia, in the former of Aristotle’s senses. But he intends to blur the distinction. And he appropriates the term entelechie for the primary active powers (activit´es), which are essential to substances according to him. In doing this, he aligns himself with scholastic-Aristotelian psychological treatises which used the term to designate the soul, substantial form, or substance-constituting principle of a living thing; see below note 41. 33 This is presumably a reference to Specimen dynamicum (published 1695), Leibnizens mathematische Schriften, ed. C.I. Gerhardt, 7 vols. (Berlin: 1849–63), 6: 234–54; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, trans. and ed. Leroy E. Loemker (second edn. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), 435–52 (hereafter cited as Loemker). 34

NE 169; also 216.

Conatus is the term used at NE 173, 216. Derivative passive powers are not mentioned; cf. Specimen Dynamicum, which introduced the public to the 4-fold classification of forces in context of theoretical physics; also see “On the Correction of Metaphysics and the Concept of Substance” (published 1694), Die Philosophische Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C.I. Gerhardt, 7 vols. (Berlin, 1875–90; reprint Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), 4: 468–70 (hereafter cited as G); Loemker, 432–3. 35

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dependent on, beings of a different type, such as actual beings.36 Damaris Masham37 objected that forces cannot constitute the essence of a substance; evidently she assumed that because forces carry potentiality, they exist only if grounded in one or more actual things. Leibniz replied by contrasting changeable forces with primary force. Unlike the former, which cannot constitute a substantial essence, “primary force is the Principe d’Action of which changeable forces are modifications.38 On this model, the actual being of a substance is continually acting: “There is always a particular disposition to action, and towards one action rather than another. As well as the disposition there is a tendency toward action—indeed there is an infinity of them in any subject at any given time, and these tendencies are never without some effect.” (NE 110–1).39 On one hand, a substance is essentially engaged in an unchanging activit´e; on the other, it is always exerting efforts/forces that cause particular acts. To ascribe an activit´e to an agent is to say that the agent’s nature is to do such-and-such, or in some cases to specify its function.40 It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the derivative forces that arise in a substance tend to cause particular acts by which the essential “work” of the substance is carried on.41 The text goes some way toward filling out this abstract conception. A substance is constantly living;42 more specifically, perceiving the world and consequently acting: “what constitutes the nature of these true unities [sc. substances], namely perception and its consequences.” (NE 378); “perception belongs to all entelechies.” (NE 210); “there is an infinity of souls, or more generally of primary entelechies, possessing something analogous to perception and appetite” (NE 318). An individual animal comprises a primary activity, which is evidently reflected in (and reflects) the animal’s sensory apparatus and other functional bodily parts.43 Perception implies 36

One qualification: finite beings depend on God, which is pure act, according to Leibniz.

37

G III.350.

A “principe” may be either a source, foundation, or rule of acting; see Petit Robert: dictionnaire de la langue franc¸aise, ed. A. Rey and J. Rey-Debove, third edition, Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 2003). 38

39

Also see NE 112, 221, 65, 305, 221, 117, 119.

Petit Robert, dir. A. Rey and J. Rey-Debove cites the activit´e of acid and that of poison. Dictionnaire historique de la langue franc¸ise, dir. Alain Ray (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1995) reports that the French word was derived from the Latin activitas, but did not retain the latter’s meaning of vis agendi.

40

Primary entelechy is also called “substantial form,” NE 317–8. Another typical formulation occurs in a letter from 1699: “. . . the active force which exerts itself in various ways through motion, the primitive entelechy or in a word, something analogous to the soul, whose nature consists in a certain perpetual law of the same series of changes through which it runs unhindered.” Letter to De Volder, G II.171; Loemker, 517. The various formulations (including activit´e) indicate no difference in metaphysical theory, as I see it. For one analysis of the diversity, see Pauline Phemister, Leibniz and the Natural World (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). 41

42

NE 305, 321f; also 162, 112, 119.

NE implies that entelechies belong to all living things, including plants and lower forms of life. Thus the term “perception” is a general term applicable to several grades of cognition ranging from intellection through sense perception and beyond. See NE 440 on the relation between the 43

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appetite: “there are no perceptions that are completely indifferent to us” (NE 162, 166). In Leibniz’s psychology, any perception of the world is (inter alia) perception of the good things in the world, and every substance is pleased by the good things it perceives (NE 162–3). A substantial activit´e may, then, be characterized as perceiving the world and consequently striving toward the good perceived, an activity defined by the limited cognitive capacities of an individual organism. Although this is not entirely explicit, many scattered texts like those just quoted support it;44 further confirmation may be found in the New Essays’ take on what counts as a truly active power. On Leibniz’s model, every change in a substance is produced by a cause that originates in the substance itself: “anything which occurs in what is strictly a substance must be a case of ‘action’ in the metaphysically rigorous sense of something which occurs in the substance spontaneously, arising out of its own depths; for no created substance can have an influence upon any other.” (NE 210). By contrast, Locke’s criterion (ii) is satisfied by powers of a substance, even though exertions of them can be traced back to causal agents external to it. There are no natural powers of this sort in Leibniz’s substance. But spontaneous change is not enough for genuine action. True action, for him, is a spontaneous change that increases the well being of the substance; that is it enhances the actor’s cognitive performance: . . . if we take “action” to be an endeavor towards perfection, and “passion” to be the opposite, then genuine substances are active only when their perceptions (for I grant perceptions to all of them) are becoming better developed and more distinct, just as they are passive only when their perceptions are becoming more confused. (NE 210)

The measure of one’s well being is one’s perception, or knowledge. And the value of perception is measured by the degree to which it is distinct as opposed to confused. There is a common sense motivation for this: the more distinctly one perceives things, the more distinctly the good in them is perceived, and the more one is pleased by and attracted to this good.45 New Essays offers a rather developed psychology (and pneumatology), but we need not say much about it. For us, it is enough that a perception of x is more distinct (confused) than a perception of y to the extent x is perceived to stand out from (blend in with) its parts and the adjacent objects more than y is perceived to do. At a distance from the sea, one hears the surf more distinctly than the individual waves crashing on the shore (NE 54). The more some things in one’s perceptual scene stand out, the better one’s perception, and since per-

active principle and complementary body of a living thing. Many living things have no conscious perceptions at all and those who do also have many unconscious ones; e.g. NE 134, 173. Also from the reply to Masham: “the positive idea of this . . . primitive force is entirely known, because [a simple substance] must always have a regulated progression of perceptions. . .”; G III.356.

44

45 NE 210. Relatively distinct perceptions are attached to relatively enhanced appetites. But distinct perceptions always contain confused ones, and the enhanced appetites of the former may be resisted by the diffused appetites of the latter. A substance secures the good it distinctly perceives only to the extent its enhanced appetites comport with its diffused appetites; relevant texts include NE 188–9, 195.

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ceiving is the activit´e of a substance, to perceive well is to execute its function well (perfect itself). For our purpose, it is not necessary to unpack this ethical doctrine. The point, for us, is to grasp the connection between a substance, its powers, and its acts: what it is for several powers to inhere in and result from the same “substratum,” as Locke might put it. We can extract the following general account. Every change in a substance is either a true action or something it passively undergoes. A substance truly acts when its derivative efforts succeed in executing its substantial activit´e; it suffers when its changes exhibit resistance to its efforts to carry out its work. This skeletal theory is meant to be more adequate for purposes of human morality than the doctrines of the Essay, but we have yet to see why.

Leibniz on Substantial Identity and Locke’s Challenge to Immaterialists New Essays objects to Locke’s account of the identity of plants and animals for the traditional reason that modifications are individuated by the substances that have them. The functional arrangement of particles that compose an animal is a modification of those particles; although a group of different particles may have an equivalent organization, they cannot have a numerically identical one. “Organization or configuration alone, without an enduring principle of life which I call ‘monad’, would not suffice to make something remain numerically the same, i.e. the same individual.” (NE 231). A mere machine, such as a ship composed of shifting planks, is not numerically the same at different times: But as for substances which have in themselves a true and real substantial unity, which execute “vital actions” properly so-called; and as for substantial beings . . . animated by a certain indivisible spirit; one can rightly say that they remain perfectly the same individual in virtue of this soul or spirit. (NE 231f )

On this account, a living thing comprises not just an organic body composed of changing particles, but also a monad, an indivisible substance without compositional parts. Indivisible spirits are said to animate rational animals; souls, to animate other animals; mere entelechies, lesser sorts of living things.46 Each type of organism is a compound essentially comprising a body composed of changing parts, yet because it also essentially includes a monad, the compound has identity in virtue of the uncompromised identity of the monad.47 Still Leibniz’s theory of simple and compound substances does not confront the basic issue with Locke. The Essay brings out two problems with regard to the identity of substances: (i) a substance made of nothing but changing parts is “the same” in a secondary sense; (ii) the series of acts that pertain to the same indivisible substance may not be all and only the acts of one person; nor, for that matter, all and

46

Also NE 134, 139, 225.

47

NE 317–8, 440.

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only the acts that constitute the same life.48 Locke argues that we can be content with (i), using (ii) to forestall opposition. The New Essays passage just quoted has (i) in view. But identity of substance is irrelevant, if (ii) is allowed to stand. In fact the compound substance theory is not in evidence in the official theory advanced in New Essays, namely, that a substance is constituted by primary and derivative forces. This latter doctrine is, however, crafted in such a way that it can be applied to both simple and compound substances. A simple substance is constituted by primary powers of a psychological sort—a perceptual-good seeking activit´e and a passive tendency to confused perception. A composite substance, or organism, is constituted by the activit´e of its simple substance and passive resistance to motion exhibited by its body.49 Considered as primary active force of a simple substance, an activit´e is executed by appetites defined by ends, which are attained to the extent confused perceptions allow. Considered as primary activity of a compound substance, this same activit´e is carried on by physical forces causing motion in the functional parts of the organism’s body.50 These physical forces are not defined by ends, but they tend, as far as mechanical laws allow, to produce movements that attain the ends of the simple substance. It was suggested above that all the efforts/forces derived from a primary activity tend to implement the activity.51 Accordingly, if this is right, the succession of appetite generated changes in the soul carry on perceiving-and-acting within a simple substance, while the succession of impetus caused changes in the soul-body compound prosecute the same activit´e in

48 Locke argues that (a) we cannot be certain that different persons are not present by turn in the same man (e.g. the prince-person and the pauper-person may exchange bodies) and (b) we cannot be certain that the same person is not present in a succession of different immaterial substances. It follows that we cannot be certain that different immaterial substances are not present by turn in the same human animal.

The primary entelechy (activit´e) is a constituent of a simple substance. But Leibniz sometimes says the simple substance is the “primary entelechy” of the compound substance it partially constitutes; NE 318; also 210, 440. I regard this as a sort of short hand for the position described above. 49

50 NE 177. The following note, probably written shortly before work began on NE, so clearly expresses this doctrine that it is worth quoting here: “Conatus is itself of two kinds—that of a simple or of a composite thing. A simple thing is a percipient, and the conatus of the percipient as such is also called appetite, in a thinking being will. . . . In a composite being or a body, conatus is motive force; mechanics deals with this.” Notes added to New Method, etc. (last few years of seventeenth century); Loemker, 92, notes 5–6. 51

To be more accurate, the perceptions and bodily movements are derived from a primary activity and its complementary primary passive power. Leibniz considers the former to be so much more significant that he sometimes fails to mention the latter.

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the living body.52 This is, I think, the best way to understand Leibniz’s doctrine that a soul and its body “perfectly express” each other; each perfectly models the other: . . . with . . . animate [bodies] . . . the soul and the machine . . . agree perfectly. Though they have no immediate influence on each other, they mutually express each other, the one having concentrated into a perfect unity everything which the other has dispersed throughout its multiplicity. (NE 318; also 177, 220)

That is, I suggest, the successive appetite-perceptions in the soul and the sequence of motion-producing bodily forces in the functional parts of its mechanical body are mutually expressive in the sense that both sequences execute the same primary activity. Two theories of substance are abroad in the text: the compound substance theory and the primary-derivative forces theory. While they are compatible, New Essays pays much more attention to laying the metaphysical ground for the latter. We will see, too, that it addresses the more important of Locke’s two problems, namely to show that the same substance is needed to unify acts that belong to the same person or even the same life. We now turn to Leibniz’s response. Locke’s spokesman in New Essays proposes that the “identity of the same man consists . . . in nothing but his enjoying the same life, which is continued by constantly fleeting particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized body.” Identity of life constitutes human identity for Leibniz, too: “This can be understood in my way.” But an organic body does not remain the same. “And if no reference is made to the soul, there will not be the same life, nor a vital unity either.” (NE 232) To be sure, the soul’s identity is not compromised in the way that of a functioning material system is. So far, this does not show, contra Locke, the same substance that underwrites the same life. Locke’s explicit challenge to the relevance of an identical immaterial substance to personal identity. The same person would be preserved in different immaterial souls, if the cognitive powers inhering in one soul were stripped from it and transferred intact to an individually different soul. This is coherent for Locke, who holds that the identity of an immaterial substance does not depend on its powers and acts.53 By contrast, New Essays propounds a theory of substantial identity that depends on nothing but cognitive acts, or more exactly, the minute perceptions of which a substance is unaware: “These insensible perceptions . . . indicate and constitute the same individual, who is characterized by the vestiges or expressions which the perceptions preserve from the individual’s former states, thereby connecting these to his present state.” (NE 55, emphasis added) Now the issue is precisely whether one’s

52 This is, I think, the sense in which both psychological and physical forces can be said to modify the same immaterial substance. On this question, see also Phemister, Leibniz and the Natural World, 187–212; cf. Robert M. Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1994), 378–93; Paul Lodge, “Primitive and Derivative Forces in Leibnizian Bodies,” Nihil Sine Ratione, VII. Internationaler Leibniz-Kongress, ed. Hans Poser (Hanover: GottfriedWilhelm-Leibniz-Gesellschaft, 2001), 2: 720–27. 53

See Essay II. xxvii. 2.

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memory-perceptions do, in fact, indicate the same substance—a person’s present memories might not represent acts generated by one’s present substance, according to Locke. So the point about the constitution of individual identity—what individual identity consists in—ought to carry the burden of this riposte. Although the claim about what present perceptions indicate is familiar from other texts, it is useless for the purpose in view in New Essays.54 Now the dialogue also puts the anti-Lockean claim this way: An immaterial being or spirit cannot be stripped of all perception of its past existence. There remain within it impressions of everything that previously happened to it, and presentiments of everything that will occur in it . . . . This continuation and bond [liason] of perceptions makes a substance really the same individual. (NE 239)

Such passages may imply that there is an inter-perceptual bond more basic than the relation of mutual indication, but they surely do not say what it is. What is needed is a bond that clarifies the principle that unites all and only the perceptions of the same substance, and also shows that the perceptions so united include all and only those that constitute the same Lockean life, as well as all those that constitute the same person. The needed account is suggested by the theory of substance-constituting primary activity explicated above. In a first effort, we might say that the series of appetiteperceptions that occur in a substance implement (more or less well) the vital activit´e of that substance. The series of appetite-perceptions in an immaterial spirit, as the sequence of bodily forces and motions in the human animal that contains the spirit, are unified by reference to the same vital activit´e.55 To be more exact, reference to the same activity will serve as a criterion for the set of perceptions that belong to the same substance and explain the bond of unity among them provided that each individual substance has an essential activit´e proper to it, alone.56 If this is granted, we can extract from the text a standard for the identity of a substance. It not only motivates the ascription of many acts to the same substance in a plausible way, but also implies that the series of acts of the same substance are precisely the series of acts that constitute the same life, according to Locke. As for persons, we can see how the criterion might block inter-substantial transfer of cognitive powers, although no very precise account will be attempted in this paper. A substance is modified by certain powers/forces, in the first place, in virtue of their tending to implement its unique activit´e. Some of its powers might be

54

E.g. Discourse on Metaphysics, sec. 8, G IV.432-3; Loemker, 307.

55

This evidently satisfies the demand that there be an intelligible relation between a substance and its powers, NE 65–6, 379, 381–2, 403. Some scholars suggest that causal closure is a criterion for states of the same substance; in context of NE, a better motivated criterion is called for. 56 This is not explicitly said in NE, as far as I can see; but it is implied by the doctrine that each substance differs from every other in virtue of intrinsic denominations; NE 110, also 245–6. It is explicit in a contemporary text: “. . . all substances are different in nature, and there are no two thing in nature which differ in number alone.” letter to De Volder (1704), Gerhardt, Philosophische Schriften, 2:264; Loemker, 534–5.

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transferred to a different substance, but they would still tend to execute the activit´e of their proper substance; even if they happened to suit a different activit´e for awhile, it would not be for long.57 They could not, then, be modifications of the second substance in the robust way its proper powers are. It can be doubted that inserted powers would really inhere in, or belong to, this second substance at all.58 New Essays thus purports to meet Locke’s challenge and cut the ground from under his theory of persons, and secure the substantial subject of moral accountability. The dispute we have unfolded hardly points to the conclusion that New Essays proposes a more tenable theory of substance, powers, and moral subjects than we find in the Essay. From Locke’s own point of view, his position would seem less than entirely satisfactory in view of the tension among his accounts of substances, active powers, and personal identity. In the explication of Leibniz’s side of the dispute offered here, no comparable tensions are evident, but this is not decisive. The better theory is plainly the theory that is true (if either is). Leibniz may have been tempted by something like a “transcendental” argument: we take ourselves to be moral subjects; if we are substances constituted as on his theory, we have a metaphysical structure that makes us optimally fit to be moral subjects; this is reason to think his theory comports with our experience. At the start of this paper, we mentioned an abstract characterization of a disagreement between Locke and Leibniz. Leibniz’s side of this might seem to license this style of argument. It is not overtly used in New Essays, perhaps because Locke takes the opposite side.59 The Essay aims to show that we are moral subjects without making assumptions about the nature of substance that a reasonable skeptic might question. Whether one views the task as Locke does or instead as his critic does will largely determine which of the two one judges to have the better side of this dispute.60

57 Such a transfer is not in accord with the order of nature and could only be effected by divine power. Moreover, Leibniz envisages that the only powers that might be miraculously transferred result in conscious perceptions; the substance retains its tendencies toward non-conscious perceptions. See NE 245, 242. 58 It is the same with all powers that cannot be explained by the natures of substances that allegedly have them; NE 66–67, 379. 59 Leibniz claims to show that his theory of substance is true at NE 378–9; the probative force of this passage is discussed in Martha Brandt Bolton, “Leibniz’s Nouveaux Essais: A Contest by Dialogue” in Pauline Phemister and Stuart Brown (eds.), Leibniz and the English Speaking World (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2007), 11–132. 60 It is a great pleasure to express my gratitude to John Rogers for his extensive scholarship on early modern philosophy, his leadership in organizing the British Society for History of Philosophy and founding and editing the Society’s journal, and his personal encouragement of other scholars. For helpful discussion of earlier versions of the paper, I am grateful to Han-Kyul Kim, Marcy Lascano, Alan Nelson, Tad Schmaltz, John Whipple, and audiences at the California Conference on Early Modern Philosophy, California State University at Long Beach, 2007 and the Midwestern Seminar on Early Modern Philosophy, University of Chicago, 1999.

Chapter 8

John Locke, Thomas Beconsall, and Filial Rebellion Mark Goldie

I The first published critique of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government has been entirely overlooked. It is an attack which offers an illuminating reading of Locke’s politics as a theory of filial disobedience and which counters it with a doctrine of fathers’ rights over their adult children and the state’s right of paternity over its citizens. It is a critique which considers the Two Treatises as subtending from the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and hence treats those books as aspects of a single project. Its dissection of Locke’s politics is subsumed into an account of his moral philosophy. Although it was the work of a hostile Tory, it offered a sober analysis, in contrast to the frenetic harangues to which the Two Treatises would soon be subjected. This critique has been overlooked in part because it appears in a book entitled The Grounds and Foundation of Natural Religion, which, on its title page, offers no clue to its anti-Lockean intent.1 About the author, Thomas Beconsall, we know next to nothing, except that he was a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, and later became vicar of an Oxfordshire parish.2 The Grounds was his sole publication besides a sermon in the University church which also assailed Locke.3 The further reason why the Grounds has been invisible is that those scholars who investigate the

1 The full title is The Grounds and Foundation of Natural Religion, Discover’d, in the Principal Branches of it, in Opposition to the Prevailing Notions of the Modern Scepticks and Latitudinarians. With an Introduction Concerning the Necessity of Revealed Religion (London, for A. Roper in Fleet Street and George West in Oxford). 2

1663/4–1709; BA, 1683; MA, 1686; Fellow, 1686; BD, 1697; vicar of Steeple Aston, 1706. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 3 The Doctrine of a General Resurrection: Wherein the Identity of the Rising Body is Asserted, against the Socinians and Scepticks. In a Sermon Preach’d before the University, at St Mary’s in Oxford, on Easter-Monday, Apr. 5 (1697). Beconsall here argues that in Locke’s location of personal identity “purely in consciousness” there lurked a kind of Platonism that denied that the body was integral to the self. This he equated with an heretical Socinian rejection of the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection.

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 127–142. and Legacy, 

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early reception of the Two Treatises tend to explore a different textual corpus from those who examine the impact of the Essay, the “political” and “philosophical” works of the 1690s and 1700s being treated discretely.4 Two things are immediately striking about Beconsall’s Grounds. The first is its date: 1698. In the decade after the publication of the Two Treatises in 1689, Locke’s book was scarcely noticed by anyone. Not until 1703 did the Jacobite Charles Leslie launch his celebrated polemic against it.5 Before 1698 the Two Treatises had been mentioned in print only four times, in passing and favourably, by Whig authors.6 The second striking fact is that Beconsall publicly attributed the authorship of the Two Treatises to Locke and so was able to read it alongside the Essay. Locke had avowed the Essay from the outset, whereas he did not admit to authorship of his political work until he made his will in 1704. To what extent his authorship of the Two Treatises was rumoured in the 1690s remains unclear. Nobody hazarded the rumour in print until 1698, when William Molyneux, in his Case of Ireland, cited it as “said to be written by my excellent friend, John Locke.”7 It is now apparent that in the same year Beconsall also made the attribution. His eleventh chapter is called “Reflections on Some Passages in Mr Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding, and a Treatise of Government, Part 2.” Archly gesturing toward the anonymity, he remarks that the “treatise [is] I presume, well known to Mr. Lock.”8 Standing amid the twenty-one chapters of the Grounds, this analysis of the Two Treatises as overthrowing paternal authority and civil government, is placed squarely within a disquisition on the foundations of natural and moral law, filial obligation, the nature of conscience, the dangers of Locke’s denial of innate ideas, and the offensiveness of his “law of fashion.” Beconsall’s book is, as his contemporary Thomas Hearne described it, “a discourse about the law of nature,” rather than, as its title suggests, natural religion.9 It belongs to a considerable body of such treatises.10 Locke’s most conspicuous

The literature is discussed in Mark Goldie, ed., The Reception of Locke’s Politics, 6 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), I, Introduction, which fails to notice Beconsall. 4

5 Charles Leslie, The New Association of Those Called Moderate Churchmen with the Modern Whigs and Fanatics, Pt II (1703). The claim has been made that Mary Astell provided “the first systematic critique” and that Locke’s politics was a hidden target of her Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), but this claim is unsustainable. See Mark Goldie, “Mary Astell and John Locke,” in Mary Astell: Gender, Reason, Faith, ed. William Kolbrener and Michael Michelson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 65–86.

For early citations see Goldie, ed., Reception of Locke’s Politics, I, Introduction, and pp. lxxiii–lxxv.

6 7

Ibid., 1:225.

8

Grounds, 143.

Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. C.E. Doble et al., 11 vols. (Oxford, 1885–1921), 1: 231. 9

10

See John Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956).

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opponent in this tradition was James Lowde, in his Discourse Concerning the Nature of Man (1694). In his later Moral Essays (1699), Lowde commended Beconsall for supporting him.11 These authors defended the claim that there was a law of nature knowable independently of, but confirmed by, revelation. Christian ethics were rational, because they conformed to the intuitions of natural reason, and could be found in the teachings of the best pagan moralists, the Stoics, and above all in Cicero. Such a view needed defence, they held, for it was challenged by “the modern sceptics and latitudinarians” whom Beconsall declared to be his enemies.12 These sceptics, he claimed, aimed at nothing less than the overthrow of the idea of natural law, by reducing morality to human artifice and convention. Beconsall regarded Locke’s Essay as belonging in outward form to the natural law tradition, but as subverting its foundations. This generic identification of the Essay as a disquisition on the moral law is alien to the dominant modern presumption that it is a treatise on epistemology. Beconsall chiefly confined his attention to Locke’s critique of innate ideas in Book I and account of ethics in Book II. He would not have been surprised to learn of the existence of Locke’s earlier, unpublished Essays on the Law of Nature, and would have seen the Essay as a continuation of the same project, not least in Locke’s revisiting of his doubts about the knowableness of the law of nature from the common consent of mankind. Beconsall was not alone in responding to the Essay in terms of moral philosophy and natural law, for this was the dominant reading in the first phase of the book’s reception, between its publication in 1689 and 1696, when Bishop Edward Stillingfleet opened a new front in the war on Locke, turning attention toward Locke’s putative theological failings, principally the inadequacy of his doctrine of the Trinity. Lowde, Beconsall, Thomas Burnet, Henry Lee, and William Sherlock all thought natural morality was jeopardised by the denial of innate ideas. The reports of Locke’s friend, James Tyrrell, on the initial reading of the Essay point to its perceived ethical implications. “Discoursing with some thinking men at Oxford . . . I found them dissatisfied with what you have said concerning the law of nature . . . whereby we distinguish moral good, from evil”; some “think you . . . resolved all virtue and vice . . . into the praise, or dispraise that men give to certain actions.” Nor was it only critics who read the book as a prolegomenon to moral philosophy. Tyrrell urged Locke to publish his Essays on the Law of Nature, while his Dublin friend William Molyneux hoped he would extrapolate from the Essay by writing “a treatise of morals, drawn up according to the hints you frequently give.”13 Oxonian suspicion that Locke’s philosophy pointed to ethical conventionalism and seemed all too Hobbesian is confirmed in Isaac Newton’s response from Cambridge, that, upon first reading the Essay, “I

11

James Lowde, Moral Essays (1699), 4, 41.

Grounds, 46. The use of the protean term “latitudinarian” is interesting. Beconsall does not allude specifically to the party of clergy to whom the label was usually attached; rather to those who held fashionable sceptical doctrines in moral philosophy. 12

13

Locke, Correspondence 4:101, 109, 508 (30 June 1690, 27 July 1690, 27 Aug. 1692).

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took you for a Hobbist.”14 That Beconsall’s critique is consonant with these early readings of the Essay, and pays minimal attention to Stillingfleet’s new theological charges, suggests a lengthy gestation for his book. A dense work of 300 pages, the Grounds’ publication date of 1698 belies an earlier intellectual context.15 This is not to say that Beconsall failed to convict Locke of irreligion, for he had also read the Reasonableness of Christianity, which appeared in 1695. He had no doubt that Locke, even in the Essay, for all its guarded judiciousness, its “reserved way of writing,” belonged among the deists, whose “cargo of infidelity and irreligion” is “now vented by the liberty of the press.”16 In the Reasonableness, he noted, Locke “hinted” at a principal maxim of the deists, namely that religious creeds were merely “profitable inventions” that derived from the “arts or mystery of priestcraft.” The deists identified revealed religion as a “cant or jargon formed by the priests,” “a contrivance of . . . creedmakers . . . to secure an empire, as well as maintenance from a silly populace.”17 However, Beconsall’s sally against deism is brief, since his treatise is not primarily a defence of revelation or the church, but of natural moral intuitions. Beconsall provides an unremarkable iteration of a conventional theory of the moral law. There is an “eternal distinction of good and evil.” It is deducible from the nature God created. The good is that which tends toward the perfection of nature. The rational principles of the good can be identified as laws, properly so called, when understood as the commands of God, such commands being implicated in the act of sovereign creation as much as expressed in the positive commands known by revelation. These laws are “implanted in the minds of men, as rational beings,” and were perfectly known to Adam before the Fall. Reason, though dulled and distorted by man’s postlapsarian passionate nature, is not destroyed. While knowledge of the law is innate, it is not achieved without mental effort: it is implanted in the well-ordered conscience, but examination and reflection are needed to activate natural potentiality. What lends assuredness to the best of our ratiocinative efforts are the teachings of the Bible. Further evidence for natural law is discernible from the common consent of those parts of humanity which are not sunk in barbarism. In sum, the moral law may be said to be “written in our hearts,” and conscience is “the candle of the Lord.” These two phrases from Scripture are unfailingly quoted in the

14

Ibid., 4: 727 (16 Sept. 1693). See G.A.J. Rogers, “Locke, Newton, and the Cambridge Platonists on Innate Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 191–206. 15 There are no citations of Stillingfleet’s Discourse (1697) but one from Locke’s Letter to the Bishop of Worcester (1697) (Grounds, pp. 46–7). The Reasonableness of Christianity (1696) is discussed only in the Introduction. He refers to the second edition of the Essay (1694) but not the third (1695). We may infer that most of Beconsall’s book was written by c.1695. Beconsall made no mention of Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), which was anonymous until the third edition of 1695. 16 Grounds, iv, vii. Press censorship lapsed in 1695. Hearne records that Beconsall wrote a pamphlet “about the press,” but this has not been identified, Collections, II, 214. 17

Grounds, iv–vii, sigs. B4v, C2r; cf. 227, 237.

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tradition which Beconsall recapitulates, the tradition against which Locke reacted in penning his critique of innate ideas.18 From these premisses flow Beconsall’s objections to Locke’s Essay. He discovers Locke’s moral scepticism in the apparent reduction of moral rules to “custom, education and . . . traditions,” more generally to “the law of fashion” or “law of opinion.” Locke is identified as a moral conventionalist, who holds that those principles which we imagine to be impressed upon our minds by God and nature, and knowable also from the common consent of mankind, are in fact inculcated merely by the “power of education.”19 Beconsall particularly deplores Locke’s technique of using the practices and beliefs of barbarous Greeks and benighted Africans and Indians as evidence in aid of disrupting claims that there are universal moral beliefs. “This gentleman has industriously amassed together all the filth and off-scouring of a reprobate mind, and a defiled conscience.” “He has sent us to all the creeks and corners of barbarity under the verge of heaven, to see rapes, murders, and the vilest incests practised, with universal approbation and allowance.” He takes us to Africa and the Indies, “the most rude and uncultivated parts of the world, to explode the doctrine of an universal consent.” Beconsall holds Locke to be inviting his readers to consider the habits of “uncultivated negroes” as morally relevant data.20 He repudiates Locke’s reduction of conscience to mental habits, inculcated by this or that circumstance of “custom, education, the superstition of a nurse . . . the authority of old women.” In Locke, moral rules are apparently reduced to the contingent mental furniture of individuals, groups, and cultures. Hence it is that “Mr Locke makes consciousness and conscience the same,” so reducing conscience to a mere “chimera.”21 There is something paradoxical, even perversely misguided, about Beconsall’s reading of Locke’s moral philosophy, though he was scarcely alone in his depiction. He devotes a whole chapter to denigrating “Mr Locke’s law of fashion,” as if Locke were a pure conventionalist, whereas Locke himself deplored the fact that what counts as moral judgement in too many minds is the accumulated rubbish of unconsidered habit, custom, opinion, and fashion. In the Preface to the second edition 18 Ibid., sig. B4r, 1–2, 6, 29ff, 61, 119, 126, 189ff; Romans 2:15, Proverbs 20:27. See Yolton, Locke and the Way of Ideas, ch. 2. Yolton discusses Beconsall at pp. 54–5, too briefly to disclose the engagement with Locke’s politics. Beconsall holds the non-naive form of innatism which Yolton finds characteristic of his generation. He concedes that the law of nature is never presented to the mind as an “angelic intuition” (sig. A5v), and that “it’s well known, those that contend for innate ideas . . . do not think they discover [i.e. reveal] themselves without the exercise of our natural powers and faculties” (p. 73). 19

Grounds, sig. B3v, 189, 141; cf. sig. B4r.

20

Locke’s example of the natives of Soldania Bay in Southern Africa is persistent in his writings, appearing in the early Essays on the Law of Nature, the Essay, and one version of the Two Treatises. See Essay I.iv.8. The perception, which was not Beconsall’s alone, that Locke took seriously the moral diversity of humankind casts doubt on some current post-colonial critiques of Locke. See Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 21

Grounds, 44–52, 249, 226ff, citing Essay I.ii.3, I.iii.9–11, I.xiii.9–11, I.iii.20.

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of the Essay, Locke defended himself against Lowde’s similar misreading: “I was there, not laying down moral rules, but showing the original and nature of moral ideas, and enumerating the rules men make use of in moral relations, whether those rules were true or false.”22 Beconsall was alarmed by the thought that, if natural moral intuition was taken away, only human artifice would be left. Yet in his more patient moments he allows that Locke was not a pure conventionalist, still less a libertine, for his alternative charge is that Locke, having abandoned moral intuition, could only avoid the chaos of moral happenstance by a forthright defence of divine positive law. Whereas modern readers have identified in Locke’s Reasonableness a sceptical move away from the epistemic optimism of the Essay—a fideist turn toward revelation as a bulwark against failing reason—Beconsall sees Locke moving in the reverse direction in his revisions of the Essay. A close enough reader of the Essay to track changes between editions, he finds the first over-reliant on revelation (for without revelation, and without natural moral intuition, mankind is left to its own moral brutishness), but notes that the second edition partially backtracked by adding a brief caveat in defence of the “light of nature.”23 As recent readers have also noted, the Essay hesitates between revelation as “the only true touchstone of moral rectitude” and confidence in the capacity of reason to discover moral rules.24

II The moral principles which Beconsall takes to be cardinal “branches” of the law of nature are parental and filial duties, and this claim lies at the heart of his engagement with the Two Treatises. Nothing, he argues, is more plainly inscribed in the natural order, nor more “carries the appearance of being innate,” than the obligation of parents to children and children to parents. Locke is accused of taking the example of filial reverence as a key instance of mistaken innatism. People submit to this principle, Locke writes in the Essay, “not because it is natural . . . but because having been always so educated, and having no remembrance of the beginning of this respect, they think it is natural.” In quoting this passage Beconsall signals the contiguity of the Essay and the Treatises: both are anti-patriarchal. Filial respect, Beconsall retorts, is a “propension” with which children are “naturally endowed,” and “the bare perception of the idea or term parent, would naturally actuate these native

22

Latterly transferred to Essay II.xviii.11, note.

Grounds, 203–4. In Essay II. xxviii.8 Locke originally wrote, “That God has given a law to mankind,” i.e. by revelation; in the second edition he elaborated over four lines, speaking of the law of God “whether promulgated . . . by the light of nature, or the voice of revelation.” See Locke, Correspondence, 4: 107–8.

23

24 Essay II. xxviii.8; IV.xii.1. See G.A.J. Rogers, “Locke and the Sceptical Challenge,” in G.A.J. Rogers and Sylvana Tomaselli, eds., The Philosophical Canon in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1996), 61–3. Reprinted in G.A.J. Rogers, Locke’s Enlightenment (Hildesheim: Olms, 1998).

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propensions in such a manner, as to command . . . filial obedience.”25 Beconsall’s tenth chapter, on parental and filial obligation, serves as a bridge between discussion of the Essay and of the Treatises. The Two Treatises is seen as the application of Lockean moral scepticism to the social and political sphere. Beconsall ignores the passages of moral realism in the Treatises which have perplexed modern readers as being apparently incompatible with the anti-innatism of the Essay.26 In turning to the Two Treatises Beconsall reveals himself to be a thoroughgoing patriarchalist. He defends patriarchalism as a political truth about the origins and nature of civil government and as a moral framework for the obligations of fathers, mothers, and children. Like other early readers of the Treatises, Beconsall sees Locke’s book as pre-eminently a critique of patriarchalism. He goes on to examine what Locke has to say about consent and turns briefly to Locke’s chapter on property. Beconsall’s political patriarchalism is entirely predictable in the generation of clergy which came of age during the high Tory 1680s, the decade in which Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha was published as a flagship of divine right monarchism. Yet, in the wake of the Revolution of 1688, Beconsall carefully detaches his Toryism from any suspicion of Jacobitism. He flatly denies any “disloyalty towards our present sovereign,” as “all that know me” can confirm. This seems ingenuous, for the Jacobite Thomas Hearne irritably called him “an admirer of King William.” There are, insists Beconsall, “principles that will maintain as true fealty and allegiance towards his present majesty” as the newly fashionable “opinion of original contract.”27 Beconsall was typical of the repositioning of post-Revolution Toryism, which made possible a stubborn persistence of patriarchal political theory, while no longer beholden to the claims of the fallen House of Stuart. Beconsall opens his account of the Two Treatises by declaring that it overturns paternal power, and that it does so by a factitious “contending for a joint jurisdiction in the mother.” “This gentleman, as well as Mr Hobbes (though both in a different way) thinks he has gained the field, by proving, that the mother is an equal sharer in that power which accrues to a father as a parent.” This feminist doctrine Beconsall takes to be contrary to both Scripture and nature, which award the male “superiority and pre-eminence” over “the weaker vessel.” Eve was created out of Adam, and the injunctions in Genesis 3:16 and Ephesians 5:22 cannot be gainsaid: “Unto the woman he said . . . he shall rule over thee”; “Wives submit yourselves unto your husbands.” Consequently, it is “evident the revealed law gives a supereminent power to the father.” Nature tallies with revelation, for it awards to the man greater “strength and vigour of body” as well as “courage and resolution of mind.” Locke, in contrast, uses “tricks and insinuations” to evade the fact “that God has . . . placed the woman in a state of subjection” to the man. In remarking that Locke would “droll away” the

25

Grounds, 40, 127, 141–2; citing Locke, Essay I. iii. 12, 23

26

Especially Two Treatises, II, §11: “the great law of nature . . . writ in the hearts of all mankind.”

27

Grounds, 181; Hearne, Collections, 1: 231.

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account of Adam’s majesty in the book of Genesis, Beconsall further intimates that he is a deistical sneerer at revelation.28 Yet Beconsall goes on to argue that Locke’s feminist critique of masculine authority is only a skirmish, for Locke’s principal aim is not to elevate mothers but to subvert the authority of fathers over sons. He holds that Locke’s dividing of paternal from political power, his arguing that they are “distinct and separate,” disastrously undermines the authority of fathers. Beconsall insists that civil power is a form of paternal power, derived from and grounded in it. He concedes that there has been change over time in the authority of fathers, for the nearly limitless primordial authority of “private parents” is now largely superseded “by the ample provision of the civil power in all regular governments.” But, in a nice revision of Lockean fiduciary theory, he holds that civil government exercises paternal power in trust, and, if it fails in that trust, power devolves again to fathers, where it originally lay. Thus, for instance, a father who kills an intruder to protect his child exercises a paternal right that ordinarily devolves upon the police powers of government. Nor is the father’s right to use force only one of self-preservation, for it is also a judicial act of punishment. In speculating on the original patriarchal right of capital punishment, he argues that such a right existed not only against an assailant in order to protect a child, but also over the child him or herself, if a miscreant. In ancient Rome, the father had the right of executing his errant offspring. Here Beconsall echoes earlier patriarchal theorists, such as Bodin, who mourned the disappearance of this Roman right of filicide. Beconsall invokes a key contention of divine right theory, that, given the commandment “thou shalt not kill,” the right of the father and of the sovereign to take life must be directly God-given. Both rights lay originally with Adam, the first father and first monarch. Beconsall is especially affronted by Locke’s notion of “an executive power in the exercise of laws of nature [residing in sons] as much as their father.” There is no such general power, for it resides only in fathers and sovereigns.29 Beconsall goes on to argue that civil government has no business in many spheres of life, and that a substantial residue of paternal power persists in individual fathers, undevolved at all times. The fiduciary and limited nature of government is such that original paternal power endures in contemporary civil society.30 Beconsall sketches a patriarchalist conjectural history. At the beginning of time “the supreme power was both parent and sovereign.” Down the ages, there have been successive “devolutions,

28 Grounds, 143–9, citing Two Treatises, II, §§52–3, 44–5. He also cites 1 Corinthians 11:3–9: “The head of the woman is the man.” Beconsall accepts that wives choose their husbands and he adopts the familiar doctrine of “designation”: matrimony is entered into by “compact,” but the authority of the husband is God-given and not derived from the compact. For Hobbes, see Leviathan, ch. 20; De cive, 9.7. 29 Grounds, 166, echoing Two Treatises, II, §8; Jean Bodin, Six Books of a Commonwealth ([1576], English tr. 1608; facs. edn., Cambridge, MA, 1962), I.4, 20–4; I.6, 46–7. Filmer also regretted the passing of filicide: Patriarcha and other Political Works, ed. J.P. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1991), 7, 18–19. 30

Grounds, 151–63, citing Two Treatises, II, §§7, 58, 64–5, 67–9, 74.

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which the reasons and necessities of civil government have made in the chiefest branches of parental power.” Thereby political and paternal power have gradually become distinguishable. While Beconsall accepts the utility of this development, he fears that “a great deal of filial reverence and duty is worn off by those devolutions,” and that the “highest veneration” for fathers subsisted only “under the first government.” The evidence of natural reason, and of the authority of the patriarchs in the Old Testament, shows that paternal “sovereignty and dominion” was once so complete that it is impossible to “imagine, that such a tremendous power was exerted purely to secure an obedience during minority,” that is, during the nonage of children. The Old Testament attests a time when “the obedience of children in the first ages of the world was as remarkable as the parents’ commands, after a state of maturity.” It is plainly false to hold that the “commanding power of parents ceases with nonage.”31 It is noticeable that Beconsall’s patriarchalism does not depend on a thesis about the genealogical succession of the kings of England from Adam. Few seventeenthcentury patriarchalists attempted so fragile a claim. Not even Filmer did so; for them, Adamic fatherhood was archetypal rather than ancestral. All humankind are, of course, the children of Adam, and royal succession should proceed by primogeniture, but the descent of Adam is lost to history, and the world is divided into many kingdoms. Beconsall made no claim about English kings; his is a thesis about the generic authority of fathers and sovereigns; and he does not exclude the possibility of “paction” in the creation of civil authority, a pact among fathers. It is doubtful that his principal source was Filmer; rather it was Pufendorf. In De jure naturae et gentium, Pufendorf spoke of the original pact “by fathers,” “the heads of families who first undertook to establish a state.” A sharp distinction is drawn here between citizens and subjects: those who form states become its citizens; women and children are not citizens but subjects. Pufendorf took up the Bodinian theme of the father’s original right of life and death over children, holding that it subsisted only while fathers remained sovereign. “But after separation into states, some rights were taken away from the heads of families, while others were restricted.” Here was Beconsall’s notion of the historical “devolution” of paternal power to civil states.32 In the sphere of their retained authority, Beconsall held that fathers have “empire” and “dominion” over their adult as well as their underage children. Since this derives not only from their duty of care, which is all that Locke allowed, and which lapses when nurture ceases, but also from the act of generation, the obligation of children to fathers is necessarily perpetual. As mankind is constantly beholden to its heavenly creator, so children are indefinitely beholden to their earthly. Just as “the true original of God’s right of dominion . . . undoubtedly results from his creative 31

Grounds, 135, 143, 156–8; cf. pp. 150–1.

Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium [1672], trans. C.H. and W.A. Oldfather (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 8.11.2, p. 1350; 7.2.20, p. 995 (citing Hobbes, De cive, 5.11; 6.2.10–11), p. 923 (citing Bodin, Six Books, 1.4.). Bodin likewise remarked that “every subject is not a citizen,” and that, historically, civil magistrates “little by little” drew jurisdiction to themselves and “extinguished all domestical powers”: Six Books, 1.6, pp. 47–8; 1.4, p. 24. 32

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and preserving power,” so likewise does parental authority. The “right of dominion and obligations of obedience” derive from the “creative, preserving power” of the maker, and there is a “right to give laws to those creatures to whom [the maker] gave a being.” The human sex act is a sacred and “strict imitation” of the divine seminal act of creation.33 A child not only owes gratitude for benefits received from its parent, but also obedience to him who has maker’s rights. Locke is condemned for holding that paternal authority is merely temporary, and Beconsall finds shocking Locke’s notion that when “once arrived to the enfranchisement of the years of discretion, the father’s empire then ceases.”34 Locke’s doctrine is one in which, at the age of reason, “children . . . are not only discharged from their paternal allegiance, but acquire a state of freedom equal to their father.” This is a view which gives rise to the Lockean notion that the descendants of Adam may, in their pretended “state of freedom, and equality, . . . enter into a compact at pleasure, and consequently establish a government upon a majority against their fathers.” It is a licence to overthrow and banish fatherly authority.35 Beconsall suggests an extension of the argument from maker’s rights, which paradoxically inverts a characteristic concept of Locke’s. He takes hold of Locke’s theory of property grounded in labour—in “creation” or maker’s rights over things— and points out that, in a significant sense, a nation’s people subsists only because of the “labour, care, and conduct of the government.” Here the state is the labourer who makes and nurtures the citizen, much as the parent makes and nurtures the child. Citizens are thus, within the sphere of the “true ends and purposes of government,” the “property of the government,” and owe it obedience and service. Locke’s doctrine of property in labour, of maker’s rights, tells against his doctrine of natural freedom.36 There may have been pacts by patriarchs, but there was never a state of nature. Beconsall dilates upon the absurdity and impiety of supposing, in the face of Adamic history, that there ever was a primeval state of natural freedom, from which political society was derived by individuals consenting together. “It’s unpardonable 33 Grounds, 129–30. As Pufendorf pointed out, the debate over whether the right of fatherhood derives from the act of generation or the rearing of children goes back to Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 8.13–14 (De jure naturae, 6.2.12, p. 928). On the debate over whether the sexual begetting of children by itself confers rights on fathers, see James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 58–9. 34

Grounds, 96–7, 101–2, 153–61, citing Two Treatises, II, §§65, 58, 69.

Grounds, 168–9. This line of thought has produced a Freudian reading of Locke’s re–enactment of the “primal crime” of parricide. “Liberty means sonship” and “brotherhood”; “fraternity” entails “castration of fathers.” Thus, Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966), 3–9. Likewise Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), chs. 3–4: “The sons, in an act of symbolic, if not actual, parricide, withdraw their consent to the father’s power and claim their natural liberty”; “classic contract theory is [a] story of the masculine genesis of political life . . . told over the dead body of the father”; “the men who defeat the father, claim their natural liberty and, victorious, make the original contract, are acting as brothers” (93, 88, 78). Pateman’s book is an important restatement of Beconsall’s reading of Locke, though from the opposite, feminist, end of the moral lens. 35

36

Grounds, 98, 174–7, citing Two Treatises, II, §§27, 45.

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arrogance” to “erect a scheme” contrary to “the story of the creation.”37 Beconsall’s defence of the book of Genesis against Whig political theory was a Tory commonplace, as was his reference to the heretical, anti-Adamic, myth of the “mushroom” men, the multiple spontaneous appearance of people, springing up independently.38 Locke offered a diseased fantasy of a world without parents. This was to construe the Lockean state of nature as an impious speculation about primeval history. Yet this is not Beconsall’s sole understanding of the theory of a natural state, and what is striking is his recognition in Locke of a jural state of nature, one that subsists implicitly in contemporary societies.39 On Beconsall’s reading, Locke holds that political legitimacy is constantly recreated by every generation as it comes of age. The crux of Locke’s theory is taken to be the repudiation of filial obligation at the age of majority. For Locke, government is not a pooling of patriarchy, but a civil association grounded in the consent of all those who have entered upon adulthood. The age of majority is seen as the critical juncture at which Locke inserts his theories of the natural freedom and equality of mankind and of “compact” and consent. In Locke, at their coming of age, young adults acquire “absolute . . . freedom” from their father’s authority and enter into civil society. Locke “place[s] everyone in a state of liberty upon their arrival at years of discretion, till they shall recognize the governing power by an express, or tacit consent.” The theory of contract and consent is therefore a dangerous doctrine of filial independence.40 This leads Beconsall to consider those perplexing paragraphs in which Locke ambiguously specifies those actions which signify consent. He notes Locke’s distinction between two sorts of consent: express, which Beconsall does not hesitate to identify with oaths of allegiance, and tacit, which he equates with the possession or enjoyment of property. These signifiers of consent are found to be flawed. Oaths of allegiance are sworn only by a minority of people, “upon special occasions,” and thus cannot comprehend everyone within citizenship. And allegiance derived from the enjoyment of property pertains only to the propertied, and lasts no longer than its possession. Locke, he shows, allows the termination of allegiance, if a citizen should donate or sell their property, whereupon he is at liberty to abandon his allegiance, enter into a new commonwealth, or create one afresh in the empty places of the world. Furthermore, Locke leaves at liberty the adult children of property-owners until they inherit their fathers’ property, as well as “the poor, or labouring part of a nation” who are not proprietors: all these “still remain in a state of nature, unless the government has actually required an oath of fidelity.” Locke hence has left the mass

37

Grounds, 146.

38

Ibid., 23, 140, citing Hobbes. The notion of “mushroom men” was suggested by theories of spontaneous generation in certain species of plants and animals. Anti-Adamic theories of the multiple origination of mankind were widely discussed in the wake of Isaac de la Peyr`ere’s scandalous Men Before Adam (1656). 39 Beconsall also makes a Humean point. It may be that government is founded on contract, but we first need “proof of the obligations of compact or voluntary promises” (Grounds, 81, 95). 40

Grounds, 153, 171, citing Two Treatises, II, §§64, 67, 69, “etc.”

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of people at liberty. This is a fatal hazard to settled government, the beginning of its “total dissolution,” for it licenses a people to abandon or destroy governments, and leaves them free to be “executioners of the law of nature, and consequently . . . have right of war,” at their discretion. Why, therefore, might not a body of “rich malcontents” dispose of their property and “become generals to worthy mobile”—that is, become commanders of the mob?41

III However, Beconsall did not dwell long on the notion of Locke as an insurrectionist patron of the mob. He was more concerned, as a matter of political economy, with the folly of permitting the uncontrolled withdrawal of people to other commonwealths or to empty places, Locke’s “vacuis locis.”42 Locke’s doctrine offended a key precept of mercantilist demography, that the nation’s population should be augmented and not dissipated. In that pre-Malthusian age, commentators were acutely anxious about population decline. Beconsall echoed a host of contemporary writers. “Fewness of people is real poverty,” wrote William Petty. “People are in truth the chiefest, most fundamental, and precious commodity,” agreed William Petyt.43 Some commentators, for this reason, were sceptical of the benefits of overseas colonies, for they were drains upon the population of the metropole. Beconsall took Locke to be a proponent of unrestricted emigration. Locke’s “dissolution” of government need not be construed as a right of rebellion: it could as readily be construed as a right of withdrawal. When Pufendorf wrote on “The Ways in Which a Man May Cease to be a Subject,” he opened with a substantial disquisition on migration.44 This was characteristically how a seventeenth-century European dissolved the bonds of allegiance. This construal would be fundamental to American readings of the Two Treatises in the 1760s, which argued that Americans had detached themselves from British allegiance by emigration and hence were ipso facto independent. Beconsall read the idea of withdrawal in the context of domestic political economy, with the implication of a fatal undermining of the nation’s demographic strength. Locke’s doctrine of the natural freedom attained at the age of majority violated the right and power of the state to mobilise its human resources. Beconsall reverts to his former argument that governments have, in a manner, a property in their citizens, because they have “made” them, second only to parental “making.” He notes that Locke grounds property and dominion in labour (“whatever . . . has labour mixed with it, becomes a property”) and he stresses that the

Grounds, 170–3, 176, 179, citing Two Treatises, II, §§63, 66, 119, 121. The word “mob” was beginning to be coined from “mobile,” itself a derivation of mobile vulgus. 41 42

Two Treatises, II, §121. For the right of withdrawal see esp. II, §115.

For these and the wider context see Daniel Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over Immigration and Population, 1660–1760 (Newark NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1995), pp. 46, 48, and passim. 43

44

Pufendorf, De jure naturae, 8.11.2–4, pp. 1348–52.

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whole population owes its protection, education, and subsistence to “the labour, care, and conduct of the government, as well as that of their natural parents.” This creates a right of dominion antecedent to contract: it is grounded in generation and nurture and not in “arbitrary deputation or commission.” He concludes that governments have a right to command “the labour and service of every adult native,” and that citizens have a duty to “maintain the strength and grandeur of the community.” Within the proper “rational ends and purposes” of government, there lies a right in the state to command the human capital as well as the “riches and treasures of a country.” Governments have “authority to impose laws for the regulation, and exacting of this labour, and industry.” There cannot be a natural right of withdrawal or desertion, and no one may emigrate without governmental permission. At this point Beconsall calls in Grotius and Pufendorf to corroborate his claim that people “cannot rightfully withdraw gregatim, because it must destroy the foundations of government.” By Locke’s principle of the right of withdrawal, “a nation may not only be dispeopled at pleasure, and consequently drained of her riches and treasure,” but also ruinously exposed to its enemies.45 Beconsall treated his sources with insufficient care, for it is Grotius rather than Pufendorf who can help him. Grotius, in a section entitled “Whether it is Permissible for Nationals to Withdraw from a State,” allowed that individuals might leave but denied that people might do so in a large body, for “if such migration were permissible the civil society could not exist,” for it would be “drained of its population.” Pufendorf disagreed: if the right to leave existed in one, it must exist in many. Furthermore, a state might benefit equally by inward migration. And, in any case, states do not flourish for ever, and rise and fall with patterns of migration: “the destruction of one is the creation of another.” Thus, for Pufendorf, there was no inhibition upon the principle that “in the pact of subjection . . . every man reserved to himself the privilege of migrating.”46 On this point, Pufendorf was at one with Locke. In a remarkably alert linkage of Locke’s philosophy with his biography, Beconsall turned to the circumstances of Locke’s current public employment. He knew that Locke was, from 1696, a member of the Board of Trade and Plantations, the cockpit of the nation’s commercial and colonial policy-making. And he did not think Locke’s public (and lucrative) responsibilities were compatible with what he had written in the Two Treatises. “This author, he’s so highly sensible how much the number of subjects contributes to the trade, riches, strength and glory of a nation, that were the question formally put and argued in the Council of Trade, and his preferments, as well as judgement, engaged upon it, I’m persuaded he would think himself obliged to declare against his former sentiments.” Locke the irresponsible anarchist was now a counsellor of state. The Oxford Tory’s resentment at the oxymoron of a Whig in power breaks forth: “Oh! Blessed politics, to be the spawn of one that is called into the counsels of a government, eats its bread, and enjoys

45

Grounds, 174–80.

Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis [1625], tr. Francis W. Kelsey ([Oxford]: Oxford University Press, 1925), 2.5.24, p. 254; Pufendorf, De jure naturae, 8.11.2–4, 1349–52.

46

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places of trust as well as profit.”47 Beconsall was making the astute observation that the Locke who wrote the Two Treatises, a propaganda piece for Whig insurrection, might sit uneasily beside the Court Whig Locke who served the Williamite regime. Locke did not respond to Beconsall’s book. Yet it is a striking fact that one of the longest additional passages he inserted into the Two Treatises, written in the margin of his copy of the third edition of 1698, and which only appeared in printed editions much later, reflected his new employment at the Board of Trade and the mercantilist demographic agenda. Part of it reads: “numbers of men are to be preferred to largeness of dominions, and . . . the increase of hands and the right employing of them is the great art of government.”48

IV We have seen that Beconsall worried that the Two Treatises might provide a handbook for rebellious youth by licensing their liberation from fatherly authority at the age of majority. This essay closes by turning to the wider context of early modern anxieties about youth. It is not easy to connect intellectual history with social, and the risk is of reducing philosophical arguments to symptoms of social tensions. Yet Beconsall’s dwelling on intergenerational relations consorted with a wider contemporary preoccupation with wayward adolescents. It was a society in which youth formed a high ratio of the population, which had a prolonged phase of adolescence, and in which the average age of marriage was high and apprenticeships long; a society with a strong tradition of primogeniture, in which the heirs of the propertied were frequently at war with their fathers, and with a perennial problem of refractory and unplaced younger sons. Social commentary, conduct books, and admonitory sermons dwelt on the insubordination of youth, while the theme of the “corruption” of youth ran through the jeremiads of those who demanded a “reformation of manners.” Specifically, there was a tendency to argue that twenty-four or twenty-five might be a better age than twenty-one for “coming of age.”49 Beconsall was scarcely alone in insisting on the “respect,” “reverence,” and “awe” owed to parents, and also on the duty of submitting to “the regulation of our lives and actions” by them, for a parent is “a kind of priest within the district of his own family.”50 Beconsall was (just as the young Locke had been at Christ Church) a teacher in a university, with daily care of pupils and regular contact with their parents. 47

Grounds, 173, 178.

Two Treatises, II, §42. The standard edition has “lands” rather than “hands,” but “hands” is the plausible reading. Locke endorsed immigration as the “easiest way of increasing your people” in his unpublished paper, “For a General Naturalisation.” John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 322–6. 48

Keith Thomas, “Age and Authority in Early Modern England,” Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976), 205–48; Ilena Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

49

50

Grounds, 129, 134–5.

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Keith Thomas has argued that the early modern period was “conspicuous for a sustained drive to subordinate persons in their teens and early twenties and to delay their participation in the adult world.”51 Political speculators in the seventeenth century tended to be gerontocratic. James Harrington proposed to confine the parliamentary franchise to those over thirty. Gerard Winstanley and John Bellers thought nobody should be eligible for public office under forty. In English Liberties (1680), Henry Care complained of “beardless politicians.” The marquis of Halifax and the earl of Shaftesbury thought thirty or forty the appropriate minimum age to be a member of parliament.52 Locke was unusual in displaying few such anxieties about youth, though he, too, argued that “age . . . may give men a just precedency.”53 The Tory Beconsall criticised the Whig Locke for favouring the claims of the young. Ironically, exactly the reverse presumption is at work in a recent analysis of the political theory of age in early modern England and America. Holly Brewer has argued that there is a systemic reason why political theorists of a radical hue were inclined to asperse beardless statesmen and propose high age thresholds for political participation.54 It was a paradox of patriarchy that under a system of primogeniture young men often came to responsibility and office early, if parental mortality allowed them to inherit when young, or if they benefited from nepotism. The Cavalier Parliament of the Restoration was rife with youthful aristocratic MPs, and this became an object of Whig reproach. Whig and republican thinking, because meritocratic in aspiration and committed to the truer nobility of acquired wisdom and virtue, leaned toward imposing age restrictions on access to political office. Anti-patriarchal theory therefore tended to be gerontocratic, and, from the late seventeenth century, English laws steadily imposed age restrictions on various aspects of responsible adult life. The end point of Brewer’s argument is the prevalence of such restrictions in American constitutional arrangements: the Founding Fathers tended to be gerontocratic and “senatorial.” She places Locke within this frame, seeing him as limiting the child, by his emphasis on the attainment of reason rather than the inheritance of paternal estate. The argument is suggestive, for it arrests the lazy assumption that “radicals” applauded youth, and it has the virtue of engaging with Locke and patriarchy through the topic of parent-child relations, whereas recent reflection in this area has tended to occur through the lens of feminism. Yet it runs counter to Beconsall’s reading and to the wider alarm of patriarchalists that Locke licensed the precocious citizenship of youth. It is not at all clear that hostility to youth was the special preserve of Whigs and republicans. In fact, in the generation before Beconsall, Cavaliers had been apt to identify in republican thought an argument for youthful rebellion. In the revolutionary era of the 1640s, when Cromwell’s army defeated Charles I, a royalist protested that “the new doctrine of the people’s sovereignty extends to give power to all . . . children 51

Thomas, “Age and Authority,” 214.

52

For these and other examples, ibid., 228–9.

53

Two Treatises, II, §54.

Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 54

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grown up,” whereas by “the law of nature, that gives all authority originally to the father . . . the residue [i.e. rest] of the family cannot avoid the government agreed upon by their fathers and masters, and have nothing to do to overrule it in the least, though they be ever more in numbers than the fathers or masters of families.”55 After 1688, Whig ideologues were conscious that their doctrines might seem to license filial, as well as female, liberty, and, more cautious than Locke, they sought to ward off such worrying implications. Two years after the Revolution, the Whig journalist Guy Miege stated the disjunction all too starkly: “all men are born free”— except for the subordination, by “the law of nature,” of “children to their parents” and “wives to their husbands.”56 Tory critics rapidly took to accusing Whigs of hypocrisy because they did not apply to the family the doctrine of the consent of the governed they trumpeted for civil society. Charles Leslie challenged Whigs to “go home, and call a council of their wives, children, and servants.”57 This dissociation was the source of the feminism of Mary Astell, in her celebrated question to the Whigs, “If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?” It was a challenge echoed in the remark of Lady Brute in John Vanbrugh’s play The Provoked Wife: “The argument’s good between the king and the people, why not between the husband and the wife.” And again in Mary Chudleigh’s remark that Whigs kept a Tory doctrine in reserve in order to keep women down: “Passive obedience you’ve transferred to us.”58 What applied to wives applied equally to children. It is not, however, apparent that any ideologist of youth liberation—unless it be Locke himself—emerged to speak against parental patriarchy as Astell spoke against conjugal. Bernard Mandeville, writing in 1709, momentarily did so. He satirised a father for “preaching nothing but passive obedience and non-resistance to his daughter.” The daughter’s advocate responds with Lockean sentiments. Respect is indeed owed to parents, “but when we come to be of age, we are no more tied to . . . obedience to their commands, but we have liberty to examine into the equity of them; nay, may justly refuse to comply with them.”59

55

The Case of the Army Soberly Discussed (1647), 6.

56

Guy Miege, The New State of England (1691), pt II, 80.

Leslie, The New Association, pt II, p. 65. Cf. Roger L’Estrange, earlier: “How would all your popular sticklers for the sovereignty of the people take it, to be beaten out of doors by their own servants, and to have their children rise in rebellion against their fathers?” (The Observator, III, no. 26, 6 Apr. 1685). For context see Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family, and Political Argument in England, 1660–1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 57

58 Mary Astell, Political Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 18; John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife (1697), Act 1, Scene 1; Mary Chudleigh, The Ladies Defence (1701), 3. 59 Bernard Mandeville, The Virgin Unmask’d (1709), 39, 192. This and the previous quotations are cited in Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), 240–1. For commenting on a draft of this essay I am indebted to Homyar Pahlan, Jacqueline Rose, and Sylvana Tomaselli.

Chapter 9

Some Thoughts Concerning Ralph Cudworth Sarah Hutton

In the section of Some Thoughts Concerning Education, where he discusses “the study of Natural Philosophy,” Locke expresses some scepticism about the accuracy of the systems of natural philosophy available in his time: But to return to the study of Natural Philosophy, though the World be full of systems of it, yet I cannot say I know any one which can be taught a Young Man as a Science, wherein he may be sure to find Truth and Certainty, which is, what all Sciences give an expectation of. I do not hence conclude that none of them are to be read . . . But whether that of Des Cartes be put into his Hands; or it be thought fit to give him a short view of that and several other also, I think the Systems of Natural Philosophy, that have obtained in this part of the Word, are to be read, more to know the Hypotheses, and to understand the Terms and Ways of Talking of the several Sects, than with hopes to gain thereby a comprehensive, scientifical, and satisfactory Knowledge of the Works of Nature.1

Locke nevertheless commends the study of nature as “convenient and necessary to be known to a Gentleman.” He also expresses a Baconian preference for “such writers, as have imploy’d themselves in making rational Experiments and Observations, than in starting barely speculative Systems.”2 The paragraph just quoted is followed by a ringing endorsement of the work of “the incomparable Mr Newton,” whose “admirable Book, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica” has “shewn how far Mathematicks, applied to some Parts of Nature, may, upon Principles that Matter of Fact justifie, carry us in the knowledge of some . . . particular Provinces of the Incomprehensible Universe.” As with the “hypotheses” of the moderns, so also with those of the ancients, Locke did not regard acquaintance with philosophical systems helpful for the study of nature. However, he appears to have thought that the study of ancient philosophy had some value. For, shortly before these comments, Locke

John Locke, STCE, 247. In their footnote on this passage the Yoltons specify that these “systems” are “Cartesian or Newtonian physicks.” The passage itself, however, does not support such a restricted interpretation view of what Locke had in mind.

1

2

ibid., 248.

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 143–157. and Legacy, 

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includes a remarkably positive appraisal of the magnum opus of an older contemporary of both men, Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe. . . . he that would look farther back and acquaint himself with the several Opinions of the Ancients, may consult Dr Cudworth’s Intellectual System; wherein that very learned Author hath with such Accurateness and Judgement collected and explained the Opinions of the Greek Philosophers, what Principles they built on, and what were their chief Hypotheses, that divided them, is better to be seen in him than any where else I know.3

This passage is sometimes cited as evidence that Locke had read Cudworth,4 but it is not always remarked that it occurs, not in a discussion of the teaching of history or classical civilization, but in Locke’s discussion of suitable systems of natural philosophy for inclusion in his educational curriculum.5 Locke’s comment is the more remarkable in view of the fact that he and Cudworth are normally treated as antithetical in philosophical terms, to be classified on opposite sides of the customary historical divide between rationalists and empiricists. After all, Cudworth’s denial that sense-data constitute knowledge and his insistence that the essence of truth is independent of body—and even mind—underscores his Platonist credentials. Cudworth was certainly not a thinker who employed himself, “in making rational Experiments and Observations”; on the contrary, he fits the description of those Locke rejected for “starting barely speculative Systems.” Locke’s views on learning classical languages, and studying classical texts, his low estimation of the value of learning Greek, together with his preference for practical knowledge (acquired from observation and experiment) as against book learning, make him a very different kind of thinker.6 Cudworth, by contrast, was a philosopher steeped in the learning of the ancients, who took it for granted that his readers would understand the original-language quotations with which his texts are encrusted. He never completed his projected system of philosophy, possibly because he never had time to fill in the quotations and write the footnotes.7 Like the humanists of the Renaissance, Cudworth presupposed a knowledge of Latin and Greek. Nevertheless, his classical erudition did not meet the scholarly criteria of the Enlightenment classicism. As early as 1691—just over a decade af3

Ibid.

4

Precisely when Locke read Cudworth is not certain. Benjamin Furly mentions reading Cudworth with Locke. Correspondence, 4:161 (letter 1336). An exception is John Rogers in, “Locke, Plato and Platonism,” in Platonism at the Origins of Modernity, ed. D. Hedley and S. Hutton (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 193–205. Rogers plays down Locke’s regard for Cudworth, by pointing out that the letter to Edward Clarke which epitomises ideas developed in STCE does not mention Cudworth (Locke, Correspondence, 2: 785, letter 844). But this is not the only detail missing from the Clarke letter. Its absence may be satisfactorily explained by the lack of space in a private letter.

5

6 A.E. Taylor was one those who perpetuated the view that Locke and Cudworth were philosophically opposed. See, e.g., “The Philosophy of Proclus,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, NS 18 (London, 1918): 631. Victor Nuovo challenges Taylor’s reading in his “Reflections on Locke’s Platonism,” in Platonism at the Origins of Modernity, ed. Hedley and Hutton, 207–223. 7 One difference between Cudworth’s True Intellectual System and his Treatise of Eternal and Immutable Morality is that the latter is relatively free of classical quotations, and contains very few marginal notes.

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ter Cudworth’s death—Richard Bentley’s Epistola ad Millium (1691) called into question the erudition on which Cudworth’s True Intellectual System was founded.8 Less than a generation after its publication, Bentley effectively destroyed Cudworth’s archaeology of truth by applying principles of historical philology to the texts out of which Cudworth constructed his philosophia perennis. Thereafter, Cudworth’s credentials as a classicist were fatally undermined, with corresponding results for the philosophical system underpinned by his Greek and Latin scholarship.9 The reverberations of Bentley’s attack, and the heightened critical awareness instilled by the new, more historically attuned philology in the ensuing century can be traced in the critical apparatus supplied by Cudworth’s German Latin translator, Johann Lorenz Mosheim. In the footnotes he supplied for his Latin translation of The True Intellectual System (Systema intellectualis huius universi of 1733), Mosheim struggled to keep faith with his author, even as he called attention to shortcomings in Cudworth’s sense of linguistic history.10 Mosheim frequently complained that Cudworth’s translation of particular Greek terms was “in conformity with his own rather than Plato’s opinion.”11 The fact that Cudworth attributes to the ancient thinkers views that sound distinctly contemporary and that, with apparent disregard for semantics, Cudworth tends to “read into” his sources more than what was actually stated, has not endeared him to modern classicists or historians. Locke’s was not among the discordant voices which derided Cudworth’s learning. It was certainly not ignorance of Greek that accounted for his disregard of Bentley’s criticisms.12 His views on Cudworth were most likely formed well before

8 Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: the Traditions of Scholarship in the Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 12–21. 9 Sometime librarian to Locke’s adversary, Stillingfleet, Bentley’s motivations for this attack may have had more to do with the theological politics of the time, than with disinterested scholarship. Cudworth was, after all, the chief philosopher of the most tolerant section of the Church of England, nicknamed Latitudinarian, and he had been associated with the republican regimes of the interregnum. Bentley’s attack is comparable to Stillingfleet’s attack on Cudworth’s fellow Cambridge Platonist, Henry More, in Origines sacrae. See S. Hutton, “Edward Stillingfleet, Henry More and the Decline of Moses Atticus,” in Philosophy, Science and Religion in England, 1640–1700, ed. R. Kroll, R. Ashcraft and P. Zagorin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 10 On this, see Sarah Hutton, “Classicism and Baroque. A Note on J.L. Mosheim’s Footnotes to Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe,” in Johann Lorenz Mosheim (1693–1755), ed. M. Mulsow (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag, 1997), 211–227. It is perhaps ironic that few of those who lament the intrusive weight of Cudworth’s erudition nowadays have the linguistic skills to judge Mosheim’s strictures. It should also be added that even after his classical erudition had been found wanting, Cudworth’s philosophy continued to attract interest, as Mosheim’s Latin translation demonstrates.

Mosheim in Cudworth, True Intellectual System of the Universe, ed. Harrison (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845), 3: 229. Cf. “His partiality for the opinions he had himself espoused seems to me to have had such an influence on his mind as to make him see things in Aristotle to which the philosopher was strongly opposed.” ibid. 3: 68, n.1. 11

12 There is a possible political dimension to the different assessments of Cudworth by Bentley and Locke. The former was, after all, chaplain to Locke’s Episcopal opponent, Edward Stillingfleet. In the late seventeenth century Cudworth was a figure who commanded a following among the tolerationist wing of the Anglican church and among non-conformists.

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Bentley’s Epistola was published. Although Some Thoughts on Education appeared two years after Bentley’s Epistola it was based on earlier drafts going back to 1683.13 We can’t be sure when Locke first read Cudworth—certainly by 1690, when Benjamin Furly recalled reading him with Locke.14 Perhaps Locke’s loyalty to his close friend, Cudworth’s daughter, Damaris Masham, inclined him to disregard Bentley’s remarks. Or perhaps his diffidence about the value of Greek erudition meant that he was less exercised by the finer points of historical linguistics— disposed, perhaps, to see it as pedantry. Whatever the case, the “accuracy and judgement” that Locke commends in Cudworth is not philological, but philosophical. What he commends in Cudworth is his compilation and explanation of “the Opinions of the Greek Philosophers, what Principles they built on,” not the accuracy of his historical philology. The particular context in which Locke’s remarks are to be interpreted is, of course, educational: instruction in knowledge, not of nature (“comprehensive, scientifical, and satisfactory Knowledge of the Works of Nature”), but of “hypotheses” about the natural world. In this respect, ancient philosophy is on the same footing with most modern philosophies, which Locke says, “are to be read, more to know the Hypotheses, and to understand the Terms and Ways of Talking of the several Sects.” And it is precisely for this knowledge of “hypotheses”, that Cudworth’s True Intellectual System is commended by Locke. In other words, it is as source and interpreter of Greek philosophy that Locke recommends Cudworth—a role Cudworth could not have fulfilled without philosophical insight. The opinion of Locke is a reminder that there is more to Cudworth’s use of ancient philosophy, than an anachronistic view of Cudworth the outdated classicist. So, instead of viewing Cudworth through the lens of classical purists, I want to take Locke’s commendation of Cudworth’s account of “the Opinions of the Greek Philosophers” for its “Accurateness and Judgement,” as a starting point for examining Cudworth’s presentation and interpretation of ancient philosophy. Rather than dwell on Cudworth as a last representative of Renaissance humanist antiquarianism, I propose to focus on Cudworth as one of the earliest moderns. Of course, there is no denying that, with its intricate engagement with classical sources, Cudworth’s philosophy was shaped and nourished by the cumulative endeavours of Renaissance humanism, whose great achievement was to have recovered the extant texts of the ancient world, and to have made them available in early modern Europe, together with the linguistic tools necessary for reading and understanding them. Cudworth’s classical erudition was in many ways the apogee of Renaissance humanism. By the time he commenced his studies at Cambridge the classical philosophical corpus had been recovered almost as fully as it is today. Thus he had at his disposal a wider range of sources than even the most philosophical of the Renaissance humanists.15 Not only was he the direct beneficiary of the humanist

13

Locke, STCE, ed. cit., 44ff.

14

Locke, Correspondence, 4: 161(Letter 1336).

e.g. Proclus (editio princeps 1618) and Sextus Empiricus (first Latin edition, 1562). He explicitly acknowledges that he had access to texts not available to Ficino or not utilised by him. See 15

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achievement in recovering and making available the philosophy of antiquity, but he exhibits many of the habits of mind of his humanist forbears. His optimistic philosophy of man and mind, and his liberal theology align him with the ethical tradition of Renaissance Humanism. Cudworth is also a product of the Renaissance in the synthetic ambition of his philosophical project: his globalising syncretism which took truth itself and all of intellectuality as its ambit sets him apart from the modern world. Not for him a little ground-clearing, as the modest “underlabourer” Locke had described his aims. Rather, Cudworth sought to construct the universe of mind, a system which was the philosophical counterpart of physics and cosmology, set out, as Tony Grafton put it “at vast and absorbing length” in his The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678). This syncretic philosophia perennis is a highly developed example of Renaissance negotiation with Graecia mendax: Cudworth, like Agostino Steucho before him, was highly skilled in sorting out what Henry More called the “pretious gold” from the “rubbish” of antiquity. The perennial model of philosophy which Cudworth expounded presupposes that truth is one and the same for all time, that the questions and answers of philosophy are timeless, and that the moderns, no less than the ancients, are engaged in the same quest for philosophical truth. As Cudworth put it in the Treatise: when innumerable created understandings direct themselves to the contemplation of the same universal and immutable truths, they do all of them but as it were listen to one and the same original voice of the eternal wisdom that is never silent . . .16

Viewed from the perspective of philosophia perennis Cudworth’s contemporaries like Gassendi and Descartes are restorers or recoverers of ancient doctrines, not founders of new philosophical systems. Cudworth himself uses the term “novantique” to denote this collapsing of ancient and modern into a single enterprise. In tracing the roots of atomism back to Moses/Moschus and in citing the most ancient sources available, Cudworth exhibits exactly the respect for origins that is the hall mark of humanism. The historical model itself (prisca sapientia) was promoted by those self-same humanists, with whom he shared a desire to accommodate pagan learning to Christianity. So, by providing what he regarded as an impeccably ancient pedigree for atomism Cudworth could defend it against the imputations of atheism that resulted from the perversions of it by later interpreters (e.g. Lucretius). Counter-historical though Cudworth’s universalist view of philosophy may be, it is nonetheless supported by a deep, humanistic sense of the authority of antiquity. This comprehensive perspective on philosophy allowed Cudworth to posit an original theistic philosophy, which contained both metaphysics and physics (his version entailed a metaphysics of spirit combined with an atomistic physics). This original philosophy was accompanied by a story of philosophy according to which the metaphysics became separated from the physics, creating two divergent branches, with Plato and his followers monopolising metaphysics, while Democritus and Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, ed. S. Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) (hereafter cited as EIM), 37. 16

EIM, 132.

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Leucippus pursued materialist theories that declined into atheism as they became blinded to immaterialism by their sensualism. By means of what might be called an exercise in comparative philosophy, Cudworth constructed a taxonomy of philosophical doctrines, in which he classified the different philosophical schools in according to how the matter theory of each correlates with theism or atheism: he identified four main branches of atheistic philosophy which he called Hylopathian, Atomical, Hylozoic and “Cosmo-Plastic.”17 It is this taxonomy of the different philosophical schools to which Locke refers when he commended The True Intellectual System of the Universe as a storehouse of the “hypotheses” of Greek philosophy. A distinctive feature of the “intellectual system” set out in Cudworth’s magnum opus is that he interprets the ancients by using ancient sources—the philosophical equivalent of the rule of reading the bible through the bible, sola scriptura. Cudworth’s mingling of old with new, in particular his insistence on seeing the “moderns” of the seventeenth-century—Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes and Spinoza— as neoteric propounders of ancient doctrines, is enough to confirm to the satisfaction of many of his twentieth-century readers that Cudworth writes unhistorically. However, his identification of atomism as part of the original natural philosophy is echoed in Locke’s endorsement of corpuscularianism in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, where he comments that “the Modern Corpuscularians talk, in most Things, more intelligibly than the Peripateticks.”18 Nothwithstanding its antique dress, there are two features of Cudworth’s approach to ancient philosophy which show that his philosophical project had a contemporary orientation rather than an antiquarian one. Firstly, as regards content, Cudworth does not simply make himself the mouthpiece of antiquity, a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy for the ancient world. Rather, he discusses ancient philosophy in relation to contemporary philosophy and the issues it provoked: it is not accidental that the philosophies scrutinised in The True Intellectual System are ones which appear to anticipate the modern natural philosophies of Cudworth’s time, especially mechanistic and atomistic natural philosophy. These are evaluated in relation to the same questions being applied in the seventeenth century to modern philosophers— questions about whether the competing new philosophies explain the phenomena, and whether they are compatible with religious belief. This “modern” reading of ancient philosophy accounts for some of the apparent “distortion” of ancient views lamented by Mosheim. But it is not far removed from contemporary philosophical practice, where philosophies of the past are analysed as anticipating or sharing central questions that preoccupy the present. The second aspect of Cudworth’s contemporary focus is linguistic, and its context is the emergence of vernacular philosophy in the seventeenth century, evident in the linguistic choices of such illustrious contemporaries as Descartes and Locke

Sarah Hutton, “Lord Herbert and the Cambridge Platonists,” in British Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Stuart Brown (Routledge History of Philosophy, V) (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 27. 17

18

STCE, 246.

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(though not Hobbes and Spinoza). In so far as it marks the point where classical languages begin to be discarded this vernacular turn is symptomatic of the breakdown of humanism, or at least it marks the point where Renaissance humanism had run its full course. Cudworth was one of the first English philosophers to write in the vernacular: the challenge facing him in an intellectual culture where vernacular philosophy had been almost unknown, was how to forge a philosophical vernacular, a language of philosophy, that provides serviceable terminology and a meaningful conceptual vocabulary. In this regard the precedent of Cicero comes to mind: the Cicero of the Tusculan Disputations who specifically sought to develop a philosophical vocabulary for Latin. Locke would not have had to read very far into Cudworth’s True Intellectual System before encountering an example of one of “the chief Hypotheses of the ancients.” In book 1, as part of his argument that Democritus and Leucippus were not the originators of “the Mechanical or Atomical Philosophy,” Cudworth cites an instance of the “Wisdom and Sagacity of the old Philosophers” which, he claims is more fully and plainly expressed, than it is in Lucretius himself, viz. That Sensible things, according to those Ideas that we have of them, are not real Qualities absolutely Existing without us, but [. . .], Phansies or Phantasms in us.19

The details he gives of this atomistic philosophy accord very well with the basic principles of the mechanical philosophy in vogue at the time he was writing. His detecting an anticipation of the moderns in the work of the ancients is consistent with his conception of the perennial philosophy. What is, perhaps, more remarkable, is that the passage he quotes comes not from, or one of the other ancient atomists besides Democritus or Leucippus, but from Plato who, he claims, “hath left a very full Record of this Mechanical or Atomical Physiology” in his dialogue the Protagoras. In making this claim, Cudworth admits that his interpretation of the dialogue was unusual (something “that hath hardly been yet taken notice of”), not least because, it appears by Plato’s manner of telling the story, and the Tenour of the whose Dialogue, that himself was not a little prejudiced against this Philosophy. In all probability the rather, because Protagoras had made it a Foundation both for Scepticism and Atheism.20

At first sight, Protagoras in Cudworth’s account might be thought to anticipate Locke. However, other references to Protagoras suggest otherwise. For the charge of atheism which Cudworth levels at Protagoras is linked not just to his sense-based epistemology, but to his materialism. In point of fact, the burden of Cudworth’s critique of Protagoras’ sense-based thinking fits exactly with Locke’s warnings about the dangers of grounding knowledge in the senses in Some Thoughts Concerning Education:

19

Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London: R. Royston, 1678), 10.

20

Ibid.

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Matter being a thing, that all our Senses are constantly conversant with, it is so apt to possess the Mind, and exclude all other Beings, but Matter that prejudice, grounded on such Principles, often leaves no room for the admittance of Spirits, or the allowing any such things as immaterial Beings in rerum natura. 21

Cudworth does indeed interpret Protagoras as a materialist forerunner of modern philosophy. But, as I shall show later, the modern thinker whom Cudworth sees prefigured in Protagoras is in fact Hobbes. For a fuller justification of Cudworth’s view that Plato was cognisant of the mechanical philosophy, and for further explanation of how Protagoras’ misapplication of it opened the way for scepticism and atheism, we must turn to a work which was originally intended to form a continuation of The True Intellectual System of the Universe. This is Cudworth’s posthumously-published A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality.22 I shall, for the remainder of this paper, focus on this work which is based on the same premises as The True Intellectual System, and is particularly relevant to seventeenth-century debates about the knowledge claims of natural philosophy (or science). This is particularly true of Cudworth’s discussion of Plato’s Theaetetus in the second book, where the emphasis is not on natural philosophy, but epistemology. Although it was not published until 1731, long after Locke’s death, the manuscript of A Treatise was among the papers preserved at the home of Cudworth’s daughter, Damaris, Lady Masham. It is, therefore, possible that Locke may have been acquainted with it while he was resident there in the last years of his life.23 In what follows I shall argue that Cudworth’s modern interpretation of Protagoras is neither arbitrary nor dogmatic, but involves an attempt to understand Protagoras through ancient sources. Although the result is consonant with his perennial model of philosophy, it does not entail a dogmatic or uncritical application of this framework. A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality was probably originally intended as a continuation of his True Intellectual System (1678). It was most likely drafted in the early 1660s. Contrary to what its title suggests the Treatise is largely taken up with epistemology. Nevertheless, the discussion of epistemology links 21

Locke, STCE, 246.

22

For present purposes, an advantage of using it is the relative absence of classical quotations, as compared with the True Intellectual System—which enables me to preclude the charge that Cudworth’s philosophy is just an exotic compilation of quotations from ancient sources strung together by baroque English sentences. Also, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality is the text most familiar to modern readers, and the only work of Cudworth’s to have received any attentions as philosophically interesting in recent times. See, for example, Arthur N. Prior, Logic and the Basis of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 23, and Brad Hooker, “Cudworth and Quine,” Analysis 61 (2001): 333–35. 23 Jacqueline Broad has disputed the possibility that Cudworth’s papers were in Lady Masham’s possession in, “A Woman’s Influence? John Locke and Damaris Masham on Moral Accountability,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 489–510. Other evidence, not cited in this paper, suggests that she did have Cudworth’s manuscripts in her possession at Oates. For example, Pierre Alllix appears to have borrowed Cudworth’s MS on the Book of Daniel (now in the British Library: BL Add MSS) from the collection at Oates.

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directly to Cudworth’s argument for the existence of moral absolutes—existence, that is, as entities independent of living beings—which is part of the argument that “the natures and essences of all things” are eternal, immutable and independent of the physical world. To deny this, according to Cudworth, is “to shake at the very foundations of all things” because it is to deny “any absolute certainty of truth or knowledge,” and to hold “that nothing was good or evil, just or unjust, true or false, white or black, absolutely and immutably.”24 Book 2 of A Treatise is largely devoted to a discussion of Plato’s Theaetetus. Cudworth focuses on Protagoras’ contention “that every fancy or opinion of every body was true” and “that man is the measure of all things whether existing or not existing.” Cudworth’s concern is with the sceptical implications of Protagoras’s relativism, especially in relation to ethics. He also discusses Protagoras’s natural philosophy, drawing some rather unexpected historical conclusions. Following Plato, Cudworth associates Protagoras’s relativism with Heraclitus who, he says, claimed “all things to be the offspring of flux and motion.” Protagorean moral relativism, he argues, derives from Heraclitean scepticism, Heraclitus having propounded the doctrine (adopted by Protagoras) that “knowledge is nothing else but sense.” Cudworth quotes a handful of passages from the first part of Plato’s dialogue (152A, 157A-D, 161D, 166D, 167C, 177C-D) to support a primarily moral interpretation of Protagoras, to the effect that any community might set its own standards of right and wrong. In Cudworth’s view, Protagoras hereby mounted “a battery or assault against morality” by striking at the “immutable natures and essences of things.” Having cited Plato to support the Protagoras-Heraclitus link, Cudworth goes on to argue that there is another element introduced by Protagoras, a “superstructure” as he calls it built on these Heraclitean foundations, but taken from another source, namely “the old atomical or Phoenecian philosophy.” By reference to Plato’s text, Cudworth proceeds to argue, that Protagoras held that “the whole world is made by nothing else but the motion of particles,” and that sensory qualities do not exist in the objects which give rise to sensations but in the organs of sense. His argument, based chiefly on Pythagoras’ account of sight and seeing, concludes that Protagoras subscribed to a version of Democritean atomism, which anticipated the mechanical philosophy propounded by Descartes and Gassendi in Cudworth’s time. However, according to Cudworth, Protagoras applied this philosophy in a way that served his own sceptical ends. In support of his relativist claim that “man is the measure of all things” and that “every fancy is true,” Protagoras used the atomist principle that the qualities we attribute to objects which we observe reside not in the objects themselves, but in the observer. However, he misapplied this principle to mean that the senses the judge of truth. This, says Cudworth, is clean contrary to the meaning of “the old atomical philosophy,” which held that knowledge required the intervention of a higher power of mind:

24

EIM, 29.

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sense alone is not the criterion or judge of what does absolutely exist without us, but that there is a higher intellectual faculty in us that judges of our senses, which discovers what is fallacious and fantastical in them and pronounces what absolutely is and is not.25

Cudworth answers Protagoras in two ways. First of all he insists that Protagoras was not the founder of philosophical mechanism or atomism, but the perverter of a pre-existing philosophy which predates both Leucippus and Democritus, and may be traced back to pre-Trojan times. On the authority of Strabo (whose source was the Stoic, Posidonius), Cudworth claims that “the doctrine of atoms is ancienter than the times of the Trojan war,” and was imported from Phoenicia by one Moschus. Cudworth’s second move against Protagoras is to cite the anti-Protagorean arguments of other philosophers; these are, first, Plato (in the Theaetetus), secondly, Aristotle (the arguments against sense-based knowledge in De anima and De sensu), and thirdly, Sextus Empiricus. It is somewhat disingenuous of Cudworth to use Aristotle and Plato’s confutation of Democritus and Protagoras respectively in support of the atomist-mechanist cause, since neither made any explicit commitment to true atomism. Cudworth does in fact acknowledge this, but exploits it by laying the blame on Protagoras: It must be acknowledged that neither of these two famous and renowned philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, had the good hap to be rightly instructed in this ancient Phoenecian and Moschical or Mosaical philosophy. Protagoras abusing it to scepticism and the taking away of the natural discrimination of good and evil, might probably beget a prejudice in Plato against it.26

In other words, Cudworth explains the absence of a Platonic physics by claiming that Protagoras was responsible for his repudiation of physics: thanks to Protagorean scepticism and further perversions of it by Epicurus, Lucretius and, ultimately, Pyrrho, the original “old physiology” or “old atomical philosophy” was, according to Cudworth, rejected by both Aristotle and Plato. And Plotinus remained confused as to “whether sensible things did really exist in the objects without us, or were only passions within us.”27 Philosophical atomism became so thoroughly obscured by misuse or refutation that, according to Cudworth, the Renaissance interpreters of Plato were ignorant of it: in a rare reference to Ficino in his works he notes that “Ficinus and Serranus . . . lived before the restitution of this mechanical philosophy, and therefore understood it not.”28 Of particular note in Cudworth’s account of Protagoras is his use of Sextus. It was in Sextus Empiricus’ comments on Protagoras that Cudworth found endorsement for his interpretation of Protagoras as a sceptic: Sextus Empiricus gives a short account of this Protagorean philosophy in a few words thus, “He asserts that which seems to every one to be, and so makes all things relative.”29

25

EIM, 47.

EIM, 39. He does, however, suggest that Plato had “a little smattering of it,” citing Timaeus 55E–56A. 26 27

EIM, 42.

28

Ibid., 37.

29

Ibid., 31.

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Cudworth also cites Sextus to confirm that Protagoras held that everything consisted of matter in motion.30 Cudworth quotes Sextus’ repudiation of Protagoras’ contention that every fancy is true. In the passage in question Sextus uses Protagoras against himself, in an argument that Cudworth thinks is better than those of Aristotle and Plato. But Sextus Empiricus bestows more subtlety upon it than either of them, If every fancy is true, then when one fancies that every fancy is not true that must be true also, and so then this proposition that every fancy is true, will be false.31

Sextus is Cudworth’s chief source for the tenets of Democritus’ philosophy, and it is from Sextus that Cudworth derives the view that the source of Democritean and Epicurean atomism was the Phoenecian Moschus.32 Sextus is therefore not only an alternative source for Protagoreanism, aside from Plato. But Cudworth uses Sextus’ account of Protagoreanism in order to distill Protagoras’s philosophy down to a handful of aphorisms and to provide him with an account of the origins of atomism. In broader terms, it can also be said that Cudworth’s reading of Sextus sharpened his awareness of sceptical arguments.33 Cudworth’s discussion of the Theaetetus is not only highly selective in what he chooses to discuss, but it sets the dialogue within the larger context of Protagoras’ likely sources (which are actually suggested by Plato) and of the Protagorean legacy. This enables him to tease out the fortuna of “the old physiology,” demonstrating the moral scepticism of Epicurus and Pyrrho, and accounting for the hostility of Plato and Aristotle to philosophical atomism. Cudworth was in effect offering a reconstruction of the “true” philosophy, as well as an historical framework which explained the transmission and distortions of philosophical doctrine across time. Although his perennial philosophy is coloured by the assumptions and methodologies of the later Renaissance, it is also coloured by the threat of scepticism—a new problem facing philosophers since the discovery of ancient scepticism with the recovery of the writings of Sextus Empiricus.34 Cudworth’s use of Sextus is an important mark of difference between his Platonism and that of his Renaissance predecessors, such as Ficino, who were ignorant of Sextus’ writings. Although the impact of Sextus is clearly evident in Cudworth’s A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, his use of Sextus in his critique of Protagoras’ sense-based epistemology suggests that his concern was not scepticism, per se, but the modern legacy, as he saw it, of Protagoreanism. In the context of the new natural philosophies of his time, especially the emergent empiricism of contemporary science. Cudworth’s endorsement of the original atomism (“the old 30

Ibid., 44.

31

Ibid., 29.

32

Ibid., 38. Sextus, Against the Physicists, 1.363.

33

Cudworth’s use of Alcinous is more limited, and confined to a statement by his sixteenth-century commentator, Jacques Charpentier, that Aristotle repudiated sense-based knowledge. Cudworth’s use of Charpentier is another indicator of the Renaissance roots of his Platonism. 34 See R.H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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physiology”) indicates that the target for his charge of scepticism against sensebased epistemology was not the new natural philosophy of the Royal Society. And it points up an area of agreement with Locke. For Cudworth’s remarks show that he was not an enemy of empiricism or of the observational methods of the new natural philosophy (science). What he denies is that observational data is, on its own, knowledge. Nonetheless, he accords sense experience a fairly important role. First of all, the senses have the natural every-day function of mediating the external world to the body. He acknowledges that, “sense be adequate and sufficient for that end which nature hath designed it to, viz. to give advertisement of corporeal things existing without us, and their motions for the use and concernment of the body.” Secondly, sense data provide the understanding with raw materials needed for formulating knowledge of the outside world. Indeed reason depends on the senses in order to do this. “The end which nature hath designed it [sense] to” includes providing “such general intimations of the modes of them [corporeal things], as may give the understanding sufficient hints by its own sagacity to find out their natures, and invent intelligible hypotheses to solve those appearances by (for otherwise reason alone without sense could not acquaint us, or assure us of the existence of any thing besides God, who is the only necessarily existent being).”35 The modern progeny of Protagoras that Cudworth had in mind were not modern atomists, or corpuscularians, certainly not those who combined their matter theory with theism. His target was, in all probability, another uncomfortable spirit raised by the revolutions in philosophy, namely Thomas Hobbes. A good part of Eternal and Immutable Morality is directed explicitly at Hobbes. Although he is not actually named in the section which discusses the Theaetetus in Eternal and Immutable Morality, he is certainly a presence behind it. For, not only does Cudworth refute the theory (ascribed to Protagoras) that knowledge is derived from sensations which are in turn the product of particles in motion but Cudworth’s emphasis is on the ethical relativism of Protagoras’ position. In other words, Protagoras is a kind of stalking horse for Hobbes. This is confirmed in the discussion of the same part of the Theaetetus which occurs at the end of The True Intellectual System.36 Here too Cudworth attacks Protagorean/Democritean sense-based epistemology, this time with a distinct allusion to Hobbes in his description of knowledge so derived as “faded and decaying sense.”37 To acknowledge the wider contemporary context within which Cudworth was writing helps explain some features of his philosophy, such as his concern about 35

EIM, 57.

The second book of his Treatise elaborates a thesis set out in The True Intellectual System (852), namely the position he attributes to “the Democritick and Epicurean Atheists,” that “all Knowledge is nothing else but Sense,” and, more exactly, that this sense-derived knowledge is nothing more than “Secondary or Fading and Decaying Sense” (851). He also discusses the sceptical consequences of such a position, namely that “all Knowledge is Nothing but Sense, either Primary or Secondary, . . . That there is no Absolute Truth nor Falsehood, and that Knowledge is of a Private Nature, Relative, and Phantastical only, or mere Seeming” (852). 36

37

Cudworth, ed. Harrison, 3:564.

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scepticism, and perhaps also, the need to construct a tradition for newly sprouted philosophical systems. But even within this wider contemporary context, there is no gainsaying the fact that Cudworth’s thinking is permeated with Renaissance attitudes to antiquity: his reliance on arguments from authority—the authority of antiquity—his commitment to philosophia perennis and his desire to ensure the compatibility of philosophy with faith. This last concern is the more understandable when we recognise that he was targeting the atheistical Mr Hobbes. This does not, of course, exonerate Cudworth from the charge that he took liberties both in his interpretation of ancient philosophy, and in his classical philology. However, these linguistic liberties should be assessed in relation to the other aspect of Cudworth, which I have not so far discussed: his philosophical terminology. Cudworth’s choice of language and his philosophical terminology have significance beyond mere matters of style. What is important is not just the manner in which he wrote but the conceptual vocabulary which he adopted. As already suggested, this is thrown into focus when we remember that the seventeenth-century saw the emergence of vernacular philosophy. It was in the seventeenth century that Western European philosophers begin to write in their own languages, using Latin only when they had an international audience in view. Hobbes is just such an example of a philosopher who wrote in English for popular home consumption—as he did in Leviathan—but used Latin for his intellectual peers on the international stage. When Cudworth was a student, Latin was the standard medium of philosophical discourse for Englishmen writing philosophy. Like Descartes, and also like his Cambridge Platonist contemporaries, he departed from the tradition of academic philosophy by choosing to write in the vernacular. But the Cambridge Platonists did not have a vernacular philosophical tradition from which to draw. This is abundantly clear in Cudworth’s English. His writings are full of new coinages, that give a certain antique flavour to his style. Many of these have since been discarded (terms like “angulosity”, “cogitability”, “flexuosity”, “nictation”, “phantasmatical”, “schetical”, “thetical”—not to mention “plastick” and “spermatick”!) Others have become standard terms in our modern intellectual vocabulary (for example, “consciousness”, “psychology”, “self-determination” are all Cudworth coinages). He also introduces a range of reflexive terms: some of which are now obsolete but some of which are part of our philosophical vocabulary as well as the language of psychology: “self-activity”, “self-power”, self-determination”, “self-reflexive”. These terms are particularly important for Cudworth’s conception of the mind as active, both in cognitive and psychological terms. The terminology employed by Cudworth— not all of it novel with him, of course—is self-consistent, but there is also a high degree of instability. For example there is wide variation in the terminology he uses to talk about ideas: “ideas”, “conceptions of the mind”, “immutable reasons”, “intelligible essences” , “intelligible reasons”, “universal reasons”, “immutable notions”, “notions of the mind” are just some of the terms he uses. But what I want to note particularly is the fact that Cudworth also imports Greek terms: one of the most important examples of a direct importation is his use of the Stoic term, “hegemonikon” in his Treatise of Freewill. But as often as not he uses Greek terms not in place of an English term, but in apposition to English terms. This is especially true

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in A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, where he uses Greek terms to denote the objects of three different levels of cognition, mind, imagination and sense: noemata, aisthesemata, phantasmata etc. These are inserted alongside the English terms employed, often with redundant frequency—the 1731 edition consigns them to the footnotes; the 1845 edition inserts them in the main text.38 Nevertheless, these terms have a genuine terminological function, especially where no English equivalent was available—for example the aforementioned word hegemonikon. These Greek terms (and they are printed using Greek orthography) provide stable signifiers for concepts which, when explained by Cudworth, are demonstrably his own, and not those denoted by any individual Greek term in any of its original uses. In other words, Cudworth uses Greek as part of his own repertoire of philosophical vocabulary. More than that, he uses Greek in order to establish his own philosophical vocabulary. The terms he employs are not intended to be faithful to the meanings they had in ancient Greek philosophy. Arguably, Cudworth’s quotations from classical philosophy function in the same way. They do indeed underwrite his own arguments, and, as Mosheim complained, Cudworth’s interpretations of them are frequently closer to his own views than to the views of the philosopher he quotes. There is no doubt that for a man of his humanist education, his speaking through the philosophy of the ancients endowed his own philosophy with the authority of precedent. But his treatment of it as having immediate relevance to his seventeenth-century present, is paradoxical though it may seem, one sense—a minor one—in which Cudworth is a “modern” in that he exhibits a philosopher’s sense of history: that is to say, the habit of mind which regards all philosophers as being engaged in the same activity, answering the same questions in the hope of solving recognised problems. On this approach, arguments are treated as able to stand or fall irrespective of the time at which they were proposed; philosophers of the past acquire significance in proportion to their contribution to a particular topic in philosophy; and individual philosophers are singled out for special mention if they are regarded as the originators or modifiers of arguments. This itself was nothing new. As Charles Schmitt long ago observed: Whenever texts of an earlier period are read, they will be subjected to some sort of interpretation and what results will differ to a greater or lesser degree from the texts upon which the interpretation is based . . . When an ancient text is plunged into a context of ideologies and ideas of a later time, with which it originally had little or no connection, adjustments, modifications and transformations must be made.39

Cudworth’s engagement with ancient philosophical texts displays the Renaissance humanist’s sense of the past as meaningful to the present. His quotations and interpretations constitute interventions in the text, sometimes quite radical interventions, of the kind that show that philosophy is a living tradition, in dialogue with itself. The existing academic philosophical tradition having failed (i.e. Aristotelianism),

38 My 1996 edition eliminates them in the interest of making the text accessible to modern readers! But that editorial decision was, for the reasons given above, a mistake. 39

Charles Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus (The Hague: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1972), 4.

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and, with it, inherited forms of philosophical discourse, Cudworth, like other innovators of his time, sought alternatives. In the absence of both an immediately available school of thought, Cudworth turned to those philosophies where he recognised affinities with contemporary developments. In his interventions in the texts of the ancients, we can see at work the process of philosophical development, and the evolution of new theories and new systems. Instead of siding with Bentley, and scorning Cudworth’s failings in historical philology, we might take a leaf out of John Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education and appreciate his labours for their value to the seventeenth-century students of philosophy, “to know the Hypotheses, and to understand the Terms and Ways of Talking of the several Sects.”

Chapter 10

Circles of Virtuosi and “Charity under Different Opinions”: The Crucible of Locke’s Last Writings Luisa Simonutti

A Circle of “Virtuosi” Recalling the happy period which he spent as tutor to Francis Masham, son of the baronet Sir Francis Masham and his second wife, Damaris Cudworth,1 Pierre Coste described the lively cultural climate that their home at the manor of Oates, situated about twenty-five miles to the north-east of London, near Harlow in the County of Essex: I cannot but take pleasure in imagining to myself, that this place, so well known to so many persons of merit, whom I have seen come thither from so many parts of England to visit Mr. Locke, will be famous to posterity for the long abode that great man made here.2

The years 1685, after the marriage of the widower baronet to Damaris Cudworth, and in particular the early 1690s, when John Locke arrived as a guest of the Masham family, marked a turning-point in the life of the Oates household, when the manor became a meeting point for the friends and acquaintances of Lady Damaris and, especially, of Locke himself. Prior to his arrival at Oates, and especially during his long sojourns on the Continent, in France and the Netherlands, Locke had frequently enjoyed the pleasure of learned and amicable conversation. In Paris, he had participated in “un cercle e´ tendu d’´erudits et de savants, parmi lesquels e´ taient volontiers accueillis les visiteurs e´ trangers”, a circle of “virtuosi” round the Huguenot “savant”, Henry Justel. Locke’s interest in these meetings aroused in is illustrated by

1

On Damaris Cudworth Masham, daughter of the Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth, and on her relations with Locke, cf. Sarah Hutton, “Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham: between Platonism and Enlightenment,” in British Journal for the History of Philosophy 1 (1993): 29–54; Luisa Simonutti, “Lady Damaris Cudworth Masham: filosofia e poesia. Con tre poemi,” in Donne, f losofi e cultura nel Seicento, ed. Pina Totaro (Rome: CNR, 1999), 183–209. Peter Laslett, “Masham of Oates: the Rise and Fall of an English Family,” History Today 3(1953): 535–43, 539. Cf. also LL and “The Recovery of Locke’s Library: Peter Laslett in Conversation with John Rogers,” in The Philosophical Canon in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Essays in Honour of John W. Yolton, ed. G.A.J. Rogers and Sylvana Tomaselli (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1996), 67–82.

2

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 159–175. and Legacy, 

159

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the numerous references to Justel and to the “savants” who frequented his house in those years, which punctuate Locke’s Journal.3 According to Pierre Des Maizeaux in his introduction the collection of Locke’s writings which appeared in 1720: Mr. Locke took a delight in forming such societies, wherever he made any stay. He establish’d one at Amsterdam in 1687, of which Mr. Limborch, and Mr. Le Clerc, were members.4

Le Clerc himself, several years earlier, had described in the Eloge Locke’s manner of launching and organising these “savant” encounters: En 1687 il voulut que Mr. Limborch et moi et quelques autres de nos amis fissions des conferences, pour lesquelles on s’assembleroit tour a` tour, une fois la semaine, tantot chez les uns et tantot chez les autres, et o`u l’on proposeroit quelque question, sur laquelle chacun diroit son avis dans l’assembl´ee suivante J’ai encore les Loix qu’il souhaitoit qu’on observat, e´ crites de sa main en Latin.5

From the very first months spent in Amsterdam during his voluntary exile in Holland, Locke also had the opportunity to attend the meetings of the learned theologians and doctors in the circle of the Remonstrant theologian, Philippus van Limborch and the doctor, Pieter Guenellon. By this means Locke became part of the “Collegium privatum medicum”, a private society which had no specific premises, but met regularly in the houses of various of its members.6 Even after he had left the city for Rotterdam, and after his final return home, Locke maintained his friendship with Pieter Guenellon and Egbertus Veen and remained in epistolary contact with various members of the “Collegie”. But most important of all, in the months spent in Rotterdam as guest of the erudite merchant from Colchester, the Quaker, Benjamin Furly, Locke had the opportunity of participating actively in the meetings of the

Gabriel Bonno, Les relations intellectuelles de Locke avec la France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: UCLA Press), 65–6.

3

4 A Collection of several pieces of Mr. John Locke, never before printed, or not extant in his Works. Publish’d by the Author of the Life of the ever memorable Mr. John Hales (London: J. Bettenham for R. Francklin, 1720), Dedication.

Jean Le Clerc, Eloge historique de feu Mr. Locke, which appeared in “Biblioth`eque Choisie,” 1705, 6: 342–411, art. 5, and again in Pierre Des Maizeaux’s edition of Oeuvres diverses de Monsieur Locke. Nouvelle Edition consid´erablement augment´ee, tome premier (second) (Amsterdam, Jean Frederic Bernard, 1732), p. LIV.

5

On 22 May 1684, Locke listed in his Journal the names of the various people involved in the meetings of the Collegium, including his own name at the end. In addition to the theologian Philippus van Limborch, who was also interested in scientific matters, other members were Matthew Slade (founder of the college in 1664 along with the anatomist Gerard Blasius), Egbertus Veen, Pieter Guenellon, Doctor Abrahamus Quina, Abrahamus Cyprianus (the latter a student of medicine and future Professor of anatomy at Franeker) and Pieter Bernagie (professor of anatomy, but also a versatile spirit and director of the State theatre).

6

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circle “De Lantaarn” which were held in Furly’s house.7 Locke must have found himself at ease at the “Lantaarn”, both in terms of the cultural atmosphere which prevailed there and of the figures which the club attracted in those years: Quakers such as Arent Sonnemans and doctors such as Hermannus Lufneu, Tobias Ludwig Kohlhans (who also distinguished himself as a defender of Quakerism in Germany) and the more famous Franciscus van Helmont; literati such as Peter Rabus; theologians such as Limborch and Le Clerc; philosophers such as Bayle8 and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, as well as dissenters and refugees, eminent politicians of the city, such as the ambassador Adriaan Paets, who had links with the Collegiants of Riijnsburg and with the Remonstrants.

Few and Plain Rules It was probably at Furly’s house in 1688, that Locke drafted a short essay entitled Pacifi k Christians9 in which he listed the “few and plain rules” which ought to be set at the foundations of a religious society, and the aims of which were to promote the principal teachings of Christianity: love, charity, peace and faith in the word of God. In Locke’s view, no man should be judged on externals, but everyone is free to practice what he thinks will promote inner spiritual well-being, love and charity: No men, or society of men, having any authority to impose their opinions or interpretations on any other, the meanest Christian. Since, in matters of religion, every man must know, and believe, and give an account for himself.10

According to Locke, it was an essential duty for all Christians to maintain feelings of love and charity in the face of the multiplicity of conflicting opinions, and to offer material and spiritual assistance to the dissenter (“in the diversity of contrary opinions”) so as to show him the path of communion. At the same time, the Christian’s task was also to dissuade “all magistrates from making use of their authority, much

7 On Benjamin Furly and his circle see Luisa Simonutti, “English Guests at ‘De Lantaarn’: Sydney, Penn, Locke, Toland and Shaftesbury,” in Benjamin Furly. A Quaker Merchant and his Milieu, ed. Sarah Hutton, (Florence: Olschki, 2007), 31–66; L. Simonutti, “Toland e gli inglesi del circolo di Furly a Rotterdam,” in Filosofi e cultura nel Settecento britannico, ed. Antonio Santucci (Bologna: Il Mulino), 2 vols., 1: 249–69. 8 On Bayle and Furly see: W.H. Barber, “Pierre Bayle, Benjamin Furly and Quakerism,” in De l’Humanisme aux Lumi`eres, Bayle et le protestantisme. Melanges en l’honneur d’Elisabeth Labrousse, ed. M. Magdelaine, M.-C.Pitassi, R. Whelan, A. McKenna (Paris: Universitas; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996) 623–33; Luisa Simonutti, “Bayle et ses amis: Paets, Furly, Shaftesbury, et le club de ‘La Lanterne’, ” in Pierre Bayle dans la R´epublique des Lettres, philosophie, religion, critique, ed. Antony McKenna et Gianni Paganini (Paris: H.Champion, 2004), 61–78. 9

See Appendix I, below.

10

Ibid.

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less their sword (which was put into their hands only against evil doers) in matters of faith or worship”.11 Christian doctrine is not “a notional science”, a speculative material subject of disputes to be entrusted to investigation by our brains or the rhetorical potential of language. Rather, it is a rule of justice, a moral canon which directs human life. The only way to maintain peace and unity within the diversity of irreconcilable opinions is, therefore, to pursue not the path of destruction and opposition but the path of love and charity. This, according to Locke, is an essential premise, and he goes on to delineate briefly, the features of a society which embraces all those who, with sincere heart, accept “the Word of Truth revealed in the Scripture, and obey the light which enlightens every man that comes into the world,”12 and to trace out the few and plain rules which should govern it.13 Locke was to return to reflect on the criteria and rules of conversation for a meeting of gentlemen and “savants” and to plan a society geared to the moral edification of its members. It is once again Pierre Des Maizeaux who recalls that, after his return to London, Locke set up a circle the aims of which were not to be confined to providing the opportunity for learned and pleasant conversation among its members, but were intended to be directed towards nurturing truth and developing a true Christian spirit as opposed to “a certain narrow spirit” which served only to provoke factious divisions.14 Against this “spirit of prejudice”, as Des Maizeaux emphasises, Locke recommended promoting the good of all human kind. This was an aim also shared by Peter King who had on various occasions in several well-known letters, discussed with Locke, topics such as the religious and political education of a young gentleman, the method for studying and interpreting Scripture, and a proposal for a group to promote Christian knowledge.15 Des Maizeaux who published the short essay Rules of a Society16 in which Locke set out a list of principles, to be signed by all the members of the society, at its weekly meetings proposing the pursuit of useful and not verbose knowledge and setting up the society as a promoter of truth and Christian charity17 —principles which echoed the opening propositions of his essay Pacifi k Christians. 11

Ibid.

12

Ibid.

13

“Decency and order in our assemblies being directed, as they ought, to edification, can need but very few and plain rules. Time and place of meeting being settled, if any thing else need regulation, the assembly itself, or four of the ancientest, soberest, and discreetest of the brethren, chosen for that occasion, shall regulate it”. Ibid. 14

Locke, A Collection, Dedication.

These five letters from Locke to Lord King appeared in The Remains of John Locke (London: E. Curll, 1714); they were published again in Locke, A Collection of Several Pieces, 330–57. 15

16 John Locke, “Rules of a Society, which met once a week, for their improvement in useful Knowledge, and for the promoting of Truth and Christian Charity”, in Locke, A Collection of Several Pieces, 358–62. 17

Ibid., Dedication.

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The Dry Club In London, in the more favourable new political climate ushered in by William of Orange, Locke, and William Popple formed a circle of friends and gentlemen, exponents of civic and regional politics and culture.18 On the recommendation of Locke himself, Popple elaborated his “Rules of the Dry Club: For the Amicable Improvement of Mix’d Conversation”,19 on the basis of these “pieces.” In point of fact Popple’s manuscript used Locke’s own proposals as the rules which were to be accepted by aspiring members; it also envisaged somewhat stricter rules for the introduction of new acolytes and the regulation of the individual meetings. More specifically, the contribution of all participants was called for in the discussion of each matter under debate. The commitment which such regulation demanded of the gentlemen and “savants” who were to take part in the activities of the Dry Club was emphasised by their mutual friend Benjamin Furly. In view of his many years’ experience in the organisation and his running of the meetings of his circle “De Lantaarn” in his home in Scheepmakershaven, Furly appeared to Locke and Popple to be the most appropriate person to consult on the regulations which were to govern the meetings of the Dry Club. William Popple, who had been Furly’s friend for some time, sent Furly a copy of the “Rules of the Dry Club.” Furly passed on to Locke his lively observations on the same: I received yesterday your acceptable lines adjoynd to the Letter of my Lady Masham of the 24th past, Where I see you are, Mr. Popple gave me an account of a Dry Club, and the Rules of it, began amongst you, but withal told me that you had been forc’t to quit there to take the fresh aire at Oates. I see nothing wanting in your Rules, but one thing, that is, a too strict binding of every one to speak to every question, even those that shal be sur le champ propounded, and that from the very first of their admission, without the lest leave to pass any of them tho a man be never so conscious of his inability to speak anything to the purpose upon the subject, which is enough to terrify a modest man from offering himself to your society. My thinks a month or 6 weeks time, till a man has learnd a little confidence might be allowed to a novice, but such it seems you desire not to be troubled with.20

The periodic meetings of the Dry Club, which brought together philosopher friends, Latitudinarians and Unitarians with some regularity, generally took place in London in the house of one of the participants. The meetings were devoted to open discussion of questions of political and religious liberty, and metaphysical, philosophical and ethical matters:–for example, the correct mode of behaviour in specific situations, or questions regarding the power of the imagination as a means of

18 On relations between Locke and Popple, cf. Luisa Simonutti, “Absolute, Universal, Equal and Inviolable Liberty of Conscience. Popple, Locke e il ‘Dry Club’,” in La formazione storica dell’alterit`a. Studi di storia della tolleranza nell’et`a moderna offerti a A. Rotond`o, a cura di H. M´echoulan, R.H. Popkin, G. Ricuperati, L. Simonutti (Florence: Olschki, 2001), 3 vols., 2: 707–49. 19

See Appendix II, below.

20

Locke, Correspondence, 4: 571 (letter 1562).

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communicating ideas.21 From the early 1690s, after Locke’s withdrawal to Oates, Popple became not only the secretary of the Dry Club, but also its guiding spirit. In his letters to Locke, Popple kept his friend informed about what was happening in London, telling him about their various friends and about new members admitted to the club. In November 1692 several of these can be identified as, in all probability, the Unitarian, Henry Hedworth, the Whig clergyman, William Stephens, Daniel Foot and Cromwell’s chaplain, Jeremiah White.22 Popple also kept Locke informed of the arguments proposed in the course of these meetings, but not so fully that he did not to ignite Locke’s curiosity, hoping thereby to persuade him to participate in person: The subjects we have been upon have been very important. The last was thus. It being supposed that God has given some General and Uniform Rule, or at least one same way of knowing his Will, though in never so different degrees, to all Mankinde, Q: 1. What that Rule is? 2. Of what weight or Authority that general Rule is in comparison with any other particular pretended or real Rule whatsoever? We dispatched the first, and are the next time to go upon the second head. But you must excuse me if I ad, that I do not tell you all this so much to satisfy your curiosity, as to excite you to come and see us. We fall naturally enough into Considerations of Weight: But you that know us, know how unequal our Shoulders are to such Burdens, and therefore I hope you will be so charitable as to let us have your assistance.23

Popple also kept informed Locke about books that had just been published and about political events. On other occasions Popple even reproached Locke for his negligence towards his creation (the Dry Club), which was actually expanding rapidly.24 Popple recalled the meeting of the Club which was held at Oates in the Spring of 1693. This was evidently an extraordinary assembly—since meetings usually took place in London. Thinking back on it, Popple regretted having forgotten to submit to his friend and the assembled members certain important matters for discussion.25 While we do not have the letters Locke wrote in reply, the care with which Popple keeps his friend up-to-date bears indirect witness to the constant interest of Locke in these meetings attended by a variety of participants. In the course of these letters William Popple shows particular interest in questions regarding religious liberty in England, and especially in relation to Unitarianism of which he declared himself a convinced supporter. He kept Locke up to date

21 The references to and accounts of these meetings appear in the letters from Popple to Locke in the course of the first half of the 1690s. After he was appointed Secretary of the Board of Trade, Popple’s letters to Locke hinge principally on matters related to this appointment. 22 Cf. The information provided by De Beer, editor of Locke, Correspondence, 4: 581–82 (letter 1567). 23

Ibid., 581.

Locke, Correspondence, 4: 621 (letter no. 1590), “Yet give me leave to say, Your Ofspring, the Dry Club, requires a little of your Care. Nay I am inclined to say, it deservs it. Tis a hopeful Childe, and now grows apace: and, what is more, it is pretty towardly. So that it is a great pity you should let it grow out of your knowledg, and leave it destitute of your further instructions”. 24

25

Ibid., 681 (letter 1630).

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on the affairs of important figures of the time, such as the Frenchman Th´eodore de Maimbourg, cousin of the more famous Louis Maimbourg, and at one time tutor to the Duke of Richmond. Th´eodore de Maimbourg’s abandoning of the Catholic faith in favour of Protestantism, and his subsequent return to Catholicism rendered him unpopular and suspect to both sides. Towards the end of his life several orthodox clergymen wanted him to make an open declaration of adherence to various doctrines, attempting, in their zeal, “to terrify him with threats of damnation unless he changed his opinion and repented. Some few others more moderate visiting him also, discoursed with him more charitably, and prayed with him.”26 Popple emphasised that Th´eodore de Maimbourg “dyed in all respects like a Christian Philosopher.” After his death, however, the echoes of the voices raised against him did not subside, and his tormented religious choice was held to be proof of his heterodoxy and of the presence on English soil of the much more serious danger represented by Socinianism, against which a more efficacious remedy would need to be found. Popple continues: The cry is Socinianism. They have been assembled upon it in a perfect Court of Inquisition, to the number of fourscore Ministers, and are about making Formularies and Tests to choak all that have not so wide a Swallow as themselves . . . And they say the King answer<ed> that he would not suffer any Socinians in his Dominions, but would have the Laws put in execution against them. But what that may signify, or whether these things may tend, I undertake not to determin.27

Popple and Locke as Readers of Nye Another subject Popple discussed with Locke in this correspondence concerned the Unitarian, Stephen Nye. On 22nd May 1695, Popple forwarded a letter to Locke, accompanied by several pages of notes containing reflections on Nye’s A Discourse concerning natural and revealed Religion,28 which had not yet been published, but which the two correspondents had been able to read in a manuscript copy. It had very likely come into Popple’s hands through the good offices of the Unitarian philanthropist, Thomas Firmin, promoter of various works by Nye. Popple evidently wished to involve his friend Locke in his reflections, to discuss with him certain aspects of Nye’s ideas and to solicit Locke’s response. After having expressed his interest in the work, Popple added, “I am perswaded, you know me to be so much of the same opinion with the Author, on this Subject.”29 He asserted that the crux of Nye’s argument lay in the interpretation of the figure and role of Christ. Popple

26

Ibid., 582 (letter 1567).

27

Ibid., Popple to Locke,12 November 1692. Cf. also letter no. 1630, ibid., 683.

Locke, Correspondence, 5: 377 (letter 1906). Stephen Nye, A Discourse concerning Natural and Revealed Religion; evidencing the Truth, and Certainty of both; by Considerations (for the most part) not yet touched by any (Glasgow, 1752, 1st ed. 1696). 28

29

Locke, Correspondence, 5: 377 (letter 1906).

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found in Nye confirmation of his own conviction that the purpose of Christ’s coming into the world was not to teach or impose a new law on the human race, “but only to revive, explain and enforce those general Laws of nature, which God had laid upon all men from the beginning.”30 Consequently, in Popple’s eyes, none of Christ’s commandments appeared to be strictly new in relation to the laws of nature, but were simply a confirmation of the same, because “the ground of all such Laws, and our Obligation to them, lye only in the nature of things, and in the relation in which we stand towards God and towards one another.”31 This idea is expressed by Nye with such clarity as to have for Popple the force of an axiom to which, as he emphasises, Nye consistently adheres throughout both the sections of the work. The demonstration of the factual truth of natural religion and its adequacy as a foundation of revealed religion, constituted the theoretical bulwark of Nye’s defence of revealed religion against the attacks of the atheists, the deists and the sceptics.32 In his manuscript notes on Nye’s Discourse concerning Natural and Revealed Religion, Popple agrees with Nye’s opinion regarding the existence and the necessity of a moral law which, in his view, had its foundations in the faith in a God and in the promise of future salvation. As regards the ritual aspect of revealed religion and the relationship of the sacraments to natural religion, Popple was convinced that these were legitimised precisely by their function of making a useful contribution to the ends of natural religion. He regarded as an indisputible truth, Nye’s statement that “the Natural Religion comprises the whole duty that we owe to God or men; whatsoever is to be beleiv’d or done by us.”33 Immediately afterwards, Popple asked himself, “What connexion have the sacraments with natural religion? The fore-going principles wil not allow them to be maintein’d any otherwise than by showing their usefulness to the ends of natural religion: which may very wel be done.”34 Nevertheless, both Nye and Popple were concerned to dissociate themselves from deism which, in the last decades of the seventeenth century, tended to be regarded as the seed of atheism.35 Without entering into a detailed discussion, Popple focuses on the question of the sufficiency of miracles to prove the truth 30

Ibid.

31

Ibid., 378.

32

Locke, Correspondence, 5: 378 (letter 1906).

33

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Locke Ms. c17, fol. 215v.

34

Ibid.

35

“Consequently to that they make all Events necessary, and laugh not onely at Revealed but even Natural Religion. I say Religion: For they talk big of Virtue and Morality. But when they lay all the grounds of both Virtue and Morality onely in the good-nature of particular persons, or in the fear of the Magistrate’s Rod, I fear their Superstructure will be very tottering. And what makes me fear this, is because I see plainly the Youth of this Age build all upon that Foundation. We are running from one Extream to another. Atheism, or, (if that word be too harsh), even Irreligion is a sad Sanctuary from the Mischiefs of Superstition. Must we then needs lye under either the one or the other? Is there no Medium? Yes certainly there is.” Ibid. Cf. Locke, Correspondence, 5: 519 (letter 2002). Popple also wrote: “Suffer me I beseech you to suggest to you some thoughts with which my own minde is at present deeply affected. The Reasonableness of Christianity (however Reasonable a Book it be) has I doubt had little Effect upon those that call themselves Deists in this Age. I dispute not how little they deserve that Title. The men I mean are such as deny all

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of revealed religion, and on the implications consequent upon the question of the eternity of matter. As regards the questions of innate knowledge, Popple reminded the author of the Discourse that, “the great Evidence that Mr Lock has given against innate notions, makes me very loth that in this Treatise any great stress should be laid upon connate knowledge.”36 In response to Popple, Locke made a number of observations on the, as yet unpublished, work of Stephen Nye. These concern principally the gnosiological aspects of the work. Locke manifested a certain perplexity about Nye’s account of the relationship between sensation and world of ideas, and more generally, of the relationship between immaterial objects and the concept of substance as well as the perception of objects in general and of their many properties and qualities.37 Finally, in drafting his notes, Locke also commented on some of the historical and hermeneutic issues raised by Nye, for example about the figure of the Messiah and the prophecy of his coming made to the people of Israel. He analysed the passages from St. John which recount how Jesus confronted the Law of Moses in the matter of the woman taken in adultery. Locke emphasised how, during his visit to Jerusalem Jesus had preferred to avoid frequent manifestations of his identity and of his earthly task so as not to enter into open conflict with the Hebrew laws. He added, however, that Jesus had openly declared to the Apostles that he was the Messiah. Locke concludes, “he had kept them [the Apostles] as servants in ignorance, but now had discovered himself openly as to his friends.”38 These are significant reflections which help to clarify the relations of Locke with the Unitarianism of Nye and with sixteenth-seventeenth century Continental Socinianism. Nye’s treatise—of which all we have mentioned here are the theoretical and problematic aspects highlighted by Popple and by Locke in their letters and their unpublished notes—Is deserving of attention particularly in view of its philosophical and religious context. From Cartesian philosophy to Locke’s gnosiology; from the biblical criticism of Spinoza, Le Clerc and Richard Simon to the religious liberalism of the Remonstrants and heterodox Jews such as Uriel Acosta and Isaac Orobio de Castro. An analysis of Nye’s Unitarianism could also provide a useful contribution to clarifying the term Socinianism which, at the end of the century, came to be used in a broad and generic manner, to denote not just a monotheist and anti-trinitarian religious position but also as an emblematic confirmation of the extreme dangerousness of heterodoxy, not just Socinianism.39

Immaterial Beings, though that dos not hinder them from talking of a God upon all occasions, but undoubtedly more for the sake of the Name than the Thing.” Ibid. 36

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Locke Ms. c17 , fol. 215v.

37

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Locke Ms. c27, fol. 92 v. Significantly, some of these themes were taken up again in a anonymous letter forwarded to the author of the Discourse. Nye was to respond at length to the reflections made, and later to publish both letters in an appendix to his Discourse. 38 39

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Locke Ms. c27, fol. 94r.

On the generic the definition of Socinianism at the end of the seventeenth century in relation to Locke, see John Marshall, Locke, Socinianism, ‘Socinianism’, and Unitarianism, in English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, ed. M.A. Stewart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 111– 182. Marshall among other things, stresses: “In the late seventeenth century the label “Socinian”

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Two Examples: Thomas Firmin, Thomas Aikenhead One of the promoters of English Unitarianism was Thomas Firmin; a friend of the Socinian, John Biddle, he was born in the same year as Locke and died in 1697. He was, as we mentioned, probably the means by which Unitarian writings reached Popple and Locke—not just the numerous works of Stephen Nye, but also several collections of treatises and polemics in defence of Unitarianism. Firmin was without doubt the philanthropist who supported the publication of Unitarian works and pamphlets and who provided economic assistance to Continental Socinian exiles and Irish Protestant refugees.40 He wrote essays on helping the poor, and one of these texts can be found in Locke’s library. (His was, moreover, an argument which Locke kept in mind during the years when he was a government official charged with collecting information about trade and the colonies). Firmin had friendly relations with Locke from the early 167041 was in correspondence with him during the first year of his sojourn in Oates. In 1694 he asked Locke with irrepressible curiosity: Sir, I have been inform’d that in your correspondence with Mr Limborch the learned Professor of Divinity at Amsterdam, he has acquainted you with a Story of a Damosel, who in studying the Controversy between the Jewish and Christian religion, was perswaded of the truth of the former against the latter; and that by reason of the Doctrin of the Trinity, in prejudice to the Unity of God, so plainly and earnestly asserted I the scriptures of the Old Testament; and that Mr Limborch was the chief Instrument in answering her Objections, and vindicating the truth of christian Religion. Now I have a great desire (and so have others of my Acquaintance) to know the particulars of the Transactions, and pray you to do me the favour to send ‘em me in writings.42

It was, moreover, precisely the article on the Trinity together with the questions of original sin, grace and free will, which was of central concern to the English Unitarians. The author of the Account of Mr. Firmin’s Religion and of the present state of the unitarian controversy, possibly Stephen Nye himself, who had already written a life of his friend, wrote in 1698, “Mr. Firmin and the English Unitarians, never were entirely in the sentiments of F. Socinus; they embraced the opinions of Mr. J. Biddle,”43 and later on added: Those in England, who call themselves Unitarians, never were entirely in the sentiments of Socinus, or the Socinians. Notwithstanding, as our Opposers have pleas’d themselves in

thus gathered together Socinians, and Unitarians who were not specifically Socinian, with those who were not Unitarian but were associated with some Socinian arguments or tendencies,” ibid., 113. Cf. further W.M. Spellman, John Locke and the Problem of Depravity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. ch.5. On Locke and Socinianism see Luisa Simonutti, “John Locke e il socinianesimo,” in Siena, Sozzini e la f losofi in Europa, ed. Mariangela Priarolo and Emanuela Scribano (Siena: Accademia senese degli Intronati, 2005), 211–49. 40

On Firmin, see Daniela Bianchi, “Thomas Firmin: eresia, filantropia e istituzioni nell’Inghilterra della fine del XII secolo,” in Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica, 10 (1980): 45–96. 41

Locke, Correspondence, 1 (letters 260 and 314).

42

Ibid., 5 (letter 1759).

43

An Account of Mr. Firmin’s Religion (London 1698), 4.

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calling us Socinians, we have not always declined the name; because in interpreting many texts of Scripture, we cannot but approve and follow the judgment of those Writers; who are confessed by all to be excellent Critics, and very Judicious.44

I would also note that the putative “Socinianism” of Locke (in so far as he can be called a Socinian) is lacking the political dimension which was markedly present among the second generation Socinians—we have only to think of Wissowaty, Przypkowsky, Schlichtingius—and that was a crucial aspect even among the early Socinians, to wit the controversy between Faustus Socinus and Paleologus. This was a debate which hinged not only on the matter of toleration but also on questions such as whether the political allegiance of the Christian is subordinate to obedience to the teachings of the gospel, and which is linked to questions about the political loyalty of Socinians. The extensive presence of continental Socinian writings in the library of Locke is well known, marking his reading both during his sojourn in Holland, and during the years at Oates. It seems to me that Locke was an indirect tributary of continental Socinianism when he turned his attention to the controversy which was inflaming the English church and the dissenters in the early 1690s. Among English Socinian writings, many of them pamphlets, Locke possessed the work of John Biddle, the three principal collections of texts on the unity of God, numerous essays by Stephen Nye, the documents relating to the controversy between Robert South and Sherlock, as well as various writings in defence of the Trinity. It appears to me that the role of the Messiah, Christology, and along with this the question of the unity of God, are at the centre of Locke’s reflections in the first half of the 1690s, as illustrated in both the Reasonableness and in the letters to Limborch.45 On the question of Unitarianism, mention might be made of an episode of enormous relevance which it must have in Locke’s view. That is, the trial for blasphemy of the medical Edinburgh University student, Thomas Aikenhead, who was hanged on 8 January 1697 in the place where he had been born in March 1676. It was the last death sentence carried out on British soil for this offence. Aikenhead was accused of atheism, and there was no shortage of informers who declared that he had denied the doctrine of the Trinity, embracing Socinianism and Spinozism. Two short writings from a one of many witnesses, the Scot, Mungo Craig, are extant.46 In A Satyr

44

Ibid., 8.

45

See the analysis carried out by Victor Nuovo and Cristina Pitassi precisely on the Christology of the Reasonableness. Maria-Cristina Pitassi, “Le Christ lockien a` l’´epreuve des textes: de la Reasonableness aux Paraphrase and notes,” in Le Christ entre orthodoxie et lumi`eres: actes du colloque tenu a` Gen`eve en aoˆut 1993, ed. Maria-Cristina Pitassi (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1994), 101–122; Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Christology as a Key to Understanding his Philosophy” in The Philosophy of John Locke: New Perspectives, ed. Peter R. Anstey (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 129–153). For Locke and Socinianism, see Luisa Simonutti, “John Locke e il socinianesimo” in Siena, Fausto Sozzini, ed. Priarolo and Scribano, 211–49. 46 John Gordon, Thomas Aikenhead: a Historical Review, in relation to Mr. Macaulay and The Witness ... Third edition (London: E.T. Whitfield, 1856). Michael Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-century Britain (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), chap. 15.

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against Atheistical Deism with the Genuine Character of a Deist,47 he explained the reasons for Aikenhead’s imprisonment, and the means he had by which he tried to save himself: by lying and dissembling. Mungo Craig did not believe the sincerity of his repentance, and distanced himself from him. In the second piece, prepared at the time Aikenhead was hanged he stated that, “A lye is no scandal”.48 It was a trial which fired public opinion. Locke was no less engaged: his papers include Aikenhead’s pleas, the extensive evidence against him, his letters of self-defence, copies of the letters which he sent to his friends, including a letter written on the day of his execution, and a letter from Somerset which provided a detailed account of the phases of the trial—a whole range of material, which he classified with care. Significantly, however, Locke’s interest in the event appears to have no echo in his correspondence, except indirectly in an emblematic observation made by Pierre Coste apropos the author of the Reasonableness of Christianity: Le plan que l’Auteur s’est fait, est tr`es-beau, et qu’il l’a rempli fort heureusement. Peut-ˆetre a-t-il laiss´e quelques vuides dans son Ouvrage, mais je croy qu’on peut assˆurer qu’il a eˆu ses raisons de le faire. Dans l’´etat o`u sont les Controverses de Religion, il y a bien des choses qu’il faut taire de toute n´ecessit´e pour ne pas perdre le fruit des choses qu’il faut n´ecessairement publier.49

The Aikenhead affair could not fail to increase Locke’s already marked caution, and his decisive distancing of himself from the accusations of Socinianism which Edwards and Stillingfleet were levelling against him during these years.

Conclusion. The Seraglio at Oates “Mr Lock was Governour of the Seraglio at Oates.”50 With these slanderous words, his enemy, John Edwards, attempted to stigmatise his sojourn at Lady Masham’s home, and the intellectual life he promoted there. It was principally through the correspondence which Locke maintained with numerous exponents of English and Continental culture that we can picture to ourselves at Oates a “virtual salon” in which the matters discussed ranged over religion, pedagogical, political and economic ideas and much besides. But it was also thanks to the hospitality and the intellectual curiosity (the writings and the letters) of Damaris Cudworth Masham

Mungo Craig, A Satyr against Atheistical Deism with the Genuine Character of a Deist. To which is prefixt an account of Mr. Aikinhead’s notions, who is now in prison for the same damnable apostacy (Edinburgh: Robert Hutchison, 1696). 47

48 Mungo Craig, A lye is no scandal. Or a vindication of Mr. Mungo Craig from a ridiculous calumny cast upon him by T.A. who was executed for apostacy: At Edinburgh, the 8 of January 1697 (Edinburgh, Written, January 15, 1697). 49

Locke, Correspondence, 5: 661 (letter 2107).

Ibid., 6: 150 (letter 2281). See Roger Woolhouse, Locke. A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) for an accurate reconstruction of Locke’s sojourn at Oates. 50

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—the inspiring muse of the intellectual life of the manor of Oates51 —that the house became a port of call for former Continental acquaintances and for their families, and a haven for English friends, providing the opportunity for visits marked by study and learned conversation, as in the case of Isaac Newton. Here are just some of the names of the most assiduous and famous frequenters of what John Edwards defined as “the seraglio” of Oates, of which Locke was the Gouvernor: Pierre Des Maizeaux, Frans van Limborch, son of the Amsterdam theologian, Pierre Coste, friend and translator, and tutor of lady Masham”s only son, Edward Clarke, Peter King, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, the aforementioned William Popple, Lord Peterborough, and Isaac Newton. Another friend, Benjamin Furly, despite having planned to do so several times, appears to have never visited Oates although his son did so on various occasions. It was, nevertheless, Furly who regularly reported to Locke about his friends from the “Lantaarn” club and the most recent English-Dutch political events. Philippus van Limborch was another “virtual visitor”. The intense letters of Molyneaux, and above all those to Limborch on the unity of God, and the letter from Limborch to Locke, which as we have seen aroused the curiosity of Firmin, were published in French and Dutch editions in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Examples of the far-reaching reverberations of this “virtual cultural salon” are numerous.

Appendix I Pacifick Christians52 1688 f) We think nothing necessary to be known, or believed for salvation, but what God hath revealed. g) We therefore embrace all those who, in sincerity, receive the Word of Truth revealed in the Scripture, and obey the light which enlightens every man that comes into the world. h) We judge no man in meats, or drinks, or habits, or days, or any other outward observancies, but leave every one to his freedom in the use of those outwards things

51

Cf. Sarah Hutton, “Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham”, Luisa Simonutti, “Lady Damaris Cudworth Masham.” 52 Oxford: Bodleian Library, Ms. Locke, c27, c. 80a, printed in The Life of John Locke, ed. Peter King, 273–275; also in Mario Sina, “Testi teologico-filosofici lockiani dal MS Locke c. 27 della Lovelace Collection,” in Rivista di f losofi neo-scolastica, 64 (1972): 73–75; Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 304–306; Luisa Simonutti, “ ‘Absolute, Universal, Equal and Inviolable Liberty of Conscience.’ Popple, Locke e il ‘Dry Club’,” in La formazione storica dell’alterit`a. Studi di storia della tolleranza nell’et`a moderna offerti a A. Rotondo, ed. H. M´echoulan, R.H. Popkin, G. Ricuperati, L. Simonutti (Florence: Olschki, 2001), 3 vols, 2: 707–49, 737–38.

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j)

k)

l)

m)

n)

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which he thinks can most contribute to build up the inward man in righteousness, holiness, and the true love of God, and his neighbour, in Christ Jesus. If any one find any doctrinal parts of Scripture difficult to be understood, we recommend him, - 1st . The study of the Scriptures in humility and singleness of hearth: 2nd . Prayer to the Father of light to enlighten him: 3rd . Obedience to what is already revealed to him, remembering that the practice of what we do know in the surest way to more knowledge; our infallible guide having told us, if any man will do the will of Him that sent me, he shall know of the doctrines, John vii. 17. 4th . We leave him to the advice and assistance of those whom he thinks best able to instruct him. No men, or society of men, having any authority to impose their opinions or interpretations on any other, the meanest Christian. Since, in matters or religion, every man must know, and believe, and give an account for himself. We hold it to be an indispensable duty for all Christians to maintain love and charity in the diversity of contrary opinions: by which charity we do not mean an empty sound, but an effectual forbearance and good-will, carrying men to a communion, friendship and mutual assistance, one of another, in outward as well as spiritual things; and by debarring all magistrates from making use of their authority, much less their sword, (which was put into their hands only against evil doers,) in matters of faith or warship. Since the Christian Religion we profess is not a notional science, to furnish speculation to the brain, or discourse to the tongue, but a rule of righteousness to influence our lives, Christ having given himself to redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a people zealous of good works, (Titus ii. 14.) we profess the only business of our public assemblies to be to exhort thereunto laying aside all controversy and speculative questions, instruct and encourage one another in the duties of a good life, which is acknowledged to be the great business of true religion, and to pray God for the assistance of his Spirit for the enlightening our understanding and subduing our corruptions, that so we may return unto him a reasonable and acceptable service, and show our faith by our works, proposing to ourselves and others the example of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, as the great pattern for our imitation. One alone being our master, even Christ, we acknowledge no masters of our assembly; but if any man, in the spirit of love, peace, and meekness, has a word of exhortation, we hear him. Nothing being so oppressive or having proved so fatal to unity, love, and charity, the first great characteristical duties of Christianity, as men’s fondness of their own opinions, and their endeavours to set them up, and have them followed, instead of the Gospel of peace; to prevent those seeds of dissension and division, and maintain unity in the difference of opinions which we know cannot be avoided-if any one appear contentious, abounding in his own sense rather than in love, and desirous to draw followers after himself, with destruction or opposition to others, we judge him not to have learned Christ as he ought, and therefore not fit to be a teacher of others. Decency and order in our assemblies being directed, as they ought, to edification, can need but very few and plain rules. Time and place of meeting being settled,

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if any thing else need regulation, the assembly itself, of four of the ancientest, soberest and discreetest of the brethren, chosen for that occasion, shall regulate it. o) From every brother that, after admonition, p) We each of us think it our duty to propagate the doctrine and practice of universal good-will and obedience in all place, and on all occasions, as God shall give us opportunity.

Appendix II Rules of the Dry Club: For the Amicable Improvement of Mix’d Conversation53 The Place of Meeting shall, in the begining, be at the House, or Lodging, of each severall Member, successively. He at whose House or Lodging the Meeting is, shall for that time preside in it, and be stiled Proposer. If hereafter the Company should think fit, to appoint any one fixed Place, for their Meeting; Yet, however, the Proposer shall every time be changed; And that, in some other fixed Method. And, at any time, in the Absence of the Person whose Turn it is be Proposer, He that is first in Rank, according to the following Artickle, shall take the Place. The Rank to be observed in every Meeting, shall be; That He that comes first into the Room shall take his Seat on the Left scand of the Proposer. And so every shall follow to take their Seats, on the Left Hand of each other, in order, as they come in. The first think to be done in every Meeting, shall be the Admission of new Members; if any be present, that have been duly chosen; according to the Rules below explained. The first Question to be spoke to in every Meeting, shall be what the Proposer of the last Meeting (after all Debates were done) proposed, then, to be debated in the next. This Question being proposed a new by the Present Proposer; He that sits next on the left hand shall first speak what he has to say to it; And after him those that follow, in the same Order: Every one endeavouring that their Answers may not be onely loose Discourses upon the Subiect; but that they tend directly to, and (as much as possible) end in the Resolution of the Question proposed. Till the Question proposed has gone once round, in the forementioned Order, no body shall speak to it any more then once. But after it has gone once round, if any one thinks fit to add any think further, he may then speak to it a second time: Which is all that is, regularly, and of course, to be permited.

53 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Locke c25, cc. 56r–57v. The manuscript, dated 1692 by Locke, was actually sent to him by William Popple. It is published in Luisa Simonutti, “ ‘Absolute . . . Liberty of Conscience’,” in La formazione storica dell’alterit`a, 2: 707–749, 741–743.

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Yet, if at any time, through the Importance of the Question, and the Moderation of the Debate, the Company should be inclined, tacitly, to connive at the continuance of further Discourses upon the same Matter; (thˆo that, and every thing else, alwayes, inviolably, in the same regular order) When sooner any Member shall either think that such Question has been sufficiently discuss’d, or that any appearance of growing Warmth is fit to be stop’d, (and that it comes to the Turn of such Members to speak) It shall be than in his power, by minding onely the Proposer of the foregoing Order, to put an immediate End to the Debate on that Question, at that time. And the Company shall theire upon, without more adoe, proceed to a new Question. But since it may happen that Any one may, yet not have sufficiently explained himself; If either He, or any other, think fit, They may in the next, or any following Meeting (after the first Question, which had been appointed for that Meeting, is ended) desire leave for a further Explication, or Clearing, of any such former Matter. When the first Question is ended. If no such Desire of Explaining former Matter intervene, and Time permit; Then he that sits next to the Proposer on the Left Hand shall offer another Question. And He that sits next to him that offers the Question shall speak first to it; And so on; Going still to the Left Hand, in offering new Questions, and speaking to what Questions shall be proposed, both in the same order, as long as the Meeting lasts. All that is said shall, for Orders sake, be addressed to the Proposer onely, and to no body elce of the Company; And He that, in his Turn, is to offer any Question, shall in the first place explain it, and the Reason why he desires to have it discuss’d; And then shall offer it to the Proposer, that if may be him be proposed to the Company. After which, and not till then it shall be spoke to by the severall Members, in the order before Explained. That all offence may the more effectually be avoyded; no body shall, in any of these Questions or Debates, mention the Name either of any Person liveing, present or absent, or of any Church, Seat, or Society of Men whatsoever, in this Island. The sole End of this Meeting being for a Serious and Impartial Enquiry after Truth, in Matters of Universal Concerment to Men, as Men; With the Maintenance of Charity under Different Opinions; and the Promoting of Peace and a Good life; It is desired that, in all Enquiries and Debates, every one would have a Constant Eye to this Great End, and regulate himself by it. After all Debates are ended, the Proposer (as has before been intimated) shall propose unto the Company a new Question, to be considered of against the next Meeting. After the Proposal of that Question, Whoever has any Person in his Eye that he thinks fit to be introduced, as a new Member, into this Society, may name him for that End. In the Close of the next, or any other following Meeting, He that so named another (or, in his Absence, any one of the Company that will answer for the Person named for a new Member, as is below required) may desire leave to speak to him to that purpose. After Leave has been given, in this manner, to speak to any Person; That Person shall be admitted into this Society, whensoever he comes. But if that Leave have by

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the plurality of Suffrages been refuss’d; He may, after three months, if any of the Company think fit, be named again a second time, in the same manner. Whoever desires Leave to speak to any Person, in order to introduce him into this Society, according to the Method about explained, shall then declare That he knows that Person; And that he judges him to be a Worthy, Sober, and Ingennuous Man; Sutted to the Conversation designed in these Meetings; And one that will satisfy the Company, by his Affirmative Answer to these following Questions; Which are to be asked everyone at his first coming into this Society, together with his Consent to be observation of all the Rules of it. 1:2. Whether he has an Universal Charity and Good will to all Men, as Men, of what Church or Profession of Religion soever they are? 2:2. Whether he thinks that no Man ought, any way, to be harmed or prejudiced, in his name, Goods, or Person, for any Speculative Opinion in Religion, or outward Way of Worship? 3:2. Whether he loves and seeks Truth for Truth’s sake; And will do his Endeavour impartialy to find, and receive it, himself, and to communicate and propagate it to others? Dry Club 9254

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Annotation in Locke’s hand.

Chapter 11

Vision in God and Thinking Matter: Locke’s Epistemological Agnosticism Used Against Malebranche and Stillingfleet Paul Schuurman

Introduction Every philosopher that assumes a rigorous Cartesian separation between thought and matter, or mind and body, will be faced with the question of how these entities can interact. This problem of interaction can be divided into various subsidiary questions. One important question is how our minds can perceive bodies. This is the question that Nicolas Malebranche sets out to answer in Part II of Book III of his Recherche de la V´erit´e (1674–1675).1 His well-known solution is the Vision in God: we perceive bodies through their ideas and these ideas are in God. I shall discuss the reply to this hypothesis by John Locke, who produced four manuscripts on the subject, three of which were written in 1692–1693 and the fourth not later then 1693. I shall then move on to the controversy with Edward Stillingfleet, in which Locke became embroiled in 1696–1698 about the possibility of thinking matter. I shall point to the connection between these two debates and the remarkable similarities between Locke’s argumentative strategies. I shall argue that although neither of these polemics has received much scholarly attention taken separately, and even less when taken together, they are highly indicative of a vital aspect of Locke’s epistemology: his agnosticism about God, mind and matter. Locke is not agnostic about the existence of these entities but about the nature of their properties. He is not an ontological but an epistemological agnostic. In modern secondary literature attention has been devoted to Locke’s agnosticism,2 and John Yolton has rightly remarked that when Locke wrote about thinking matter, he wrote “about the limitation

Nicolas Malebranche, Recherche de la v´erit´e o`u l’on traite de la nature de l’esprit de l’homme et de l’usage qu’il en doit faire pour e´ viter l’erreur dans les sciences, 3 vols, ed. Genevi`eve RodisLewis (Paris: J. Vrin, 1962–1964) (cited herafter as Recherche), Bk 3, Pt 2, Ch. 1, Sect. 1, vol. I, p. 417: “je parle principalement ici des choses mat´erielles qui certainement ne peuvent s’unir a` notre ame, de la fac¸on qui est n´ecessaire afin qu’elle les apperc¸oive: parce qu’´etant e´ tendu¨es, & l’ame ne l’´etant pas, il n’y a point de rapport entr’elles.” 1

See Michael Ayers, Locke. Epistemology and Ontology, Vol. 2: Ontology (London: Routledge, 1993), 148.

2

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 177–193. and Legacy, 

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of human knowledge”3 . Yet no single article has been devoted to a comparison of Locke’s agnostic arguments against the Vision in God with those in favour of the possibility of thinking matter.4

Vision in God: Texts Malebranche defended his hypothesis concerning the Vision in God in the First Edition of the Recherche and all subsequent editions. He provided additional arguments in chapter X of the “Eclaircissements,” which were published in a separate third volume to the main work in the Third Edition by Andr´e Pralard (1678).5 A third and last form of the argument appeared in Malebranche’s 1693 reply to criticism by Pierre Sylvain R´egis in the latter’s Cartesian textbook, Cours entier de philosophie (1691). According to an entry in his notebooks, Locke bought the Recherche in March 1676,6 but it is not until 1 March 1685 that some brief notes in his Journal on the teaching of mathematics give clear proof of him actually reading the work.7 There are no clear indications that during his years in France he ever met Malebranche.8 Malebranche’s best known British follower was John Norris (1657-1711), who defended the Vision in God in his book Reason and Religion (1689).9 In 1690 he published some Cursory Reflection , which were appended to his Christian Blessedness.10 The Cursory Reflection was the first published attack on John Locke’s Essay after its appearance in December 1689. A critical review of Norris’s attack was published by Locke’s friend Jean le Clerc in the Biblioth`eque Universelle (1691); and an English translation of this review appeared in the third volume of the Athe-

John Yolton, Thinking Matter. Materialism in Eighteenth Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 14.

3

See, however, Charlotte Johnston, “Locke’s Examination of Malebranche and John Norris,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (1958): 551–8, p. 553, on Locke’s MS c. 28, fols 107–112. 5 More precisely, this is the “Troisi`eme e´ tat,” on which were based several “Editions,” ´ including the Third and the Fourth; see Genevi`eve Rodis-Lewis, “Introduction” to Recherche, 1: viii. 4

6

MS Locke f. 15, p. 15.

7

MS Locke f. 8, p. 264.

J. Lough, Locke’s Travels in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), xxxix; see also Gabriel Bonno, Les relations intellectuelles de Locke avec la France. University of California Publications in Modern Philosophy, 38. 2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955), 58.

8

9 John Norris, Reason and Religion: or, the grounds and measures of devotion, consider’d from the nature of God, and the nature of man, in several contemplations, with exercises of devotion (London: S. Manship, 1689; repr. of the second edition of 1693: Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001). 10 John Norris, Cursory Reflection upon a Book call’d An Essay concerning Human Understanding (London: S. Manship, 1690), appended to Christian Blessedness: or, Discourses upon the Beatitudes of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (London: S. Manship, 1690; repr. New York: Garland Press, 1978).

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nian Gazette, also in 1691. Norris replied to this English version in 1692 with A Brief Consideration.11 Locke’s relations with Norris were initially friendly, but a private misunderstanding about a letter in 1692 incurred Locke’s implacable wrath, and it seems that it was only after this unfortunate accident that Locke was motivated to draft three responses to both Norris and Malebranche himself. The manuscripts containing these reactions are currently deposited in the Bodleian Library and none were published during Locke’s lifetime. 1. MS Locke c. 28, fols 107-112, “JL to Mr Norris”/“JL Answer to Mr Norris Reflections 92,” manuscript in Locke’s hand, published by Richard Acworth in The Locke Newsletter 2 (1971): 8-11 (referred to hereafter as “Answer to Norris”). 2. MS Locke d. 3, pp. 1-86, “JL Of seeing all thing<s> in God 1693,” manuscript in the hand of an amanuensis, published by Peter King as “An Examination of P. Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things In God,” in Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke (London: J. Churchill, 1706), 137-213 (referred to hereafter as “Examination”). 3. MS Locke d. 3, pp. 89-109, “Some other loose thoughts which I set down as they came in my way in a hasty perusal of some of Mr Norris’s writeings, to be better digested when I shall have leisure to make an End of this Argument,” published in 1720 by Pierre Des Maizeaux as “Remarks upon Some of Mr. Norris’s Books” 1720 (referred to hereafter as “Remarks”).12 The hand of Locke is visible in corrections and additions to both (2) and (3), but much more prominently in (2) than in (3). 4. Finally, there is an unpublished fourth text, “Recherche”; MS Locke c. 28, fol. 159r-159v (this text will be referred to by its two first words: “Things material”). The critical queries in this text all pertain to the Vision in God or to related problems discussed in Part II, Book III, chapters 1, 2, and 5 of the Recherche. The most complete discussion of MSS (1)–(3) can still be found in an article by Charlotte Johnston, although she does not mention MS (4).13 The dates of the first two texts were entered by Locke himself (1692 and 1693). The third text, “Remarks,” is dated 1693 by Johnston. Its relative order vis-`a-vis the two previous texts is relatively straightforward: the “Remarks” are entered on the pages following the “Examination” in the same manuscript.14 Moreover, the phrase “Some other loose thoughts” suggests that it is a continuation of a previous text, and the “Examination,” which ends with “Thus far 1693,” seems the most likely candidate. In addition,

A Brief Consideration of the Remarques made upon the foregoing Reflection by the Gentlemen of the Athenian Society follows the Cursory Reflection appended to the second edition of the Christian Blessedness (London: S. Manship, 1692). 11

12 A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr Locke, Never before printed, or not extant in his Works (London: R. Francklin, 1720), 153–175. 13

Johnston, “Locke’s Examination.”

14

It should be noted, though, that the quires of this manuscript were never bound together.

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since Locke replies to Norris’s Brief Consideration of 1692, we can be sure that the “Remarks” were written after this tract. Hence the date suggested by Johnston for the “Remarks,” 1693, seems plausible. “Things material” was originally enclosed in a letter by Locke to an unknown person, dated 3 December 1693 by de Beer, who remarks that the connection between the two pieces “appears to be fortuitous.”15 Quotations from all of these manuscripts are based on my own transcriptions; paragraph numbers are those of the original manuscripts.16 Johnston has correctly remarked that Norris’s role as catalyst for Locke’s reactions has been underestimated, not in the least because Peter King in his edition of the “Examination” had suppressed paragraphs 1, 3-5, and also a sarcastic allusion to “A certain Gent”,17 which all show that Norris was very much at the centre of Locke’s attention. Hence Johnston writes that “it is plain that in attacking the fountain head of his theories, Locke was more concerned to strike a blow at Malebranche’s disciple”18 and also that the “Examination” was not directed primarily against Malebranche, “but against Norris through his acknowledged master.”19 When Locke writes to William Molyneux on 28 March 1693 about the possibility of adding a chapter on the Vision in God, he is perhaps making an allusion to Norris.20 In addition, the very title of the Remarks indicates that we are dealing with “Some other loose thoughts which I set down as they came in my way in a hasty perusal of some of Mr Norris’s writeings.” Yet for all the importance of Norris in occasioning Locke’s replies, and in spite of Norris being a philosopher in his own right who was not a slavish follower of Malebranche, the fact remains that Norris added little to the hypothesis of the Vision in God that had not already been supplied by Malebranche himself. Consequently it is not surprising that the substance of Locke’s arguments against the Vision in God is directed against Malebranche, not against Norris. Indeed this is what Locke had announced himself in para. 5 of the “Examination”: “He [Norris] will pardon me if I have recourse for my information to him that is looked on as the author of it [Malebranche].” Moreover, Locke’s MS “Things material” proves that he was quite able of discussing Malebranche without any reference to Norris at all. Finally, when Locke, in his correspondence with William Molyneux in March-April 1695, again suggests and then finally rejects the possibility of including his comments on the Vision in God in the next edition of the Essay, his main

15

De Beer in Locke, Correpondence, 4:756 (letter 1678).

16

I have not signalled scribal additions and deletions, which in the case of the quotations used for the present article were all minor. Occasionally I have supplied letters missing in the original manuscripts; these editorial insertions are marked between < >. 17 “A certain Gent: I know, would have found fault with this want of method in another, and to tell where Ideas were to be seen, before he had told us, what they were would have been an unpardonable fault to him.” Op. cit., para. 29. 18

Johnston, “Locke’s Examination,” 554.

19

Ibid., 557.

20

Correpondence, 4: 665 (letter 1620).

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concern seems to be the substance of Malebranche’s philosophy, not his old quarrel with Norris, who receives no mention at all.21 Strictures can also be put on Locke’s sources within the Malebranchean corpus. Malebranche’s 1693 arguments for the Vision in God came too late to influence Locke’s polemics with Norris. Similarly, Malebranche’s elucidations in the tenth “Eclaircissement” of the Recherche had no influence on the three texts by Locke mentioned above under (1)-(3)-(4), although they are addressed in (2), i.e. in the “Examination.”22 However, it is safe to say that most of Locke’s arguments against the Vision in God pertain to the guise in which they appeared in the first editions of Malebranche’s Recherche, and it is to this formulation that I shall now turn.

Vision in God: Malebranche At the start of the second part of Book III of the Recherche, Malebranche makes the following elegant, if perhaps overconfident observation: I think everyone agrees that we do not perceive objects external to us by themselves. We see the sun, the stars, and an infinity of objects external to us; and it is not likely that the soul should leave the body to stroll about the heavens, as it were, in order to behold all these objects.23

The objects of our minds are not material objects themselves, but ideas: “Thus, by the word idea, I mean here nothing other than the immediate object, or the object closest to the mind, when it perceives something.”24 For Malebranche the question of how we can perceive material objects should be couched in terms of the relation between objects and ideas. He thinks that he can narrow down these relations to five distinct possibilities: We assert the absolute necessity, then, of the following: either (a) the ideas we have of bodies and of all other objects we do not perceive by themselves come from these bodies or objects; or (b) our soul has the power of producing these ideas; or (c) God has produced

21 See Locke to W. Molyneux (8 March 1695), Correpondence, 5: 287 (letter 1857); W. Molyneux to Locke (26 March 1695), Correpondence, 5: 317 (letter 1867); Locke to W. Molyneux (26 April 1695), Correpondence, 5: 353 (letter 1887); see also Locke to Peter King (4 and 25 October 1704), Correpondence, 8: 412–413 (letter 3647). Cf. Franc¸ois Duchesneau, L’Empirisme de Locke (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1973), 207. 22

“Examination,” paras 43, 52, and 58 ff.

Recherche, 3. 2. 1, vol. I, p. 413: “Je croi que tout le monde tombe d’accord, que nous n’appercevons point les objets qui sont hors de nous par eux-mˆemes. Nous voyons le Soleil, les Etoiles, & une infinit´e d’objets hors de nous; & il n’est pas vraisemblable que l’ame sorte du corps, & qu’elle aille, pour ainsi dire, se promener dans les cieux, pour y contempler tous ces objets.” The translation of this quotation (and subsequent quotations) from the Recherche is by Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp: Nicolas Malebranche, The Search after Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) (hereafter cited as LO), 217. 23

24 Recherche 3. 2. 6, vol. I, p. 414: “Ainsi par ce mot id´ee, je n’entends ici autre chose, que ce qui est l’object imm´ediat, ou plus proche de l’esprit, quand il apperc¸oit quelque objet” (LO, 217).

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them in us while creating the soul or produces them every time we think about a given object; or (d) the soul has in itself all the perfections it sees in bodies; or else (e) the soul is joined to a completely perfect being that contains all intelligible perfections, or all the ideas of created beings.25

He rejects (a)-(d) in favour of (e), the famous Vision in God.26 God has the ideas of all the creatures that He created in Himself, since otherwise He could not have created them. We know furthermore “that through His presence God is in close union with our minds, such that He might be said to be the place of minds as space is, in a sense, the place of bodies.”27 Given these two assumptions, “the mind surely can see what in God represents created beings, since what in God represents created beings is very spiritual, intelligible, and present to the mind.”28 Our minds can see what in God represents created beings, provided that God wishes to reveal these objects to our minds. There are three reasons for assuming that this is indeed God’s wish. The most important reason, according to Malebranche, is that when we want to think about something in particular we first cast a glance over all beings in general and only then “apply ourselves to the consideration of the object we wish to think about.”29 This confirms his thesis that all our particular ideas of created beings “are but limitations of the general idea of the Creator.”30 Moreover, there is an economy in nature. God does great things by small and simple means. He could have chosen to produce “as many infinities of infinite numbers of ideas as there are created minds,”31 but he has chosen the more simple option of having the idea

25 Recherche, 3. 2. 1. 2, vol. I, p. 417: “Nous assurons donc qu’il est absolument n´ecessaire, que les id´ees que nous avons des corps, & de tous les autres objets que nous n’appercevons point par eux-mˆemes, viennent de ces mˆemes corps, ou de ces objets: ou bien que nˆotre ame ait la puissance de produire ces id´ees: ou que Dieu les ait produites avec elle en la cr´eant, ou qu’il les produise toutes les fois qu’on pense a` quelque objet: ou que l’ame ait en elle-mˆeme toutes les perfections qu’elle voit dans ces corps: ou enfin qu’elle soit unie avec un eˆ tre tout parfait, & qui renferme g´en´eralement toutes les perfections intelligibles, ou toutes les id´ees des eˆ tres cr´eez” (LO, 219).

See also Steven Nadler, Malebranche and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 137–140.

26

27 Recherche, 3. 2. 6, vol. I, p. 437: “que Dieu est tres-´etroitement uni a` nos ames par sa pr´esence, de sorte qu’on peut dire qu’il est le lieu des esprits, de mˆeme que les espaces sont en un sens le lieu des corps” (LO, 230). 28

Ibid. “Ces deux choses e´ tant suppos´ees, il est certain que l’esprit peut voir ce qu’il y a dans Dieu qui represente les eˆ tres cr´eez, puisque cela est tres-spirituel, tres-intelligible, & tres-present a` l’esprit” (LO, 231).

29 Recherche, 3. 2. 6, vol. I, p. 440: “que lors que nous voulons penser a` quelque chose en particulier, nous jettons d’abord la vˆue¨ sur tous les eˆ tres, & nous nous appliquons ensuit a` la consideration de l’objet auquel nous souhaitons de penser” (LO, 232).

Recherche, 3. 2. 6, vol. I, p. 443: “Ainsi comme nous n’aimons aucune chose que par l’amour n´ecessaire que nous avons pour Dieu, nous ne voyons aucune chose que par la connoissance naturelle que nous avons de Dieu: & toutes les id´ees particuli´eres que nous avons des cr´eatures, ne sont que des limitations de l’id´ee du Cr´eateur’ (LO, 233). 30

31 Recherche, 3. 2. 6, vol. I, p. 438: “autant d’infinitez de nombres infinis d’id´ees, qu’il y a d’esprits cr´eez” (LO, 231).

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of each material object only once, in himself, and allowing each of us to see the object in question through its idea in Himself. Finally, the Vision in God admirably expresses the fact that we can know nothing without God, 32 or, as is attested by 2 Cor. 3: 5: “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God.”

Vision in God: Locke Locke agrees with Malebranche that we perceive objects through their ideas. Actually, distinct echoes of Malebranche’s definition can be heard in Locke’s Essay, where he describes the word “idea” as “that Term, which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding when a Man thinks.”33 Locke disagrees strongly with Malebranche, however, over the question of how we have access to these ideas and hence to the material objects represented by these ideas. Locke rejects Malebranche’s Vision in God in favour of a mechanistic account of perception, in which bodies directly cause our ideas and in which a vital role is played by the physical concept of impulse. In the First Edition of the Essay (repeated with minor variations in the Second Edition of 1694 and the Third Edition of 1695) Locke states that bodies operate one upon another “by impulse, and nothing else.”34 Although in the first three editions of the Essay he is confident that he can rule out actio in distans in favour of operation by impulse, his actual explanation of how external bodies cause ideas is highly tentative: If then Bodies cannot operate at a distance; if external Objects be not united to our Minds, when they produce Ideas in it; and yet we perceive these original Qualities in such of them, as singly fall under our Senses, ’tis evident that some motion must be thence continued by our Nerves, or animal Spirits, by some parts of our Bodies, to the Brains, the seat of Sensation, there to produce in our Minds the particular Ideas we have of them.35

Indeed, in the “Examination” he grants Malebranche the general point that our ideas may be caused by God, but he replies that we cannot know the nature of this causal process. This ignorance is neglected by the Vision in God whereas it is a cornerstone of Locke’s own account: Impressions made on the retina by rays of light I thinke I understand and motions from thence continued to the brain may be conceivd, and that these produce Ideas in our mindes I am perswaded but in a manner to me incomprehensible. This I can resolve only in to the good pleasure of God whose ways are past findeing out, and I thinke I know it as well when I am told these are Ideas that the motion of the animal Spirits by a Law established by God produces in me as when I am told they are Ideas I see in God. The ideas tis certain I have

32

Recherche, 3. 2. 6, vol. I, p. 439.

33

Locke, Essay I. i. 8, p. 47.

Locke, An Essay concerning Humane Understanding (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003; repr. of London: Th. Basset, 1690), II. v. 11, p. 56. 34 35

Ibid.

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and God both ways is the original cause of my haveing them; but the manner how I come by them, how it is that I perceive I confesse I understand not.36

This quotation suggests again that perceptions move along complicated trajectories of which the first stages should probably be understood mechanically. This is in accordance with the previous account of perception in the Essay, although it should be noted that Locke seems less sanguine about the privileged states of “impulse” in these first stages. He does not mention “impulse” once in the entire tract. He is adamant, however, about the last stages. We don’t understand how at the final stage of the physical process (whether in the form of impulses or any other form) there is a transformation into psychological ideas: “how the alteration is made in our soules I know not”;37 and Malebranche’s Vision in God is a failed attempt at going beyond this “I know not.” We have seen above that according to Malebranche we can see all things in God, provided that this is His wish. In the “Examination” Locke is prepared to concede coherence (if not truth) to Malebranche’s observation that our soul cannot perceive material bodies and that we have the ideas of these bodies only in God, in whom they are present to our minds; but he balks at the additional criterion of God’s will, which according to him reduces Malebranche’s account to complete vacuity: “But when, after this, I am told that their presence [of ideas to our minds] is not enough to make them be seen, but God must do some thing farther to discover them to me I am as much in the darke as I was at first, and all this talke of their presence in my minde explains nothing of the way wherein I perceive them.”38 He attacks all three reasons given by Malebranche for the assumptiom that God indeed wishes us to perceive bodies through His ideas, and in all cases he makes skilful use of an agnostic line of argument. Firstly, Malebranche’s contention that the Vision in God conforms to the order in which our mind grasps things (beings in general first, particular things later), typically and unsurprisingly meets with the full brunt of Locke’s empiricist epistemology: we receive particular ideas first and general ideas only at a later stage. A more specific problem in this context is God’s simplicity. According to Malebranche, “particular ideas are in fact but participations in the general idea of the infinite”39 in God, and “In order for us to conceive of a finite being, something must necessarily be eliminated from this general notion of being.”40 In this way, Malebranche tries to maintain both the priority of general notions over particular notions and the perception of a plurality of particular objects through the Vision in God, whilst at the same time maintaining that God’s nature itself is simple; God has 36

“Examination,” para.14.

37

Ibid., 35.

38

Ibid.

Recherche, 3. 2. 6, vol. I, p. 441: “toutes ces id´ees particuli´eres ne sont que des participations de l’id´ee g´en´erale de l’infini” (LO, 232). 39

40 Ibid.: “Mais enfin que nous concevions un eˆ tre fini, il faut necessairement retrancher quelque chose de cette notion g´en´erale de l’ˆetre” (LO, 232); see also Recherche, vol. II, p. 446 note ∗ .

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only one Idea, “the general idea of the infinite.”41 Locke is not impressed by this argument. He remarks that once Malebranche grants the existence of distinct ideas of objects, he must, according to his own thesis of the Vision in God, admit that these distinct ideas are in God; and their very distinctness means that they cannot be conflated into one general notion of being. So, Malebranche’s apparent fusion of his ontological claim about God (His simplicity) and epistemological claims about us (our ability to partake in a multitude of distinct ideas that are in God) leads him to contradictions: “This seemes to me to expresse a Simplicity made up of variety, a thing I cannot understand.”42 Locke’s answer is a rigorous separation of these claims. As long as our ability to have a multitude of distinct ideas is not based on any claim about the nature of God, no contradictory conclusion can arise about His simplicity. Locke fully subscribes to both God’s simplicity and His omniscience— and hence the possible presence of a myriad of distinct ideas in His mind. Yet he stresses his ignorance about the compatibility of these attributes: “God I believe to be a simple being that by his wisdome knows all thing<s>, and by his power can do all things. but how he does it I thinke my self lesse able to comprehend than to contain the Ocean in my hand or grasp the Universe with my span.”43 So, “though it cannot be denyd that God sees and knows all things yet when we say we see all things in him it is but a metaphorical expression to cover our ignorance in a way that pretends to explain our knowledge, seeing things in God signifieing no more than that we perceive them we know not how.”44 Secondly, Malebranche had argued that God does great things by small means, and on this principle of divine economy He had chosen for the simple option of having the idea of each material object only once, in himself, allowing each of us to see the object through this idea in Himself. In the “Remarks,” Locke replies that God indeed never does any thing in vain, but he uses the argument from economy in a completely different way, not for the Vision in God, but for ideas caused by sensory perception. God has given us wonderfully contrived senses and we may assume that these contribute in some way to producing ideas in our minds by the presence of objects. If not, then His creation of senses would be “lost labour.”45 Moreover, if we do not need our senses to form the ideas of material objects, then a blind man could have these ideas as well as a man endowed with sight and this is obviously not the case. Here again, Locke admits that he does not know himself how ideas are produced in our minds, but human ignorance should not be the criterion for placing strictures on God’s omnipotence, “As if it were impossible for the Almighty to produce any thing but by ways we must conceive, and are able to comprehend.”46

41

Recherche, 3. 2. 6, vol. I, p. 441: “l’id´ee g´en´erale de l’infini” (LO, 232).

42

“Examination,” par. 36; see also “Remarks,” para. 11.

43

“Examination,” para. 36.

44

Ibid.

45

“Remarks,” para. 3.

46

Ibid.

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Thirdly, in the “Examination” Locke makes a similar point against Malebranche’s argument that the Vision in God is in accordance with God’s will because it makes us completely dependent on this will. According to Locke, this means that Malebranche gives a very laborious explanation for something that he had been prepared to accept all along: “that the Ideas we have are in our mindes by the will and power of God, though in a way that we conceive not, nor are able to comprehend.”47 Locke admits that vision by sensory impressions leaves us as ignorant about God’s will as Malebranche’s Vision in God: “Here is the will of God giveing union and perception in both cases, but how that perception is made in both ways seemes to me equalle incomprehensible.”48 The Vision of God is a “learned circuit,” which “in good earnest seemes to me to be nothing but goeing a great way about to come to the same place.”49 Vision by sensory impressions, on the other hand, is more plausible because it is more simple, and it is more simple because it does not try to make explanatory use of God. In addition, the Vision in God is not only implausible, it is also theologically unsound. In the Recherche, Malebranche asserts that “It cannot be doubted that only God existed before the world was created and that He could not have produced it without knowledge or ideas; consequently, the ideas He had of the world are not different from Himself, so that all creatures, even the most material and terrestrial, are in God, though in a completely spiritual way that is incomprehensible to us.”50 Locke thinks that it is dangerous to talk about material things that are immaterially in God. This assertion seems “to come very near saying . . . that material things are God or a part of him.”51 So, Locke is here pointing to the supposedly Spinozist implications of Malebranche’s thesis. Locke adds that this will not have been “what our A designs,” “yet thus, I fear, he must be forced to talke, who thinkes he knows God’s understanding so much better than his owne. that he will make use of the divine Intellect to explain the humane.”52 Locke makes the same point in the “Remarks,” where he observes that this thesis is not better “than what those say who make God to be nothing but the universe.”53 Here again we have an example of the nefarious consequences of making unfounded knowledge claims about God. Finally, Locke uses his epistemological agnosticism not only against Malebranche’s internal argumentation for the Vision in God, but also against the latter’s

47

Ibid., para. 35.

48

Ibid., para. 47.

49

Ibid., para. 45.

Malebranche, Recherche, 3. 2. 4, vol. I, pp. 434–435: “Il est indubitable qu’il n’y avoit que Dieu seul avant que le monde fˆut cr´ee´ & qu’il n’a pˆu le produire sans connoissance & sans id´ee: que par cons´equent ces id´ees que Dieu en a eu¨es ne sont point diff´erentes de lui-mˆeme & qu’ainsi toutes les cr´eatures, mˆeme les plus materielles & les plus terrestres, sont en Dieu, quoi que d’une mani´ere toute spirituelle & que nous ne pouvons comprendre” (LO, 229). 50

51

“Examination,” para. 27.

52

Ibid.

53

“Remarks,” para. 11.

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prior enumeration and rejection of all other alternative relations between ideas and bodies. Locke remarks that even if we would not be able to find a better possibility than the last item in Malebranche’s enumeration, i.e. the Vision in God, then this would still amount to no more than an argumentum ad ignorantiam. In the Essay he explains that those who use this debatable argument require “the Adversary to admit what they alledge as a Proof, or to assign a better.”54 In the particular case of his discussion of the Vision in God in the “Examination,” he adds that given “the weakenesse of our mindes and the narrowness of our capacitys,”55 Malebranche cannot be sure that his enumeration is complete. Hence our inability to “assign a better” alternative does not oblige us to consider Malebranche’s reasons “as a Proof.” We are ignorant about God, who may have authored connections between material bodies and our perceptions that totally surpass our understanding. This means that Malebranche was wrong to take his own ignorance as the measure for his enumeration of five possibilities, which “must be built on this good opinion of our capacitys, that God cannot make the creatures operate but in ways conceivable by us . . . To say there can be no other, because we conceive no other does not I confesse much instruct.”56

Vision in God and Thinking Matter There is an intriguing connection between Malebranche’s Vision in God and Locke’s suggestion about thinking matter. The Vision in God is an answer to the problem of how our immaterial minds can perceive material bodies. We have already noted that the reason for considering this as a problem at all, was Malebranche’s subscription to the Cartesian tenet that the essence of mind is thinking, while the essence of matter is extension. He was aware that his formulation of the mind-body problem (let alone his answer to this problem) is in danger of collapse once we start to doubt the nature of these essences: Now if we suppose that the essence of matter is not extension in height, breadth, and depth, but some other thing we are not familiar with, how shall we refute the error of the freethinker, who maintains and even shows with plausible arguments that it is the matter composing the brain that thinks, reasons, wills, and so forth? How can we prove that a thing we do not know does not have such and such a property . . .?57

54

Essay, IV. xvii. 20, p. 686.

55

“Examination,” para. 6.

56

Ibid., para. 12.

Recherche, 3. 2. 8. 2, vol. I, p. 466: “Or si l’on suppose que l’essence de la mati´ere n’est point l’´etendu¨e en longueur, largeur & profondeur, mais quelque autre chose qu’on ne connoit point, comment refutera-t-on l’erreur d’un libertin, qui soˆutient, & qui prouve mˆeme par des raisons sensibles & apparentes, que c’est la mati´ere dont le cerveau est compos´e, qui pense, raisonne, veut, & le reste. Peut-on prouver qu’une chose qu’on ne connoˆıt point, n’a point telle ou telle propri´et´e, & convaincre d’erreur celui qui sc¸ait que le cerveau bless´e, on ne pense plus, ou qu’on pense mal.” (LO p. 247). 57

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Once we start supposing that the essence of matter is not extension, admit that we do not know the essence of matter, and consider it “a thing we do not know,” we are liable to the error of freethinkers who maintain that matter thinks. And this, of course, amounts to Locke’s famous suggestion about thinking matter in the Essay, which indeed takes its point of departure in this kind of agnosticism about the essence of matter (and thinking and God). It is agnosticism that drives Locke’s precise formulation. He does not suggest, like Malebranche’s “freethinker,” that matter can think, but rather observes that he does not know enough to deny this possibility. We have the Ideas of Matter and Thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know, whether any mere material Being thinks, or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own Ideas, without revelation, to discover, whether Omnipotency has not given to some Systems of Matter fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to Matter so disposed, a thinking immaterial Substance: It being, in respect of our Notions, not much more remote from our Comprehension to conceive, that GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to Matter a Faculty of Thinking, than that he should superadd to it another Substance, with a Faculty of Thinking; since we know not wherein Thinking consists, nor to what sort of Substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that Power, which cannot be in any created Being, but merely by the good pleasure and Bounty of the Creator.58

There is no proof that Locke had Malebranche in mind when he made his suggestion, but he did read Malebranche while he was writing the Essay, and the possibility of thinking matter is the very consequence of an agnosticism that Malebranche had tried to pre-empt with his Vision in God.

Thinking Matter: Stillingfleet and Locke When Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, attacked Locke’s Essay in three publications, he was especially scathing about the possibility of thinking matter. Locke reacted to each of Stillingfleet’s texts, resulting in the following sequence that was brought to an end by the death of the bishop in 1699. The topic of thinking matter is discussed in each of these texts, with the exception of text (4), Locke’s First Reply: 1. Stillingfleet, “The Objections against the Trinity in Point of Reason answer’d,” chapter 10 of A Discourse in Vindication of the Trinity (London: H. Mortlock, 1697) (referred to hereafter as Vindication);59 2. Locke, A Letter to Edward Bishop of Worcester (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1697) (referred to hereafter as Letter);60 3. Stillingfleet, The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Letter (London: H. Mortlock, 1697) (referred to hereafter as First Answer);61 58

Essay IV. iii. 6, pp. 540–541.

59

For “thinking matter” see p. 241 ff.

60

Included in Works, 4: 1–96. On “thinking matter”, pp. 31 ff (see also pp. 95–96).

61

For “Thinking matter,” see p. 47 ff.

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4. Locke, Mr. Locke’s Reply To the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Letter (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1697) (referred to hereafter as First Reply);62 5. Stillingfleet, The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Second Letter (London: H. Mortlock, 1698) (referred to hereafter as Second Answer);63 6. Locke, Mr. Locke’s Reply To the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Second Letter (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1699) (referred to hereafter as Second Reply);64 the “Second Reply” was probably published in c. November 1698.65 Stillingfleet belonged to a liberal Anglican tradition that tried to use reason and reasonableness against the dangers of skepticism and religious heterodoxy.66 Using the well-known Cartesian distinction between demonstrative and moral certainty, he stated that even where it is not possible to reach demonstrative certainty about religious propositions, we can still obtain moral certainty “as long as the evidence for them is much more considerable than the Objections against them.”67 Hence, as he had put it in A Rational Account of the Protestant Religion (1664), faith is a “rational and discursive Act of the Mind,” i.e. “an assent upon Evidence, or Reason inducing the mind to assent.”68 The doctrines of the Anglican Church are not mysterious and can be believed on the basis of rational evidence. In the Vindication Stillingfleet tried to show that the doctrine of the Trinity is not above but in accordance with reason. He gave an analysis of the two most important concepts related to the Trinity, i.e. substance and person, and also of reason itself. It is this analysis in the tenth chapter that brings him into conflict with Locke’s Essay. Stillingfleet agreed with Locke that reason can be combined with religion, but they differed about the precise nature of this relationship. Whereas for Locke The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) was an attribute of faith As delivered in the Scriptures, Stillingfleet sought reasonableness in Anglican theological doctrine.69 Moreover, according to Stillingfleet reason is an independent source of knowledge. This latter point explains much of his animosity against Locke’s “way of ideas.” In the Vindication he denies that all ideas must be either from sensation or reflection; 62

Works, 4: 97–184.

63

For “Thinking matter,” see pp. 29–30 and p. 35 ff.

64

Works, 4: 191–498; for “thinking matter,” see p. 293 ff. and p. 459 ff.

65

See Correpondence, 6: vii.

See Richard H. Popkin, “The Philosophy of Stillingfleet,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 9 (1971): 307. 66

67 Edward Stillingfleet, A Letter to a Deist. In Answer to several Objections against the Truth and Authority of the Scriptures (London, 1677), 6–7, quoted in Popkin, “Stillingfleet,” 307. 68 Stillingfleet, A Rational Account of the grounds of Protestant religion (1664), in Works (London: H. and P. Mortlock, 1720), 196, quoted in M.A. Stewart, “Stillingfleet and the Way of Ideas,” in English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, ed. M.A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 271–272. 69

Cf. Stewart, “Stillingfleet,” 278–279.

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“that we must have clear and distinct Ideas of whatever we pretend to any certainty of in our minds’; and “that the only Way to attain this certainty, is by comparing these Ideas together.”70 Against this, Stillingfleet holds that certainty “is not placed upon any clear and distinct Ideas, but upon the force of Reason distinct from it.”71 For Locke, ideas and reasoning are complementary, the former forming the indispensable basic material for the latter, while for Stillingfleet “it is not the Idea that makes us certain, but the Argument from that which we perceive in, and about our Selves.”72 This quotation illustrates Stillingfleet’s inability to grasp an elementary aspect of Locke’s epistemology: certainty cannot be sought in individual ideas, but in the comparison between two or more ideas.73 The same quotation is telling in another respect as well. The phrase “that which we perceive in, and about our Selves” points to the source of Stillingfleet’s concept of “reason” as a way of obtaining certainty, over and above our clear and distinct ideas received from sensation or reflection. This source is Cartesian. According to Stillingfleet, Descartes’s cogito shows that it is possible to have certainty without clear and distinct ideas: “here it is not the Clearness of the Idea, but an immediate Act of Perception, which is the true ground of Certainty.”74 In general, we have “Principles of true Reason” and these are not taken from our ideas; examples of these principles are, “That no man can doubt his own Perception; that every thing must have a Cause; that this Cause must either have Knowledge or not.”75 It is important for Stillingfleet to posit reason as an independent source of certainty, over and above our ideas received from sensation or reflection, because reason can teach him something that ideas cannot: the existence and the attributes of substances, which he needs to show the reasonableness of the Trinity. He agrees with Locke that we cannot have a clear and distinct idea of substance by comparing the ideas we have from sensation and reflection. Reason, however, forms some “general Notions, or rational Ideas,”76 and of these “Substance is one of the first . . . Since it is a Repugnancy to our first Conceptions of things, that Modes or Accidents should subsist by themselves, and therefore the Rational Idea of Substance is one of the first, and most natural Ideas in our minds.”77 Thanks to reason as he understands it, Stillingfleet feels that he can attribute an ontological status to substance that is so robust that its denial would amount to a logical contradiction, whereas Locke degrades substance to “a bare Grammatical Etymology.”78 “And is this all indeed,

70

Vindication, 232.

71

Ibid., 250.

72

Vindication, p. 252.

73

See Locke, Letter, Works, 4: 29.

74

Vindication, 248.

75

Ibid., 251.

76

Ibid., 235.

77

Ibid., 235–236.

78

Ibid., 237.

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that is to be said for the being of Substance, that we accustom our selves to suppose a Substratum?”79 According to Stillingfleet, Locke’s reliance on ideas, his agnosticism about the essence of substances, and his neglect of reason as an independent source of certainty, all seem to combine to bring him to the grave error of entertaining the possibility of thinking matter, and leave him incapable of proving “a Spiritual Substance in us, from a Faculty of Thinking; because he cannot know from the Idea of Matter and Thinking, that Matter so disposed cannot think. And he cannot be certain that God hath not framed the Matter of our Bodies, so as to be capable of it.”80 In the First Answer Stillingfleet adds that the possibility of God giving immortality to a material substance “takes off very much from the evidence of Immortality,” since matter “of its own Nature”81 is not capable of thinking. He adds that Hobbes had tried to use the supposed materiality of the soul to deny its immortality. He does not accuse Locke outright of having the same aims, “But what is all this to you? I hope nothing at all. But it shews, that those who have gone about to overthrow the Immortality of the Soul by nature, have not been thought to secure the great ends of Religion and Morality.”82 Nevertheless, he suggests that Locke’s suggestion comes dangerously close to Hobbist materialism. In Locke’s defence of the possibility of thinking matter against Stillingfleet, agnosticism about the essence of God, mind and matter figure as prominently as they had done in his assault on the Vision in God. In the Second Reply to Stillingfleet, Locke compares the possibility of God having superadded thought to matter with another case of superaddition: that of the “attraction of matter by matter.” Both are instances of something being added by God to the essence of matter “which we cannot conceive.” If the latter is possible, then the former cannot be ruled out. When Locke makes this analogy between thinking matter and gravity he does not forget to pay tribute to “Mr. Newton’s incomparable book.”83 His reference to the elusive concept of Newtonian gravity is not only relevant for his agnosticism about thinking matter, but also for his agnosticism about the perception of bodies, and hence for his earlier attack on the Vision in God. We have seen that in the first three editions of the Essay he confidently ascribed the first stages of our perception of bodies to “impulse,” although he confessed ignorance about the subsequent stages of a process that eventually results in us having ideas of external bodies; and we have also seen that he stopped stressing the privileged status of impulse in the “Examination.” In the Second Reply this development is brought to its conclusion, with Locke squarely admitting that Newton’s work has taught him that impulse is not the only way that bodies can operate on each other, gravitation being another possibility. Locke announces that, in the light of this new concept of gravitation, he 79

Ibid., 236. See also Stillingfleet, Answer, pp. 13–14; cf. Locke, Essay II. 23. 1, p. 295.

80

Vindication, 242.

81

First Answer, 55.

82

Ibid., 56–57.

83

Ibid., Works, 4: 467.

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will change his earlier statements about the impossibility of bodily operations at a distance and about impulse being the only possible operation of bodies one upon another in future editions of the Essay. So, Locke makes a similarly agnostic use of Newtonian gravitation in both controversies; it is used to defend the possibility of thinking matter against Stillingfleet, while at the same time retrospectively strengthening his case against Malebranchean pretensions about how we perceive material bodies. In Locke’s other agnostic arguments in defence of the possibility of thinking matter, a major part is played by Stillingfleet’s supposed “reasonablenesse.” Locke replies that the bishop’s difficulty in acknowledging the possibility of God creating thinking matter seems to rest on his difficulty in squaring this possibility with reason. According to Locke, this seems to imply that the bishop allows only those divine actions that are in accordance with his own reason. Locke remarks that this criterion is incorrect: “The omnipotent Creator advised not with us in the making of the world, and his ways are not the less excellent, because they are past our finding out.”84 Just as he had done in his discussion of the Vision of God, Locke then proceeds to show that his adversary’s point is not only incorrect from a philosophical point of view, but also that it is suspect in a theological sense. Stillingfleet’s use of the criterion of reason seems to undermine the credibility of divine revelation “in all supernatural truths, wherein the evidence of reason fails. And how much such a principle as this tends to the support of the doctrine of the Trinity, or the promoting of the Christian religion, I shall leave it to your lordship to consider.”85 Here Locke turns the tables on the bishop, who had started his controversy with Locke in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity and who had invoked the spectre of materialist Hobbism against Locke, but who is now presented as “a patron of the oracles of reason” rather than a supporter “of the oracles of divine revelation,” giving rise to the charge that his writings may be of more use to the followers of Hobbes and Spinoza then “those justly decried” authors themselves.86 Here again, as we have seen already in the controversy about the Vision in God, Locke uses his agnosticism about the essence of God, mind and matter to show that if any one is in danger of capitulating to the pit-falls of Hobbism or Spinozism it is not he but his adversary.

Conclusion In this article I have made no distinction between Locke’s epistemological agnosticism about God, about minds or about bodies. This is because, according to Locke, God, minds and bodies all belong to the same category. They all fall under the discipline of natural philosophy, “whether it be God himself, Angels, Spirits, Bodies, or 84

Ibid., Works, 4: 461.

85

Second Reply, Works, ibid., 477.

86

Ibid., 4: 477.

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any of their Affections.”87 Our ideas (and subsequent knowledge) of these entities, whether spiritual or corporeal, all share the same imperfect character. This general agnosticism drives both Locke’s argumentation against Malebranche’s Vision in God and his defence of the possibility of thinking matter against Stillingfleet. We do not know how God causes our ideas of external bodies and consequently there is no way of proving the Vision in God. Nor can our ideas of thinking and of matter teach us anything certain about the possibility or impossibility of God giving the power of thinking to matter. For Malebranche there was a clear connection between these two issues: denial of the Vision in God opens the door to agnosticism about the essence of matter, which in its turn feeds the error about thinking matter. Locke denied the Vision in God and he was agnostic about the essence of matter and he refused to deny the possibility of thinking matter. Locke was Malebranche’s worst nightmare come true.88

87 88

Essay IV. xxi. 2, p. 720.

I would like to thank Bill George and Ferdinand Delcker for their very useful comments. Special thanks are due to John Rogers, who has continued to advise me on my work ever since he supervised my PhD thesis and who read an earlier version of this article before he (nor I) realized that it would be used in a volume dedicated to him.

Chapter 12

Pierre Coste, John Locke, and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury John Milton

I Towards the end of September 1697 a young French Protestant refugee left London to travel to Oates, the house in Essex that was the home of Sir Francis Masham and his wife Damaris, the daughter of Ralph Cudworth.1 Pierre Coste had been engaged to serve as tutor to their son Francis Cudworth Masham, then aged eleven; he had been chosen for his new post by John Locke, who had himself been living at Oates since 1691. Locke had already begun corresponding with Coste while Coste was still in Holland, but he was not present to greet the new arrival—he had been in London since June, and apart from one short visit of four days in the first week of September did not return to Oates until the end of November.2 After Christmas Locke gave an assessment of the new tutor to William Molyneux: “Mr. Coste is now in the house with me here, and is tutor to my lady Masham’s son. I need not I think now answer your question about his skill in mathematicks and natural history: I think it is not much; but he is an ingenious man, and we like him very well for our purpose.”3 It is

1 He arrived on 24 or 25 September, according to a biography written shortly after Coste’s death by his friend Charles de la Motte: “La vie de Coste et anecdotes sur ses ouvrages,” Universiteitsbibliothek, Leiden, March. 45, fos. 5–11. This has been printed in John Locke, Que la religion chr´etienne est tr`es-raisonnable; Discours sur les miracles, ed. H´el`ene Bouchilloux; Essai sur la n´ecessit´e d’expliquer les Epˆıtres de S. Paul; La Vie de Coste, ed. Maria-Cristina Pitassi (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999), 231–60; the quotations below are taken from this edition, cited as “Vie de Coste.”

There are eight letters from Coste among Locke’s papers, dating from 1695–1700: Correspondence, letters 1917, 1940, 2107, 2285, 2480, 2601, 2609, 2746; no other correspondence between them is known to have survived. The dates of Locke’s journeys to and from London in 1697 are taken from Bodleian Library [henceforward, Bodl.], MS Locke f. 29, p. 147. 2

Locke to Molyneux, 10 Jan. 1698, Correspondence, 6: 294; Molyneux had enquired about Coste’s mathematical expertise on 27 May 1697, ibid., 133–4.

3

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 195–223. and Legacy, 

195

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a rather tepid commendation, and one wonders what Coste thought when he read it after Locke’s death.4 Even before Coste came to England he had made translations into French of Some Thoughts concerning Education and the Reasonableness of Christianity, and had started on the Essay concerning Human Understanding.5 During his time at Oates he finished work on the Essay, and followed this with a condensed and re-ordered version of the two Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity.6 The two men discussed the translation of the Essay very carefully, as Locke acknowledged in a letter to the publisher, Henri Schelte: “Before it was sent to you Mr Coste read me this version from one end to the other, and in every place where I noticed that it had departed from my thoughts, it was returned to the sense of the original.”7 Coste’s translation made Locke’s main philosophical work accessible to a European readership, and in the eyes of many observers it created a debt that Locke did not adequately repay.

It was published in Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke, and Several of his Friends (London, 1708), 256.

4

De l’education des enfans (Amsterdam, 1695), Que la religion chr´etienne est tres-raisonnable (Amsterdam, 1696); for further details, see Jean S. Yolton, John Locke: A Descriptive Bibliography (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1998), 237–8, 283–4, cited below as “Yolton, Bibliography.” On the slow pace of Coste’s work on the Essay before he came to England, see Jean Le Clerc to Locke, 9 Apr. 1697 (NS), Correspondence, 6: 72. 5

Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement (Amsterdam, 1700), Que la religion chr´etienne est tres-raisonnable. . .seconde partie (Amsterdam, 1703): Yolton, Bibliography, 120–3, 284–5. Coste also translated extracts from the controversy with Stillingfleet, Nouvelles de la r´epublique des lettres, Oct. 1699, 363–85, Nov. 1699, 483–513; these are not mentioned by Yolton. On Coste’s translations, see Gabriel Bonno, “Locke et son traducteur franc¸ais, Pierre Coste,” Revue de litt´erature compar´ee 33 (1959): 161–79; Margaret E. Rumbold, Traducteur huguenot: Pierre Coste (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 51–64; Ross Hutchison, Locke in France, 1688–1734 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991), 25–8; Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 117–21; Jørn Schøsler, “L’Essai sur l’entendement de Locke et la lutte philosophique en France au XVIIIe si`ecle: l’histoire des traductions, des e´ ditions et de la diffusion journalistique (1688–1742),” in idem (et al.) La Diffusion de Locke en France, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2001:04, 1–259. 6

7

“Mr. Coste m’a lˆu cette Version d’un bout a` l’autre avant que de vous l’envoyer, & que tous les endroits que j’ai remarqu´e s’´eloigner de mes pens´ees, ont e´ t´e ramenez au sens de l’Original,” Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement humain (Amsterdam, 1700), sig. ***1r .

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Coste has often been described as Locke’s secretary,8 but there is little if any evidence for this: such assistance as Locke needed was normally undertaken by his current manservant.9 Coste was employed by Sir Francis Masham and received his salary from him, not from Locke: there are no accounts with Coste in Locke’s own ledgers.10 His usefulness to Locke lay in his command of French. Locke had acquired a reasonable familiarity with that language during his travels in France from 1675 to 1679,11 and he must have used it again quite frequently while in exile in the Netherlands from 1683 to 1689. Opportunities to speak French in England would have been much rarer, and where possible Locke seems to have preferred conducting his foreign correspondence in Latin. In 1697, however, he found himself needing to use French once again. One of the parts of the Essay that Coste had translated while still in Holland was Book IV, ch. x, “Of our Knowledge of the Existence of a God.” One reader of this was Johannes Hudde, burgomaster of Amsterdam and former correspondent of Spinoza.12 Locke heard about his interest and some of the questions he had raised from Philippus van Limborch, and as Hudde did not read

“Pierre Coste, secr´etaire de Locke,” T.J. de Boer in Henry Ollion, Letters in´edites de John Locke a` ses amis Nicolas Thoynard, Philippe van Limborch et Edward Clarke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1912), 213n; “Pierre Coste remained at Oates for over seven years, acting sometimes as the philosopher’s secretary, sometimes as a general intellectual aide,” Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London: Longmans, 1957), 438; “Pierre Coste, Locke’s secretary and translator,” Rosalie Colie, Light and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 140; “Pierre Coste, who became Locke’s secretary in later years,” J.W. Gough in John Locke, Epistola de Tolerantia, ed. Raymond Klibansky and J.W. Gough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 44; “Coste was later taken on by Locke as secretary,” Mario Montuori, John Locke on Toleration and the Unity of God (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1983), 182n, cf. 188n; “Coste had been Locke’s secretary,” Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 396; “Pierre Coste, Locke’s friend and secretary,” Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics & Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press , 1986), 372; “Pr´ecepteur de Francis Masham a` Oates et ensuite secr´etaire de Locke,” Maria-Cristina Pitassi in Vie de Coste, 228; “Coste also acted as Locke’s secretary,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), “Pierre Coste.” 9 On Locke’s use of his manservants in this role, see J.R. Milton, “Manservant as Amanuensis: Sylvester Brounower,” The Locke Newsletter, 25 (1994): 79–83; see also Locke to Anthony Collins, 25 Oct. 1704, Correspondence, 8: 416–7. 8

10 Transactions with Coste in Locke’s ledgers and his journals almost all relate to expenses incurred as Francis Cudworth Masham’s tutor, or (during Locke’s final years) from having purchased books for Locke while on visits to London: Bodl., MS Locke b. 2, fos. 175, 176, 179, 181, 183, 185; MS Locke c. 1, pp. 333, 335, 338, 361, 371; MS Locke c. 2, pp. 9, 65, 80, 81; MS Locke f. 10, pp. 396, 410, 428, 483, 486, 522, 556, 581, 584. 11 There is no record in any of Locke’s numerous commonplace books that he was buying or reading any French books before his departure to France in 1675. 12 Coste to Locke, 6 July 1697, Correspondence, 6: 156. On Hudde’s enquiries, see Wim Klever, “Hudde’s question on God’s uniqueness: a reconstruction on the basis of van Limborch’s correspondence with John Locke,” Studia Spinozana 5 (1989): 327–57.

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Latin, Locke was forced to reply to Limborch in French.13 Coste was involved in the drafting of one of these letters,14 but otherwise there seems to be no evidence among Locke’s own papers that he was ever used as a secretary or as an amanuensis. Our main source for the details of Coste’s life at Oates is the biography written by Charles de la Motte;15 although this was not put together until 1747 or 1748, over forty years after the events described here, it is clear that the main source of the stories it contains was Coste himself. According to this account Locke’s relations with Coste during the last years of his life became somewhat strained. Part of the problem was that Coste became convinced that Locke had failed to honour earlier assurances about money,16 but there were also disagreements about less sordid matters: despite his intellectual gifts, Locke was not free (according to Coste) from national prejudices, unlike Coste himself.17 Locke has not often been seen as an incarnation of John Bull, but as an insecure and impecunious exile Coste seems to have become extremely sensitive to what he perceived as slights. As time went on relations between the two men deteriorated further: M. Locke devenoit tous les jours plus reserv´e avec M. Coste, qui ne le menageoit pas assez. Par exemple, M. Locke ne perdoit pas une occasion la plus e´ loign´ee de deprimer Descartes,

13 The relevant letters are Locke to Limborch, 29 Oct. 1697, 21 Feb. 1698 (sent again on 2 Apr. 1698) and 21 May 1698, Correspondence, 6: 243–4, 321–5, 363, 405–6. 14 On these letters see Montuori, John Locke on Toleration, 185–90, 199–219. Contrary to explicit statements by both Montuori (189, 208) and De Beer (Correspondence, 6: 783), only the draft of the letter of 21 Feb. 1698 (Bodl., MS Locke c. 24, fos. 158–60) is in Coste’s hand. The draft of the letter of 21 May 1698 (fo. 164) is in the hand of Locke’s manservant, Timothy Kiplin. I cannot identify the handwriting of the draft of the letter of 29 October 1697 (fos. 156–7), but it is certainly not that of either Kiplin or Coste. A photograph of a document in Kiplin’s hand (Bodl., MS Locke c. 28, fo. 119, wrongly ascribed to his predecessor, Sylvester Brounower) is the left-hand item in the frontispiece to P. Long, A Summary Catalogue of the Lovelace Collection of the Papers of John Locke in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959). On 22 Feb. 1697 Locke had told William Molyneux that Kiplin could not copy writings in French, Correspondence, 6: 9; presumably he subsequently learned to do this. 15

De la Motte (c.1667–1751) worked as a proof-corrector in the Amsterdam book trade; for the little known about his life see Pitassi’s introduction to the Vie de Coste, 225–8. Coste left him $150 in his will, National Archives, Kew, [henceforward, NA], PROB 11/752, fo. 274. The identification by De Beer (Correspondence, 6: 223n) of Coste’s correspondent as Lagier de la Motte is mistaken. 16 “. . . quoi que M. Locke eˆ ut dit d’abord a` M. Coste qu’il auroit soin de lui et qu’il le pˆut tr`esfacilement par son grand credit et par ses richesses, il n’a pas fait la moindre chose pour lui,” Vie de Coste, 239. 17

“Malheureusement M. Locke avec tout son esprit e´ toit un peu national et M. Coste point du tout. Cela indisposoit le premier contre le second,” ibid. Coste seems to have been rather sensitive on these matters: “M. Coste. . .told me one day that the [third] earl of Shaftesbury having read to him one of his pieces, he blamed his lordship for not having owned the obligations he had to the French authors on certain accounts, nor rendered them all the justice due to them on others. The earl promised to repair this fault in a preface, which in fact he some time afterwards read to his friend. The treatise soon after this appeared in print, but without any preface. M. Coste demanded the reason, and the earl told him that he did not dare publish it, for fear of setting his whole nation against him.” Jean-Bernard le Blanc, Letters on the English and French Nations (London, 1747), 2: 233.

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le P. Malebranche, l’Art de penser, les plus fameux Academiciens de Paris, et M. Coste les d´efendoit sans fac¸on, en gardant pourtant les r`egles de la politesse la plus exacte. . .18

Coste no doubt thought that he was being suitably respectful, but one may wonder whether Locke did: he was not someone who welcomed disagreements of this kind. Several of the notes Coste added to later editions of his translation of the Essay show that he felt Locke had sometimes mis-understood what Descartes and his followers had been saying, but that when he had tried to argue this with Locke himself he got nowhere: Lorsque je vins a` traduire cet endroit [II. viii. 14] de l’Essai concernant l’Entendement humain, je m’apperc¸us de la m´eprise de M. Locke, & je l’en avertis: mais il me fut impossible de le faire convenir que le sentiment qu’il attribuoit aux Cartesiens, e´ toit directement oppos´e a` celui qu’ils ont soˆutenu. . .19

On another occasion Coste reported that they had been talking about innate ideas, and that he had asked Locke how it was that certain small birds—the goldfinch, for example—knew how to build complicated nests even though they had never been taught to do so by their parents.20 If he had hoped for a considered response, he would have been disappointed: “M. Locke me r´epondit brusquement, Je n’ai pas e´ crit mon Livre pour expliquer les actions des Bˆetes.”21 Stories such as these provide a revealing glimpse of Locke’s reaction to criticism, and one cannot help wondering how often Coste was the recipient of this kind of put-down and what he felt. By the autumn of 1704 Locke’s health was failing, and he knew that he did not have long to live. On 26 October, two days before he died, he asked Coste to come to his room. What followed is described by De la Motte: M. Locke lui fit beaucoup d’amiti´es, et il lui dit qu’il voudroit lui demander une grace, qu’il esperoit qu’il voudroit bien la lui accorder. Vous jugez bien que M. Coste lui r´epondit qu’il e´ toit tr`es-dispos´e a` faire toujours ce qui d´ependroit de lui pour l’obliger. Alors M. Locke, apr`es l’avoir remerciˆe de sa bonne Volont´e pour lui, le pria de vouloir traduire en Franc¸ois

18

Vie de Coste, 242.

Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement humain (Amsterdam, 1742), 131, note on II. xiii. 25; this first appears in the 1735 edition. 20 “Il me souvient a` ce propos, qu’en conversant un jour avec M. Locke, le discours venant a` tomber sur les Id´ees inn´ees, je lui fis cette Objection: Que penser de certains petits Oiseaux, du Chardonneret, par exemple, qui e´ clos dans un Nid que le Pere ou la Mere lui ont fait, s’envole enfin dans les Champs pour y chercher sa nourriture sans que le Pere, ou la Mere, prenne aucun soin de lui, & qui l’ann´ee suivante fait fort bien trouver & d´emˆeler tous les materiaux dont il a besoin pour se bˆatir un Nid, qui par son industrie se trouve fait & agenc´e avec autant ou plus d’art de celui o`u il est e´ clos lui-mˆeme? D’o`u lui sont venues les id´ees de ces diff´erens materiaux, & de l’art d’en construire ce Nid?,” ibid., 111, note on II. xi. 5; this first appears in the 1742 edition. 19

21 Italics in original. Coste’s increasing openness about his disagreements with Locke is described in Jørn Schøsler, “Les e´ ditions de la traduction franc¸aise par Pierre Coste de l’Essay Concerning Human Understanding de Locke,” Actes du VIII e congr`es des romanistes scandinaves (Odense: Odense University Press, c.1983), 315–24.

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un Livre qu’on lui remettroit apr`es sa mort et qu’apr`es cela il en presenteroit un Exemplaire a` une personne qui lui seroit nomm´ee dans le pacquet qu’on lui remettroit.22

The most natural interpretation of this is that Coste was not told what the book he was to translate would be. When Locke died everyone in the household was given a legacy of some kind apart from Coste, who received only the package mentioned by Locke: Le pacquet contenoit le Livre qui e´ toit celui du Gouvernement civil, avec diverses Additions et Corrections que M. Coste fournit dans la suite a` Churchill pour le reimprimer. Il y avoit aussi dans le pacquet une Lettre o`u M. Locke repetoit les mˆemes choses qu’il lui avoit dites dans sa derni´ere conversation, et lui nomma la personne a` qui il devoit pr´esenter un Exemplaire de sa Traduction; cette personne e´ toit M. King qui fut l’heritier de M. Locke. . .23

The letter Locke wrote to accompany the package has not survived, but reports of its contents—presumably derived from Coste himself—soon began to circulate. It was mentioned (though unfortunately not quoted) in a letter written many years later by De la Motte, who commented that if it were published even the most morally easygoing observers would consider it “the act of a . . . ” (De la Motte left it to his reader to supply a suitable word).24 If Coste felt that he had been shabbily treated, he was not alone in this—indeed Locke’s actions soon became the subject of scandalised gossip in the Republic of Letters. Within two months of Locke’s death Pierre Des Maizeaux received a letter from Amsterdam telling him of adverse reactions there: Vous avez raison de trouver e´ trange que Mr. Locke n’ait rien laiss´e par son Testament a` M. Coste. Il y a peu de gens qui ait autant d’estime pour ce Grand homme que moi. Mais je ne saurois m’empˆecher de regarder sa conduite a` cet e´ gard comme une tˆache a` sa Memoire. Il y a dans cette ville beaucoup d’honnˆetes gens qui connoissoient et estimoient extremement Mr. Locke, mais tous ont e´ t´e scandalisez de son ingratitude. Je suis presque assur´e que si il pouvoit entendre tout ce qu’on a dit l`a dessus, il se repentiroit bien d’avoir n´eglig´e Mr. Coste.25

Des Maizeaux’s own indignation can be seen in a letter that he sent to the Third Earl of Shaftesbury a month later:

22

Vie de Coste, 243.

Ibid., 243. Coste was one of the witnesses to Locke’s will, signed on 11 April 1704, Correspondence, 8: 424, though whether he had been informed of all its provisions is not known; his name is also missing from an earlier list of legacies drawn up by Locke on 27 March, Bodl., MS Locke c. 25, fo. 71. He had, however, been given some expensive books while Locke was still alive, including three volumes of writings by Socinus and a large volume containing the works of Hippocrates: see John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford, 1971), 235; Locke to Peter King, 5 July 1704, Correspondence, 8: 341. 24 “Je parle de la Lettre que M.L. lui e´ crivit deux jours avant sa mort pour lui eˆ tre rendue apr`es sa mort. Il n’avoit qu’`a publier cette Lettre, et les gens les moins amis de la vertu, conviendroient c’est le trait d’un . . .,” De la Motte to Pierre Des Maizeaux, 7 Dec. 1723 (NS), British Library [henceforward, BL], Add. MS 4286, fo. 253, ellipsis in original; see Goldgar, Impolite Learning, 121–3. 23

25

De la Motte to Des Maizeaux, 6 Jan. 1705 (NS), BL, Add. MS 4286, fo. 11.

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Voila Mr. Locke, qui avoit de si belles Qualit´es, et qui e´ toit si riche: ne s’est il pas, en quelque Maniere, deshonor´e a` sa Mort, par la maniere bizare dont il a dispos´e de son Bien. Il en a combl´e des gens a` qui il ne le devoit pas, et n’a pas donn´e un soˆu a` des personnes qui l’avoient servi utilement pendant plusieurs Ann´ees.26

It would seem that Des Maizeaux tried to get these views into print. In March 1705 he received a letter from Jacques Bernard, the editor of Nouvelles de la r´epublique des lettres—the journal that in the previous month had printed Coste’s memoir— explaining why the remarks he had sent him were not going to be published: Je n’ai pas fait usage de vos remarques sur Mr. Locke, car elles auroient e´ t´e arrˆet´ees en chemin, Mr. de la Motte, qui corrige mon Ouvrage ne les auroit pas laiss´e passer. D’ailleurs la liaison que j’ai eu avec ce savant, et diverses autres raisons ne me permettoient pas de ternir sa m´emoire, surtout apr`es tout le bien, que Mr. Coste en avoit dit.27

It was clearly the wrong time to be candid about Locke’s less estimable qualities. For the moment—in public at least—de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

II In the mid-1940s an annotated copy of the third (1698) edition of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government was discovered in the library of Christ’s College, Cambridge.28 A few of the many additions and corrections it contains are in Locke’s hand, but the great majority appear to have been made by Coste.29 Des Maizeaux to Shaftesbury, 10 Feb. 1705, NA, PRO 30/24/27/17, printed in Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and “Le Refuge Franc¸ais”-Correspondence, ed. Rex A. Barrell (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), cited below as “Barrell,” 226–7. Coste was not the only person in Locke’s circle who received nothing: a still more scandalous omission was James Tyrrell. 26

27

Bernard to Des Maizeaux, 6 Mar. 1705 (NS), BL, Add. MS 4281, fo. 144.

28

Shelf-mark BB. 3.7a. The Christ’s copy and the circumstances of its rediscovery were described by Peter Laslett in the Introduction to his edition of the Two Treatises (Cambridge, 1967), ix, 9–11, 147–9. I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College Cambridge for permission to cite material from this book. The corrections in §§ 1–4 of the First Treatise are in Locke’s hand, but probably only a few very small changes thereafter. The handwriting of the other additions differs in several respects from Coste’s usual hand, and when I first investigated the Christ’s copy I was inclined to doubt whether he had written any of them apart from the comment in French on the end fly-leaf which is unmistakably in his hand. I am now more confident that they were made by Coste, and that the differences from his usual hand were caused partly by the limited space available in the narrow margins of the volume, partly by the use of English, and perhaps also by a tendency to imitate some of symbols used by Locke in the earlier copy from which this one was derived, especially his use of an ampersand resembling a Greek rho; it is perhaps significant that on the relatively few occasions when Coste did write in English, he used this kind of ampersand quite frequently: see in particular the copies he made in the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s letter-book of letters written in April and May 1711, NA, PRO 30/24/22/7, pp. 43, 45, 57; also Coste to Shaftesbury, 23 Aug. 1706, Hampshire Record Office, Winchester [henceforward, HRO], Malmesbury papers, 9M73/G255/7. Nevertheless the issue should not be regarded as entirely settled. It should be noted that Laslett’s 29

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It is very likely that the copy now at Christ’s was not the only amended copy of the Two Treatises to have been produced: Peter Laslett also surmised that another master-copy—perhaps of the second edition of 1694—had been made, and that it was this that was used in the preparation of the first posthumous edition of the Two Treatises, published in 1713.30 Several of Coste’s marginal additions have features which make it virtually certain that they had been transcribed from similar marginalia in another copy of the Two Treatises,31 and on the end fly-leaf he recorded a variant reading to Second Treatise § 172 with the comment “C’est ainsi que Mr. L. a corrig´e cet endroit dans l’Exemplaire sur lequel il souhaite que son Livre soit rimprim´e apr`es sa mort.”32 This was obviously written after Locke’s death, and even in the absence of any other evidence would show beyond doubt that another copy of the Two Treatises with annotations in Locke’s own hand was seen by Coste after Locke died. This would have been the copy used by John Churchill when he prepared the 1713 edition; the copy now at Christ’s seems to have remained in Coste’s possession. Independent testimony that Coste had been given an annotated copy of the Two Treatises comes from a letter De la Motte wrote to Des Maizeaux in November 1709. Jean Barbeyrac in Berlin had asked De la Motte to procure a copy of the most recent English edition of the Two Treatises, and had accordingly been sent a copy of the 1698 edition by a bookseller in London to whom the request had been passed on. Barbeyrac replied that he had been hoping to receive a copy of the edition which had appeared after Locke’s death “o`u l’on a inser´e les corrections qu’il [sic] e´ toient dans l’Exemplaire laiss´e a` Mr. Coste.”33 Of course no such edition existed, but clearly Barbeyrac must somehow have heard reports that a corrected copy of the Two Treatises had been left to Coste. One more piece of evidence should be mentioned. A copy of the Two Treatises was sent to Oates only a few weeks before Locke died: on 4 October Locke’s publisher Awnsham Churchill wrote to him to say that he was sending “the Two treatises of Government and a pacquet, which I begg you to deliver mr Coste.”34 It is unclear from this whether both the book and the packet were to be delivered to Coste or just

identification of the hand as Coste’s did not come from a comparison of the annotations with other manuscripts in Coste’s hand, but rather from the statement in the 1764 edition of the Two Treatises that use had been made of “a Copy delivered by him [Locke] to Mr. Peter Coste, communicated to the Editor [Thomas Hollis], and now lodged in Christ’s College, Cambridge.” See Yolton, Bibliography, 44. 30

Two Treatises, 10, 148–50, 453, 468, 471, 475.

31

In particular, First Treatise, § 154, on which see Laslett’s textual note (467–8).

32

Laslett’s transcription (491) is inaccurate here: he has “par” and “imprim´e” for “sur” and “rimprim´e.” 33

De la Motte to Des Maizeaux, 5 Nov. 1709 (NS), BL, Add. MS 4286, fo. 91. The letter is quoted at greater length and discussed in S.-J. Savonius, “Locke in French: the Du Gouvernement civil of 1691 and its readers,” Historical Journal 47 (2004): 47–79, at 57n. 34

Correspondence, 8: 404.

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the packet alone, but if it was both then it would seem very likely that the copy of the Two Treatises was the one given to Coste after Locke’s death. All this raises two questions that are by no means easy to answer: (i) What was in the packet that Coste was given after Locke’s death—was it the Christ’s copy, the other master-copy, or even both? (ii) Was the main set of alterations in Coste’s hand in the Christ’s copy made before or after Locke’s death? Laslett clearly believed Coste’s alterations in the Christ’s copy were made before Locke died—indeed that the Christ’s copy is a “printer’s copy prepared for the press between 1698 and 1704 by Locke himself and by Coste.’35 The wording of De la Motte’s account, that the copy given to Coste contained “diverses Additions et Corrections que M. Coste fournit dans la suite a` Churchill pour le reimprimer,” suggests that he was given the other master-copy. If Coste had already written the marginal annotations in the Christ’s copy while Locke was still alive then it is very unlikely that this would have been the copy given to him after Locke’s death. Locke was intensely secretive but he was not a grand mystificateu . Why should he have extracted from Coste a promise to translate an un-named work, and then arranged for him to be given a package that, when opened, revealed a volume full of his own handwriting? If Coste had been asked to make corrections in a copy of the Two Treatises he would by that very request have been let into the secret that Locke was its author. It is not impossible that Locke would have been prepared to divulge this, but though Coste must have been told about the authorship of some of Locke’s other anonymous works—he had, after all, translated the two Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity since coming to Oates—Locke was extraordinarily secretive about the Two Treatises. Coste may have lived in the same house as Locke, but he was never among his closest and most trusted friends. The story told by De la Motte suggests that secrecy was maintained right until the end: Coste was not asked by Locke to translate the Two Treatises—he was asked if he would translate an unspecified book, and then told that he would be given a packet containing it after Locke died. Since the letter that accompanied the packet given to Coste has not survived, we do not know what exactly Locke wished Coste to do. According to Laslett: Locke must have left directions behind him for the publication of this text for posterity. . . . Presumably these directions were left with Churchill, the publisher, though it is a little difficult to understand why nine years were allowed to elapse before the book appeared, for the posthumous Essay took only two. It may be that Locke’s heir and literary executor [Peter King] was given the responsibility, or even Pierre Coste.36

It is very unlikely that Coste had any part in the preparation of the 1713 edition, or that either of the Churchill brothers would have felt in any need of his assistance; in

35

Laslett, Two Treatises, 146.

36

Ibid., 10.

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any case he was not even in England at the time when the edition was presumably being prepared.37 All the evidence mentioned so far indicates that Locke asked Coste to translate the Two Treatises a few days before he died. Another part of De la Motte’s account, however, seems to indicate that the request had been made some months earlier: Vers la fin lors que M. Locke vouloit quelque chose de M. Coste il le faisoit demander par Mad. Masham, c’est ainsi que quelques mois avant sa mort il lui fit proposer de traduire l’Essai du Gouvernement Civil dont on avoit fait une nouvelle edition Angloise fort augment´ee. M. Coste le promit pourvˆu qu’il trouvˆat un Libraire qui voulˆut imprimer sa Traduction en Hollande. Il promit de m’´ecrire pour chercher ce Libraire, mais il me manda en mˆeme tems qu’il voudroit bien qu’il ne trouvˆat point de Libraire qui voulut l’entreprendre.38

Coste—it appears—did not want the job but preferred not to offend Locke. De la Motte accordingly wrote to Henri Schelte, who still had two hundred unsold copies of David Mazel’s 1691 translation on his hands and was therefore not at all enthusiastic about publishing a replacement. He agreed to do so on condition that someone would buy the remaining copies of the earlier edition, and that he would not have to pay for the new translation. This was reported back to Coste and hence to Locke, who declined to proceed further: it would not have been fair for Coste to do all this work without being paid, and it is clear that Locke was not going to provide any money himself.39 It is difficult to know what to make of this. The statement that a new and greatly expanded English edition had been produced is certainly incorrect, but the account of the negotiations with Schelte sounds quite plausible. If De la Motte’s story is reliable, then Locke must have asked Coste to translate the Two Treatises some months before he died (and thereby revealed to him the secret of its authorship, if he had not done so already), but had then let the project lapse. If this was indeed the case, why should he subsequently have arranged for Coste to be given a copy of the Two Treatises after his death with instructions for it to be translated? Each of De la Motte’s stories is individually quite plausible, but it is difficult to see how they can both be true. One possible solution was suggested by an anonymous referee to whom an earlier version of this paper was sent: “Locke’s first attempt to secure the translation failed. If he was determined to have the work (re)translated by a translator who had shown reluctance to proceed, why not secure his commitment to a dying man without indicating the exact nature of the request?” This is an ingenious proposal, and one that 37 Coste left England with his pupil Sir John Hobart in February or March 1712 and did not return until 1714: Coste to Shaftesbury, 1 May 1712 (NS), NA, PRO 30/24/45/80, fo. 574, Barrell, 147; Vie de Coste, 248–53. He was not involved in the edition of Locke’s Posthumous Works: in the summer of 1706 he had heard that the Churchills were preparing this but did not know whether it would include the Shaftesbury memoir: Coste to Shaftesbury, 16 May 1706, NA, PRO 30/24/47/26, Barrell, 107 (mis-dated 10 May); 15 June 1706, HRO, 9M73/G255/4. 38

Vie de Coste, 242.

“. . .il e´ toit trop e´ quitable pour engager M. Coste a` un si grande travail sans aucune recompense,” ibid., 243.

39

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cannot be dismissed, but it has the serious demerit of imputing to Locke a devious and manipulative mode of behaviour that seems wholly out of character. Another solution was proposed by a second referee: Lady Masham asked Coste to translate the Two Treatises as a request from herself. This would not have involved divulging their authorship. After Locke’s death and the disclosure that he was the author, Coste would have had little doubt that Lady Masham’s request came from Locke—indeed she may even have said so herself. Locke might well have felt that Coste’s reluctance to translate the Two Treatises when he did not know who had written them should not be taken to imply a reluctance to translate them once he knew who their author was.

This is also very ingenious, but again I am unconvinced. One problem is that it presumes not merely that Coste had not been told by Locke who had written the Two Treatises—which is very likely—but that he really did not know. Considering how frequently Locke’s authorship had already been suggested—or indeed positively asserted—by various contemporaries this is hard to believe.40 Unless further evidence is forthcoming it is difficult to see how all these problems can be resolved. My own inclination is to believe that Locke did not entrust Coste with the secret of his authorship of the Two Treatises while he was still alive, and therefore that Coste’s marginal additions in the Christ’s copy were made after Locke’s death, in order that he would himself have a copy incorporating Locke’s final revisions if he were to produce a new translation. As will become apparent later, there is evidence that Coste did indeed begin to do this.

III Coste did not remain at Oates for long after Locke’s death, though he did have enough time to write a memoir of Locke that was published in French in 1705, and in English translation in 1720.41 Many years later he gave an account of the circumstances of its composition to Shaftesbury’s nephew, James Harris: J’ai vecu avec lui [Locke] dans la meme Maison pendant les sept dernieres ann´ees de sa vie. Je l’ai vˆu mourir; et peu de jours apr`es sa mort, tout plein de mon sujet, je jettai sur

40 41

See Laslett, Two Treatises, 4–5.

“Lettre de Mr. Coste a` l’Auteur de ces Nouvelles, a` l’occasion de la mort de Monsieur Locke,” Nouvelles de la r´epublique des lettres Feb. 1705: 154–77; A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, Never before printed, or not extant in his Works (London, 1720), i–xxiv. It would appear that Coste had been planning to move to London even before Locke died: on 31 Oct. 1704 (NS) De la Motte told Des Maizeaux that “Mr. Coste doit aller demeurer a` Londres, et peutˆetre y est-il d´eja,” BL, Add. MS 4286, fo. 10. That Coste had been thinking about leaving Oates was known to Locke: see Peter King to Locke, 16 Aug. 1704, Correspondence, 8:379.

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le Papier l’Eloge de Mr. Locke. . .. Je lus cet Eloge de Mr. Locke en manuscrit a` Madame Masham. . .. Elle e´ couta la lecture de mon Ecrit, et n’y trouva rien a` redire.42

The portrait that Coste painted would certainly not have offended Lady Masham, or any of Locke’s other friends who might have heard it—on the contrary, the praise might even have been regarded by a detached observer as a trifle excessive: He was born for the good of mankind. Most of his actions were directed to that end; and I doubt, whether, in his time, any man in Europe applied himself more earnestly to that noble design, or executed it with more success . . . Prudent without being Cunning; he won people’s esteem by his Probity, and was always safe from the attacks of a false Friend, or a sordid Flatterer. Averse from all mean complaisance; his Wisdom, his Experience, his gentle and obliging Manners, gained him the respect of his inferiors, the esteem of his equals, the friendship and confidence of the greatest quality.43

The memoir occupies little more than 4,000 words, and there is no reason to doubt the reliability of Coste’s memory when he told Harris that he had written it within a few days of Locke’s death—in a much earlier letter to Arent Furly he described it as having been written “peu de temps apr`es la mort de Mr Locke.”44 The papers recording the payment of Locke’s legacies show that Coste was still at Oates on 3 November, when he finished helping with the division of Locke’s library, but none of the subsequent bequests was witnessed by him apart from one on 20 December, when Francis Cudworth Masham received a “snuffer” and snuff-dish.45 According to De la Motte he stayed long enough to translate Lady Masham’s Discourse concerning the Love of God into French; since this is a work of rather more than 20,000 words, the task must have taken several weeks at least.46 He had, however, certainly

42

Coste to Harris, 27 Dec. 1738, HRO, 9M73/G232. I am grateful to Sarah Lewin at the Hampshire Record Office for obtaining permission from the Malmesbury family to quote material taken from the Malmesbury papers. 43 A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke (London, 1720), v, vi. “On peut dire qu’il e´ toit n´e pour le bien des hommes. C’est a` quoi ont tendu la plˆupart de ses Actions; & je ne sai si durant sa vie il s’est trouv´e en Europe d’homme qui se soit appliqu´e plus sincerement a` ce noble dessein, & qui l’ait execut´e si heureusement.. . . Prudent sans eˆ tre fin, il gagnoit l’estime des Hommes par sa probit´e, &´etoit toˆujours a` couvert des attaques d’un faux Ami, ou d’un lˆache Flatteur. Eloign´e de toute basse complaisance; son habilet´e, son experience, ses mani´eres douces & civiles le faisoient respecter de ses Inferieurs, lui attiroient l’estime de ses Egaux, l’amiti´e & la confiance des plus grands Seigneurs.” Nouvelles de la r´epublique des lettres, Feb. 1705: 154, 156. 44 Coste to Furly, 23 Jan. 1705, NA, PRO 30/24/27/18. The letter also indicates that Coste did not remain at Oates for very long: “la mort de Mr Locke et le desordre ou m’a jett´e la necessit´e ou je me trouvai peu de jours apres de quitter Oates, et de vivre a` Londres.” The original letter is lost, and the surviving manuscript is a copy sent to Shaftesbury: see A. Furly to Shaftesbury, 24 Feb. 1705 (NS), NA, PRO 30/24/45/80, fo. 192. The full text of Coste’s letter together with a conclusive identification of both writer and addressee are given in S.F. Whitaker, “Pierre Coste et Shaftesbury (avec une lettre in´edite),” Revue de litt´erature compar´ee 25 (1951): 241–53. 45

Bodl., MS Locke c. 35, fos. 9, 66. These had belonged to his maternal grandmother, Ralph Cudworth’s wife, and were mentioned in Locke’s will, Correspondence, 8: 420. 46 “Apres la mort de M. Locke et e´ tant encore chez Mylord Masham il [Coste] traduisit un petit Livre intitul´e Discours sur l’Amour divin, compos´e par Madame Masham,” Vie de Coste, 241. The

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left by early December, since in the final version of the memoir, dated “A Londres ce 10 de Decembre 1704,” he stated that he been in London for some time.47 The most likely explanation for his presence at Oates later in December is that he was paying a short visit, perhaps to discuss his translation of the Discourse with Lady Masham. Coste met up with some old friends like Pierre Des Maizeaux, but did not much enjoy living in London, which he described to Furly as “une solitude affreuse.”48 He was, however, to remain there for several more months, staying for at least part of the time with Robert Pawling at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Locke’s old London address.49 At some time during this period he seems to have entered into contact with the Third Earl of Shaftesbury,50 and on 20 March he wrote to him to explain why he had been delayed in setting out for Dorset: Je vous ai d´eja dit, Milord, ce qui m’a empˆech´e de partir pour St. Giles d`es que j’eˆus rec¸u la Lettre de Mr. King. Car d`es lors ne doutant plus que vous ne dussiez bientˆot recevoir l’Original du Manuscrit en question, je serois parti sur le champ, si Madame Masham ne fut arriv´ee a` Londres pour y chercher du remede contre une incommodit´e qui la tourmente depuis plus d’un Mois. Elle est venu¨e sans Madamoiselle Masham avec quelques Domestiques qui n’avoient jamais e´ t´e a` Londres, et elle va eˆ tre priv´ee demain de la compagnie de Sir Francis Masham qui la laissera dans une Maison de gens qu’elle ne connoit point. Comme elle peut avoir besoin de mon secours dans ces circonstances, et que je suis persuad´e que Mr. LeClerc ne peut recevoir assez tˆot ce que vous voulez lui envoyer, pour l’inserer dans le sixi´eme Volume de son Journal, je me trouve encore dans la n´ecessit´e de me priver de l’honneur de vous voir.51

The manuscript mentioned here is almost certainly the autograph of Locke’s Memoirs relating to the Life of Anthony, First Earl of Shaftesbury, which Peter King had extracted from among Locke’s papers after his death.52 King told Shaftesbury that though he had inherited Locke’s papers, in his view this one properly belonged to Shaftesbury himself, and that he would therefore dispose of it “as your Lordship

translation was published in Amsterdam in 1705; the dedicatory epistle is dated 9 Jan. 1705, so it is likely that Coste finished the task after he went to London. “Quoi que je sois quelque tems a` Londres,” Nouvelles de la r´epublique des lettres (Feb. 1705), 176.

47

48 Coste to Arent Furly, 23 Jan. 1705, NA, PRO 30/24/27/18. The letter of 6 Jan. 1705 (NS) from De la Motte to Des Maizeaux was written in response to a letter from Des Maizeaux enclosed in one from Coste to De la Motte, BL, Add. MS 4286, fo. 11. 49 De la Motte’s letter to Des Maizeaux of 31 Mar. 1705 (NS) was forwarded to Coste at this address, BL, Add. MS 4286, fo. 14. Coste had stayed there with Francis Cudworth Masham in 1698 and 1702, Bodl., MS Locke c. 1, p. 335, MS Locke c. 2, p. 65. 50 Coste had been writing to Shaftesbury before Locke died, though no letters are known to have survived: see Benjamin Furly to Locke, 8/19 Feb. 1704 , Correspondence, 8: 192. 51 HRO, 9M73/G255/2. The material included in the sixth volume of Le Clerc’s Biblioth`eque choisie was his own “Eloge de feu Mr. Locke,” 342–411; this incorporated the account sent to him by Shaftesbury on 8 Feb. 1705: Jean Le Clerc, Epistolario, ed. Maria Grazia Sina and Mario Sina (Florence: Olschki, 1987–97), 2: 520–4. 52

NA, PRO 30/24/42/62, fos. 9–15. See Locke to King, 4 Oct. 1704, Correspondence, 8: 415.

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shall direct.”53 Shaftesbury was eager to see the manuscript, but did not wish to risk its loss: “I must confess I have naturally a great impatience to see the sheets but being not willing to venture the Originall by any Carriage I shou’d be extreemly glad of having a Coppy by the Post, as soon as you can gett them writt out for Me.”54 King replied that he had ordered the papers to be transcribed and hoped to send them “in a post or Two,” but if any copy was made, it seems not to have been sent.55 In the end it was the original manuscript that was delivered to Shaftesbury: King took it to Salisbury when he went there for the assizes in March, and his servant brought it to Wimborne St Giles.56 Coste himself probably travelled down to Dorset in April,57 and no sooner had he arrived than Shaftesbury asked him to translate Locke’s memoirs of his grandfather into French: Je n’y fus pas plˆutˆot arriv´e que MyLord Shaftsbury me donna a` lire des Memoires assez incomplets que Mr. Locke avoit composez, a` sa sollicitation, concernant le pr´emier Comte de Shaftsbury. Il me chargea de les traduire en Franc¸ois. Ma Traduction ne lui ayant pas deplu, il l’envoya d’abord a` Mr. LeClerc pour qu’il l’inserˆat dans un Journal qu’il faisoit imprimer de mois en mois a` Amsterdam.58

Le Clerc published the memoirs as requested,59 though in a form that caused some annoyance to both Coste and Shaftesbury—at least if Coste’s account is to be trusted: MyLord rec¸ut bientˆot cette Traduction telle qu’il avoit plˆu a` Mr. LeClerc de la publier: car par une imprudence qui me paroˆıt inexcusable, il fit plusieurs changemens dans ma Copie

King to Shaftesbury, 9 Dec. 1704, NA, PRO/30/24/47/24, printed in The Works of John Locke, 9 vols. (London, 1824), 9: 322. 53

54 Shaftesbury to King, [c.13] Jan. 1705, NA, PRO 30/24/22/2, fo. 35; draft in PRO 30/24/22/5, fo. 370; another copy in PRO 30/24/22/5, fo. 372; printed in The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Author of the “Characteristics,” ed. Benjamin Rand (London: Sonnenschein, 1900), 325–6. 55 King to Shaftesbury, 18 Jan. 1704[/5], NA, PRO 30/24/20/88. The copy of the Memoirs in Bodl., MS Locke b. 4, fos. 109–14, was made by William Shaw, Locke’s last manservant, perhaps after Locke died, as the last eight w ords are in the hand of Peter King. The text printed in the Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke (London, 1706), 281–304, was not derived from this but directly or indirectly from Locke’s autograph. 56 King to Shaftesbury, 14 Mar. 1704[/5], NA, PRO 30/24/20/86. The servant who brought it was not named, but as he was described as having formerly worked for Locke it was probably William Shaw. 57 A letter of 12 May 1705 from King to Shaftesbury, HRO, 9M73/G258/2, indicates that Coste had been at St Giles for some time; see also Shaftesbury to Arent Furly, 9 May 1705, NA, PRO 30/24/20/99, printed in Original Letters of Locke; Algernon Sidney; and Anthony Lord Shaftesbury, ed. Thomas Forster (London, 1830), 210–3. 58 59

Coste to James Harris, 27 Dec. 1738, HRO, 9M73/G232.

“M´emoires pour servir a` la Vie d’Antoine Ashley, Comte de Shaftesbury, & Grand Chancellier d’Angleterre, sous Charles II,” Biblioth`eque choisie 7 (1705): 146–91.

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sans la comparer avec l’Original qu’on ne lui avoit point envoy´e, et qu’il n’a jamais vˆu. MyLord Shaftsbury desapprouva cette libert´e aussi bien que moi.60

It is not clear to a modern reader that Le Clerc did anything very reprehensible: he seems to have made some small deletions and rewritten a few passages, as well as adding a short preface and some notes to explain aspects of English history that would have been unfamiliar to most foreign readers. Authors, however, generally dislike their work being altered by editors without their permission, and Coste was— in retrospect at least—ready to be irritated by what Le Clerc had done. Perhaps what annoyed him most was that Le Clerc gave him no credit at all for the translation, but left readers to assume that it was all his own work—as indeed they generally have done. Coste spent the summer at St Giles, enjoying the hospitality and companionship of his host.61 He reported this to Bayle, possibly in slightly over-excited terms since Bayle’s reply conveys a faint note of irritation: “La narration que vous me faites concernant les agr´emens de sa conversation, ses manieres si honnˆetes, si vives, si assaisonn´ees d’´erudition, est tr`es-belle.”62 It was a kind of polished, erudite conversation that Coste was going to miss greatly during the next few years.63 In the autumn of 1705 Coste moved to Chipley in Somerset to act as a tutor to Edward and Mary Clarke’s children.64 For a short while he seems to have been contented,65 but he soon began to feel lonely and unappreciated and his relations with Clarke became increasingly poor. Mrs Clarke had died a few months after his

60 Coste to Harris, 27 Dec. 1738, HRO, 9M73/G232. Coste’s work as the translator and his irritation at Le Clerc’s alterations are also mentioned in a letter he wrote to Shaftesbury on 7 June 1712 (NS): “c’est moi qui ai traduit ces Memoires sur l’original qu’il n’avoit point vˆu quand il [Le Clerc] fit des changement [sic] dans mon Manuscrit,” NA, PRO 30/24/21/184. In this copy (the original is lost) the letter is dated “Mardy le 7me Juin 1712,” the digit being badly faded. In a later endorsement the letter is dated 1715, which is clearly impossible as Shaftesbury had been dead for nearly two years; subsequently this was altered to 1710, the date given in the National Archives catalogue. The only year between 1710 and 1712 where 7 June was a Tuesday in either the Julian or Gregorian calendar was 1712. The letter is printed with the correct date in Barrell, 153–4. 61 According to Coste’s letter to James Harris, HRO, 9M73/G232, he was at St Giles “pr`es de six mois,” which would suggest a departure in September or October, but Shaftesbury left St Giles for Chelsea in August and did not return until November, and Coste presumably went with him: see Voitle, Shaftesbury, 225, 237, 242.

Bayle to Coste, 3 July 1705 (NS), Lettres de Mr. Bayle, Publi´ees sur les Originaux: avec des Remarques: par Mr. Des Maizeaux (Amsterdam, 1729), Vol. III, p. 1023. 62

63 “. . .j’aurois grand besoin de jou¨ır de ces douces conversations de St. Gilles, o` u vous m’invitez avec tant de bont´e,” Coste to Shaftesbury, 13 Nov. 1706, HRO, 9M73/G255/9. 64 He must have been there by late November, if not earlier, since Shaftesbury described him in a letter sent to Arent Fury on 5 December as “well settled in Mr Clarks family,” NA, PRO 30/24/20/108. In a letter of 5 September 1708, HRO, 9M73/G255/19, Coste told Shaftesbury that he had “encore 25 mois” remaining to spend at Chipley. If, as seems likely, his contract was for five years, this suggests he joined the household in October 1705; see also Coste to Shaftesbury, 23 July 1707, 10 Sept. 1707, HRO, 9M73/G255/13, 15. 65

“Je me porte mieux ici qu’`a Londres,” Coste to Shaftesbury, 23 Dec. 1705, HRO, 9M73/G255/1.

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arrival, and her husband, whose own health had been poor for some years, sank into a state of clinical depression from which he never recovered.66 Coste was hardly much happier, and his increasing dislike of his employer was vividly expressed in a series of letters from what he described to Shaftesbury as “le triste sejour de Chipley.”67 In May 1706 he complained of Clarke’s bad temper and inactivity: “L’humeur de Mr. Clarke qui l’a plong´e dans une malheureuse inaction, m’a donn´e jusqu’ici beaucoup de chagrin.’68 Clarke’s silences were oppressive: “Rien n’est capable de reveiller Mr. Clarke que les Nouvelles. S’il ouvre la bouche une fois le jour, ce n’est que pour en parler.”69 Clarke was not only unhappy himself, but in his misery was doing what he could to prevent the other members of the household from enjoying themselves: “Mr. Clarke qui vit renferm´e dans sa Chambre, prend plaisir a` sevrer toute sa famille des douceurs qu’il a pris en aversion.”70 As Coste remarked in a grim attempt at humour, “Si j’´etois naturellement melancolique, je serois ici comme le Poisson dans l’eau.”71 Coste had no great opinion of the ability of Clarke’s children, but he felt strongly that their education would suffer if they were confined to a house that Clarke’s neighbours had ceased to visit, conversing solely “avec des valets et des pa¨ısans.”72 Eventually he persuaded Clarke to go to London so that he could attend to his parliamentary business, but even this afforded little relief. Clarke almost never left the house, and his only pleasure was finding fault with whatever Coste did.73 Finally Coste could contain his rage no longer. Describing Clarke as possessing “la mani´ere la plus d´esobligeante du monde,” he told Shaftesbury that nothing was more unbearable than having to live “dans la dependance d’un tel homme.”74 66 Mary Clarke died on 10 Jan. 1706: Correspondence, 2: 480 (her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography wrongly gives a date of 10 Jan. 1705). Clarke’s eldest son had committed suicide in 1705; this and his wife’s death left him, in Mark Knight’s words, a “broken man” who “festered in a state of chronic depression”: Eveline Cruickshanks et al., The House of Commons, 1690–1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3: 596. 67

Coste to Shaftesbury, 23 July 1707, HRO, 9M73/G255/13.

68

Coste to Shaftesbury, 28 May 1706, HRO, 9M73/G255/3. The letter makes it clear that a particular source of irritation at this time was Clarke’s failure to sign Coste’s contract of employment, even though this had been drawn up and merely awaited his signature. 69 Coste to Shaftesbury, 23 Aug. 1706, HRO, 9M73/G255/7. Clarke’s inability to communicate in French would not have made matters easier: see Clarke to Locke, 7 Mar. 1691, Correspondence, 4: 221. 70

Coste to Shaftesbury, 17 June 1707, HRO, 9M73/G255/12.

71

Coste to Shaftesbury, 23 July 1707, HRO, 9M73/G255/13.

72

Coste to Shaftesbury, 23 July 1707, HRO, 9M73/G255/13; 16 March 1708, HRO, 9M73/G255/16. On the Clarkes’ children and their education, see Bridget Clarke, “Huguenot Tutors and the Family of Edward and Mary Clarke of Chipley, 1687–1710,” Proceedings of the Huguenot Society 27 (2001): 527–42. 73 “Accabl´e du poids de son oisivet´e, il ne songe qu’`a gronder. Si je viens un peu trop tard a` son gr´e, il s’en fˆache par la seule raison qu’il n’a autre chose a` faire dans ce temps-l`a.” Coste to Shaftesbury, 2 Feb. 1709, NA, PRO 30/24/45/80, fo. 534, Barrell, 125. 74

Coste to Shaftesbury, 7 May 1709, HRO, 9M73/G255/23.

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In January 1710 Coste was in London again, but Clarke’s behaviour towards him had not improved. He told Shaftesbury that he could have given him yet more details of Clarke’s dreadful manners, but that he had decided to spare him a recital of “des choses si odieuses et si degoutantes.” He then continued: Aujourd’hui j’en suis si frapp´e que je ne puis m’empˆecher de vous dire un mot. Je ne vois presque jamais ce Mr. qu’`a table; et l`a il s’´etudie a` m’observer quand je demande du pain, et a` me rire au nez.. . . Tout le reste de sa conduite r´epond a` ses mani´eres. Je m’´etois apperc¸u de cela depuis quelque temps. Je ne savois a` quoi en attribuer la cause. Mais enfin j’ai appris c’est qu’il a conc¸u une haine horrible contre moi, parce que le temps approche qu’il doit me payer une annuit´e de 20 pi´eces.75

The details of Coste’s financial affairs are difficult to reconstruct, but it would appear that Clarke had agreed to settle on him an annuity of $20 provided that he completed his term of service. Clarke was now reluctant to honour his obligations, and Shaftesbury and some of his (un-named) friends had to apply considerable pressure before he agreed to do what he had promised.76 It is not at all surprising that when Clarke made his will in June 1710, four months before he died, Coste was left nothing.77 Almost the only solace for Coste as he mouldered in the depths of the Somerset countryside was his correspondence with Shaftesbury. Much of this is concerned with literary matters, especially Latin poetry,78 but one person who they both knew well was Locke. It is very striking that almost all Coste’s remarks about him are disparaging. The first of these occurs in a letter of June 1707: “J’aurai bientˆot achev´e la traduction du Livre de Mr. Locke. J’espere m’occuper bientot apr`es a` quelque chose de plus instructif et de plus agr´eable. . .”79 What exactly he had been translating is not altogether clear—the problem is discussed below—but he had evidently found the task an irksome one.

75

Coste to Shaftesbury, 7 Jan. 1710, HRO, 9M73/G255/36.

76

Though no names are mentioned this is clearly the annuity discussed in Shaftesbury’s letter to Coste of 3 Oct. 1711 (NS), NA, PRO 30/24/23/8, p. 42, Barrell, 195; see also Somerset Archives and Record Service, Taunton, Sanford papers, DD\SF/1846. 77 Somerset Archives and Record Service, DD\SF/293, will dated 15 June 1710. In contrast with both Clarke and Locke, Shaftesbury bequeathed Coste an annuity of $20: NA, PRO 30/24/21/224. Annual payments of $20 to Coste appear in the accounts kept during the early 1720s by Benjamin Wyche, the fourth Earl’s steward: NA, PRO 30/24/28/8 fo. 29; PRO 30/24/28/10, fos. 106, 109. 78 James Dybikowski, “Letters from Solitude: Pierre Coste’s Correspondence with the third Earl of Shaftesbury,” in Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, Jens H¨aseler and Antony McKenna, eds., Les r´eseaux de correspondances a` l’ˆage classique (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Universit´e de St-Etienne, 2006), 109–33; I am grateful to Professor McKenna for alerting me to the existence of this valuable study. 79 Coste to Shaftesbury, 17 June 1707, HRO, 9M73/G255/12. The more agreeable and instructive work was “un petit Ouvrage sur Horace,” eventually published as Œuvres d’Horace. Traduites en Franc¸ois par le P. Tarteron. . .avec des remarques critiques sur la traduction par P. Coste. 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1710). On Coste’s and Shaftesbury’s profound interest in Horace, see Laurent Jaffro, “‘De bon lieu’: Pierre Coste, James Harris, et la diss´emination de l’interpr´etation Shaftesburienne d’Horace,” La Lettre Clandestine 15 (2007): 47–60.

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The next unfavourable reference occurs in a letter of September 1708. Coste had been reading the recently published Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke, and Several of his Friends, and was not impressed: J’ai employ´e depuis peu une journ´ee a` lire un volume de Lettres de Mr. Locke. Je doute que vous ayiez la patience d’en faire autant. Mr. Locke s’est admirablement bien peint lui-mˆeme dans ces Lettres, dont il fait lui seul le continuel sujet. On n’y parle que de lui, et de ses Livres qui sont comblez d’´eloges sans fin. Son ami qu’il n’avoit jamais vˆu [William Molyneux], ne se fait connoˆıtre a` lui que par cette admiration constante de tout ce qui part de sa plume; et d`es lors Mr. Locke tout penetr´e d’estime pour lui, le regarde comme un sincere amateur de la verit´e, auquel il ne sauroit trouver son egal dans toute l’Angleterre. C’est presque l`a tout ce que contient cet amas de lettres. Je comprens fort bien que cet entretien devoit eˆ tre fort agreable a` Mr. Locke; mais je doute qu’il plaise beaucoup au Public, qui voit par ses propres yeux le fort et le foible des Livres de Mr. Locke, et que les e´ loges de Mr. Molineux ne sauroient lui faire trouver meilleurs. Pour moi j’aurois empˆech´e la publication de ces Lettres par respect pour Mr. Locke, si la chose eut dependu de moi: mais puisqu’elles sont publiques je souhaite pour l’amour de Mr. Churchill qu’on s’empresse de les lire.80

The tone of this is not merely cool but positively hostile: Coste seems to have regarded Molyneux as a flatterer and a toady, and Locke as an egoist who lapped up the compliments offered and judged Molyneux’s philosophical acumen by his readiness to accept Locke’s own views. This was not something that Coste had been prepared to do even while he was at Oates, and the influence of Shaftesbury seems to have increased his disenchantment still further. One aspect of Locke’s philosophy, that he grew especially to dislike was his egoistic account of human motivation. The topic is raised in an undated letter that was probably sent towards the end of 1708 or early in 1709: Je vais prendre la libert´e, Milord, de vous consulter sur une affaire a` quoi je suis persuad´e que vous prenez beaucoup d’int´erˆet. Il se pr´esente une occasion fort naturelle de defendre la Vertu contre les attentats d’un Philosophe de nˆotre connoissance. On me demande de Hollande le Livre que Mr. Locke a fait pour prouver que la Religion Chr´etienne est raisonnable. C’est un Livre que j’ai traduit en Franc¸ois avant que de venir en Angleterre. L’edition est vendu¨e, et on veut le rimprimer. Je dois envoyer une Copie corrig´ee qu’on donnera a` l’Imprimeur. En relisant cet Ouvrage, j’y ai trouv´e que Mr. Locke pour faire valoir l’utilit´e qui revient aux hommes de la connoissance de l’Evangile, dit entr’autres choses que JesusChrist nous a procur´e un grand avantage en nous fournissant de puissans motifs pour nous porter a` bien vivre. Pour relever l’excellence et la n´ecessit´e de ces motifs, il soˆutient que la Vertu et le bonheur ne se trouvent guere souvent ensemble, et qu’`a cause de cela elle n’avoit pas, avant Jesus-Christ, un fort grand nombre de Sectateurs.81

80 81

Coste to Shaftesbury, 5 Sept. 1708, HRO, 9M73/G255/19.

HRO, 9M73/G255/37. Assigning even an approximate date to this letter is not straightforward. According to a letter from De la Motte to Des Maizeaux of 24 Oct. 1709 (NS): “Il y a un an qu’un Libraire vouloit re¨ımprimer la Religion raisonnable de Mr. Locke,” BL, Add. MS 4286, fo. 89; this suggests that the request for a new edition of Coste’s translation arrived in the autumn of 1708. Coste was in London when 9M73/G255/37 was written, while Shaftesbury was staying with Sir John Cropley at Betchworth in Surrey. Shaftesbury was there from the autumn of 1708 until the summer of 1709, apart from 5 February–15 April, when he was at St Giles: see Voitle, Shaftesbury, 286–96. Coste seems to have been in London by early November 1708 and to have remained there until early June 1709: see HRO, 9M73/G255/20–26; NA, PRO 30/24/45/80, fo.

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Coste then quoted his own translation of the following passage from the Reasonableness of Christianity: And ’its no wonder She [virtue] prevailed not much in a State, where the Inconveniences that attended her were visible, and at hand; And the Rewards doubtful, and at a distance. Mankind. . .Could not but think themselves excused from a strict observation of Rules, which appeared so little to consist with their chief End, Happiness; Whilst they kept them from the enjoyments of this Life; And they had little evidence and security of another.82

Coste found this utterly deplorable, and suggested that Locke’s outlook resembled that of the legendary Assyrian king Sardanapalus: Sardanopale auroit pˆu raisonner de cette mani´ere: mais Epicure n’auroit pˆu e´ couter un tel discours. Je croi donc, Milord, que je ne risque rien, si je me d´eclare publiquement contre une satire si scandaleuse. Elle me choque, quoi que j’avoˆue¨ que sans vous je n’y verrois encore rien de choquant. Voici maintenant mot pour mot la Note que j’ai resolu de faire imprimer au bas de la page o`u se trouvent les passages que je viens de citer.

The note began: A raisonner sur le Principe de Mr. Locke, il faudroit dire qu’une conduite oppos´ee a` celle que prescrit la Vertu, est en effet la plus avantageuse dans ce Monde; et qu’ˆot´e l’esperance d’un grand Bonheur apr`es cette vie, il vaut mieux eˆ tre fourbe que sinc´ere; ingrat que reconnoissant; dur et sans compassion que g´en´ereux et bienfaisant, etc.

A second note was prefaced with another disparaging comment: “Dans la suite Mr. Locke entreprend de nous parler des opinions des Philosophes sur le chapitre de la Vertu, et il en parle comme un homme qui ne connoissoit ni ces opinions ni leurs Auteurs.” Coste then provided Shaftesbury with the entire text of the note, before concluding, “Voil`a, Milord, ce que j’ai resolu de publier sur cette mati´ere, si vous jugez que je puisse le faire sans exposer une si bonne cause, et sans m’attirer la haine publique.” What Shaftesbury advised is not known, but though he would undoubtedly have agreed with what Coste had written it is likely that he recommended caution; in the event, nothing was published while Shaftesbury was still alive. When, however, a new edition of Coste’s translation finally did appear, in 1715, the notes he had shown Shaftesbury were printed with only slight changes.83 Another expression of distaste for Locke’s ethics occurs in a letter of May 1709: J’ai e´ t´e charm´e de voir l’approbation que vous donnez a` ma petite Apologie de la vertu contre les insultes de Mr. Locke. J’avois d´eja montr´e une partie de cette apologie a` Mr. vˆotre Fr´ere [Maurice Ashley] qui n’y trouva rien a` reprendre. Plus j’y pense, plus je suis

534. A date between November 1708 and January 1709 for 9M73/G255/37 seems most likely: though Coste was in London and Shaftesbury at Betchworth in May and June, the topics raised in 9M73/G255/37 are rather different from those discussed in the letters written during those months (HRO, 9M73/G255/23–26, 39; NA, PRO 30/24/45/80, fo. 541). John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (London, 1695), 284–5. In the Clarendon Edition, ed. John C. Higgins-Biddle (Oxford, 1999), 161, “the enjoyments of this Life” is given wrongly as “the enjoyments of the Life.”

82

83 Le Christianisme raisonnnable (Amsterdam, 1715), 1: 320–2, 326–7; in the passage quoted here the only change was that “le Principe de Mr. Locke” was altered to “ce Principe.”

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convaincu de la fausset´e et de la bassesse des Principes que ce Philosophe avoit sur cette importante mati´ere.84

As described by Coste in this letter, the “Apologie” took the form of a dialogue between the fourth-century Cynic philosopher Crates of Thebes, who was given views close to Shaftesbury’s, and Sardanapalus—“ce Prince infame” as Coste called him—whose opinions resembled Locke’s. Unfortunately it was never published, and no part of it is known to survive. Both Coste and Shaftesbury were careful not to allow their dislike of Locke’s views to become public. Shaftesbury had published his Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour in the late spring of 1709, and he asked Coste to make a translation into French.85 This was published in the following year, with a preface and some notes supplied by Coste, though neither the author nor the translator was identified.86 By the autumn the translation had been finished and was being printed. Shaftesbury must have been sent a copy of the proofs, since in an undated letter that Coste wrote in October or thereabouts some of the finer details of the translation are defended against his criticisms.87 The letter concludes with a postscript: Il y a quelque temps que j’oubliai de vous dire que sur l’avis que vous me donnˆates de ne pas nommer Mr. Locke, j’´ecrivis de changer la Note o`u je l’avois nomm´e; mais l’avis vint trop tard, comme vous verrez. Je croi pourtant que vous ne serez pas choqu´e de la mani´ere dont j’ai cit´e ce Philosophe. Je l’ai fait avec beaucoup de menagement.

The main target of Coste’s notes was Hobbes,88 and only one note mentioned Locke by name. Shaftesbury had described how “some even of our most admir’d modern Philosophers had fairly told us that Virtue and Vice had, after all, no other Law or

84

Coste to Shaftesbury, 7 May 1709, HRO, 9M73/G255/23.

Voitle, Shaftesbury, 294–5. Coste’s work on this is described in the letters sent to Shaftesbury in the summer and autumn of 1709: HRO, 9M73/G255/27, 29–32; NA, PRO 30/24/45/80, fo. 541, Barrell, 128–9.

85

86 Essai sur l’usage de la raillerie et de l’enjoument dans les conversations (The Hague, 1710), i–xii, 57, 60, 66, 69–70. Coste did not attempt to keep his work secret: his authorship of the preface is acknowledged in an undated letter he wrote to Leibniz: G.W. von Leibniz, Philosophischen Schriften, ed. C.J. Gerhardt (Hildesheim: Olms, 1978), 3: 406–7. The preface is also discussed in Coste to Shaftesbury, 1 Nov. 1709, HRO, 9M73/G255/31. 87

HRO, 9M73/G255/41. An approximate date is indicated by a remark that copies of Le Clerc’s edition of Menander had already reached London; the preface to this was dated 5 Sept. 1709 (NS), and on 6 November Shaftesbury wrote to Le Clerc to thank him for having sent a copy, NA, PRO 30/24/22/7, pp. 7–8: see Barrell, 75–7, 94–6, 247–51. That Shaftesbury had been reading a proof copy of Coste’s translation and not a manuscript is shown by Coste’s mention of page- and line-numbers that are identical with those in the printed edition. The letter also contains on its final page a set of notes in Shaftesbury’s hand correcting various faults in the printing. The translation was published by mid-January: see De la Motte to Des Maizeaux, 17 Jan. 1710, BL, Add. MS 4286, fo. 100. 88

Essai sur l’usage de la raillerie, viii–x, xii, 57, 60, 66, 69–70.

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Measure, than mere Fashion and Vogue.”89 Coste’s note supplied the identification, though in a curiously indirect way: Je n’ai pˆu d´ecouvrir de moi-mˆeme a` qui en veut ici mon Auteur: mais un de mes Amis qui a frequent´e long-temps en Angleterre les meilleures Compagnies, et qui connoˆıt les bons Livres de ce Pa¨ıs-l`a, m’a assur´e qu’il s’agit ici de Mr. Locke, qui dans son Essai sur l’Entendement appelle la Vertu la Loi d’Opinion (Liv. II. Chap. 28. §7.10.) et la Loi de Coˆutume, §13.90

There was nothing very offensive about this, and perhaps the most significant feature of the note is the extreme care that Coste was taking to conceal his own identity: as the translator of Locke’s Essay he would have known very well to whom Shaftesbury had been alluding, and would certainly not have needed to ask a friend who had lived in England for advice. In public at least he was still being very cautious. After Shaftesbury’s death this was to change.

IV In 1720 Pierre Des Maizeaux published A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, a volume containing a variety of writings that had either not previously been printed, or else had not hitherto been publicly attributed to Locke.91 While this was in the press he was sent an English translation of Coste’s memoir of Locke together with a letter, apparently anonymous, requesting—or rather ordering—him to insert the memoir in his collection. Des Maizeaux obeyed, but chose to publish the anonymous letter as well, which he had not been asked to do. The letter explained why Des Maizeaux had been sent the translation of Coste’s memoir. What had annoyed its writer was the contrast between the praise Coste had lavished on Locke immediately after his death and the tone of his more recent utterances: The Letter was written some time after Mr. Locke’s Death; and appears to be the production of a man in raptures, and struck with the highest admiration of Mr. Locke’s Virtue, Capacity, and of the excellency of his Writings; and under the deepest affliction for the loss of a person, to whom in his life-time he had paid the most profound respect, and for whom he had constantly express’d the greatest esteem, and that even in writings whereof Mr. Locke did not know him to be the Author. And therefore, Mr. Locke’s Friends judge its publication necessary, not only, as they think it contains a just Character of Mr. Locke, as far as it goes; but, as it is a proper Vindication of him against the said Mr. Coste, who in several Writings, and in his common

89

Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (London, 1709), 32.

90

Essai sur l’usage de la raillerie, 42n–43n.

On this, see Philip Milton, “Pierre Des Maizeaux, A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, and the Formation of the Locke Canon,” Eighteenth-Century Thought 3 (2007): 255–91. 91

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Conversation throughout France, Holland, and England has aspers’d and blacken’d the Memory of Mr. Locke; in those very respects, wherein he was his Panegyrist before.92

This was a brutal and very public denunciation of Coste, and its publication permanently damaged his relations with Des Maizeaux.93 The letter had ostensibly been sent on behalf of an (un-named) group of Locke’s friends, but there can be little if any doubt that it came from Anthony Collins, who had written privately to Des Maizeaux some years earlier to express his feelings about Coste’s behaviour: However, this much I owe to the memory of Mr Locke, as to think of some plan of a vindication of him from the treatment of Mr Le Clerc and Mr Coste; who both servily flatterd him during his life and made panegyricks upon him immediately after his death. Mr Coste not only in his Travels thro France and Holland, but in republishing works, which he thought it a glory to translate, has acted the part of a calumniator both in the manner of attacking him, and in the attacks themselves which are the efforts of a man who has Persons and not things in view. I think that deserves to be calld servile flattery, which is said to a man in his life time, and contradicted afterwards.94

What Coste had done to bring such denunciations upon himself has never been adequately explained.95 Such little information as survives on the matter suggests that in the years immediately after Locke’s death Collins’s relations with Coste had been entirely friendly: Coste had discussed Shaftesbury’s writings with Collins, had

92 A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, ii–iii, italics reversed. A manuscript of the anonymous letter in Collins’ hand is among Des Maizeaux’s papers, BL, Add. MS 4282, fos. 174–5; a full text is given in Milton, “Pierre Des Maizeaux.” In this Coste was also accused of disrespect towards the memory “of the late Incomparable Earl of Shaftsbury since his death, and of others who had been Benefactors to him”; these remarks were omitted when the letter was published.

Coste to Newton, 16 Aug. 1721, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H.W. Turnbull et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77), 7: 148; Vie de Coste, 260; see also Goldgar, Impolite Learning, 129–31 for De la Motte’s reaction.

93

94

Collins to Des Maizeaux, 28 Feb. 1716[7], BL, Add. MS 4282, fo. 125. The actions by Le Clerc that had annoyed Collins probably relate to his review of Locke’s Paraphrase and Notes in the Biblioth`eque choisie, 13 (1707): 37–178; see Locke, Paraphrase and Notes, 60–1. Le Clerc also had the temerity to compare Locke’s philosophical abilities unfavourably with those of Limborch, who in “his Letters to Mr Locke. . .happily explain’d the Nature of Liberty; of which that Great Man had not an exact idea,” Jean Le Clerc, A Funeral Oration upon the Death of Mr. Philip Limborch (London, 1713), 25. The issue is discussed in Goldgar, Impolite Learning, 123–4, Milton, “Pierre Des Maizeaux,” and Rumbold, Traducteur huguenot, 19–20. Some years earlier Coste had been described in the M´emoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux arts [Journal de Tr´evoux], Mai 1707, p. 934, as being the author of a “Lettre e´ crite a` Mr. l’Abb´e Dauxi par Mr. de la Coste” replying to earlier attacks on Locke. He denied this in a letter to Jacques Bernard of 30 Oct. 1708, Biblioth`eque de la Soci´et´e de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Franc¸ais, Paris, MS 295, lettre 14, quoted and discussed in Rumbold, Traducteur huguenot, 21–2.

95

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made use of his library, and had even gone with to St Giles to see Shaftesbury’s infant son.96 Why then did things change? One part of Collins’s accusation was that Coste had “aspers’d and blacken’d the Memory of Mr. Locke” in conversation, especially while travelling in Holland and in France. Collins would have been well placed to gain information about Coste’s activities abroad: he had himself been in the Netherlands between January and September 1713,97 and may well have met him or heard reports of what he had been saying to others. Coste could certainly be extremely indiscreet. In 1714 he was staying in Paris, where his conversations with Nicolas Remond were reported by Remond to Leibniz: Mons. Coste qui est encore ici pour quelques mois . . . m’a promis de me faire un extrait en franc¸ois de ce qui peut vous regarder dans les lettres posthumes de M. Lock; il juge aussi que ce qui y est rapport´e de vos jugemens est tout ce qu’il y a de bon dans ce recueil.98

It would seem that Coste’s estimation of Some Familiar Letters had not risen in the six years that had elapsed since he had written about it to Shaftesbury: the criticisms of Locke’s Essay which Leibniz had sent to Thomas Burnet were—Coste now felt —the only item of value in the entire collection.99 Collins is unlikely to have known of Remond’s letter, but it would appear that he did possess what he saw as irrefutable evidence of Coste’s misdeeds: among Des Maizeaux’s papers there is a draft of a letter apparently intended as a reply to a review of A Collection of Several Pieces that had appeared in the Bilblioth`eque Angloise, in which the editor of that journal was assured that if Coste ever attempted to deny these accusations, the Friends of Mr Locke would prove them in a way that would leave him with no reply.100 This information can only have come from Collins himself. The second part of Collins’s accusation was that Coste had been disrespectful towards Locke in his writings, and specifically in his translations of Locke’s works. The only new editions of these that had appeared since Locke’s death were De l’education des enfans (1708, 1711, 1715) and Le Christianisme raisonnnable

96 Coste to Shaftesbury, 5 Sept. 1708, HRO, 9M73/G255/19; Coste to Shaftesbury, 25 June 1709, NA, PRO 30/24/45/80, fo. 541; Coste to Shaftesbury, nd [c.1710], HRO, 9M73/G255/42; Shaftesbury to Coste, 12 Jan. 1712 (NS), PRO 30/24/23/8, p. 98; Coste to Shaftesbury, 1 May 1712 (NS), PRO 30/24/45/80, fos. 574–5; Barrell, 128, 150, 200.

James O’Higgins, Anthony Collins: The Man and his Works (The Hague, 1970), 79–80. Coste was abroad between 1712 and 1714: see n. 37 above. 97 98

Remond to Leibniz, 5 May 1714 (NS), Philosophischen Schriften, 3: 617.

99

These were sent to Locke by Burnet and a copy then passed on to Molyneux: Burnet to Locke, 14 Mar. 1697, Locke to Molyneux, 10 Apr. 1697, Correspondence, 6: 60–2, 86–93; Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke, and Several of his Friends (London, 1708), 196–205. “. . .si Mr. Coste s’avise jamais de nier le fait dont on l’accuse les Amis de Mr. Locke sont prets a` le lui prouver sans replique,” BL, Add. MS 4222, fo. 261, italicised passage underlined in MS. The review was in the Biblioth`eque Angloise 7 (1720): 285–343. The same letter (fo. 262) suggests that it was Coste’s conversations “surtout dans les pays etrangers” which had provoked Locke’s friends.

100

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(1715).101 In her valuable discussion of the problem Anne Goldgar has suggested that “Given the timing of Collins’ complaints, it seems likely that the true provocation of ‘the friends of Mr. Locke’ came from the 1715 translation of The Reasonableness of Christianity”102 One can agree that Collins and the other members of his circle might not have been much pleased by the rather bumptious tone of Coste’s “Avertissement du Traducteur”: Pour moi je prendrai la libert´e de d´eclarer ici, que je n’adopte pas tous les raisonnemens de Mr. Locke, quoi que je me sois donn´e la peine de mettre son Livre en Franc¸ois. On en verra des preuves en un ou deux endroits de cette nouvelle Edition. Il m’auroit e´ t´e facile d’en grossir le nombre, si j’eusse voulu critiquer les deux ou trois pr´emiers Chapitres du Pr´emier Volume, o`u sur des explications de quelques Passages de l’Ecriture, assez incertaines, Mr. Locke s’est engag´e dans des raisonnemens qui ne paroissent pas fort solides. . .103

Any irritation that they might have felt would certainly not have been mollified if they had then gone on to read the two notes that Coste had shown to Shaftesbury. Nevertheless it is unlikely that this edition was the immediate cause of Collins’ anger: by the time he wrote to Des Maizeaux other even more inflammatory comments by Coste had become public. In 1716 a selection of the letters that Shaftesbury had written to his young prot´eg´e Michael Ainsworth was published as Several Letters written by a Noble Lord to a Young Man at the University. Locke was mentioned several times, most conspicuously in a letter of 3 June 1709, where he was accused of subverting the foundations of morality: “’Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all Fundamentals, threw all Order and Virtue out of the World, and made the very Ideas of these (which are the same as those of God) unnatural, and without Foundation in our Minds.’104 There was also an unkind—and distressingly memorable—reference to “the credulous Mr. Locke’ as a gullible devourer of unreliable travel narratives.105

The1714 edition of the Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement was merely a reissue of sheets from the 1700 edition with a new title-leaf, and accordingly contained no new notes: see Yolton, Bibliography, 123–4. 101

102

Impolite Learning, 125–6.

103

Le Christianisme raisonnnable. (Amsterdam, 1715), 1: iii–iv.

Several Letters Written by a Noble Lord (London, 1716), 39. Neither Shaftesbury nor Ainsworth was mentioned by name in this edition, but as several of the letters were signed “S∗∗∗∗” the identification of the noble lord who had written them can hardly have caused much difficulty. The original letter is NA, PRO 30/24/20/143; the texts of both this and the version published in 1716 are printed in Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury: Standard Edition, ed. Wolfram Benda et al., (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1981–), 2.4: 402–3.

104

105

Similar remarks on Locke’s defects as a philosopher can be found in a letter Shaftesbury wrote to James Stanhope on 7 Nov. 1709, NA, PRO 30/24/27/23; another copy in Shaftesbury’s letter-book, PRO 30/24/22/7, pp. 9–14. This was printed by Barrell in Appendix A to his edition (pp. 239–43) but supposed by him to have been written by Shaftesbury to Coste before Locke’s death, though as Coste had certainly never employed his leisure hours “aboard Fleets and with the Command of Armys’ he seems an unlikely recipient. It is printed with the correct addressee in Rand, Shaftesbury, 413–17.

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The publication of these letters was not authorised by Shaftesbury’s family, and it is very unlikely that Coste was involved in any way.106 He did, however, report their publication in an (anonymous) letter of his own to the Nouvelles de la r´epublique des lettres, in which Shaftesbury was explicitly identified as their author.107 Locke was mentioned several times. Coste noted that he had been praised for having delivered philosophy from the barbarities of the schoolmen, but felt that others—presumably the Cartesians108 —deserved the main credit for this: On le lou¨e d’avoir travaill´e a` d´egager la Philosophie de la barbarie, qui l’avoit enti´erement e´ loign´ee du commerce du Monde. Il semble mˆeme qu’on lui attribu¨e la gloire d’avoir faites les premi´eres ouvertures. Mais c`et Ouvrage avoit e´ t´e commenc´e, &´etoit d´eja fort avanc´e, avant que Mr. Locke eˆut e´ crit.109

In other words, Locke was not the trail-blazer that his admirers believed him to be. More damagingly, he was accused of having contributed more than anyone to the corruption of philosophy and natural theology. Hobbes had begun this, but what Shaftesbury called “the Poyson of his Philosophy’ had been made less effective by his notorious advocacy of absolute government. Locke’s irreproachably whiggish politics made him much more dangerous: “il a comme extermin´e du Monde la Vertu & l’Ordre, en e´ tablissant que les id´ees de l’Ordre & de la Vertu, qui sont les mˆemes que celles de Dieu, n’ont point fondement naturel dans notre Esprit.’110 Shaftesbury’s jibe at “the credulous Mr. Locke’ was translated for the benefit of continental readers: Et que le cr´edule Mr. Locke ne vienne point ici nous amuser par ses Contes Indiens & Barbares, de peuples sauvages, qui n’ont point de pareilles id´ees, comme l’en ont assur´e des Voyageurs, Auteurs d’un rare savoir, gens d’une sinc´erit´e a` toute e´ preuve, & sur tout grands Philosophes . . . 111

It would seem very likely that it was the publication of this letter in the Nouvelles de la r´epublique des lettres that provoked the anger Collins expressed in his letter 106

The anger felt by the fourth Earl is apparent in comments he made to Thomas Birch in the late 1730s in connection with the biography of his father that Birch was writing, describing it as “a fraudulent and sinister publication’ and putting the blame for its publication (very plausibly) on Ainsworth himself, BL, Add. MS 4254, fo. 240. 107 “Fragment d’une Lettre e´ crite de Londres a` l’Auteur de ces Nouvelles, o` u il est parl´e de deux Livres Nouveaux,” Nouvelles de la r´epublique des lettres (Nov. & Dec. 1716) 762–7. The letter is dated 17 Sept. 1716; Coste’s authorship was acknowledged in a subsequent “Lettre de Mr. Coste a` l’Auteur de ces Nouvelles, au sujet du Fragment de Lettre ins´er´e dans celles de Novembre & D´ecembre. pag. 762,” ibid., Jan. & Fev. 1717: 124–8. Compare the note added to the 1729 edition of Coste’s translation of the Essay, at II. xxiii. 25: “Il est pourtant tr`es-certain que les Cartesiens ont d´emontr´e, long-temps avant que M. Locke eˆut song´e a` composer son Livre, que les Id´ees des Saveurs & des Odeurs sont uniquement dans l’Esprit de ceux qui goˆutent les Corps qu’on nomme savoureux, & qui flairent les Corps qu’on nomme odoriferans. . ..”

108

109

Nouvelles de la r´epublique des lettres (Nov. & Dec. 1716), 764.

110

Ibid., 765.

111

Ibid., 765–6, italics reversed.

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of 28 February 1717. The dates fit: copies of the November–December issue of the journal would probably have reached England by the end of the year, and copies of the January–February issue two months later. The wording of Collins’ letter also indicates that he found himself in some difficulty because Coste’s unfavourable remarks about Locke were difficult if not impossible to disentangle from similar statements made by Shaftesbury. It began: Instead of the Remarks, which you expect from me, I here send you some few on Mr Pictet’s book. I am very unwilling to say any thing, even in the softest manner, with relation to my Lord Shaftsbury, whose freinds will take it very unkindly from me; and therefore I have not begun what I intended, since I could not have separated my Lord from Mr Coste.112

Shaftesbury had been dead for four years, but still had powerful friends to protect his memory. The remarks which Collins had promised to send to Des Maizeaux therefore remained unwritten, and for the time being Coste escaped public censure.

V It is clear from the account given above that within a few years of Locke’s death, Coste was making unappreciative and often hostile remarks about both his character and his writings. There is no reason to believe that he was not wholly sincere. Coste would have been aware that Shaftesbury had come to detest several aspects of Locke’s philosophy, and was presumably confident that he would not object to reading unflattering comments on Locke’s character, but he was himself under no obligation to say what he did: if he had still admired Locke he could have defended him, or at least kept quiet. As Coste readily acknowledged, it was through his discussions with Shaftesbury that he acquired his aversion for Locke’s moral philosophy: all his earlier disagreements seem to have arisen out of his attachment to the Cartesian tradition in which he had been educated, and to a feeling that Locke had disparaged this without having properly understood it.113 The cult of Virtue was new, and clearly came from Shaftesbury himself. It is, however, unlikely that Shaftesbury’s influence was the only—or even the main—cause of the dislike of Locke so manifest in Coste’s letters. All this raises a question which it is not easy to answer: how deeply estranged from Locke did Coste become during Locke’s own lifetime, while they were both living together at Oates? Our only evidence for bad relations comes from De la 112

BL, Add. MS 4282, fo. 125. Mr Pictet was the Genevan minister B´en´edict Pictet, the third edition of whose Trait´e contre l’indiff´erence des religions (Geneva, 1716) had attacked both Collins’s Discours sur la libert´e de penser (“London” [Amsterdam?], 1714)—a translation of A Discourse of Freethinking—and Le Christianisme raisonnnable. It does not mention either Shaftesbury or Coste. The remarks on Pictet’s book that Collins mentioned were printed in the second edition of his Discours (“London,” 1717), iv–x, as a “Lettre. . .`a M. D∗∗∗∗,” dated 28 Feb. 1717. He confessed to Shaftesbury that though he now found the theological hedonism of the Reasonableness of Christianity repellent, “sans vous je n’y verrois encore rien de choquant,” Coste to Shaftesbury, nd [c.1708–9], HRO, 9M73/G255/37.

113

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Motte’s biography, and though the main source for this was undoubtedly Coste himself, we do not know how much of the information came from letters written at the time, and how much from later letters or conversations. Coste’s own memoir conveys no hint of any ill-feeling towards Locke: its tone is on the contrary one of unrestrained admiration. The conventions governing an obituary of this kind were, of course, quite restrictive: revelations of private gripes and disappointments would have been wholly out of place. Nevertheless Coste was under no obligation to write anything, and if he had begun to dislike his former patron he could easily have remained silent. Anthony Collins, who had been a frequent visitor to Oates during Locke’s last years, seems not to have noticed any disaffection on Coste’s part—in the 1720 letter to Des Maizeaux he described him as having paid the most profound respect to Locke during his lifetime, and as having constantly expressed the greatest esteem for him. Clearly there was no obvious divergence between Coste’s public demeanour and the adulatory tone of his memoir: if he harboured any private resentments he must have kept them well hidden. Perhaps the safest conclusion is that the seeds of his later hostility were sown at Oates while Locke was still alive and further nourished by Locke’s failure to leave anything to him in his will, but only came to flower as he brooded unhappily in what the Third Earl himself called “allmost five Year’s Confinement in the Desarts of Chiply.”114

Appendix There remains one final problem: what was the book by Locke that Coste had nearly finished translating in June 1707? There are several possibilities. 1. It might have been the revised and expanded edition of De l’education des enfans published in 1708. This was a translation of the fifth English edition (1705), and was described on its title-page as more than a third longer than its predecessor, which had been based on the first edition of 1693. The preface is dated “A Chipley dans la Province de Somerset, le 2. d’Avril 1708.”115 This might seem to suggest that the translation had been completed only a short time before, but Coste’s letters in the Malmesbury papers show that he had been working on it in the summer of 1706. In August he told Shaftesbury: je suis actuellement engag´e a` retoucher ma traduction du Livre que Mr. Locke a compos´e sur l’Education. J’y joins en mˆeme temps quantit´e d’additions que Mr. Locke y a fait depuis. C’est un ouvrage de commande, qui ne peut eˆ tre differ´e.116

114

Shaftesbury to Coste, 25 July 1712 (NS), NA, PRO 30/24/23/9, fo. 34; Barrell, 207.

De l’education des enfans (Amsterdam, 1708), xxxii; I am grateful to Professor M.A. Stewart for checking the precise wording of this in a copy in Edinburgh University Library. Since the book was published not later than mid-June 1708, when Coste was sent three copies, the preface was probably written after the printing of the main part had been completed: see De la Motte to Des Maizeaux, 15 Jun. [1708] (NS), BL, Add. MS 4286, fo. 62. 115

116

Coste to Shaftesbury, 23 Aug. 1706, HRO, 9M73/G255/7.

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Shaftesbury must have enquired why he was doing this, since Coste’s next letter explained why he had agreed to undertake a task that he now clearly regarded as extremely tiresome: Et en mˆeme temps un autre Libraire m’ayant demand´e les additions du Livre de l’Education de Mr. Locke, je n’en ai pˆu les lui refuser. Mais cette traduction finie, j’espere employer mon temps a` quelque chose de meilleur.117

The implication of this is that he had either finished the translation or was about to do so. Whatever Coste was translating in the summer of 1707, it would seem not to have been Some Thoughts concerning Education. 2. Another possibility is that Coste had translated something included in the Oeuvres diverses de Monsieur Jean Locke (Rotterdam, 1710).118 This contained some of the material published in the Posthumous Works of 1706: the Conduct of the Understanding, the New Method of a Commonplace book, the Discourse of Miracles, and the memoir of Shaftesbury, together with Le Clerc’s memoir of Locke and a translation of the Epistola de Tolerantia. Apart perhaps from the Epistola, the only items that would have required translation were the Conduct and the Discourse of Miracles; all the others had already appeared in French in either the Biblioth`eque universelle or the Biblioth`eque choisie.119 It might seem that this possibility is ruled out by an account Coste wrote many years later: after listing all the works by Locke that he had translated, he added: Voil`a tout ce que j’ai traduit des ouvrages de M. Locke. On a publi´e apr`es sa mort un livre intitul´e Œuvres diverses de M. Locke, chez Fr´ed´eric Bernard, libraire d’Amsterdam. M. Locke me les avait montr´ees en manuscrit. Je n’ai eu aucune part a` l’´edition de ces opuscules, si l’on excepte quelques lettres de M. Locke et de M. Limborch, qu’on a ins´er´ees dans ce recueil de pi`eces posthumes.120

This might seem enough to settle the issue, but as we have seen, one of the pieces included in the 1710 Oeuvres diverses—Locke’s memoir of Shaftesbury—certainly had been translated by Coste. If he had forgotten this or (more likely) had not remembered that it had been included in the Oeuvres diverses, then it is possible that his memory was imperfect on other matters. This does seem, however, a fairly remote possibility: the wording of Coste’s letter to Shaftesbury—“la traduction du Livre de Mr Locke”—seems to indicate that he had been translating an entire book and not merely one item in a collection. The letters between Locke and Limborch that Coste did admit to translating were not included in the 1710 edition of the

117

Coste to Shaftesbury, 20 Sept. 1706, HRO, 9M73/G255/8.

118

For a fuller description, see Yolton, Bibliography, 426–7.

A French translation of the Epistola had been made in 1689 but not published: see John Locke, Epistola de Tolerantia, ed. R. Klibansky and J. W. Gough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), xxvii–xxix. No copy is known to have survived, and it is uncertain whether it was used by the compilers of the Oeuvres diverses. I am grateful to Delphine Soulard for reminding me of this.

119

120

Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris, MS Fr. 24414, fo. 218, printed in Robert Shackleton, “Renseignements in´edits sur Locke, Coste et Bouhier,” Revue de litt´erature compar´ee 27 (1953): 319–22, from which the text here has been taken.

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Oeuvres diverses, but appeared in the expanded edition published in Amsterdam in 1732.121 They were first printed in Some Familiar Letters (1708), and had therefore not yet appeared when Coste wrote to Shaftesbury in June 1707. 3. The final—and perhaps the most likely—possibility is that Coste was translating the Two Treatises of Government (or more probably the Second Treatise alone). Jean Le Clerc had reported in his own “Eloge de feu Mr. Locke” that such a translation was being undertaken, though without identifying who was doing it.122 Evidence that Coste did indeed start work comes from the Vie de Coste. According to De la Motte: Son dessein e´ toit aussi de traduire tous les Ouvrages Posthumes qu’on imprimeroit les uns apr`es les autres en commenc¸ant par le Gouvernement civil. Je vous dirai tout de suite pourquoi il ne le fit pas. M. Collins, qui e´ toit alors fort de ses Amis, et l’un des Executeurs du Testament de M. Locke, se mit dans l’esprit de savoir quelle e´ toit la somme assez considerable (ce sont les termes mˆemes de la lettre de M. Locke) qui e´ toit destin´ee par M. Locke a` M. Coste pour sa traduction de ce Trait´e du Gouvernement civil. M. Collins, dis-je, aprit enfin que c’´etoit dix pi`eces, de quoi il fut fort surpris. Quand M. Coste vint a` savoir ce vilain, lui qui traduisoit cet Ouvrage sans aucune vˆue de r´ecompense de l’Auteur, brˆula ce qu’il avoit deja fait, quoi qu’on lui ait offert plus d’une fois beaucoup plus qu’il n’a eu pour ses traductions.123

Coste, it would seem, had started work on the translation without any specific indication of what the somme assez considerable promised by Locke was going to be, though presumably with the hope that it would be reasonably generous. On hearing from Collins that he was to be paid ten pounds—or perhaps ten guineas—he felt so insulted by Locke’s stinginess that he destroyed his own work. If indeed this happened, it would certainly go a long way towards explaining the tone of Coste’s remarks in his letters to Shaftesbury. It would be ironical if an action by Collins had helped contribute to the estrangement from Locke that Coste came to feel in the years following Locke’s death, and for which Collins was himself to rebuke him so severely.

121

Yolton, Bibliography, 427–9.

122

“Nous en aurons bien-tˆot une Edition Angloise beaucoup plus correcte que les pr´ecedentes, aussi bien qu’une meilleure version Franc¸oise,” Biblioth`eque choisie 6 (1705): 381. Vie de Coste, 244–5, italics in original. As often, De la Motte was inaccurate on points of detail concerning affairs in England: Collins was not one of the executors of Locke’s will, the “full and sole Executor” being Peter King, Correspondence, 8: 424.

123

Chapter 13

Toleration and its Place: A Study of Pierre Bayle in his Commentaire Philosophique Ian Harris

Toleration might seem at first blush to be a topic that comprises only a few elements—some matter, such as the believer’s conscience, its relation to the presence or absence of political or social sanction, and the authority from which the latter proceeds—but there again simplicity has not been the same as isolation since the Garden of Eden closed. For if the question is, how to regard conscience, the answer depends very much upon aspects of thought, including presuppositions, that have much wider reference. I am not sure that this is ultimately a very controversial claim, but it is one that tends to be overlooked, and more especially its consequences are rather less prominent in contemporary thought than they deserve. For instance, the propositions that metaphysics may condition views about toleration or coercion, and that toleration in its turn may have a revisionary effect on other aspects of thought are not received commonly amongst modern philosophers: with whom the opinion that justice does not presuppose metaphysical tenets is not unknown,1 and who write about toleration with little sustained reference to those aspects of thought which lie beyond political theory. Intellectual historians, on the other hand, are more likely to be receptive to those propositions. It is fitting, then, that this essay honours one who has approached philosophy through its past, and has emphasized the relationship between Locke’s epistemology and his views about toleration.2 This essay considers one of Locke’s contemporaries. It argues that the view of liberty of conscience developed by Pierre Bayle was conditioned by metaphysical beliefs, namely his conception of an epistemological order, his conception of God, and his natural theology, and by a concurrent political position, that is to say, his conception of the positive relation of state to church. It argues, further, that this

John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” in his Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), ch.18. For a pertinent question, Jean Hampton, “Should Political Philosophy be Done without Metaphysics?” Ethics 99 (1989): 791–814, and compare Andrew Vincent, The Nature of Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). 1

2

See especially G.A.J. Rogers, Locke’s Enlightenment (Hildesheim: Olms, 1998).

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 225–243. and Legacy, 

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view of toleration, in its turn, conditioned his views about the Old Testament and about soteriology. The argument advanced here comprises three claims. The first is that one crucial component in Bayle’s argument against a magisterial right to coerce religious belief derives from his conception of epistemological certainty, not from scepticism or fallibilism. It is this postulate of certainty that makes liberty of religious conscience the sole outcome possible in terms of knowledge as understood by Bayle. The second claim relates to Bayle’s natural theology, in terms of which, though there is no magisterial right to coerce, there is a magisterial duty to support the church and certain aspects of morality: Bayle thought that the church should have this relationship to the state because the latter had a positive role to play in upholding the former and in encouraging religious study; and he thought, too, that church and state should support some virtues and suppress some vices. The third claim is that though liberty of conscience derives from certainty according to Bayle, it also requires doubts about some established claims concerning the Old Testament, and about soteriology. So Bayle’s commitment to toleration, which itself points to epistemological and theological claims, requires revisions, including some in versions of Christian doctrine current in his day. If this argument shows that one view of toleration both required metaphysical postulates and tended to promote change in other departments of thought, it provides a cue for asking whether contemporary attention to toleration might not benefit from being broadened in its intellectual scope. It also suggests certain emphases in writing about Bayle. Scholars have given much attention to the question of scepticism in his thought. The classical form of the question has been about Bayle’s beliefs— whether he was a Christian or whether he was an atheist, and, indeed, whether he was an orthodox Calvinist or someone devoted to undermining Christian belief.3

Ludwig Feuerbach, Pierre Bayle. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Menscheit (Ansbach: Bruegel, 1838); Ars`ene Deschamps, La Gen`ese du scepticisme e´ rudite chez Bayle (Li`ege:Vaillant-Carmanie, 1878); James Fitzjames Stephen, “The Scepticism of Bayle,” in his Horae Sabbaticae (3 ser., London: Macmillan, 1892), ser. ii, essay 11; Cornelia Serrurier, Pierre Bayle en Hollande: e´ tude historique et critique (Apeldoorn: Dixon, [1913]); Howard Robinson, Bayle the Sceptic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931); J. Chaix-Ruiy, “La philosophie de Pierre Bayle. Scepticisme, criticisme ou fideisme?” Giornale di Metafisic 2 (1947): 517–27; W.H. Barber, “Pierre Bayle: Faith and Reason,” in W.G. Moore et al., eds., The French Mind, Studies in Honour of Gustave Rudler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 109–25; E.D. James, “Scepticism and fideism in Bayle’s Dictionnaire,” French Studies 16 (1962): 307–24; H.T. Mason, “Pierre Bayle’s Religious Views,” French Studies 17(1963), 205–17; H.M. Bracken, “Bayle not a skeptic?” Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (1964): 169–80; K.C. Sandberg, “Pierre Bayle’s Sincerity in His Views on Faith and Reason,” Studies in Philology 61(1964): 74–84; Idem, At the Crossroads of Faith and Reason, An Essay on Pierre Bayle (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966); Craig B. Brush, Montaigne and Bayle (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966); E.D. James, “Pierre Bayle on Belief and “Evidence”,” French Studies 27(1973): 395–404; Idem, “Faith, Sincerity and Morality: Mandeville and Bayle,” in I. Primer, ed., Mandeville Studies (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975); M. Heyd, “A Disguised Atheist or a Sincere Christian? The enigma of Pierre Bayle,” Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 39 (1977): 157–65; Gianni Paganini, Analisi della fede e critica della ragione nella f losofi di Pierre Bayle (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1980); Oscar Kenshur, “Pierre Bayle

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This topic has been broadened in the more recent past into one about scepticism in a more strategic sense, that is to say about the possibility of reaching certain knowledge, about the variety of scepticism involved, and about whether scepticism or fallibilism would be a more appropriate term for Bayle’s positions.4 Alongside these questions, there has been sustained attention to Bayle’s undoubted role as a proponent of liberty of conscience: attention which explores its character in a variety of ways, some of which make reference to scepticism or fallibilism.5 It is no part and the Structures of Doubt,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 21(1988): 297–315; Ruth Whelan, “The anatomy of superstition,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, no.259 (1989); A.C. Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729, vol.1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 244–62; Hubert Bost, Pierre Bayle et la religion (Paris: Champion, 1994); O. Abel and P.F. Moreau, eds., Pierre Bayle: la foi dans le doute (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1995); David Wootton, “Pierre Bayle, libertine?,” Studies in Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), ed. M.A. Stewart, 197–226; Anthony McKenna, “Rationalisme moral et fid´eisme” in Hubert Bost and Philippe de Robert, eds., Pierre Bayle, Citoyen du Monde (Paris: Champion, 1999), 257–74; Gianluca Mori, Bayle: philosophe (Paris: Champion, 1999); and, for a position sustained for many years in many publications, see especially Richard Popkin, The High Road to Pyrrhonism (San Diego: Austin Hill Press, 1980), and his History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). Compare J-J. Bouchardy, Pierre Bayle et la “nature des choses” (Paris : Champion, 2001), and Hans Bots & Jan de Vet, Strat´egies Journalistiques de l’ancien r´egime (Amsterdam : APA Holland University Press, 2002). 4 John Kilcullen, Sincerity and Truth. Essays on Arnauld, Bayle, and Toleration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), esp. p.101; Jose Maia Neto, “Academic Skepticism in Early Modern Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997): 199–220; Thomas M. Lennon, “Bayle’s Anticipation of Popper,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997): 695–705; idem, “Bayle, Locke, and the Metaphysics of Toleration,” Studies in Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy, ed. Stewart, 177–95; idem, Reading Bayle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); idem, “What Kind of a Skeptic Was Bayle?’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002): 258–79; idem, “Pierre Bayle,” Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayle), (2003), General Editor, Edward N. Zalta; and idem, “Bayle and Socinianism: a Cautionary Note,” in Anthony McKenna and Gianni Paganini, eds., Pierre Bayle dans la r´epublique des lettres (Paris: Champion, 2004), 171–91 at 184–5 on the Commentaire. W.J. Stankiewicz, Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960); Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols. (The Hague : Nijhoff, 1963–4), vol.2, pt. iv, chs.18–19; Jean P. Jossua, “Pierre Bayle, pr´ecurseur des th´eologies modernes de la libert´e religieuse,” Revue des Sciences Religieuses 39(1965) : 113–57; Elisabeth Labrousse, Bayle trans. Denys Potts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. 80–85; Harry M. Bracken, “Toleration Theories: Bayle, Jurieu, Locke” in his Mind and Language; Essays on Descartes and Chomsky (Dordrecht: Foris, 1984), 83–96; Amie Godman Tannenbaum, Pierre Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary. A Modern Translation and Critical Interpretation (New York: Lang, 1986); Harry M. Bracken, “Pierre Bayle and Freedom of Speech,” in E.J. Furcha, ed, Truth and Tolerance (Montreal: McGill University, 1990), 28–42; idem, “Toleration Theories: Bayle vs. Locke,” in E. Greffier and M. Paradis, eds., The Notion of Tolerance and Human rights. Essays in Honour of Raymond Klibansky (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1991), 1–11; Sally L. Jenkinson, “Rationality, Pluralism and Reciprocal Tolerance: a Reappriasal of Pierre Bayle’s Political Thought,” in Iain Hampsher-Monk, ed., Defending Politics: Bernard Crick and Pluralism (London: British Academic Press, 1993), 22–45; Oscar Kenshur, “Bayle’s Theory of Toleration: the Politics of Certainty and Doubt” in his Dilemma of Enlightenment: Studies in the Rhetoric and Logic of Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), ch.3, pp.77–111; Harry M. Bracken, “Bayle and the Origins of the Doctrine,” in Freedom of Speech: Words are not Deeds (Westport:

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of the purpose of this essay to suggest that these topics are unimportant, but rather to suggest that emphasis upon them does not direct our attention to other matters, which should claim our attention because they have at least equal importance. These are the dependence of the rights of conscience on knowledge; the natural theology with which the latter is connected, and which bears upon Bayle’s view of church and state; the positive role of the state in morality and religion; and the ways in which the terms of Baylean toleration suggested to their proponent revisions in theology. This essay, then, explores aspects of Bayle’s thought which suggest ways of thinking anew about his positions.6 After all, if scepticism might ground intolerance,7 we can ask if certainty might support toleration. It is worth emphasizing, in particular, that underlying those of Bayle’s views considered here are terms of natural theology. The supposition that God, and duties flowing from Him, could be apprehended by natural faculties is one that Bayle made, and from which he drew conclusions about epistemology, morality and religion. This treatment of Bayle calls for a prefatory word about his manner of arguing more generally. Bayle’s principal statement about toleration, the Commentaire

Praeger, 1994), 1–19; Sally L. Jenkinson, “Two Concepts of Tolerance: why Bayle is not Locke,” Journal of Political Philosophy 4(1996): 302–22; Gianluca Mori, “Pierre Bayle, the Rights of Conscience, the “Remedy” of Toleration,” Ratio Juris 10(1997): 45–59; Barbara Sher Tinsley, “Sozzini’s Ghost: Pierre Bayle and Socinian Toleration,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57(1996): 609–24; J.C.Laursen, “Baylean Liberalism: Tolerance Requires Nontolerance,” in J.C. Laursen and C.J. Nedermam, eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society. Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 197–215; Sally L. Jenkinson, “Bayle and Leibniz: Two Paradigms of Tolerance and Some Reflections on Goodness without God,” in J.C. Laursen, ed., Religious Toleration. “The Variety of Rites” from Cyrus to Defoe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 173–89; idem, “Introduction” in Jenkinson, ed., Bayle, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), xviii–xli; idem, “The Public Context of Heresy. Bayle, Maimbourg, and Le Clerc,” in J.C.Laursen, ed., Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe. For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 119–38; Barbara Sher Tinsley, Pierre Bayle’s Reformation (Selinsgrove, Pa: Susquehannah University Press, 2001); Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), ch.7; John Kilcullen and Chandran Kukuthas, “Introduction” in Bayle, Philosophical Commentary (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 2005), esp. xvii–xviii; John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), ch.6. 6 This is not to suggest that there are not ways besides those stated in the preceding notes. See, for example, Pierre Dibon, ed., Pierre Bayle: le Philosophe de Rotterdam (Amsterdam: Publications de l’Institut Franc¸ais de Amsterdam, 1959); Pierre R´etat, Le Dictionnaire de Bayle et la lutte philosophique au XVIIIe si`ecle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1971); J.P. Jossua, Pierre Bayle ou l’obsession du mal (Paris: Auber Montaigne, 1997); James A. Harris, “Answering Bayle’s Question: Religious Belief in the Moral Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, 1(2003), eds. Daniel Garber and Steven Nadler, 229–253; John Robertson, The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chs.5–6. Richard Tuck, “Scepticism and Toleration in the Seventeenth Century,” Susan Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch.1.

7

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philosophique, was written in a style more familiar to his time than to ours, that is to say, as an exegesis of a specific text. The principles fundamental to his view of toleration accordingly appear as facets of a commentary rather than as propositions introduced in their own right, and established in the course of continuous logomachy. So it would be a long task to expound Bayle’s arguments in their entirety; and the result, perhaps, would leave a misleading impression of his thought. For underlying the dialectical criticism to which he subjected the advocates of coercion is a pattern of postulates about knowledge and God, postulates with political consequences. It is to these postulates that this essay turns first in order to show how Bayle meant to establish the claims of religious conscience, and what intellectual force he required to debar coercion.

I Bayle’s primary postulate was that there is a standing form of divine order, an order disclosed by both nature and scripture. This order should not be opposed by human dissent, for that would be to contradict God’s ordinances. God Himself, the great exemplar, could not commit a contradiction of any sort, and if people contradicted the divine order they committed iniquities. As the divine method of winning converts— more precisely Christ’s—was persuasion rather than force, it is hardly surprising that Bayle concluded that the coercion of conscience about worship was ultra vires for the state. It followed that Christ’s injunction to “compel them to come in”—the compelle intrare of the Vulgate8 —could not be understood to authorise force in making converts. Bayle’s conception of this standing order, so far was developed in his Commentaire, was expressed in epistemological terms. It was—to be more precise— conducted in terms not just of a theory of knowledge, but also of the substantive conclusions at which reason, and a scripture capable of being correlated with reason, were said to arrive. Bayle emphasized the understanding because he wished to discount the claim compelle intrare by showing that it failed to cohere with knowledge as he understood it.9 8 9

Luke 14: 23.

There is, of course, recognition by many scholars that Bayle treated reason as a final judge, albeit without connecting this point with toleration, e.g. Jean-Michel Gros, in idem (ed.), Bayle, De la Tol´erance (Paris: Pocket, 1992) [ = parts one and two of Commentaire philosophique with some supporting materials], 21, 23–4, 35–7. There have been, however, recognitions in passing of some points made central here. See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C.A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 167–8 (mentions “most certain moral principles”); Walter E. Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965), 157 (some axioms are so certain they cannot be disbelieved), 161–2 (basic truths of ethics are very clear), and 173 (infallibility of reason); Kenshur, “Bayle’s Theory of Toleration,” 86 (states that “Bayle has to assert that we have an innate awareness of our obligations towards God that is no less clear and distinct than our awareness that the whole is greater than its part”); J.B. Schneewind, “Bayle, Locke, and the Concept of Toleration,” in Mahdi Amin Razavi

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His technique was to emphasize, firstly, the epistemological priority of the natural understanding and of Christian revelation, and, secondly, to emphasize the divine origin of these sources of information—and therefore to emphasize the authority of the conclusions that they yielded. The natural understanding, he claimed firstly, was incontestable: it offered an “original and indefeasible light,” and this light was a resource “for distinguishing infallibly between truth and falsehood.”10 If the natural understanding was so certain, one would expect a complementary emphasis to the effect that the scriptures, rightly understood, would agree with the criteria of reason. The expectation is fulfilled. If “the governing and original rule . . . is the natural light,” then the Gospel was “a rule which is verified on the purest ideas of right reason.”11 That Bayle meant his, or God’s order to have epistemological authority could scarcely be less ambiguous. Bayle’s move of attributing divine authorship to his epistemological scheme was crucial. If the natural understanding was a faculty “for distinguishing infallibly between truth and falsehood,” that was so because “God . . . wanted . . . to provide the soul with a resource that would never fail for distinguishing infallibly between truth and falsehood.”12 It is this assumption about divine authorship which makes sense of the claims that reason is infallible, and that such “natural light” is “natural revelation,” indeed “the original, permanent & universal revelation.”13 Scripture itself, of course, had a function in the divine scheme—revelation, insofar as it came via Christ, improved the quality of reason’s findings: His was “a doctrine, which far from being contrary to the ideas of natural reason and to the purest principles of natural equity, extended these, clarified them, developed them, perfected them.”14 Reason and Christian revelation, to Bayle’s mind, would be aspects of a continuous scheme which enjoyed divine authority. What was the content of this scheme? Some of the content may seem banal if we look at Bayle’s examples, but its banality serves to underline the point which, we shall see, Bayle wished to emphasize. He offered the small change of platitude, reminding his reader that “the whole is greater than the part, that it is appropriate

& David Ambuel (eds.), Philosophy, Religion, and the Question of Intolerance (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 3–15, at 7 (mentions that “reason shows us undeniable principles of morals’); and McKenna, “Rationalisme moral et fid´eisme,” 266 (says that “le rationalisme moral fonde la d´efense des droits de la conscience”). None of these explain these points or explore their bearings. Rex’s 161–2 is cited by Laursen, “Baylean Liberalism,” 204–5 for the claim that the inequity of persecution is one of the certain moral truths. This does not appear to be the position of either Rex or Bayle, the latter of whom spent much time explaining his objections to persecution. Commentaire Philosophique, I. i., i OD, 2 : 368r cf. 370l. Bayle’s works, except the Dictionnaire, are cited from his Oeuvres Diverses of 1727 (hereafter cited as OD) as reprinted and augmented by Elisabeth Labrousse, 5 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1964–82). Page numbers are augmented with “l’ and “r’ where necessary to distinguish left and right columns. 10

11

Ibid., I. iii., OD, 2: 372r.

12

Ibid., I. i., OD, 2: 368r.

13

Ibid., I. iii cf I. i., OD, 2: 373l, 372r, 370l.

14

Ibid., I. iii., OD, 2: 373l.

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to be grateful to benefactors, not to do unto others what we would not have done to ourselves, to keep our word, and to act in good conscience.”15 Yet the smallness of the change is consistent with an elegant economy of means. These examples are propositions which no one at the time would have paused to doubt, and it was an uncontroversial claim that Bayle required to establish a more pointed conclusion. He would take one of these claims, and turn it to support his case for liberty of conscience. We should beware of supposing that he intended to accept only such scriptural statements that reason could discover for itself, or that he supposed that there should be no limits upon rational speculation.16 It was to the sphere of morals that Bayle drew attention as a proper field for reason. For “if it is possible to maintain certain limitations in respect of speculative truths, I don’t believe there should be any with regard to those practical and general principles which [we call] common morals.”17 Such a concern with practice, as we shall see, was sufficient for Bayle’s purpose in respect of toleration. For the Baylean order was one in which elementary axioms, such as the ones just mentioned, were not to be contradicted. His assumption was that the epistemological order is all of a piece. If a principle was founded in terms of reason and revelation, it was unthinkable that it should be subject to qualification by another principle of equal validity—the moral economy was self-consistent. It was self-consistent because it was a divine economy, and Bayle adduced the time-honoured assumption that “God . . . is incapable of contradicting Himself.”18 Conformably, the Gospel illustrates the conformity of God’s ways to man’s. “Do they want infinite examples of the conformity of the ways of God to those of man” Bayle exclaimed, “one has only to read the Gospel.”19 What was the outcome of this reasoning? If Bayle’s reading of divine purpose were admitted, it followed that a certain sort of pattern was being held up for our obedience. If, for instance, God wished people to act in accordance with their conscience—and we have seen that this was on Bayle’s list of incontrovertible claims—it followed that an unimpeachable pattern was being offered to mankind, one not liable to contradiction in other terms warranted by God. It followed from this account, ceteris paribus, that to permit liberty of conscience, not to coerce it, was required of the magistrate. Bayle’s examples of divine action all tell in favour of toleration. The baylean deity, indeed, did not wish us to belie our conscience. Rather conscience, as Bayle claimed more forcefully, was “the voice and law of God” for each individual person.20 Where does this lead the reader? If Bayle’s standing order was indefeasible, 15

Ibid., I. i, OD, 2: 370l.

16

Ibid., I. i, OD, 2: 368r.

17

Loc.cit.

18

Ibid., I. iii, OD, 2: 374l.

19

Ibid., II. ii, OD, 2: 398l.

20

Ibid., I. vi, OD, 2: 384r, cf. I. v, 2: 379v.

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it followed that what contradicted it was unacceptable. That order treated a person’s allegiance to conscience as a matter of priority, warranted the priority as divinely established, and suggested that prima facie coercion of conscience was unacceptable. Furthermore, scriptural texts or reasoning which did contradict baylean order could not be accepted. So, for instance, if the text compelle intrare were taken to authorise coercion it was simply being misconstrued because, so taken, it contradicted the divine order Bayle had identified. The literal sense of the text, to Bayle’s mind, was not the sense intended but a mere human invention of a later day. Bayle specified as a “fundamental principle,” and the “surest key for understanding Scripture well, that if by taking it literally, it obliges people to commit crimes or (not to mince words) to commit actions that the natural light, the precepts of the Decalogue and the morality of the Gospel prohibit to us, it is necessary to take for granted that the sense presumed is mistaken, & that in place of a divine revelation one is offering one’s own imaginings, passions and prejudices to people.”21 Bayle, armed with a conception of divine order, could distinguish what he wished to receive from the Bible. Bayle identified the contents of his standing order with care. His choice of the Decalogue and the Gospels requires some notice. Bayle’s preference within the Bible was definitely for the New Testament. The exemplary figure of Christ, whom Bayle could depict as a paragon of persuasion, was an obvious resource. What, then, of the Decalogue? This was indispensable if Bayle was to claim that morality was integral to the order he sketched and, in any case, would have been taken by his contemporaries to be congruent with reason. It can scarcely surprise, after all this, that Bayle’s conceptual array was inconsistent with government’s exerting coercion against religious conscience as such. Bayle deployed the argument from contradiction in addressing the two sources of political authority most commonly assumed by his contemporaries, that is to say an immediate derivation from God and a derivation from Him via popular consent. Bayle asserted with respect to both that the conscience of the believer is “the voice and law of God in him,” and correspondingly could not be denied without contempt of the Deity. A magistrate entitled to coerce conscience would be authorised to induce people to hate God—so that a manifest contradiction of God’s (or Bayle’s) order would arise. It followed that the magistrate could not have such authority. For “to command . . . to act against conscience and to command to hate or hold God in contempt are the same thing; consequently, God, being incapable of conferring the power to order the hatred of contempt of Himself, could not have conferred the authority of commanding that one act against one’s conscience.”22 On parallel grounds it was impossible to think that people could authorise a government entitled to make them act thus: for this too “would be a contradiction in terms; for if a man is not under restraint, he will never allow anyone to command that he hate his God, and to despise the laws dictated to conscience so clearly and valuably, & engraved

21

Ibid., I. vi, OD, 2: 367r, cf. I.vi, 2: 380l.

22

Ibid., I. vi, OD, 2: 384r.

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on his heart.”23 In short, there could be no magisterial right to coerce conscience, because that would contradict the standing order of God. Thus epistemological certainty, as understood by Bayle, establishes liberty of conscience and prohibits magisterial coercion against conscience. It is certain on Bayle’s terms that God requires us to follow our consciences, and consequently that He has not established any undue barriers to our doing so. Conversely, no human, magistrate or otherwise, can contradict His order. Thus certainty is a central feature of Bayle’s argument about toleration. One can go further. If the case for toleration is thus far established certainly, and cannot be contradicted, it follows that no set of contradictory conclusions can be established. So baylean certainty would establish liberty of conscience as the only proper outcome. This essay does not maintain that there is nothing but purported certainty to Bayle’s argument in his Commentaire. It draws most heavily on part one of the book, and says relatively little about the later parts;24 and it does not deny that one of its author’s tactics was to raise doubts about intolerance and the positions that Bayle thought went with it. Indeed, the third section of this essay explores some of the doubts that Bayle raised against these—doubts that his positions about knowledge and toleration required. All that this section has sought to demonstrate is that claims to certainty were a crucial means of establishing toleration for Bayle, and it has done its work if the reader no longer thinks it sufficient to say that “Bayle’s support [for toleration] rests on . . . a sceptical attitude towards truth, and a moral argument which asserts the rights of conscience above any religious revelations,”25 but instead sees that this support required certainty, with which some parts of revelation belonged on Bayle’s view.

II If this route of Bayle’s towards toleration—epistemological certainty—is a surprise, his destination is not unexpected. In the present section of this paper, his destination itself is the surprise. The advocate of toleration is not the person we expect to be also the proponent of state support for the church, and of state inculcation of religion, especially if our attention has been claimed, as it has been claimed, for doubt of various sorts. But Bayle was a proponent of these positions. His certainty about knowledge proceeded from theological assumptions. These were not those of revealed religion, but rather those of natural religion. We have seen that “God . . . wanted . . . to provide the soul with a resource that would never fail for

23

Ibid., I. vi, OD, 2: 384r.

24

The next section of this essay draws more on part two.

H.T.Mason, Pierre Bayle and Voltaire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 136. The emphasis of Brush, Montaigne and Bayle, 240, that Commentaire was the first place where Bayle developed a sustained scepticism is of the same family. 25

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distinguishing infallibly between truth and falsehood.”26 Bayle thought that reason was this resource, that it was infallible, and that such “natural light” was “natural revelation”—indeed was “the original, permanent & universal revelation.”27 If natural reason thus had authority from God, what else did Bayle presume in his argument for toleration? Plainly, the existence of God, and the possibility of knowing sufficiently about Him and His moral requirements to conduct ourselves in this world via our natural faculties. Bayle referred to “natural light” and “natural law.”28 It was the certainty of “natural light,” in fact, which enabled Bayle to approve Christ’s morals. For all the moral teachings of Jesus Christ are such that being tried in the balance of natural religion they will be found to be good metal. . . . He performed miracles to uphold a doctrine, which, far from opposing the notions of Reason, and the purest principles of natural equity, extended, clarified, developed and perfected them; He spoke, then, on behalf of God.29

So natural reason approved these Christian teachings. It did not approve all readings of the Bible: for instance the literal interpretation of compelle intrare (which we have seen Bayle reject already) was unacceptable because it was “contrary to the lights of natural Religion, the unadulterated and original law of equity.”30 Natural reasoning did not serve only for liberty of conscience, of course, but had wider functions. One was to establish a morality of a broad scope, that is to say, both a proper attitude towards God and towards others. For Bayle regarded it as “certain” that one should “do acts of virtue, & of love of God.” That this was “certain” implies that he treated God’s existence and natural law, which would recommend both worship and virtuous conduct, as beyond doubt. Bayle observed that “one cannot be a Sceptic or Pyrrhonist in religion throughout one’s life,” and one must fix on something, “true or false”: it was with this reference that the “certain” status of loving God and acting virtuously was enunciated.31 Whatever else was doubtful about religion, these facts were certain. Bayle took these terms of natural religion as “evident.” The evident included a duty for the state to sustain society against what tended to subvert it. For the “eternal and immutable order gives to magistrates the power of punishing felony & sedition, & whatever else subverts the laws of the State.”32 Bayle’s catalogue of views subject to magisterial coercion because they promoted that subversive class was extensive. It included opinions encouraging sedition, theft, murder and perjury,33 as also the

26

Commentaire philosophique, I. i., OD, 2: 368r.

27

Ibid., I. iii cf I. i., OD, 2: 373l, 372r, 370l.

28

Ibid., II. iv, OD, 2: 410l.

29

Ibid., I. iii, OD, 2: 372r–373l.

30

Ibid., 374l.

31

Ibid., II. viii, OD, 2: 427r.

32

Ibid., II. iv, OD, 2: 408l.

33

Ibid., II. v, OD, 2: 412l. cf. II. iv, OD, 2: 408r.

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propagation of pro-opinions about “Sodomy, adultery, Murder.”34 In other words, an extensive range of opinions and actions were to be coerced because they were taken to undermine society. Bayle, though he excluded coercive action by the state against conscience as such, thus admitted it in another connection: his state had coercive authority to maintain society, including authority over relevant opinions. There was more. For if Bayle thought that to allow a state to touch legitimate conscience was to undermine his order, there was an obvious limitation. Conscientious disturbance of civil order was unacceptable. For instance, the state was said to be entitled to deal with any manifestations of religion that undermined society. Bayle considered that if a religious group threatened “the public good,” its adherents should be persuaded to act otherwise and, if recalcitrant, expelled from the state.35 Coercion should apply not least to religious groups that sought to undermine existing religion by force.36 This view made sense in terms of Bayle’s assumption of an order complicit with ordinary morality. For he assumed, as we have seen, that some moral conduct was necessary to the continuance of state and society: and as such morality was a portion of God’s standing order, it followed to that extent that an enforcement of some morals and the consequent maintenance of society were authorised by Him. It also followed that a Christian church, if it inculcated worship of God and good morals, was valuable. As Bayle thought that the church was an agency that restrained “cupidities,” evidently he thought it did good in that respect.37 It is clear, more pointedly, that Bayle supposed that if government should support civil order, it should also support Christianity. This is not to say that he supposed that the state was entitled to suppress what it took to be false religion, for that implied contravening some conscientious (if perhaps mistaken) belief. Half of the prince’s traditional function—to suppress false religion—was thus excluded, but the other part—to uphold Christianity—remained. Bayle’s terms are graphic. “Nothing,” he wrote, Nothing is more advantageous to the Church than Princes who protect & cherish it; who see to it that it should be served by wise & educated pastors, & who found and endow Colleges and Academies for this purpose: who spare no necessary charge for its needs; who take care to punish scandals & bad ways amongst the clergy so that others may take heed and walk in the path of integrity their profession demands: who by their own good lives, and by their laws foster the practice of virtue especially, and last of all, are always ready to punish severely those who would try to oppress the liberty of the Church.

And so there can be no doubt that Bayle supposed that the state should uphold the church in a variety of ways.38

34

Ibid., II. ix, OD, 2: 431l–432l.

35

Ibid., I. vi, OD, 2: 385l.

36

Ibid., II. vi, OD, 2: 416r.

37

Ibid., II. vi, OD, 2: 416r.

38

Ibid., II. vi, OD, 2: 416r.

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Neither is this an isolated passage—for it is clear, too, that the baylean magistrate was entitled to act in order to promote people’s religious welfare as he understood it. Even when Bayle insisted that magistrates could not coerce people from one belief into another, he asserted that they were entitled to direct them to pay attention to religion—indeed that “they can . . . command them to examine, to study a religion.”39 Whilst Bayle eschewed the coercion of conscience, he countenanced religious study, including the study of some faith, at magisterial command. Neither this political didacticism nor state support for the church suggest that he favoured the separation of church and state in every respect: just that the latter was supposed to underwrite Christian worship in a variety of ways, and to inculcate the study of religion. This point is sufficiently far from the received emphasis on Bayle as an exponent of toleration—one does not say in contradiction to it—to provoke further enquiry.40 That is true especially because this linkage of church and state involved important consequences for other departments of Bayle’s thought. Bayle evidently meant to admit the state into ecclesiastical affairs to the degree that it supported religion, and to exclude it to the degree that it threatened what he understood by religion. This may seem doubly curious, for Bayle’s position is often linked with Locke’s, but Locke’s mature position is obviously different. To Locke’s mind the state had no business with the creeds and worship as such.41 The baylean magistrate, however, not only performs the lockean function of upholding civil society but also undertakes the non-lockean function of upholding religion. Why the difference? It is important to avoid discounting Bayle as an inferior version of Locke. This is so especially because there is little doubt that Locke’s arguments about toleration are philosophically superior to Bayle’s. Instead, the emphasis falls here on the point that their theoretical intentions were different, that some of the differences which distinguish their positions can be used to illuminate Bayle’s intentions, and to underline the consequences of his views about toleration for the character of his broader thought. Locke’s position about toleration is free from the assumptions about the corporate identity of communities which are emphasized in much of the Christian thought of his time. Some of these assumptions—though by no means all—are to be found in Bayle, and their presence reflects the role that he attributed to the state. The notion of corporate identity implied that one would be responsible for the many, and, as the one did well or ill, the many would fare well or ill. This was not a replication of the classic observation that quicquid delirant reges, plecuntur achivi.

39

Ibid., I. vi, OD, 2: 386r. My emphasis.

Compare the curious judgement of Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2: 555, “Bayle a pu nous sembler timide quand il s’agissait de fixe des bornes pr´ecises aux pr´erogatives de l’´etat.” 40

41 Epistola de Tolerantia, ed. Raymond Klibansky (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 66, “Because in truth the whole jurisdiction of the magistrate looks solely to these civil goods, all right and command of civil authority is both defined by and limited to the care and promotion of them only, neither ought it nor can it be extended to the cure of souls.”

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It was an assumption about representation and responsibility. The first case was that in which God appointed Adam to represent the human race at the earliest point in its history, and in which, when Adam fell, all humanity suffered punishment for his sin. Yet the logic applied not only to burdens but also to benefits, for if Adam represented mankind, so too did Christ, and as its representative He took upon himself the punishment that fell upon it.42 The logic, whatever its burdens or benefits, presumed that a representative stood for the represented in the fullest sense—that they were liable for whatever he did, whether for good or evil, and without any obvious substantive concurrence in what he did. The presumption (though situated in a very different style of argument) was continued by Hobbes,43 but he was by no means the only thinker to apply such logic to politics. Bossuet for one suggested that people suffer justly for the sins of their rulers.44 Two assumptions at least lay behind this view in is theological manifestations. One was that the person appointed to represent the many has endowments superior to theirs—as Adam and Christ alike were supereminent in understanding,45 and Christ (though not Adam) in goodness also—and that the many were clearly inferior in this connection, so much so that they required to be directed for their own good. The other assumption was that this superior person was in fact appointed by the Deity in order to represent the many, and that God would pursue the representative’s actions through the medium of particular providence. This model obviously lent itself to a unitary state and to a unitary church accompanying it. For it suggests that the state would have a single head, and fits readily with the suggestion that the church should be constituted in the same way. It lent itself, also, to the view that one person should be head of church and state alike, and so unite the community more fully. That such a model should recommend itself

42 For the model, and Locke’s rejection of it, Ian Harris, “The Politics of Christianity,” in G.A.J. Rogers, ed., Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 197–215, esp. 198–200, 212–14. 43 There is little sign that Hobbesian people, once a sovereign is instituted and subsists, have an opportunity to authorise it, though they are reckoned to be authors of its actions; and the same applies to those under sovereignty by acquisition. More remarkably, Hobbes stated that not only those who had refused their consent at institution, but also those who were neither involved nor consulted, were obliged to submit or to suffer the consequences. Though the refusers can be reckoned to covenant tacitly, it is not clear that the latter category can. “For if he entered into the Congregation of them that were assembled [to institute a sovereign], he sufficiently declared thereby his will (and therefore tacitely covenanted) to stand to what the major part should ordayne. . . And whether he be of the Congregation, or not; and whether his consent be asked, or not, he must either submit to their decrees, or be left in the condition of warre he was in before; wherein he might without injustice be destroyed by any man whatsoever,” Leviathan (London: Crooke, 1651), II. xviii, p.90 (my emphasis). 44 Politique tir´ee des propres paroles de l’´ecriture sainte, ed. Jacques Le Brun (Geneva : Droz, 1967), VII, a.5, prop.16. 45

For example, Adam’s superiority in point of perception, and therefore in naming entities; on which, Hans Aarsleff, “Leibniz on Locke on language,” in his From Locke to Saussure (London: Athlone Press, 1982), ch.1.

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in an era of state-building and that the clergy of established churches should fall in with it cannot surprise. No doubt it would be too epigrammatic to say that Adam inaugurated the modern state: yet the notion that the whole community would be upheld by God if its leader did well (as by upholding true religion) was pervasive. Correspondingly, the notion of schism from a unitary church (that is to say, assuming this to be a true church) was dangerous to the whole community.46 Locke broke decisively with such views. For him, each man consents for himself in order to be represented, and retains substantive control over his representative’s subsequent actions. So, for instance, no man can transact on behalf of his children or more remote descendants.47 Correspondingly, when we turn to ecclesiastical matters, and to theodicy, we find that no one can transact with God save on his own behalf, and that notions of a true church and even of particular providence are left mostly in the background.48 Church and state could be treated by Locke as independent and consequently separate organisations. Bayle was less thoroughgoing in his treatment of church and state because he was less radical than Locke about corporate identity, at least when he wrote the Commentaire philosophique. Hitherto Bayle’s chief reference to the subject had been to unpick connections between particular providence, collective punishment and true religion. His Pens´ees diverses sur la Com`ete had rebutted the suggestion that a comet could presage God’s displeasure against government and peoples (and therefore, implicitly, for religious error in their midst, and so could portend their collective punishment for permitting the deviance of a few).49 The correlation between religious deviance within a group, such as a state, and God’s displeasure against the group as a whole for permitting it, presumed that the group had a corporate identity and that its leaders had a responsibility to regulate its common beliefs. Indeed, Bayle famously went further, and implicitly queried a correlation between religious deviance and the weakening of society. He argued in his Pens´ees that atheism and idolatry did not seem to be inconsistent with society,50 and made a related point in

46

For more on the political consequences of the doctrine, Ian Harris, “Tol´erance, e´ glise et e´ tat chez Locke” in Les fondements philosophiques de la tolerance, ed. Y.C. Zarka, F. Lessay and G.A.J. Rogers, 3 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 1: 175–218, esp. 184–99.

47 “he . . . cannot by any Compact whatsoever, bind his Children or Posterity,” Two Treatises, II.viii.116, p.364. 48 Harris, “Tol´erance, e´ glise et e´ tat chez Locke,” 204–06, 213–14. Locke’s rejection of atheism was not cast in terms of averting the strokes of particular providence that their presence might provoke, but rather their own character and its results, ibid., 215–6. I intend to write about the theme of corporate identity and its political effects at greater length elsewhere. 49 ss. 52–60 (comets neither causes nor signs of ills to come), s.229, 235 (impossible that comets could be the efficient cause of the ills they presage), OD, vol.3, pp.37–42, 139, 142. On previous writing about this topic, see Geoffroy Atkinson, “Pr´ecurseurs de Bayle et de Fontenelle. La com`ete de 1664–1665 et l’incredulit´e scavante,” Revue de Litterature compar´ee 25 (1951) : 12–42. 50

Pens´ees, ss. 132–4, OD, 3: 84–7.

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his Commentaire by suggesting that heretics as such do not damage the state.51 Evidently, if particular providence functioned, it did not do so in a way that obviously correlated religious deviance with collective punishment. Yet the notion that the magistrate was a religious guardian had not receded from Bayle’s thought. A title to guide the governed was implied in his persuasive role, whether in directing those of religions other than his own to study the latter, or in reasoning with the anti-social religious. It is true that such a role is not coercive, for Bayle excluded that (though coercion on behalf of the public good would be admitted), but that there should be such a role implies a responsibility for the spiritual welfare of the governed. Bayle, as we have seen, emphasized the role of the magistrate in upholding the church and in inculcating religion. We can add now that this role had divine approval. For if “God promises her [the church] the love and protection of earthly sovereigns as a special blessing,”52 we may presume that princes who love and protect the church are doing His will. Why did Bayle, unlike Locke, emphasize state support for the church? The answer lies no doubt, in part, with the circumstances in which his lot was cast. The French state had provided protection to the Huguenots in the face of the enmity of the Roman Catholic Church—a point whose significance is underlined by the uncomfortable position of Merlat’s treatise.53 To this point can be added Bayle’s personal situation in the United Provinces, where on occasion the government provided a bulwark against Calvinist inroads against liberty of conscience—including, perhaps, protection for the author of Commentaire philosophique from the consequences of ecclesiastical censure.54 In these circumstances, it would be intelligible if Bayle were reluctant to probe the character of the state’s corporate function when he wrote his Commentaire. It was otherwise for an Englishman, whose own government had been on occasion the source as well as the agent of religious coercion. Bayle, then, was a proponent of liberty of conscience in his Commentaire rather than an assailant of all political intervention in religious matters. In respect of such attention, his practical circumstances and his intellectual position agreed with one another. The latter presupposed a natural theology, as did the epistemology which established liberty of conscience. Yet if Bayle maintained, or at least failed to revise, a traditional position about corporate identity in his Commentaire, the view of toleration he developed there involved moves in other areas of his thought, moves which may appear to be aggressive, but which served to close gaps in his intellectual defences.

51

Commentaire, II. vi, OD, 2: 417l.

52

Ibid., II. vi, OD, 2: 416r, cf. 416l.

[Elie Merlat], Trait´e du pouvoir absolu des souverains: pour server d’instruction, de consolation et d’apologie aux e´ glises Reform´ees de France qui sont affli e´ es (Cologne : Cassander, 1685). 54 Brush, Montaigne and Bayle, 240 points out that the Walloon clerical response to the book was condemnation. 53

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III At least two topics of the first importance were left in a state of uncertainty by Bayle’s manner of argument in his Commentaire. One was the status of the Old Testament. The other was soteriology. Both received attention in his later writings as well as in the Commentaire itself, and its character owes something to his concern with toleration. In particular, the way in which Bayle had developed his argument for toleration left some salient points vulnerable to attack, and so called for defensive moves from him. These moves were to put question marks against the presumptions that supported those corporate positions that were inconsistent with his conclusions. The uncertainty related in the first instance to innovation. The Old Testament was not uniformly convenient for Bayle. In the first place, it gave prominence to a view of divine action which had a content that differed significantly from the solidarity of reason and Christian revelation that he had given as a basis for his claims against magisterial coercion of religious conscience. The uniform pattern of this divine order, however, was quite different from that supposed in an older view of God’s dealings with mankind. For Isaiah reminds us that His ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not ours.55 This contention militates against the characterisation of divine order that Bayle postulated—for the order of reason and Christian revelation might be far distant from His real intentions if Isaiah were right. Then there were the non-irenic claims and activities of the prophets. The behaviour of Moses and his successors was less pacific than Christ’s, so that the Old Testament could hardly have suited Bayle’s purpose even had he been able to jettison Isaiah quietly. How then did Bayle deal with this uncomfortable situation in his Commentaire? He insinuated that the Old Testament was inferior in value to the New, as Moses was inferior to Christ because he had authorised coercion,56 and so implied that the Pentateuch at least was not up to scratch. Much of the rest is silence within Commentaire Philosophique. Indeed a case might be constructed to the effect that the Old Testament as a whole did not serve Bayle’s turn on the topic of toleration. This position was inconvenient in that the claim that reason and revelation together provided certainty was a preamble to arguing that certainty supported liberty of conscience. The Old Testament was doubly inconvenient, for it was the source of those corporate assumptions that had been used against liberty of conscience. Something had to give if Bayle was to maintain his claims about toleration in the face of contrary evidence and assumptions. That something would be the Old Testament. In Dictionnaire Philosophique it received the glare of Bayle’s attention. For if Bayle was at once the advocate of the independence of conscience and the proponent of state supervision over other aspects of ecclesiastical affairs, he needed to establish that conscience was properly the province of its possessor, not the magistrate. There was a difficulty in this task, a difficulty which had its roots in the Old Testament. One need hardly point out that the Fall of Man could be

55

Isaiah, 55: 8.

56

Commentaire, I. iii, OD, 2: 373l–r.

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understood to offer grounds for the supervision of conscience. If the Fall was held to have obscured the intellect and weakened the will, it might be supposed that some people, rescued by grace from this plight, should have the spiritual and civil supervision of the rest, who were not so blessed. It was true that the Old Testament did not specify the consequences of the Fall for human abilities with any precision, but it was true too that it offered a ground upon which theologians had constructed arguments for the authority of church over the believer, and for the state as the church’s assistant in that respect. For Bayle to ensure that this train of thought hit the buffers of dialectic, and so to save the independence of conscience, required a decisive change. This was to do away with Adam’s representative role. It appears, from the article about Eve in his Dictionnaire, that Bayle was happy to imply that Adam (or for that matter Eve) had no endowment adequate to a role as mankind’s representative: There never was an undertaking of such importance: the destiny of the human race for all centuries to come was at stake . . . and yet there never was a matter settled so promptly . . . it must be admitted that the two heads to whom God had confided the well-being of mankind protected it in a manner that was worse that useless . . . they put up less resistance than a child when someone wishes to take its doll.57

From this, one would infer that Adam was not qualified to represent mankind, and so could not have been intended for that role by God, and consequently whatever mankind suffered at the Fall was not by way of punishment. Thus, if the Old Testament could not be ignored, nor perhaps treated in a directly critical manner, it could be reassessed and the warrant that it might afford to corporate identity and so to corporate direction would be abridged where it touched conscience. The move was perhaps all the more necessary for Bayle because of the juxtaposition of individual conscience and state protection of religion within the Commentaire. If the specific effects of the Fall could be questioned, so too was the specific salience of Christianity itself. For the argument of the Commentaire depends in an important sense of our being ignorant of the identity of the true church, and gives rise to a doctrine of soteriology which displaces Christianity from its central position. Why must we be ignorant of the true church in order that Bayle might maintain his view of toleration? The answer is that one of the central components of the case against toleration of religious difference was the claim to know better. The true church, the church that embodied God’s intentions for mankind, had a warrant superior to all others, this warrant might be supposed to extend to other churches being brought into conformity with it, and to the consciences of their adherents being corrected. If so, there was no legitimate room for individual conscience which did not correspond to the tenets of the true church. Bayle recognised as much, dwelling on the assumption of persecutors that they were right.58 His response was the obvious one, that is to say, to imply that the true 57 “Eve,” Note A, Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (edn., 16 vols., Paris, 1820–24, repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1969), 6: 329. 58

II. vii, OD, 2: 419–22.

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church cannot be known. This was not a position that anyone would have cared to enunciate explicitly, but Bayle’s view that everyone holds themselves to be orthodox59 suggests that the evidence in the case was less than decisive. Certainly, though Bayle discussed the church in his Commentaire, he was very far from identifying a true church there or from allowing others to proceed on the premise that they had done so. This line corresponds to a remarkable manoeuvre, whose effect is to diminish the soteriological necessity of Christianity. The manoeuvre was to place emphasis in the winning of salvation upon the disposition of the enquirer after truth rather than on his or her success in discovering religious truth. Whilst Christian doctrine required that two criteria be met if someone was to be saved, Bayle required only one. Christian doctrine had dwelt, firstly, on action in conformity to the Decalogue, and, secondly, on that action proceeding from an appropriate disposition, that is to say one in which obedience flowed from a love of God, and not from any terrestrial motive or selfish ground; or, failing complete conformity in both action and disposition, an animating faith in God to justify the sinner. Bayle reduced these two criteria to one by insisting that though the proper disposition was necessary to be saved, yet attaining to any specific truth was not. The doctrine may sound odd, well-known though it is, but it was certainly present in the Commentaire, for Bayle wrote that, the sole law that God, in His infinite wisdom, could set to man with regard to truth, is to love every thing that seems to him true, after having employed all his faculties in order to discover it.60

And indeed Bayle had prefaced this conclusion with the doctrine that a disposition was adequate for goodness in cases of conduct where people acted under misinformation.61 Why did he maintain the sufficiency of disposition in such cases? Here again we encounter the question of truth. The claim to possess truth was one of the qualifications to coerce. It was a title, we may add, which belonged not only to the true church in its dealings with mistaken Christians but also to any Christian dealing with non-Christians. Now the protection of non-Christians fell under Bayle’s aegis as a direct consequence of his treatment of conscience. Conscience for Bayle was a law to its possessor. Bayle argued that what signified was a sincere search for truth, and an adherence to it in one’s conduct. If so, the significant matter is the conscientiousness of the belief, which is considered without reference to and so regardless of the validity of the belief, and without reference to action that coheres with it. In this light, the conscience of the non-Christian is as significant as that of the Christian—and this light, of course, is the light of Bayle’s epistemological order.

59

I. x; II. viii, OD, 2: 391r, 427l.

60

Commentaire, II. x, OD, 2: 437l.

61

Ibid., II. ix, OD, 2: 432r–33r.

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Its illumination suggested that Christian and non-Christian alike be exempted from coercion, ceteris paribus. The soteriological consequence is evident. An earnest belief and a diligent search for truth, rather than a specific object of belief, are the grounds of salvation. This is a conclusion that does not wholly agree with Christian doctrine—for that is nothing if not insistent about the necessity of certain beliefs to salvation. Whilst Bayle himself concluded that “I die a Christian philosopher,” it is less than obvious that his philosophical case for liberty of conscience tends to support the necessity of Christianity to salvation. At any rate, it has been argued here that a distinctive account of salvation, and a questioning attitude towards the Old Testament are required by Bayle’s position on toleration.

This essay suggested at the outset that toleration is not a topic that can be treated to best effect in isolation. On this reading, a view of conscience is properly a view of conscience in its place. What is that place, according to Bayle? Now that it has been located, it is timely to recollect that long ago one of his most appreciative readers gestured towards it. The Commentaire Philosophique was “the most usefull work Bayle ever wrote, and the least sceptical.” The reader should have known, for he was Edward Gibbon.62 The baylean location of conscience is one that implied an epistemological order whose dialectical use was to outflank the claims that had reposed on a scriptural text. Bayle’s doctrine had a wider setting still. It rests upon a view of natural theology, in which not only epistemology but also morals and religion had their place, and in which the state enforced some morals, and had a role in respect of religion. Bayle’s view of toleration had an effect in relation to his view of the state and of corporate identity, a view tempered by the institutional situation of his thought. Baylean toleration and its setting in natural theology had intellectual consequences that touch other, apparently distant but really contiguous portions of his thought, whether about the Bible or about soteriology. So to see toleration in its place brings in view a new Bayle.

62 D.M. Low, ed., Gibbon’s Journal to January 28th , 1763. My Journal, I, II & III and Ephemerides (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 101 (entry for 23 July 1762). For some English readers of Bayle, see Justin Champion, “ ‘Most Truly . . . A Protestant’: reading Bayle in England,” McKenna and Paganini, eds., Pierre Bayle, 503–26.

Chapter 14

Rousseau Juge de Locke or Reading Some ´ Thoughts on Education after Emile Sylvana Tomaselli

The seventeenth-century philosopher most likely to spring to mind in connection with Jean-Jacques Rousseau today is Thomas Hobbes; this is probably so even if one does not confine one’s thoughts to England, and all the more certain if one does think of Rousseau qua political thinker and the author of Du Contrat Social (1762). This is the Rousseau that seems to predominate in current perceptions of him, and there is no doubt that Du Contrat Social (1762) shows a real engagement with Hobbes’ conception of political legitimacy. Much as it does now, Rousseau’s name did evoke a political persona in his own time, one that was identified with a peculiar conception of the state of nature and a distinctively radical critique of civilization; for some, Rousseau was also a constitutional authority as exemplified by the requests he received to draft the constitutions of Corsica and of Poland. First and foremost in the eighteenth century, however, Rousseau was identified with a pedagogical vision. Considered primarily as the author of Julie, ou La Nouvelle ´ H´elo¨ıse (1761) as well as Emile, ou De L’Education (1762) (which Rousseau indicated contained his first principles despite being his last work for publication in his life time),1 the seventeenth-century English philosopher to whom one might think Rousseau was most indebted would be John Locke—the Locke who prevailed for most of the eighteenth century, the author of the Essay on Human Understanding (1689) as well as of Some Thoughts on Education (1693). This is not to seek to belittle the mark Locke’s Two Treatises on Civil Government (1689) left on Rousseau’s political works or indeed on the whole of his writings.2 The centrality of property and the nature of the means of its legitimate acquisition to Rousseau’s discussion of the foundations of society is but one starting point in establishing the influence of the Englishman’s political thought on that of the Genevan. Yet even within Rousseau’s political texts, it could be argued that the Locke who principally affected him was the epistemologist, the Locke of the way of ideas, who

Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques, in Oeuvres Compl`etes, Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (eds) 4 vols (Paris : Gallimard, 1964), 1: 933. (Oeuvres Compl`etes hereafter cited as OC).

1

For an account of the reception of Locke’s Treatises in Europe, see, S.-J. Savonius,” “Locke in French, the Du Gouvernement Civil of 1691, and its Readers,” Historical Journal 41(2004), 1: 47–79. 2

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 245–260. and Legacy, 

245

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led him to search for the birthplace of our ideas of meum and tuum or of the self. Locke was the thinker whom Rousseau acknowledged to have led him to examine the origins of ideas. As he put it in a poem first published in1739 and entitled “Le Verger de Madame la Barronne de Warens”: Dans ce verger charmant, j’en partage l’espace, Sous un ombrage frais, tantˆot je me d´elasse, Tantˆot avec Leibnitz, Mallebranche (sic), et Newton, Je monte ma raison sur un sublime ton, J’examine les Loix des corps et des pens´ees : Avec Locke je fais l’histoire des id´ees : Avec Kepler, Wallis, Barrow, Rainaud, Pascal, Je devance Archim´ede, et je suis l‘Hˆopital.3 (In this charming orchard, I share its space, Under a refreshing shadow, sometime I rest, Sometime with Leibnitz, Mallebranche (sic), and Newton, I raise my reason to a sublime pitch, I examine the laws of objects and of thoughts: With Locke I study the history of ideas: With Kepler, Wallis, Barrow, Rainaud, Pascal, I overtake Archimedes, and I follow l‘Hˆopital.) The history of ideas, the quest for their genesis in mankind as well as in his own self, was central to Rousseau’s theoretical as well as psychological preoccupations. When and how natural man came to acquire a notion of his individuality, of love, property, and abstractions generally, was a study whose importance to Rousseau was only matched by his relentless self-analysis and search for the how and when of his emotional and intellectual make-up. In many ways, Rousseau could be argued to have sought to be Lockean through and through, to live and think in accordance with what he took to be Locke’s empiricism. Rousseau’s entire oeuvre has in fact been read as an application of Locke’s empiricism or, perhaps more accurately, the sensationalism often associated with him, especially so through the prism of Condillac.4 Though it cannot be explored here, this is an attractive interpretation of Rousseau that needs to be born in mind, especially as it concerns the comprehensiveness of Rousseau’s adoption of another’s philosophical outlook; for surprising though this might seem given the eagerness with which he sought to shun any appearance of discipleship in his most famous works, we know that Rousseau discovered that, initially at least, he could only truly comprehend a philosophical position or system of thought by immersing himself in it. 3

“Le Verger de Madame de Warens,” OC, 2:1128. The translations that follow are mine.

This is the learned view of Marcel Raymond editor of Les Rˆeveries du Promeneur Solitaire; see for e.g. OC, 1:1821. 4

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Recalling his auto-didactic days whilst living with Madame de Warens, “Maman,” at Charmettes, Rousseau describes in Book VI of the posthumous Les Confessions 5 how after a morning of outdoor prayers and contemplation, he lunched with her, and following a couple of hours of conversation would devote his afternoons to reading philosophical books, such as, “la Logique de Port-royal, l’Essai de Locke, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes, etc.”6 Finding all philosophers to disagree amongst themselves, he laboured vainly to reconcile them, and was ultimately forced to adopt another method altogether, one to which he attributed all his intellectual progress despite (as he seemed to enjoy emphasising) his severely limited capacity to study. “En lisant chaque Auteur,” he writes, “ je me fi une loi d’adopter et suivre toutes ses id´ees sans y mˆeler les miennes ni celles d’un autre, et sans jamais disputer avec lui.” 7 After some years, Rousseau found himself with a sufficient store of knowledge to become intellectually independent and to reflect “sans le secours d’autrui.”8 By dint of having engrossed himself in various thinkers’ distinct points of view, Rousseau tells us that, when without books, for instance when travelling, he could recall what he had read and compare ideas, weigh them in the light of reason, and separate the true from the false. Despite having embarked on this way of studying relatively late in life, he discovered that his discernment had lost none of its vigour, and that when he came to publish his own thought “on ne m’a pas accus´e d’ˆetre un disciple servile, et de jurer in verba magistri.” 9 Although this account of the history of his originality is by no means unproblematic, it might be best, when thinking of Rousseau’s relationship to Locke or indeed to any author, not to focus overly on either acknowledgements, or even confrontations, but to seek also less tangible, but possibly deeper, marks of parentage. One might of course also wish to take Rousseau’s word on the nature of his reflections, and shun recognition of any family ties and thus see him as beholden to no one. ´ This might seem particularly appropriate in relation to Emile, for in its foreword Rousseau claimed, as he was wont to, that despite all that had been written on it, the subject of education was entirely new before he came to address it. What is more, he singled out Locke’s pedagogical work as having left the topic untouched.10 That Rousseau should have done so is a testimony, were one needed, of the esteem in which he could assume his readership might hold Locke’s Thoughts. Why then did Rousseau just appear to brush it aside? Why not engage with it? With these reflections in mind, let us consider how Some Thoughts on Education so thoroughly failed to make a mark on “l’utilit´e publique, la premi`ere de toutes les

5

Rousseau composed the Confessions between the end of 1766 and the end of 1770.

6

OC, 1:237.

7

Ibid. “Whilst reading each author,” he wrote, “I made it a rule to adopt and follow all his ideas without mixing mine nor those of anyone else, and without ever arguing with him.” 8

Ibid. “Without anyone else’s help.”

9

Ibid., 238. “I was not accused of being a servile disciple, and of swearing in in verba magistri.”

10

Ibid., 4:241.

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utilit´es, qui est l’art de former des hommes,”11 Rousseau’s opening gambit might be deemed simply to reveal the depth and shamelessness of his ingratitude, but it merits some consideration, if only as it might heighten, or, at least alter, our sensibilities in reading Locke’s text.12 Did Locke’s thoughts extend no further, or not much further, than to the well-being of an individual or, for that matter, to that of any number of them, but in a manner unrelated to public utility? Unwittingly Rousseau’s dismissal of Some Thoughts alerts its reader—for it must be read again—to the very feature he denied it and helps the reader see it as it should be seen, namely as a pedagogical text written within a specific social and political context. Some Thoughts arose out of an exchange of letters between its author and Edward Clarke, who had consulted Locke on the education of his son. That Locke was concerned with the welfare of individuals, no one could wish to deny. That he thought the burden of responsibility for it rested with the individuals themselves and their parents through the upbringing they had received from them is no less clear. One of the first points the philosopher made plain was his position on the cause of happiness and misery. Locke famously believed that “Mens Happiness or Misery is most part of their own making. He, whose Mind directs not wisely, will never take the right Way; and he, whose Body is crazy and feeble, will never be able to advance in it.” This led him to assert that apart from the lucky few who “are from their Cradles carried towards what is Excellent; and by the Privilege of their happy Constitutions, are to do Wonders,” nine out of ten men “are what they are, Good or Evil, useful or not, by their Education.”13 That Locke focused on the education of a particular group of individuals is also indisputable. He was explicit about the class and gender of those individuals who were the principal objects of his Thoughts. Although he did not wish to commit himself in this publication as to where the difference between the sexes lay, Locke wrote it not for the education of daughters, but that of sons; his aim being to explain “how a young Gentleman should be brought up from his Infancy.”14 Locke did discuss girls’ education privately as when he wrote to Mary Clarke, wife of the dedicatee of Some Thoughts, in the mid 1680s. This said, he did not entirely exclude girls from his published reflections, and they came to mind in relation to clothing, which Locke thought ought to be loose for both the sexes, although he was particularly critical of tight bodices on young girls.15 Women were mentioned further when discussing the pros and cons of educating boys at home. Interestingly, Locke evoked the example of daughters to show that being educated at home did not “make them less knowing or less able Women,” adding: “Conversation, when they come into the World, soon gives them a becoming assurance.”16 It is in relation 11

“public utility, the first of all utilities, which is the art of forming men.”

12

Pierre Burgelin comments on Rousseau’s ingratitude, see OC, 4.4: 1290–1.

13

Locke, STCE, 83, #1.

14

Ibid., 86, #6.

15

Ibid., 90–91, #11–12.

16

Ibid., 129, #70.

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again to language that women’s education makes another favourable appearance in the book as Locke notes that many ladies, who have never been taught grammar, but have spent their time in “Well-bred Company” speak as correctly as most gentlemen taught in grammar schools.17 Thus it may well be that Locke, while not entirely shying away from the subject of girls” education, simply felt ill at ease publishing on it as he might have considered he had insufficient experience to justify doing so; but there is nothing in his Thoughts that could not in principle be extended to them provided one did not wish to make women into a qualitatively different kind of creature from men. Indeed, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) as well as her more specifically pedagogical texts, Mary Wollstonecraft, who certainly had no such desire, might be said to have applied Locke’s philosophy of education to the weaker sex in order that they ceased to be thought such ever more. That Locke himself wanted women to be as he wanted men is made explicit in his letter to Mary Clarke: “Since therefore I acknowledge no difference of sex in your mind relating. . .to truth, virtue and obedience, I think well to have no thing altered in it from what is [writ for the son].”18 In keeping with his opening sentence, “A sound Mind in a sound Body,” Locke’s attention had first turned to the body.19 Refraining from overly protecting children from the elements was one of Locke’s principal injunctions; indeed, he urged parents to expose their progeny to the inclemency of the weather, and seemed particularly keen on thin shoes so that they might let in water in winter. Mothers were responsible for the overly pampered upbringing that Locke was writing against and motherly love would, he thought, stand in the way of the implementation of such a harsh regime.20 Predictably, Locke thought diet “ought to be very plain and simple,” but he also believed it should be without meat at least until the child reached his second or third year. While both parents were likely to take exception to this, given the over consumption of meat amongst his contemporaries, Locke did single out “fond Mothers and foolish Servants” as being particularly responsible for feeding meat to very young children, and in over-abundance to boot.21 Likewise, Locke frowned upon sugar, salt and spices, wine and strong drinks, some, though not all, fruit, and, despite being (or possibly because he was) a physician warned against reliance on medicine, but thought well of butter and cheese, and especially bread; indeed, he urged that only bread be given between meals: “I impute a great part of our Diseases in England to our eating too much Flesh, and too little Bread.”22

17

Ibid., 225, #168. See also, 218, #165.

John Locke: Selected Correspondence, ed. Mark Goldie (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 106. The differences Locke allowed for girls’ upbringing were few and very minor, for example that they might be kept out of the hottest sun for the sake of their complexion. 18

19

STCE, 83, #1.

20

Ibid., 84, #4; 87, #7.

21

Ibid., 92, #13.

22

Ibid., 93, #14.

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In addition, Locke braved appearing “soft and effeminate” in recommending unrestricted sleep for young children: “In this alone they [children] are to be permitted to have their full Satisfaction.”23 That, however, should be on hard beds. Life ought also be punctuated by “Going to Stool regularly”24 and this seems to have been the only instance in which habituation to a set timing was advocated by Locke, whereas he advised parents not to feed their young children at regular times, for he was very wary of opening the door to dependency of any kind in matters of food and drink.25 With this, Locke was able to reduce his advice on physical education to a “few and easily observable Rules”: Plenty of open Air, Exercise and Sleep; Plain Diet, no Wine or Strong Drink, and very little or no Physick; not too Warm and Straight Clothing, especially the Head and Feet kept cold, and the Feet often used to cold Water, and exposed to Wet.26

Children should thus not be accustomed to anything except that which would strengthen and invigorate their bodies. At a more general level, the subject of habituation is one of the more important ones to emerge from Locke’s intervention. The task with regard to the development of the mind ran along similar lines: “As the Strength of the Body lies chiefly in being able to endure Hardships, so also does that of the Mind.”27 The sentence that follows makes it abundantly clear that by the education of the mind, Locke actually meant the formation of moral character: And the great principle and Foundation of all Vertue and Worth, is placed in this, That a Man is able to deny himself his own Desires, cross his own Inclinations, and purely follow what Reason directs as best, tho” the appetite lean the other way.28

John Rogers has convincingly argued that Locke held a teleological view of man and believed God to have made man with the capacities to know the good and pursue it.29 Furthermore, as John and Jean Yolton put it, “It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that Locke’s Some Thoughts is mainly a treatise on moral education,” adding that for Locke, “Virtue is the health of the soul, the aim of education is to produce a healthy, virtuous person.”30 The mistake most parents made was in failing to ensure that the mind of their boys be disciplined and “pliant to Reason” early enough. They

23

Ibid., 97, #21.

24

Ibid., 99, #23.

25

Ibid., 94, #15.

26

Ibid., 102, #30.

27

Ibid., 103, #33.

28

Ibid. See also, 173, #113 where Locke writes one of his more Stoical passages: “The many Inconveniences this Life is exposed to, require we should not be too sensible of every little hurt. What our Minds yield not to, makes but a slight impression, and does us but very little harm: “Tis the suffering of our Spirits that gives and continues the pain.” See, for instance, his “Locke and the Sceptical Challenge,” in The Philosophical Canon in the 17 th and 18th Centuries: Essays in Honour of John W. Yolton (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1996), 49–67. 29

30

STCE, Editors’ Introduction, 18.

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were not trained to curb their passions and appetites. Here again, it was not parental neglect but parental fondness that was at fault, as vices were not nipped in the bud under the mistaken belief that they were innocent in the very young and remediable in later years. What parents failed to grasp was that “the Principle of all Vertue and Excellency lies in a power of denying our selves the satisfaction of our own Desires, where Reason does not authorize them.” 31 The rigorous, but not harsh, discipline applied to younger children, would, Locke believed, lead to awe and respect, and these would render debasing corporal punishments, which lead to slavish characters, unnecessary especially as children grew up. Finding that “Children are very sensible of Praise and Commendation,” Locke suggested means to “make them in love with the Pleasure of being well thought on” and “in love with all the ways of Vertue.”32 “Concerning Reputation,” he wrote, I shall only remark this one Thing more of it; That though it be not the true Principle and measure of Vertue, (for that is the Knowledge of a Man’s Duty, and the Satisfaction it is to obey his Maker, in following the Dictates of that Light God has given him, with the Hopes of Acceptation and Reward) yet it is that, which comes nearest to it: And being the Testimony and Applause that other People’s Reason, as it were by common Consent, gives to virtuous and well-ordered Actions, it is the proper Guide and Encouragement of Children, till they grow able to judge for themselves and to find what is right, by their own Reason.33

In addition, children were not to be burdened with too many rules, nor taught by them. Emulation was the means that Locke favoured most; manners, deportment, and conduct ought especially to be taught by example.34 Locke was also emphatic that education had to be suited “to the Child’s natural Genius and Constitution,” for “God has stampt certain Characters upon Mens Minds, which, like their Shapes, may be perhaps a little mended; but can hardly be totally alter’d, and transform’d into the contrary.”35 Time was also to be allowed to work its effect, as Locke believed it would particularly in relation to civility.36 On the question of whether boys should or should not be educated at home, Locke weighed the inconveniences and, as already been mentioned above, took comfort in the example of girls who, in his view, did not suffer from being kept away from schools and thereby from bad company. He noted further, “whatsoever, beyond that, there is of rough and boisterous, may in Men be very well spared too: For Courage and Steadiness, as I take it, lie not in Roughness and ill Breeding.”37 We will return to Locke’s mention of courage below; what is of interest here is that in relation to home schooling as throughout the text, Locke’s foremost concern was not only with the acquisition, but also the preservation, of virtue: “Vertue is harder to be got, than 31

Ibid., 107, #38.

32

Ibid., 116, #57 and 117, #58.

33

Ibid., 119, #61.

34

Ibid., 124, #67.

35

Ibid., 122, #66.

36

Ibid., 125, #67.

37

Ibid., 129, #70.

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a Knowledge of the World; and if lost in a Young Man is seldom recovered.”38 As the case of young women coming into the world proved, Locke argued, confidence would soon be gained when needed in young men. For those at all able to have one, Locke thus recommended a private tutor, who would be better able to attend to the child’s particular pedagogical needs and matters of deportment as well as “more manly Thoughts, and a Sense of what is worthy and becoming, with a greater Proficiency in Learning into the Bargain, and ripen him up sooner into a Man, than any School can do.”39 While mothers had been the inadvertent corrupters of the very young through their misguided fondness, it was fathers who, in their eagerness for worldly success, spoilt boys in the later years: But Fathers observing, that Fortune is often most Successfully courted by bold and bustling Men, are glad to see their Sons pert and forward betimes; take it for an happy Omen, that they will be thriving Men; and look on the Tricks they play their Schoolfellows, or learn from them, as a Proficiency in the Art of Living, and making their Way through the World. But I must take the liberty to say, that he, that lays the Foundation of his Son’s Fortune in Vertue, and good Breeding, takes the only sure and warrantable way. And ’tis not the Waggeries or Cheats practised amongst School-boys, ’tis not their Roughness one to another, nor the well-laid Plots of Robbing an Orchard together, that make an able Man; But the Principles of Justice, Generosity and Sobriety, joyn’d with Observation and Industry, Qualities, which I judge School-boys do not learn much of one another.40

Lest it be thought that Locke might have been intent on ensuring that his advice produce manly men of virtue for their own sake or that of their family only, it should be noted that these comments were quickly followed by the philosopher’s wish “that those, who complain of the great Decay of Christian Piety and Vertue every where, and of Learning and acquired Improvements, in the Gentry of this Generation, would consider how to retrieve them in the next.”41 That there was, moreover, a patriotic backdrop to Locke’s pedagogical reflections is made abundantly clear when he warns that unless “Innocence, Sobriety, and Industry” be instilled and maintained in the present youth, it will be ridiculous to expect that the next generation “should abound in that Vertue, Ability, and Learning, which has hitherto made England considerable in the World.”42 And he went on to declare: I was going to add Courage too, though it has been looked on as the Natural Inheritance of Englishmen. What has been talked of some late Actions at Sea, of a kind unknown to our Ancestors, gives me occasion to say, that Debauchery sinks the Courage of Men: And when Dissoluteness has eaten out the Sense of true Honour, Bravery seldom stays long after it. And I think it impossible to find an instance of any Nation, however renowned for their Valour, who ever kept their Credit in Arms, or made themselves redoubtable amongst their Neighbours, after Corruption had once broke through, and dissolv’d the restraint of

38

Ibid.

39

Ibid., 130, #70.

40

Ibid., 131, #70.

41

Ibid.

42

Ibid., 131–2, #70.

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Discipline; and Vice was grown to such an head, that it durst shew it self bare-faced, without being out of Countenance. 43

As we saw above, Locke was eager to dissociate the idea of courage from those of roughness and lack of breeding, and anxious that the nature of moral excellence was rightly conceived and not taken as a given. For him all considerations had to give way to that of inspiring virtue in the young and this was of consequence not only to young men as individual moral agents in this world and the next, nor only to the gentry as a class, but to the nation as a whole, if only because of the duty that class had to it. Locke himself carried his patriotism on his sleeve and while he was wary of those who in Parliament cloaked their self-interest in the language of the “Publique Good,” he was determined to fight for the prosperity of his country and was not embarrassed to say so: “And whilst I have any breath left I shall always be an Englishman.” 44 His discourse on education was thus alert to misconceptions about the nature and source of true manliness and concerned that anything he might suggest might be deemed to lead to effeminacy or not to suppress it.45 Like many of the Ancient philosophers before him, he thought of self-command and particularly self-denial as providing the keys to the felicity of individuals, but also as being the root of national survival and distinction. Like the Ancients, he believed edifying models to play an essential role in the formation of moral character, and imitation was one of the principal modes of learning for him. It is in this context that he expressed his strong disapproval of the involvement of servants in the raising of children. Education was very much a parental matter for Locke, though this by no means precluded the employment of tutors. While his Thoughts are replete with detailed practical advice on the rearing of very young and adolescent boys, it is obvious that any parent wishing to follow it would have to be a model, although perhaps not quite a paragon, of wisdom and self-control or would have to endeavour to become one as an essential prerequisite to the successful up-bringing of their children. The tutors they hired would of necessity have to be very remarkable moral characters too, a topic to which Locke devoted a good portion of his book.46 Locke was keen to insist that education had to be tailored to each child, but he was unambiguous about imitation: But of all the Ways whereby Children are to be instructed, and their manners formed, the plainest, easiest and most efficacious, is, to set before their Eyes the Examples of those Things you would have them do, or avoid. Which, when they are pointed out to them, in the Practice of Persons within their Knowledge, with some Reflection on their Beauty or Unbecomingness, are of more force to draw or deterr their Imitation, than any Discourses which can be made to them.47

43 Ibid., 132, #70. It is thought that Locke had the Battle of Beachy Head in June 1690 in mind; see Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 132, n. 26. 44

Selected Correspondence 227 and 263.

45

STCE, 169, #109, for instance as well as his discussion of sleep above.

46

Ibid., 148–158.

47

STCE, 143, #82.

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Nor was the setting of good examples to be a temporary expedient, but to be used by fathers as long as they thought fit: “Nothing sinking so gently, and so deep, into Men’s Minds, as Example.”48 The practicality of what is effectively an instruction manual should thus not obscure the fact that Some Thoughts amounts to a quiet, but discernable, call for the moral reformation of the country. It is a critique. Amidst discussions of fencing, of how and when to acquire languages, to receive religious education, and to travel, and of the need for even a gentleman to learn a trade, if only book-keeping, there is a running lesson for parents. Mothers as well as fathers would have to reconsider the true nature of parental love and duty as well as the true nature of virtue and end of life. We have had a glimpse earlier of their misconstruction of the good and how their feelings often stood in the way of raising a physically and morally strong new generation. Locke also urged fathers to reflect on the quality of their relationship with their sons and recommended that they show them friendship and trust and cease being reserved and distant as he indicated was all too common amongst his contemporaries.49 Those with estates should draw their sons into their confidence and gradually teach them the proper management of the family property. Ultimately, Locke hoped that his treatise would encourage parents to “dare venture to consult their own Reason, in the Education of their Children, rather than wholly to rely upon Old Custom.”50 His Thoughts may have been for the education of sons, but it was no less, and I would venture far more, for the re-education of their parents. What consulting reason seemed to lead Locke to reconsider was whether customary ways of raising children succeeded in making them what they ought to be given the world they were to enter.51 From what he had seen of the raising of children amongst his acquaintances and what he knew of the practice more generally, the means seemed to be inconsistent and unlikely to produce their intended results, nor was the nature of the latter unquestionable or sufficiently thought through. The pampering of early years, followed by a mixed regime of indulgence and arbitrary restrictions punctuated by rather ruthless physical punishments, teaching methods that stunted any desire for knowledge or fitted the young “rather for the University, than the World’52 , and the absence of edifying company at best produced youths ill prepared for the vicissitudes of life.

48

Ibid. See also the same advice directed to tutors, 147, #147.

49

Ibid., 160, #96.

50

Ibid., 265, #217.

51

Ibid., 158, #95.

Ibid., 157, #95. See, also in Selected Correspondence, Locke’s letter to the Earl of Monmouth of 1690 (?) in which he questions the need to turn a gentleman into “a thorough scholar,” 146. 52

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The world for Locke was one of temptations.53 It was also one where corruption was rife.54 Only those endowed with wisdom, fortitude, and self-control could make their way in it and lead the nation away from vice and self-destruction. John Dunn has rightly argued that Locke did not think his society in imminent danger of polical collapse and that in the last two decades of the seventeenth century he was relatively confident of its ability to continue reproducing itself.55 This should not, however, eclipse the apprehensions apparent in his correspondence and Some Thoughts about the moral state of the nation and his belief that the character formation of the gentry was in very serious need of attention. It is in this context that his pronouncements on the subject have to be seen and this is especially so of his insistence that curbing self-love or molding it in the direction of public utility had to begin as early as possible. Locke warned parents to eradicate any tendency toward covetousness and injustice as soon as they and like vices made their appearance. Liberality and a sense of justice had to be inculcated in gentlemen at an early stage, but as justice was a complex matter that could only begin to be comprehended much later through understanding of the notion of legitimately acquired property, parents had to be imaginative: The first Tendency to any injustice, that appears, must be supprest with a shew of Wonder and Abhorrency in the Parents and Governours. But because Children cannot well comprehend what Injustice is, till they understand Property, and how particular Persons come by it, the safest way to secure Honesty, is to lay the Foundations of it early in Liberality, and an Easiness to part with to others whatever they have or like themselves. This may be taught them early, before they have Language and Understanding enough to form distinct Notions of Property, and to know what is theirs by a peculiar Right exclusive of others.56

Read alongside his bemoaning the narrow-mindedness and misguided sense of selfinterest of his compatriots in government, the Church, and various parts of civil society in his correspondence of the 1690s, say, in relation to the Naturalization Bill or reforms in manufactures or the Poor Law, it would seem that Locke thought the spirit of liberality in very short supply in his time: [. . .] I could say much on This, but I must then find fault with our Legislators, who to [sic] often examine thinges by the touchstone of their own Interest, and either thro them out, or coolely let them fall, as they answer that end; I wish That House were better fild with men

53

See, for instance, his letter to John Alford who had just left Christ Church, Oxford, and whom Locke warned that he would need “courage that may defend and secure your virtue and religion” and that “there are more dangerous theeves, than those that lay wait for your purse, who will endeavour to rob you of that virtue which they care not for themselves.” Selected Correspondence, 34. 54 “The corruption of the age gives me so ill a prospect of any success in designs of this kind” he wrote to William Molyneux in February 1697 in connection to new practices in linen manufacture. Selected Correspondence, 238. 55 John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: an Historical Account of the Argument of the “Two Treatises of Government” (Cambridge, 1969), 237. 56

STCE, 170–1, #110.

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of publique spirits than it is; our Taxes might be raysed with more Ease, our Trade better secured, and our Mony made to goe farther towards the use of the Warr, . . .57

These are perhaps timeless and common enough laments, but their ubiquity does not lessen their force. Nor should it be forgotten that Edward Clark, whose correspondence with Locke about the education of his son led to the composition of Some Thoughts, was a Member of Parliament. As with any hint of injustice, so any sign of timorousness had to be promptly attended to by parents and educators. Perhaps partly because of the scandal (alluded to above) caused by the Earl of Torrington, the Admiral whose timid command of the English Fleet, abandonment of England’s Dutch allies and retreat before the French had brought great shame on the nation, Locke discussed the question of eliminating fear and developing courage in children. Though he did not wish to be seen to recommend the Spartan approach, that is, recommend that boys be whipped so as to fortify them again pain, he did offer suggestions as to how to hardened them against the fear of pain and danger.58 Yet, however keen he was that his work led to the making of men of courage, Locke was equally, if not more, apprehensive lest it fail to ensure that they were not cruel. The torture of animals was not to be tolerated as “they who delight in the suffering and destruction of inferiour Creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benigne to those of their own kind.”59 An abhorrence of killing any creature ought, in Locke’s view, to be nurtured in all children. In the light of this, it is difficult to see how Rousseau could justify the claim that even after Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education the art of making men, the foremost of public good, was left open for him to have to explain. Judging by some of the comments Locke received following its publication, his contemporaries appeared to think that he had gone beyond offering practical advice of the kind to be expected in pedagogical guides. Apologizing for troubling Locke, with whom he was not acquainted personally, for advice, James Hamilton wrote in February 1694: I am not only prompted by the ingenious solid and practical notions you have layde downe, as welle for the inculcateing and cherishing Moralitye in Youthe, as the improvement of theyr understandeing, but I am farther incouraged by the generous and publicke spiritte which shines throughout your booke, and is very particularly expressed in the middle of the second paragraph of the epistle dedicatorye to that booke.60

Hamilton was referring to Locke’s pronouncement: “For I think it every Man’s indispensable Duty, to do all the Service he can to his Country: And I see not what difference he puts between himself and his Cattel, who lives without that thought.”61 Rousseau was not to know how Locke’s book had been received, nor how it fitted

57

Selected Correspondence, 228.

58

STCE, 178–9, #115.

59

Ibid., 180 116.

60

Selected Correspondence, 194.

61

“To Edward Clarke of Chipley, Esq.,” STCE, 79.

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with his political preoccupations and proposals, but it is hard to see how anyone could overlook the purpose of the book or deny that, however much it might be deemed to have been unsuccessful for one reason or another, Some Thoughts was a contribution to the art of forming men, and, more to the point, to form them for civil society and indeed political office. It might be thought that Rousseau was writing in bad faith or just carelessly. If, arguably, little hangs on his motive, the question raised here remains an interesting one as it leads one to read Locke’s work not only as a “treatise on moral education,” as it has rightly been seen, but also as a political work in its aims to produce a ruling class psychologically open to social and economic changes Locke considered necessary to England’s future prosperity. Some Thoughts is often read in the light of An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) to test the extent to which the former conforms to what might be taken as the epistemological prescription derivable from the latter. That is all well and good, but the work’s epistolary origins must not be forgotten, and it should also be seen against Locke’s everyday but long-term worries about the blinkered and narrowly self-interested views of his compatriots. What did this leave for Rousseau to undertake as for the first time? As all commentators agree, he seemed to be following Locke’s footsteps most closely in his early pedagogical reflections, those relating to his position as tutor in the household ´ of M. de Mably in 1740, Projet pour L’Education de Monsieur de Sainte-Marie. The extent of the influence is difficult to ascertain since both Locke and Rousseau had absorbed the views of a number of educationalists and philosophers, amongst whom Montaigne may well be the most noticeable.62 Be this as it may, Rousseau’s first thoughts on education closely resemble Locke’s. Borrowing from Peter Jimack’s ´ summary in his extensive study of Rousseau’s Emile, Rousseau’s Projet is highly critical of corporal punishment; he argues, as Locke had, that it should be replaced by the tutor or parent’s overt contempt, and recommends a similar plan of rewards for good behaviour; he also discourages excessively long and tiring lessons, and draws up a programme of studies that aims to develop the child’s ability to reason.63 Most importantly, as Jimack further notes, Rousseau’s goal, like that of Locke, is to prepare the child to become a gentleman. However it is precisely in this respect that the two texts differ most sharply. Were one in need of imagining what Locke’s Some Thoughts might have been without what I have suggested is its public aspect, Rousseau’s Projet would give a fair sense of it. To be sure, the Projet is no more than a memorandum; it is much shorter and not the product of mature reflection. However much Rousseau’s intentions as a tutor seem to be to follow Locke’s prescriptions, the two texts cannot in all fairness be compared in any sense approaching that of weighing one against the other. This said, the Projet is written for a particular gentleman’s son and, if set besides Locke’s

See Yolton and Yolton’s introduction to STCE, 12–13, and Peter D. Jimack’s excellent La Gen`ese et la redaction de l’Emile de J-J. Rousseau: Etude sur l’histoire de l’ouvrage jusqu’`a sa parution (Geneva: SVEC, 1960), 273–90.

62

63

Jimack, La Gen`ese, 290.

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Thoughts, helps discern the moral and political dimension that could so easily have been missing from the Englishman’s work whilst still fulfilling its pedagogical brief. ´ As Rousseau himself invites the comparison, one may ask how Emile succeeds ´ where Some Thoughts failed. While Emile is the result of considered opinion and a far more extensive study than the Projet, it is not at all obvious how Rousseau’s substantial pedagogical treatise uniquely fulfils the requirements that he set in its preface: “l’utilit´e publique, la premi`ere de toutes les utilit´es, qui est l’art de former des hommes.” 64 Despite what one cannot but describe as feigned criticisms, Rousseau follows Locke almost to the letter in numerous respects. Hardening children physically, not indulging them, ensuring that they remain eager to learn, teaching them through play, dressing them in loose clothing, letting them sleep, feeding them simple and plain food, avoiding meat, alcohol — all these counsels and more are to be found in ´ Emile. Rousseau may be more or less insistent on any one point, but all of the topics he addressed are at the very least touched upon by Locke or arise from following the logic of his thought. However, as Jimack has remarked, some or most of the similarities might simply be commonplaces of contemporary pedagogical writings; but this is not so of the need to learn a trade, for example, nor, I would add, the manner in which travelling is discussed in both the works.65 That Rousseau wrote with Locke in hand is further demonstrated by incidental remarks. Thus, not only does Rousseau, like Locke, prefer boys to be educated at home, but he also supports his case by drawing on the example of girls just as we have seen Locke to have done.66 The likeness is such that one is reminded of what Rousseau told of his own method of learning, mentioned at the beginning of this essay, namely one of total and uncritical immersion in the author under study. Countering the many parallels is at least one important and well-noted difference, however, that is, that whilst Locke in Some Thoughts wrote with real men, indeed, ´ specific gentlemen in mind, Rousseau’s Emile has an imaginary child in an imaginary situation as its subject. The implication of this for the question addressed in this chapter is that Some Thoughts is more, rather than less, likely to be of public consequence, at least in the short term. For Rousseau’s contrivance eliminates parents and 67 ´ The public utility that the latter work places a fictive tutor centre stage in Emile. might or might not realise cannot therefore be of a reformist kind, there being no question of changing parental attitudes or modifying existing practices or moulding existing characters. Moreover, as we have seen, albeit briefly, imitation played a crucial role in the learning process for Locke. This made it essential that the adults that were being imitated were worthy of imitation. Were all the gentry to follow Locke’s advice and seek to be models worthy of emulation, society would have

64

See n. 9 above.

65

Jimack, La Gen`ese, 294.

66

OC, 4: 654–5.

In this, Rousseau reveals his debt to F´enelon’s highly influential T´el´emaque (1699), which has a mentor prepare the eponymous character for the kingship to which he is destined. 67

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become a radically different place from what it was. Locke’s hopes are not likely to have stretched anything like that far, but he did seem to believe that something could be done by at least some parents and governors. While Rousseau was not committed to the view that the world was entirely bereft of noble models, this was not a belief ´ he allowed to permeate his Emile. Apart from himself, whom he made the ideal tutor in his pedagogical novel, Rousseau did not put much store on existing potential role models. For him, any social transformation would have to be effected through a newly ´ brought up generation. Emile is to be educated away from the world, but in order to enter society eventually. As Geraint Parry succinctly put it, “Rousseau’s aim in ´ Emile is to show how a child can be turned into a man in civil society or, more accurately, despite civil society.”68 While Locke recommended educating children at home to protect them from bad influences, he was not so determined to delay knowledge of the world. Indeed, he thought no one likely to cope with its difficulties and evils, who was not gradually made aware of its nature. Through the visits of family friends and acquaintances as well as a worldly wise tutor, Locke made for the measured introduction of civil society into the domestic arena. However wanting it was, civil society did contain the means of its own redemption for Locke. Not so for Rousseau. The wedge between the two works was driven by a difference in social and political opinions. ´ This is not the only dissimilarity between Some Thoughts and Emile, but it is in my view the most important one given our concerns here. Comparisons between Locke and Rousseau have, for instance, led commentators to note that unlike his English predecessor, the Swiss educationalist did set a specific programme of education according to age. Tied to this consideration, they have tended to stress that what differentiates Rousseau’s from Locke’s educational project is, above all else, ´ that Emile is premised on the natural goodness of man and thus that the difference between the two works is that the eighteenth-century one proposes a programme of learning for a naturally good man and, by implication, that the seventeenth-century one doesn’t.69 But this is misleading. That Locke believed God made individuals each with their peculiar traits and tendencies we have seen him make clear earlier. That he believed it essential to recognise the nature of each child’s temper and to modify it so that it be capable of virtue has also been noted and cannot be overemphasized.70 That he thought children could be made better or worse by their education and their social environment is undeniable, hence the attention he gave to education. He would not, it is true, have 68 Geraint Parry, Emile: ´ Learning to be Men, Women, and Citizens, in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), 250. 69 For the view that the distinctiveness of Emile ´ rests on its basis in natural human goodness, see for instance, Jimack, La Gen`ese, 317, or Nicholas Dent, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 2005), 81–122. 70 John Yolton emphasized throughout his scholarly work that Locke did not think of the mind as being a complete blank. See, for instance, “Tabula Rasa” and “Tempers” in A Locke Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 288–291.

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followed Rousseau in claiming, as the latter did when defending himself after the ´ publication of Emile in a letter to Christophe de Beaumont the Archbishop of Paris, that the fundamental principle of morality is that: l’homme est un eˆ tre naturellement bon, aimant la justice et l’ordre; qu’il n’y a point de perversit´e originelle dans le cœur humain, et que les premiers mouvements de la nature sont toujours droits.71

The reason for that is not that Locke adhered to the doctrine of original sin; he did not. Rather, it is because the pronouncement makes very little philosophical sense to anyone who thinks, as Locke did, that man is born devoid of ideas, principles and truths, including, or one might even say, especially, moral principles and truths, and that his primary innate tendency is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. How far Rousseau himself was from holding that view is a fair question; one that needs to be pressed on those who all too readily take his claim about the natural goodness of man as a coherent and meaningful proposition and, what is more, the basis of his overall philosophy. But the natural goodness of man, if it was a considered belief of his (and in my view it was not) was certainly not the corner stone of his philosophy. What was, as many commentators have argued, was the quest for the meaning of, and all the more the psychological, social and political conditions for, moral autonomy. At the risk of appearing to accuse him of being “un disciple servile, et de jurer in verba magistri,” Rousseau was at one with Locke in this respect as well; both authors sought to establish and preserve moral autonomy and hoped their pedagogical works would lead to its acquisition. Locke thought it achievable, albeit under specific reflective as well as political conditions, within the existing culture. Not so Rousseau. Autonomy for him required a degree of detachment from the prevailing civilization that Locke thought neither necessary nor possible. They ´ differed subtly, but importantly, on the subject of imitation. In Emile, only Sophie learns with and through her mother’s teaching, and thus receives the very education ´ from which Rousseau was eager to preserve Emile. It is a pity that one of the few leads Rousseau did not take from Locke is one that would have made it possible for women to attain moral autonomy as well.72

71 OC, 4:935. “Man is naturally good, loving justice and order; that there is no original perversity in the human heart, and that the first movements of nature are always righteous.” 72

That was Wollstonecraft’s reproach against Rousseau; Locke did not give her cause to do so.

Chapter 15

Locke’s “Things Themselves” and Kant’s “Things in Themselves”: The Naturalistic Basis of Transcendental Idealism Yasuhiko Tomida

Introduction It is well known that Kant objects to the corpuscular hypothesis, takes the plenist position, and treats the concept of force as a basic one in his physical theory.1 On this point he draws a sharp line between himself and Locke, who attempts to establish an epistemology on the basis of the corpuscular hypothesis. Moreover, according to Kant, such Lockean epistemology is merely a “physiology of the human understanding.”2 In other words, it is an example of the Quinean “naturalistic” epistemology that cannot play its authentic role—that is, the role of rightly determining the possibility and range of our knowledge. However, it is clear that Kant is well acquainted with Locke’s views in the Essay and even inherits some part of them; for example, he accepts a distinction that corresponds to the Lockean distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Kant himself does not say much about the relationship between his philosophy and Locke’s. However, we can to a considerable extent confirm the relationship between the two on the basis of his writings of the critical period. Interestingly, such investigations suggest that the framework of Kant’s transcendental idealism has a certain problematic structure. For despite the fact that his transcendental idealism seems to be modeled on the framework of Lockean theory of ideas, Kant refutes the latter. In this essay I will clarify this problematic structure. To do this I will adduce as an important clue a fact of correspondence, that is, the fact that Kant’s “things in themselves”, “affection,” and sensible “representations” correspond to Locke’s “things themselves”, “affection,” and sensible “ideas,” respectively.

See Immanuel Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgr¨unde der Naturwissenschaften, in Kants gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Georg Reimer/Walter de Gruyter, 1902–), 4: 465–565 and Martin Carrier, “Kant’s Theory of Matter and His Views on Chemistry,” in Kant and the Sciences, ed. Eric Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 205–30. Incidentally, for Kant’s pre-critical view on sciences, see Martin Sch¨onfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 1

Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Jens Timmermann (Philosophische Bibliothek, 505; Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1998), AIX.

2

Sarah Hutton, Paul Schuurman (eds.), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008, 261–275. and Legacy, 

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For many Kant scholars this correspondence is already almost self-evident.3 In this essay, however, I begin with reconfirming the correspondence as carefully as possible. I first take up Kant’s argument against Berkeleyan “dogmatic” idealism by showing that we can identify his sensible representations with Berkeley’s “ideas of sense.” Then, through the medium of the close relationship between the framework of Berkeley’s theory of ideas and that of Locke’s, I further confirm that Kant’s sensible representations are identifiable with Locke’s sensible ideas. If this identity is confirmed, then we can also confirm that Kant’s “affection” corresponds to Locke’s and that Kant’s “things in themselves,” which affect our senses (or minds), corresponds to Locke’s “things themselves,” which also affect our senses. Confirmed in this way, the correspondence between Kant’s “things in themselves” and Locke’s “things themselves” makes their difference in character all the more noticeable. Whereas Locke’s “things themselves” are objects of scientific investigations (especially by the corpuscular hypothesis), Kant’s “things in themselves” are thoroughly unknowable. But despite their unknowability Kant affirms the existence of things in themselves, and this has been viewed for a long time as one of the serious problems in Kant’s philosophy. According to Kant, things in space (and their properties) are nothing but representations “in us,” and appearances qua representations necessarily demand the existence of things in themselves (though these are unknowable). From an historical point of view, however, if Descartes” and Locke’s theories of ideas do not precede it, such a view must be unintelligible. If I may limit my consideration to Locke and Kant, perhaps we can say that Kant’s “things in themselves” are the product of a degeneration of Lockean “things themselves.” In other words, Kant’s concept of “things in themselves” would not make sense without the model of Locke’s naturalistic theory of ideas,4 and as a result

3 For example, Gardner’s following words about sensation suggest that he regards the correspondence in question as self-evident: “Having agreed with empiricism that sensation is a posteriori and originates through the subject’s being somehow impinged upon from the outside, Kant will say nothing more about sensation itself other than that it composes a “manifold” (multiplicity). In contrast with Locke’s meticulous typology of sensible ideas, everything that Kant will go on to say about sense experience has to do with what the mind makes of its manifold of sensation.” (Sebastian Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason [London: Routledge, 1999], 67).

Seeing that in his natural philosophy Descartes located sensible “ideas” as internal items in contradistinction to a newly posited external world of bodies qua a mechanistic one, and that Locke inherited the idea language from Descartes, Descartes’ view must play an important role in our inquiry. However, since we can find in Locke some items that not only in their contents but also in their expressions correspond to Kant’s “things in themselves” and “affection” more properly, I discuss here exclusively bearing Locke in mind. Incidentally, for my interpretation of Descartes’ theory of ideas, see my “Descartes, Locke, and “Direct Realism”, in Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster, and John Sutton (eds.), Descartes’ Natural Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000), 569–75 and my The Lost Paradigm of the Theory of Ideas: Essays and Discussions with John W. Yolton, Philosophische Texte und Studien, 87 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2007), 177–184.

4

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of its degeneration, the framework of his transcendental idealism seems to have a distorted logic. To make this clear, I begin with a consideration of Kant’s argument against Berkeleyan idealism.

From the G¨ottingen Review Among early criticisms of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason there is a so-called “G¨ottingen Review” (Feder/Garve review).5 After several arguments the reviewers conclude: when, to assume the most extreme position with the idealist [such as Berkeley], everything of which we can know and say something is merely representation and law of thought, when representations in us, modified and ordered in accord with certain laws are just that which we call object and world, why then the fight against this commonly accepted language, why then and from where this idealist differentiation?6

In brief, the anonymous writers say that Kant’s position is identical with Berkeleyan idealism.7 As is well known, in the Appendix of the Prolegomena Kant vehemently argues against the reviewers” criticism.8 Interestingly, he allows the reviewers to identify his position with Berkeley’s to some extent, but by saying that the full identification reveals their inability to understand the biggest task of the Critique of Pure Reason, he rejects their conclusion. In fact, he asserts that “Space and time, together with everything contained in them, are not things (or properties of things) in themselves, but belong instead merely to the appearances of such things”9 and by saying that “thus far I am of one creed with the previous idealists,”10 he suggests that he shares

5 Zugabe zu den G¨ ottingischen Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen (January 19, 1782), 40–8. “Die G¨ottinger Recension,” in Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden k¨unftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenshaft wird auftreten k¨onnen, ed. Karl Vorl¨ander (Philosophische Bibliothek, 40; Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969), 167–74. 6 “Die G¨ ottinger Recension,” 174. English translation is from: Brigitte Sassen, Kant’s Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 58. Following the conventions of the Cambridge editions of the works of Immanuel Kant, the translator indicates emphasis through bold type. 7

As Margaret Wilson says, the reviewers do not repeatedly mention the proper name “Berkeley.” See Margaret Dauler Wilson, Ideas and Mechanism: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 289, n. 8. However, it is certain that both the reviewers and Kant himself acknowledge that Berkeley is one of the idealists in question. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden k¨unftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenshaft wird auftreten k¨onnen, in Kants gesammelte Schriften, 4: 371ff. Henceforth, Prolegomena.

8

9 Ibid., 374. English translation is from: Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That will be Able to Come Forward as Science, trans. Gary Hatfield, in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 162. 10

Kant, Prolegomena, 374. English translation: 162.

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the same view with Berkeley to some extent. However, to show that there is a critical difference between them, he continues: But these idealists, and among them especially Berkeley, viewed space as a merely empirical representation, a representation which, just like the appearances in space together with all of the determinations of space, would be known to us only by means of experience or perception; I show, on the contrary, first: that space (and time as well, to which Berkeley gave no attention), together with all its determinations, can be cognized by us a priori, since space (as well as time) inheres in us before all perception or experience as a pure form of our sensibility and makes possible all intuition from sensibility, and hence all appearances.11

“The real problem” of the Critique of Pure Reason is, of course, to clarify “the possibility of synthetic cognition a priori,” whose existence Kant believes has already been shown by pure mathematics and pure natural science.12 And to solve this problem he asserts that space and time “can be cognized by us a priori.” Therefore, it seems to Kant that the G¨ottingen review—which merely regards his idealism as Berkeleyan, and neglects the problem concerning the possibility of synthetic cognition a priori—does not understand what “the real problem” is.According to Kant, when synthetic judgments a priori are seen from the empiricist viewpoint and treated as empirical judgments, they lose their universality and necessity.13 Therefore, whereas empiricists reject innate cognitive elements and base all cognition on experience,14 Kant asserts that our sensibility and understanding have some cognitive forms a priori and space and time are a priori pure forms of sensible intuition. They are nothing but the forms that appearances qua representations have a priori, and are inapplicable to things in themselves. As we know, this is one of the most important characteristics of his position. As mentioned above, Kant refers to Berkeley’s idealism as “dogmatic.”15 In dogmatic idealism space and time are not regarded as pure forms of sensibility and there is no room for things in themselves that affect our senses. Therefore, there are some conspicuous differences between Kant’s and Berkeley’s positions. However, the fact that Kant sometimes explains his position by comparing it with Berkeley’s—and especially the fact that he treats his sensible “representations” as

11

Ibid., 374–5. English translation: ibid.

12

See ibid., 377. English translation: 164–5.

For Kant’s view that empirical cognition is lacking in universality and necessity, see Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, AXV, A1–2, B3–4, etc. 13 14

This “standard”’interpretation of empiricism does not apply to Locke. For this matter, see Locke’s treatment of mathematics and morality mentioned in the next section, and my comment on the affinity between Locke and Plato in Yasuhiko Tomida, Inquiries into Locke’s Theory of Ideas (Philosophische Texte und Studien, 62; Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2001), 14–15. Henceforth, Inquiries. Kant, Prolegomena, 375; idem, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B274. Incidentally, in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant does not mention Berkeley. In the second edition we find his name in B71 as well as in B274. 15

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the items that correspond to Berkeley’s “ideas of sense’16 —affords an important clue to our understanding of Kant. If we can identify Kant’s sensible representations with Berkeley’s ideas of sense, this identification serves as a ground for the identifiability of Kant’s sensible representations with Locke’s sensible ideas. For, as I discussed on another occasion, it seems that Berkeley’s idealist framework is formed by eliminating “things themselves” (qua matter) from Locke’s three-term-relational framework comprising things themselves, ideas, and the mind.

Homology between Locke and Kant I have already discussed the formation of Locke’s theory of ideas on several occasions.17 In his theory of ideas, some items different from the ordinary things on some points are, for several reasons, posited as new “things themselves.”18 They are single corpuscles or aggregates of corpuscles that only possess primary qualities like shape, size, and solidity. In other words, Locke accepts the corpuscular hypothesis as the seemingly best hypothesis for grasping various natural phenomena adequately, and posits new “thingsthemselves,” as it were, beyond the ordinary things that possess not only primary qualities but also colour, taste, heat or coldness, and so on. If we refer to such ordinary things as “experiential objects,” by introducing the new things themselves the experiential objects that have thus far been treated as external “things” change their status into that of “ideas in the mind.” The threeterm-relational framework of his theory of ideas—comprising things themselves, ideas, and the mind—is established in this manner.19 The newly posited “things themselves” are in a wider sense “causally” related to the sensible ideas produced in the mind.20 According to Locke, when things themselves “affect” our senses, and motions are communicated from sense organs to the brain, ideas are produced in the mind correspondingly.21

16 For Berkeley’s distinction between “ideas of sense” and “ideas of imagination,” see George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop, 9 vols. (London: Nelson, 1948–57), Vol. II, Part I, §§ 30 and 33; idem, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, 2: 235; idem, Philosophical Commentaries, in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, vol. I, ##818 and 823. 17 For example, my Inquiries, Part I, Chapter 5; idem, “Locke’s Representationalism without Veil,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 13 (2005): 675–96. 18

On this, see my “Locke’s Representationalism without Veil,” 686–7.

19

For this reason Locke’s ideas cannot be a veil. See my “Locke’s Representationalism without Veil.” For Lockean causal view on influxu physicus, see Eric Watkins, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 24–5.

20

21 See my “Locke’s Representationalism without Veil,” 678–82. For examples of Locke’s use of the word “affect,” see Locke, Essay, II. i. 3, II. i. 6, II. i. 25, II. ii. 1, II. vii. 5, etc.

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Concerning the ideas, Locke says that “our Ideas [are] nothing, but actual Perceptions in the Mind, which cease to be any thing, when there is no perception of them.”22 For Locke, who rejects innate ideas, this is quite natural; ideas can exist only when the mind perceives them. Berkeley’s thesis, “esse is percipi,” can be seen as a variant of this Lockean view. As he says at the beginning of Part I of the Principles, experiential objects are, for Berkeley, nothing but “sensible things” qua “collections of ideas.”23 Therefore, they cannot exist without being perceived.24 As is known, Locke’s ideas are not limited to sensations and mental images.25 By contrast, Berkeley’s interpretation of ideas is imagistic, and by appealing to the Likeness Principle, the Master Argument, an argument against abstract ideas, and so on, he refutes materialism, including Locke’s.26 As a result, in Berkeley’s idealism, “things themselves” qua matter are erased from the Lockean three-term-relational framework, and only ideas and the mind remain.27 Therefore, if Kant’s sensible representations and Berkeley’s “ideas of sense” are identified with one another, and the latter is further identified with Locke’s sensible ideas produced in the mind by affection of things themselves, then by employing the sensible ideas shared by Locke and Kant as common elements, we can compare Kant’s framework with Locke’s. And by this comparison we realize that there is a conspicuous homology between their frameworks. In Locke’s case, “things themselves” affect our senses, and as a result sensible ideas are produced in our minds. In Kant’s case, “things in themselves” affect our senses or minds, and as a result sensible representations are produced in our minds. If we can identify Locke’s sensible ideas with Kant’s sensible representations, then by means of the “affection” that acts as the occasion to produce ideas or representations in us, we can confirm that Kant’s “things in themselves” precisely correspond to Locke’s “things themselves.”28 The possibility that Kant’s “representations” can be identified with Locke’s “ideas,” it is also suggested by the fact that when Kant mentions Locke’s prototypical distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments in the Essay, he refers to 22

Essay II. x. 2.

23

Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, §1.

For this matter, see my “Locke, Berkeley, and the Logic of Idealism,” Locke Studies 2 (2002), 227–31. Incidentally, Kant accepts Locke’s view on ideas (representations) and says: “To have representations and nevertheless not to be conscious of them, therein there seems to be a contradiction. For if we are not conscious of them, how can we know that we have them? Locke already pointed this out. Therefore, he also rejected the existence of such representations [as we can have without consciousness]. (Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, in Kants gesammelte Schriften, 7: 135. Translation is mine.) 24

25

See note 33 below.

26

I do not think, however, that Berkeley’s arguments are sound. See my “Locke, Berkeley, and the Logic of Idealism II,” Locke Studies 3 (2003): 63–91. 27

See ibid., 77ff.

There are several passages in the Critique of Pure Reason where Kant mentions the “affection.” See e.g., Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A190/B235. 28

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Locke’s “idea” as “representation,” i.e., as “Vorstellung.”29 Furthermore, an important clue for the correspondence between Kant’s “things in themselves”, “affection,” and sensible “representations” on the one hand, and Locke’s “things themselves”, “affection,” and sensible “ideas” on the other, is given by Kant’s treatment of the Lockean distinction between primary and secondary qualities. In his Prolegomena Kant says: That one could, without detracting from the actual existence of outer things, say of a great many of their predicates: they belong not to these things in themselves, but only to their appearances and have no existence of their own outside our representation, is something that was generally accepted and acknowledged long before Locke’s time, though more commonly thereafter. To these predicates belong warmth, color, taste, etc. That I, however, even beyond these, include (for weighty reasons) also among mere appearances the remaining qualities of bodies, which are called primarias: extension, place, and more generally space along with everything that depends on it (impenetrability or materiality, shape, etc.), is something against which not the least ground for uncertainty can be raised; and as little as someone can be called an idealist because he wants to admit colors as properties that attach not to the object in itself, but only to the sense of vision as modifications, just as little can my system be called idealist simply because I find that even more of, nay, all of the properties that make up the intuition of a body belong merely to its appearance: for the existence of the thing that appears is not thereby nullified, as with real idealism, but it is only shown that through the senses we cannot cognize it at all as it is in itself.30

In this passage Kant takes up Locke’s so-called “ideas of secondary qualities” such as warmth (heat), color, and taste, and confirms that “they belong not to these things in themselves, but only to their appearances and have no existence of their own outside our representation,” that is, that they are Lockean sensible ideas. In addition to that, he asserts that “the remaining qualities of bodies, which are called primarias: extension, place, and more generally space along with everything that depends on it,” are also “mere appearances.” Thus, Kant characterizes his view as the view which holds that “all of the properties that make up the intuition of a body belong merely to its appearance.”31 Interestingly, in this statement Kant not only identifies his representations with Lockean ideas, but also suggests that he is thinking about his “things in themselves” in comparison with Locke’s “things themselves.” The warmth, color, and taste that Kant thinks “have no existence of their own outside our representation” are, in Locke’s case, “ideas” in the mind. Kant accepts this, and further asserts that the so-called primary qualities are not qualities of things in themselves but merely ideas in the mind. In brief, he deprives things in themselves not only of warmth, color, and so on but also of the primary qualities that Locke gives to things themselves.

¨ Kant, Prolegomena, 270. Incidentally, Kant also mentions this subject in his Uber eine Entdeckung, nach der alle neue Kritik der reinen Vernunft durch eine a¨ ltere entbehrlich gemacht werden soll, in Kants gesammelte Schriften, 8: 245.

29

30 31

Kant, Prolegomena, 289. English translation: 84.

However, as already mentioned above, Kant nevertheless tries to distinguish between the two. For this, see Section 5 below.

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The correspondence explained above is not the only correspondence between Kant’s and Locke’s frameworks. For Kant, sensible representations are produced according to the forms of our sensibility, and as he emphasizes in the Transcendental Aesthetic, in the case of our outer sense they appear with a spatial character. That is, though the representations appear in the mind, they are perceived as something in space. By contrast, Locke does not view space as an a priori form of our sensation, but as his argument in the chapter on perception in the Essay shows, the sensible “complex ideas of substances” appear as something in space in spite of their general determination of “being in the mind,” and in our ordinary life we regard them as “things” qua experiential objects. As is well known, in the chapter on perception Locke analyzes the process of our spatial perception, and discusses the close relationship between our visual and tactual sensations.32 Thus, though Kant’s view is profoundly different from Locke’s, their framework shares important similarities. In fact, we can find further interesting correspondences between Locke’s and Kant’s frameworks. One of them is concerned with their treatments of mathematics. To explain why mathematical judgments are not empirical and have universality and necessity, Kant regards space itself—to which shape, size, and the like belong—not as something empirical but as something which a priori belongs to our cognitive power. On the contrary, Locke thinks that the idea of space is originally acquired through our perception of experiential objects, and he applies the idea in positing new “things themselves.” Therefore, according to Locke, corpuscles—“things themselves” that affect us—are in space, and on this point he is clearly opposed to Kant, who views space as an a priori form of our sensibility, locates it merely in us, and does not apply the idea of space to things in themselves. However, Locke does not think that all knowledge is empirical. Leaving Kantian analytic truth aside, he thinks that in mathematics and morality a sort of non-empirical knowledge is possible. Locke’s discussion about this is not detailed, but it is clear that he views “ideas of modes”—which mathematics and morality treat—to be ideas that have no external archetypes and can be framed independently of our experience. Thus, according to Locke, though mathematical ideas do not belong to the mind a priori, nonetheless they are in an important sense independent of our experience, and relying on this view, he tries to explain the special character of mathematics.33

Kant’s Tacit “Theory” These correspondences between Kant’s and Locke’s frameworks point up some character differences between their corresponding elements. One such difference is 32

See my Inquiries, 46ff.

For this see e.g., Locke’s discussion in the Essay IV. iii. 18–19. Incidentally, it is sometimes still said now that Locke is an imagist and on this point his view is quite different from that of Kant, who acknowledges concepts as well as sensations. But the imagist interpretation of Locke is mistaken. For detailed discussions on this matter, see my “Sensation and Conceptual Grasp in Locke,” Locke Studies 4 (2004): 59–87 and “‘Separation’ of Ideas Reconsidered,” Locke Studies 5 (2005): 39–56. 33

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that between “things themselves” and “things in themselves.” As already mentioned, Locke’s “things themselves” are single corpuscles or aggregates of corpuscles that possess only primary qualities (and powers based on them). They affect our sense organs qua aggregates of corpuscles, and accordingly a sort of motion is communicated to the brain. As a result, sensible ideas are produced in the mind. By contrast, in Kant’s case, “things in themselves” are not known to us, and since space is a form of our sensibility, the idea that things in themselves are in space does not make sense. But though he has such a view, Kant repeatedly emphasizes that sensible representations are given to us by “things in themselves” affecting our minds or senses. Why does Kant assert the existence of the unknown “things in themselves’? To this question various answers have been given. To consider the question adequately I examine several sub-questions concerning the premises that Kant employs in his Critique of Pure Reason. The most important sub-question is: why does Kant take it for granted that things in space are representations in the mind? As is known, in the time of Berkeley, the view that immediate objects of our experience are ideas in the mind comes to be almost self-evident. This means that the spread of the Cartesian-Lockean theory of ideas this view has become quasiintuitive knowledge.34 however, it was originally one established by introducing a new view of bodies; in this sense, it is a result of a scientific theory. In fact, as his Dialogues explicitly shows, even Berkeley had to demonstrate the view in question not intuitively but by presenting a similar theory. And in explaining his view that ideas are “in the mind,” even Berkeley, who denied the existence of external matter, had to do that by comparing ideas with something “without” the mind. As is known, to clarify the logic of his theory of ideas, Berkeley employs “the argument from identification with pleasure and pain”, “the argument from relativity” and so on, and tries to demonstrate that all sensible qualities of experiential objects are ideas in the mind. Interestingly, in all these arguments the ordinary premise that experiential objects exist outside the mind is always tacitly employed, though it is explicitly denied in the conclusion of the overall argument. For example, a tacit premise is used as an inevitable support of pain’s determination of “being in the mind,” and in this sense the premise plays a central role in his “argument from identification with pleasure and pain.” That is, even in Berkeley’s case, the view that experiential objects are collections of ideas in the mind is a result of a “theory” based on a tacit premise concerning the existence of external things.35 Thus, not only in Locke’s case but also in Berkeley’s, the view that experiential objects are ideas is based on a certain rather concrete theory about external things. Locke gives his “things themselves” a cluster of theoretical determinations including that of “possessing only primary qualities.” In the case of Berkeley too, when he begins his arguments in the Dialogues, he tacitly employs various determinations that we ordinarily believe experiential objects possess. Thus, whereas the determination that Kant gives to things in themselves is quite thin (it is just that “we cannot

34

For this matter, see my “Ideas without Causality: One More Locke in Berkeley,” forthcoming.

35

For Berkeley’s tacit premise, see my “Locke, Berkeley, and the Logic of Idealism,” 234ff.

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know what they are, but they surely exist and affect us”), in Locke’s and Berkeley’s cases some items that possess much more concrete determinations play the role of determining the internality of ideas. Now it will be seen that behind Kant’s positing unknowable “things in themselves” and reinterpreting the ordinary external things in space as internal representations, the naturalistic logic of the seventeenth-century theories of ideas is tacitly operating. If this were not the case, he would have no reason for regarding the objects of our experience as internal from the start and for grasping them as appearances in contrast to things in themselves. Further, the view that things in themselves “affect” our senses would not make sense without our ordinary experience concerning the causal process of sense perception (or some physical view framed by sophisticating it). That is, it seems that the very framework of Kant’s transcendental idealism could not be established if it were not based on our ordinary experience or more sophisticated physical view. Originally that bodies in space are representations in the mind is not our apodictic knowledge. Otherwise we would ordinarily take for granted that such bodies are in us; but the fact is otherwise. Therefore, when Kant regards such things and their properties as internal representations, he must tacitly employ a sort of theory that enables him to do so. In the time of Kant, it was already regarded as self-evident that the immediate objects of our perception are representations (or ideas) in the mind—as if this were apodictic truth. In fact, Kant himself says that “everyone immediately knows what a representation is,”36 clearly demonstrating this. And as his writings suggest, it was chiefly Locke (as well as Descartes)37 who prepared the way for him. As mentioned above, Locke regards experiential objects and their properties as “ideas” because he must posit new “things themselves” for some reason. Similarly Descartes, introduces a new sort of body that possesses only shape and size, and in relation to this he regards the objects of our sense perception as something in the mind.38 Further, such a view is based on various important suggestions from ancient atomism; therefore, it has its roots in ancient Greek science. But in any case, at least

36

Immanuel Kant, Logik Blomberg, in Kants gesammelte Schriften, 24: 40. Translation is mine.

37

That Kant inherits a part of Descartes’ view is known, e.g., from his view of apperception. However, what I am now bearing in mind is the fact that Kant shares with Descartes the view that representations inherent in our consciousness have absolute certainty. In discussing Descartes’ “problematic” idealism Kant suggests this and says: “I am no more necessitated to draw inferences in respect of the reality of external objects than I am in regard to the reality of the objects of my inner sense (my thoughts), for in both cases they are nothing but representations, the immediate perception (consciousness) of which is at the same time a sufficient proof of their reality.” (Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A371. English translation is from: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 427.) 38 For this matter, see my Amerika Gengo Testugaku no Shiten [The Viewpoints of American Philosophy of Language] (Kyoto: Sekaishisosha, 1996), Part II, Chapter 1.

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it is certain that the view concerning the internality of our immediate objects is based on a scientific introduction of the new sort of things. Indeed, in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant says that “it . . . follows naturally from the concept of an appearance in general that something must correspond to it which is not in itself appearance.”39 Seeing that Kant’s “appearance” means “sensible representation,” it is clear that for Kant too, representations maintain their character of “internality” only in relation to something external. Concerning the necessity of the existence of things in themselves (qua the correlates of sensible representations), Kant does not give any further explanation. But if we bear in mind the correspondence between Kant’s and Locke’s frameworks and Kant’s comments on his predecessors, it may fairly be presumed that he formed his framework by converting that of the seventeenth-century, naturalistic theory of ideas.40

Elimination of Hypothetical Thinking When we bear in mind the fact that Locke’s “things themselves” are posited on the basis of a hypothesis, it is clear that by regarding “things in themselves” as utterly unknowable, Kant rejects hypothetical thinking at least concerning the things that affect our senses. Since Locke acknowledges the value of hypothetical thinking, there is no logical difficulty in employing the corpuscular hypothesis.41 In contrast, as discussed below, when Kant regards things in themselves as unknowable, a logical difficulty arises. The old suspicion against his view—How can we know the existence of unknowable things in themselves?—is, in this sense quite natural. But why does he, nevertheless make such an alteration in the character of the things at all? Perhaps the most important reason for it must consist in his general view of science, especially that of natural science. According to some scholars, including G.A.J. Rogers, in the seventeenth century some leading scientists had already reached a consensus about the probable character of natural science.42 In contrast, according to Kant, science must be, at least at its core, apodictic in character. This absolutist tendency is already suggested by the fact that he finds samples of “synthetic judgments a priori” in pure mathematics and

39

Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A251. English translation, 348.

40

Seeing that the expression “affection’ itself is also found in Spinoza, it is not necessarily certain whether Kant immediately received it from Locke’s Essay. However, as Kant’s words concerning the distinction between primary and secondary qualities cited above suggest, it is clear that when he thinks of the relationship between things that play the role of affecting on the one hand and the representations produced through the affection on the other, he bears Locke’s view in mind. 41

See my “Locke’s Representationalism Without Veil,” 687–8.

G.A.J. Rogers, “Boyle, Locke, and Reason,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 27 (1966): 214–15; M.J. Osler, “John Locke and the Changing Ideal of Scientific Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (1970): 3–16. 42

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pure natural science. Further, in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, published in 1786, he says: A rational doctrine of nature . . . deserves the name of a natural science, only in case the fundamental natural laws therein are cognized a priori, and are not mere laws of experience.43

Judging from such a view on science, it seems impossible for Kant to build hypothetically posited items into the basic part of his epistemological framework. In fact, in the Preface of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason he says: As far as certainty is concerned, I have myself pronounced the judgment that in this kind of inquiry it is in no way allowed to hold opinions, and that anything that even looks like an hypothesis is a forbidden commodity, which should not be put up for sale even at the lowest price but must be confiscated as soon as it is discovered. For every cognition that is supposed to be certain a priori proclaims that it wants to be held for absolutely necessary, and even more is this true of a determination of all pure cognition a priori, which is to be the standard and thus even the example of all apodictic (philosophical) certainty.44

If he denies the existence of something external, he not only loses the grounds for internality of the internal items, but also his position will be identified with Berkeley’s idealism. Therefore, despite his rejection of hypothetical thinking, Kant maintains the existence of things in themselves. However, to explain the possibility of “synthetic judgments a priori” Kant transfers space and time as well as some important concepts into the area of Cartesian certainty (i.e., into the mind), and the result is the Kantian problematic characterization of “things in themselves’—that they are “utterly unknowable.” When Kant strips things in themselves of any concrete determination and describes them as “being unknowable” instead, he must bear in mind his doubts about Locke’s theory of ideas. The following words of Kant clearly suggest this: 4866. 1776–78. M IX–X. Locke a physiologist of reason, the origin of concepts. He committed the error of taking the occasion for acquiring these concepts, namely experience, as their source. Nevertheless he also made use of them beyond the bounds of experience.45

When Locke hypothetically posits things themselves (that is, imperceptible corpuscles), he applies to them several ideas acquired from experience.46 In this sense we can say that Locke “made use of [ideas] beyond the bounds of experience.” Kant rejects such a procedure. Therefore, it is natural that Kant cannot apply various determinations such as spatiality and temporality to things in themselves. Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgr¨unde der Naturwissenschaften, 468. English translation is from: Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. Michael Friedman, in idem, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, 184. 43

44

Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, AXV. English translation: 102.

Immanuel Kant, Handschriftricher Nachlaß: Metaphysik, in Kants gesammelte Schriften, 18: 14. English translation is from: Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 197.

45

46

For this matter, see my “Sensation and Conceptual Grasp in Locke.”

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In this connection, there is one more thing I must mention. Kant’s view that things in themselves are unknowable corresponds to Locke’s view that our knowledge concerning things themselves is very limited.47 The results of hypothetical investigations are still regarded as essentially probable, but in the present sciences this probability is generally viewed as very high. However, for various historical reasons, Locke could not rate their results highly, although he acknowledged the value of hypothetical methods. In view of this, we can assume that, in his account of science (discussed above) Kant amplified Locke’s moderate valuation of hypothetical methods, and that this led to Kant’s unknowability thesis.

Remaining Suspicions However, just as Berkeley distorted the logic of ideas by applying his arguments against the real existence of secondary qualities also to primary qualities,48 so we must say that Kant distorts the logic of ideas by making the hypothetically introduced “things themselves” into unknowable items the existence of which is nevertheless assured. For this reason, many philosophers including Jacobi and Fichte were skeptical of Kant’s concept of “things in themselves.” But in this section I take up two other sorts of logical suspicions, one of which is concerned with the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. As previously mentioned, Kant accepts the distinction between “primary qualities” and “secondary qualities” in Berkeley’s sense (according to Locke’s original wording, the distinction between “ideas of primary qualities” and “ideas of secondary qualities”). He distinguishes shape, size, etc. from color, taste, etc., and says that the former are the qualities that bodies qua appearances originally possess, but that the latter are merely our senses” modifications. According to Locke’s original view, the distinction is based on the relationship between the qualities of “things themselves” and the sensible ideas in the mind. Since Kant does not acknowledge that things in themselves possess spatial determinations such as shape and size, even if Kant accepts the distinction, he cannot explain it in the Lockean way. Therefore, in Kant’s explanation of the distinction, things in themselves play no part. In fact, when he introduces the distinction into the framework of his transcendental idealism, his explanation does not depend on things in themselves. In the Critique of Pure Reason he says: Besides space . . . there is no other subjective representation related to something external that could be called a priori objective. Hence this subjective condition of all outer appearances cannot be compared with any other. The pleasant taste of a wine does not belong to the objective determinations of the wine, thus of an object even considered as an appearance, but rather to the particular constitution of sense in the subject that enjoys it. Colors are not

47 48

For Locke’s view, see Essay, IV. iii. 11–16.

See my “Locke, Berkeley, and the Logic of Idealism” and “Locke, Berkeley, and the Logic of Idealism II.”

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objective qualities of the bodies to the intuition of which they are attached, but are also only modifications of the sense of sight, which is affected by light in a certain way. Space, on the contrary, as a condition of outer objects, necessarily belongs to their appearance or intuition. Taste and colors are by no means necessary conditions under which alone the objects can be objects of the senses for us. They are only combined with the appearance as contingently added effects of the particular organization. Hence they are not a priori representations, but are grounded on sensation, and pleasant taste is even grounded on feeling (of pleasure and displeasure) as an effect of the sensation. And no one can have a priori the representation either of a color or of any taste: but space concerns only the pure form of intuition, thus it includes no sensation (nothing empirical) in itself, and all kinds and determinations of space can and even must be able to be represented a priori if concepts of shapes as well as relations are to arise. Through space alone is it possible for things to be outer objects for us.49

In this passage Kant distinguishes three sorts of items: “space”, “intuition of bodies,” and “representations of colors” or “representations of tastes.” The first (space) and the third (representations of colors and representations of tastes) are connected with the second (intuition of bodies) in different ways. Since space is a subjective condition of outer objects, it is necessarily connected with the “intuition of bodies.” By contrast, though “representations of colours” and “representations of tastes” are connected with the “intuition of bodies”, “representations of colours” are “modifications of the sense of sight, which is affected by light in a certain way” and are “contingently added effects of the particular organization.” Therefore, we recognize their connection with the intuition of bodies only a posteriori. (In the case of “representations of tastes” too, the situation is basically the same. But according to Kant, in the case of “the pleasant taste of a wine,” the taste is not a mere sensation contingently connected with the intuition of a body. It also shares our “feeling . . . as an effect of the sensation.”) According to Kant, space is an a priori determination of sensibility, and modifications of space, such as shape and size, are variants of the a priori spatial quality that belongs to the mind. Since their basis (space itself) is an a priori form of intuition, they have a character basically different from that of colour and taste, which are merely “effects of the particular organization.” Thus, Kant’s explanation of the distinction in question is certainly not based on determinations of things in themselves, and in this sense it is consistent. But we must take note of the origin of the distinction itself. It was originally established, by Locke and others, by a hypothetical investigation; therefore, it is probable. In Kant’s framework, however, the distinction is based on a pure form of our sensibility, and accordingly, the character of the distinction changes into that of an absolute one. Thus, it seems to me that though Kant’s epistemology is in several ways tacitly based on hypothetical investigations, officially he does not acknowledge it. The other logical suspicion concerns the non-causality of representations. According to Berkeley, an idea cannot be a cause of another idea, and on the basis of this view he regards the world as a world of signs. As discussed on another occasion,

49

Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A28–9. English translation, 161.

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Berkeley’s view is based on Locke’s, whose materialism he criticizes.50 For Locke, an idea cannot be a cause. For in the case of sensible ideas, they are results produced by things themselves and such ideas in the mind cannot be external causes of other ideas. Locke’s view on ideas is, of course, not so simple. As I have repeatedly argued, in Locke’s case, the ideas applied to “things themselves” are originally acquired in our ordinary experience of experiential objects.51 The idea of causation is one of these. In positing new “things themselves” it is given to them as a component, and accordingly experiential objects change their status into that of ideas—that is, that of items produced in the mind by things themselves affecting our senses. Thus, things themselves bear causality, and ideas produced in the mind are, as the results of affection, void of causal character. Berkeley’s view of the world as signs is a legacy from Locke. Whereas Locke’s newly posited “things themselves” bear the causal character, Berkeley denies the existence of matter (Lockean things themselves), and God plays a role instead. If we bear the non-causal character of Locke-Berkeleyan ideas in mind, Kant’s theory of representations seems incompatible with original logic of ideas (representations). Kant’s things in themselves, which correspond to Locke’s things themselves, affect our senses and in this sense they certainly bear a quasi-causal character. However, the concept of cause that Kant regards as one of the pure concepts of understanding is applicable only to appearances qua representations. That is, for Kant, things qua representations possess causal character. Thus, Kant’s theory of representations seems to have another logical distortion. Hegelians and Kantians often say that Kant synthesizes empiricism and rationalism. Indeed, on the one hand, he acknowledges the affection by things in themselves and regards the objects of our experience as mental; on the other hand, he acknowledges various a priori items in the mind and regards their rational consequences as important. However, his synthesis is performed by tacitly accepting the naturalistic logic of ideas that Locke shares with Descartes, and at the same time distorting it. In this sense, Kant’s anti-naturalistic, transcendental idealism rests on a tacit naturalistic basis.

50

See my “Ideas without Causality: One More Locke in Berkeley.”

51

For example, see my “Sensation and Conceptual Grasp in Locke,” 59–63.

List of Publications by G.A.J. Rogers∗

Books 1. Locke’s Enlightenment. Aspects of the Origin, Nature and Impact of his Philosophy. Europaea Memoria. Hildesheim: Olms, 1998. 2. Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes. Edited by G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. 3. John Locke, Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Other Philosophical Writings, vol. I. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch and G.A.J. Rogers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. 4. John Locke: Content and Context. Edited by G.A.J. Rogers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 5. Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature & De Corpore Politico. Edited by G.A.J. Rogers. Key Texts Series. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994. 6. Leviathan. Contemporary Responses to the Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes. Edited by G.A.J. Rogers. Key Issues Series. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995. 7. The Philosophical Canon in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Edited by G.A.J. Rogers and Sylvana Tomaselli. Rochester NY: Rochester University Press, 1996. 8. The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context. Politics, Metaphysics and Religion. Edited by G.A.J. Rogers, J. M. Vienne and Y. C. Zarka. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. 9. Hobbes and History. Edited by G.A.J. Rogers and Tom Sorell. London: Routledge, 2000. 10. Les Fondements Philosophiques de la Tol´erance en France et en Angleterre au XVIIe siecle. 3 vols. Edited by Franck Lessay, G.A.J. Rogers and Y.C. Zarka. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. 11. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. 2 vols. Edited by G.A.J. Rogers and Karl Schuhmann. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003. Reprinted, London: Continuum 2005. 12. Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy. Edited by G.A.J. Rogers and Tom Sorell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. 13. John Locke, Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Other Philosophical Writings. Vol. 2. Edited by G.A.J. Rogers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, forthcoming.

Articles and Chapters 1. “The Hypothesis of Harmony. An Interpretation of the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century.” The Listener, 18 October 1965, 261–264. 2. “Boyle, Locke and Reason.” Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966): 205–216. 3. “Newton, the Ether, and Seventeenth-Century Science.” In Actes du XIe Congr`es International d’Histoire des Sciences, 349–354. Wrocaw: Ossolineum, 1968.

∗ The editors would like to thank Jo Rogers and Merilyn Holme for their assistance in compiling this list.

277

278 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

List of Publications by G.A.J. Rogers “Descartes and the Method of English Science.” Annals of Science 29 (1972): 237–255. “The Veil of Perception.” Mind 84 (1975): 210–224. “Locke’s Essay and Newton’s Principia.” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 217–232. “Locke, Newton and the Enlightenment.” Vistas in Astronomy 22 (1978): 471–476. “Locke, Newton and the Cambridge Platonists on Innate Ideas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 191–205. “The Empiricism of Locke and Newton.” In Philosophers of the Enlightenment, edited by S. Brown, 1–30. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979. “Galileo”, “Locke” , and “Newton”. In A Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by Antony Flew. London: Pan Books and Macmillan Press, 1979. “L’empirismo di Locke e Newton.” Rivista di Filosofi 70 (1979): 421–446. “Locke, Law, and the Laws of Nature.” In John Locke, edited by R. Brandt, 146–152. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1981. “The System of Locke and Newton.” In Contemporary Newtonian Research, edited by Z. Bechler, 215–238. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982. “The Basis of Belief. Philosophy, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England.” History of European Ideas 6 (1985): 19–39. “Descartes and the English.” In The Light of Nature, edited by. J.D. North and J.J. Roche, 281–302. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985. “Die Cambridger Platoniker.” In Friedrich Ueberwegs Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts. Bd. 3, England, edited by J.P. Schobinger, 240–282, 285–90. Basel: Schwabe, 1988. “Die philosophischen Lehrst¨atte. 2. Cambridge.” Ibid., 10–12, 28–29. Basel: Schwabe, 1988. “Naturphilosophie, Aufbruch der Wissenschaft, Newton. Einleitung.” Ibid. 343–347. Basel: Schwabe, 1988. “Hobbes’s Hidden Influence.” In Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, edited by G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan, 189–205. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. “More, Locke and the Issue of Liberty.” In Henry More 1614–1687, edited by Sarah Hutton, 189–199. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989. “Why not learn the Ethical Dimensions of Medical Practice?” Horizons, December 1989, 811–816. “Richard I. Aaron.” The Locke Newsletter 20 (1989): 11–13. “Descartes and the Mind of Locke. The Cartesian Impact on Locke’s Philosophical Development.” In Descartes: Il Metodo e i Saggi, 2 vols, edited by Giulia Belgioioso, Guido Cimino, Pierre Costabel and Giovanni Papuli, 689–697. Roma: Instituto Della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990. “Religion and the Explanation of Action in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes.” In Thomas Hobbes. Le Ragioni del Moderno tra Teologia e Politica, edited by Giofranco Borrelli, 35–50. Napoli: Morano, 1990. “L’influence cach´ee de Hobbes.” In Thomas Hobbes. Philosophie Premiere, Th´eorie de la Science et Politique, edited by Yves Charles Zarka and Jean Bernhardt, 209–222. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. “L’influence nascosta di Thomas Hobbes.” In Hobbes Oggi, edited by Francesco Barone, 473–489. Milan: Franco Angeli Libri, 1990. “The Cambridge Platonists: Ancient Philosophy, Modern Science and Christian Theology.” In Images de Platon et lectures de ses oeuvres, edited by Ada Neschke, 237–253. Lausanne: Editions du Cerf, 1990. “John Locke.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 101, British Prose Writers 1600–1800, First Series, edited by Donald Siebert, 202–219. Detroit: Gale, 1991. “Locke and the Latitude-Men: Ignorance as a Ground for Toleration.” In Philosophy, Religion and Science 1640–1700, edited by Richard Kroll et al., 230–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992.

List of Publications by G.A.J. Rogers

279

30. “Francis Bacon” and “Innate Ideas.” In A Companion to Epistemology, edited by Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa, 40 and 216–217. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 31. “Contexte des rapports intellectuels entre Hobbes et Locke.” Archives de Philosophie, Tome 55, Cahier 4 (1992): 531–551. 32. “Locke, Anthropology and Models of the Mind.” History of the Human Sciences 6 (1993): 73–87. 33. “The History of Philosophy and the Reputation of Philosophers.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 31 (1993): 113–118. 34. Introduction to Locke’s Philosophy. Content and Context, edited by G.A.J. Rogers, 1–27. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 35. “Gassendi and the Birth of Modern Philosophy.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26 (1995): 681–687. 36. “John Locke, Conservative Radical.” In The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1800, edited by Roger Lund, 97–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 37. “Innate Ideas and the Infinite: the Case of Locke and Descartes.” The Locke Newsletter 26 (1995): 49–67. 38. “Locke and the Problem of Scepticism.” In The Philosophical Canon in the 17th and 18th Centuries, edited by G.A.J. Rogers and Sylvana Tomaselli, 49–66. Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 1996. 39. “Science and British Philosophy: Boyle and Newton.” In Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. 5, edited by Stuart Brown, 43–68. London: Routledge, 1996. 40. “Innate Ideas and the Ancient Philosophy in Cudworth’s Epistemology.” In Mind Senior to the World, edited by Marialuisa Baldi, 149–161. Milan: Francoangeli, 1996. 41. “Charleton, Gassendi et la r´eception de l’atomisme epicurien en Angleterre.” In Gassendi et L’Europe, edited by Sylvia Murr, 213–225. Paris: Vrin, 1997. 42. “The Other-Worldly Philosophers and the Real World: The Cambridge Platonists, Theology and Politics.” In The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context, edited by G.A.J. Rogers, J.M. Vienne and Y.C. Zarka, 3–15. Kluwer: Dortrecht, 1997. 43. “Die Cambridge-Platoniker und das neue Wissen.” Platon in der Abendl¨andischen Geistesgeschichte, edited by Theo Kobusch and Burkhard Mojsisch, 155–169. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997. 44. “La religion et la loi naturelle selon Hobbes. Les Lois de la nature et la loi morale.” Politque, Droit et Th´eologie chez Bodin, Grotius et Hobbes, edited by Luc Foisneau, 265–282. Paris: Editions Kim´e, 1997. 45. “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” In John Locke. Essay u¨ ber den menschlichen Verstand, edited by Udo Thiel, 11–38. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997. 46. “Hobbes and Locke on Authority.” Hobbes Studies 10 (1997): 38–50. 47. “John Locke’s State of Nature as Utopian Ideal.” Anglophonia 3 (1998): 77–87. 48. “Hobbes.” In Columbia History of Western Philosophy, edited by Richard H. Popkin, 346–351. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 49. “Locke.” In Columbia History of Western Philosophy, edited by Richard H. Popkin, 382–389. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 50. “Newton and the Guaranteeing God.” In Newton and Religion. Context, Nature and Influenc , edited by James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, 221–236. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998. 51. “Stillingfleet, Locke and the Trinity.” In Judaeo-Christian Culture in the Seventeenth Century. A Celebration of the Library of Narcissus Marsh (1638–1713), edited by Richard H. Popkin, Allison P. Coudert, Sarah Hutton and Gordon M. Weiner, 207–24. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998. 52. “Popkin, Scepticism and the History of Modern Philosophy.” In Everything Connects: in Conference with Richard H. Popkin: essays in his honor, edited by James E. Force and David S. Katz, 279–291. Kluwer: Dordrecht, 1998.

280

List of Publications by G.A.J. Rogers

53. “The 17th Century and the Reconstruction of Knowledge.” In The Proper Ambition of Science, edited by Joseph Wolff and Martin Stone. London: Routledge, 1998. 54. “Samuel Bold”, “Walter Charleton” and “Joseph Glanvill.” In the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward Craig. London: Routledge, 1998. 55. “Locke, Stillingfleet et la tol´erance.” In Les Fondements Philosophiques de la Tol´erance en France et en Angleterre au XVIIe Siecle, 3 vols, edited by Frank Lessay, G.A.J. Rogers and Y.C. Zarka, 1: 91–113. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. 56. “John Locke,” “Isaac Newton,” “John Sergeant,” “James Tyrrell,” and “John Wynne.” In Dictionary of Eighteenth Century British Philosophers, edited by John W. Yolton, John Valdimir Price and John Stephens. Thoemmes Press: Bristol, 1999. 57. “Harrington, Locke and Aristotle: the Natural and the Unnatural in Commonwealth and Nature.” In James Harrington and the Notion of Commonwealth, edited by Luc Borot, 131–150. Montpellier: Centre d’´etudes et de recherches sur la Renaissance anglaise, 1998. 58. “La religion et la loi naturelle selon Hobbes. Les lois de la nature et la loi morale.” In Politque, Droit et Th´eologie chez Bodin, Grotius et Hobbes, edited by Luc Foisneau, 265–282. Paris: Editions Kim´e, 1997. 59. “The Limit of State Authority: John Locke and the Invention of the Private.” In Dal Necessario al Possibile. Determinismo e libert`a nel pensiero anglo-olandese del XVII secolo, edited by Luisa Simonutti, 99–115. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998. 60. “John Bramhall,” “John Eachard”, “Thomas Hobbes,” “Edward Hyde,” “George Lawson,” “John Locke,” “Isaac Newton,” “Samuel Parker,” “John Sergeant,” “James Tyrrell,” “John Whitehall,” and “John Wynne.” In The Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century British Philosophers, 2 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2000. 61. “Locke, Therapy and the abuse of Langauge.” In La philosophie comme m´edecine de l’ˆame a` l’ˆage classique, edited by Genevi`eve Brykman, 117–130. Paris: Le Temps Philosophique, 2003. 62. “Hobbes, Sovereignty and Consent.” Rivista di Storia Della Filosfi 59 (2004) 241–248. 63. “In Memoriam: John W. Yolton.” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 419–421. 64. “Locke, Plato and Platonism.” In Platonism at the Origins of Modernity, edited by Douglas Hedley and Sarah Hutton. 193–205. Dordrecht: Springer 2007.

Editorship The British Journal for the History of Philosophy. Founding Editor G.A.J. Rogers vols 1–7, Bristol: Thommes Press, 1993–1997. Vols. 8– continuing, London: Routledge/Taylor and Francis.

Reprints (Selection) Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual History of the Universe. Introduction by G.A.J. Rogers. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994. Henry More, Major Philosophical Works. 9 vols. Introduction by G.A.J. Rogers. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997. Thomas Hobbes, Opera Philosophica. 5 vols. Edited by William Molesworth. Introduction by G.A.J. Rogers. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999. Edward Stillingfleet, The Philosophy of Edward Stillingfleet including his Replies to John Locke. 6 vols. Introduction by G.A.J. Rogers. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999. Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae. Preface by Alan Sell. New Introduction by G.A.J. Rogers. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2000.

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281

Reprinted Articles 1. “Boyle, Locke and Reason.” In Philosophy, Religion and Science in the 17th and 18th Centuries, edited by John W. Yolton, 339–81. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1990. 2. “Locke, Newton and the Cambridge Platonists on Innate Ideas.” In Philosophy, Religion and Science in the 17th and 18th Centuries, edited by John W. Yolton, 351–65. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1990. 3. “Locke’s Essay and Newton’s Principia.” In Philosophy, Religion and Science in the 17th and 18th Centuries, edited by John W. Yolton, 366–81, Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1990. 4. “Boyle, Locke and Reason.” In John Locke, edited by Richard Ashcraft, 462–75. London: Routledge, 1991. 5. “Descartes and the Method of English Science.” In Essays on Early Modern Philosophers. Vol. 7 Natural Scientists, edited by Vere Chappell, 65–84. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992. 6. “The System of Locke and Newton.” In Essays on Early Modern Philosophers. Vol. 7 Natural Scientists, edited by Vere Chappell, 315–38. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992. 7. “Locke, Law and the Laws of Nature.” In Essays on Early Modern Philosophers, Vol. 8 John Locke. Theory of Knowledge, edited by Vere Chappell, 502–18. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992. 8. “Locke, Law and the Laws of Nature.” In Locke. Edited by John Dunn and Ian Harris. 2 Vols. 1: 505–21.Cheltenham: Elgar, 1997.

Reviews About 120 reviews in 16 different academic journals and the TLS and THES.

Index

A Aaron, R.I., 60, 62, 66, 67, 84 Aarsleff, H., 237 Abel, O., 227 Acosta, U., 167 Acworth, R., 179 Adam, 13, 22, 23, 39, 130, 133–136, 237, 238, 241 Adam, C., 77 Adams, R.M., 124 Aetius, 7 Aikenhead, T., 169, 170 Aikman, J., 51 Ainsworth, M., 218, 219 Airy, O., 51 Alexander, P., 87 Alford, J., 255 Allison, H., 263 Alllix, P., 150 Ambuel, D., 230 Anstey, P.R., 169 Aoki, S., xii, xvii Archimedes, 246 Aristotle, 12, 29, 48, 110, 118, 119, 136, 152, 153 Arnauld, A., xii, 65, 99, 101 Ashcraft, R., 145, 197 Ashley, M., 213 Ashley Cooper, see Shaftesbury Ashworth, E.J., 59 Astell, M., 128, 142 Aston, S., 127 Atkinson, G., 238 Atticus, T. Pomponius, 92 Ayers, M.R., viii, xii, xvii, 69, 177 B ´ 94, 99 Balibar, E., Barber, K., 115 Barber, W.H., 161, 226 Barbeyrac, J., 202 Barnes, J., 110

Barrell, R.A., 201, 204, 209–211, 214, 217, 218, 221 Barrow, I., 246 Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, Sieur du, 21 Bayle, P., xi, xiv, xv, 161, 209, 225–236, 238–243 Beaumont, C. de, 260 Beaurepaire, P.-Y., 211 Bechler, Z., 75 Beconsall, T., xi, xiii, 127–141 Beer, E.S. de, 164, 180, 198 Bellers, J., 141 Benda, W., 218 Bennett, J., 6, 91, 99–101, 103, 108, 117, 118 Bentley, R., 21, 145, 146, 157 Beran, H., 49 Berkeley, G., 60, 62, 262–266, 269, 270, 272–275 Bermudez, J.L., 78 Bernagie, P., 160 Bernard, F., 222 Bernard, J., 201, 216 Bernard, J.F., 160 Bettenham, J., 160 Bianchi, D., 168 Biddle, J., 168, 169 Birch, T., 219 Blanc, J.-B. le, 198 Blasius, G., 160 Blaustein, A.P., 45 Bloch, O., 94 Bodin, J., 134, 135 Boer, T.J. de, 197 Bolton, M. Brandt, xiii, xvii, 115, 116, 126 Bonno, G., 160, 178, 196 Bossuet, J.-B., 237 Bost, H., 227 Bots, H., 227 Bowman, C., 272 Boyle, R., 75, 76, 81–84 Bracken, H.M., 226, 227 Breckle, H.E., 63 Brewer, H., 141

283

284 Bright, G., 21 Broad, J., 150 Brooke, C., 89 Brounower, 198 Brown, N.O., 136 Brown, S., xii, xvii, 126, 148 Brun, J. le, 237 Brush, C.B., 226, 233, 239 Buchanan, G., 51, 54, 56 Buickerood, J.G., 86 Bull, J., 198 Burgelin, P., 248 Burnet, G., 51 Burnet, T., 129, 217 C Calvin, J., 5 Care, H., 141 Carey, D., 131 Carrier, M., 261 Cass, F., 91 Cassirer, E., 229 Cavendish, C., 81 Cazzaniga, G.M., 90 Chaix-Ruiy, J., 226 Champion, J., 243 Chapell, V., 59, 69, 70, 115 Charles I, 51, 141 Charles II, 54, 208 Charleton, W., 81 Charpentier, J., 153 Christ, 21–24, 165–167, 172, 201–203, 205, 212, 229, 230, 232, 234, 237, 240 Chudleigh, M., 142 Churchill (brothers), 200, 202–204, 212 Chyrsippus, 4 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 3–5, 15, 92, 129, 149 Clark, E., 256 Clarke (children), 210 Clarke, B., 210 Clarke, D.M., 78 Clarke, E., 144, 171, 209–211, 248 Clarke, M., 209, 210, 248, 249 Clerc, J. le, 160, 161, 167, 178, 196, 207–209, 214, 216, 223, 228 Coke, E., 92 Colie, R., 197 Collins, A., 197, 216–221, 223 Colmero, M., 51 Cooper, J.M., 4, 12, 15 Cope, K.L., 86 Coste, P., xi, xiv, 6, 89, 93–95, 159, 170, 171, 195–223

Index Cottingham, J., 77 Courtenay, W.J., 100 Craig, M., 169, 170 Cranston, M., 76, 197 Crates of Thebes, 214 Cromwell, O., 51, 52, 141, 164 Cropley, J., 212 Cruickshanks, E., 210 Cudworth, R., xi, xiv, 144–157, 159, 195, 206 Cudworth, D., see Masham, Damaris Cusanus, N., 48 Cyprianus, A., 160 D Davies, C.G., 94 Delcker, F., 193 Democritus, 147, 149, 152, 153 Dent, N., 259 Derrida, J., viii Des Chene, D., 112 Des Maizeaux, P., 160, 162, 171, 179, 200–202, 205, 207, 212, 214–218, 220, 221 Descartes, R., viii, xi, xii, 75–88, 96, 97, 103, 147, 148, 151, 155, 190, 198, 199, 247, 262, 270, 275 Deschamps, A., 226 Dibon, P., 228 Diderot, D., 46 Diels, H., 7 Digby, K., 81 Doble, C.E., 128 Duchesneau, F., 181 Dunn, J., 16, 255 Dybikowski, J., 211 E Edwards, J., 170, 171 Epictetus, 3 Epicurus, 152, 153, 213 Estrange, R. l’, 142 F F´enelon, Franc¸ois de Salignac de la Mothe-, 258 Feuerbach, L., 226 Fichte, J.G., 273 Ficino, M., 146, 152, 153 Filmer, R., xii, 27, 54, 133–135 Firmin, T., 165, 168, 171 Flanz, G.H., 45 Foakes-Jackson, F.J., 6 Foisneau, L., xiii, xvii Foot, D., 164 Forster, T., 208

Index Frede, D., 10 Frede, M., 9 Freeman, S., 225 Freytag L¨oringhoff, B. von, 63 Friedman, M., 272 Furcha, E.J., 227 Furly, A., 206–209 Furly, B., xiv, 144, 146, 160, 161, 163, 171, 206, 207 G Gagnebin, B., 245 Garber, D., 78, 85, 88, 228 Garcia, J., 115 Gardner, S., 262 Gassendi, P., 147, 148, 151 Gaudemar, M. de, 104 Gaukroger, S., 78, 262 Geach, P., 115 Gellius, Aulus, 3 Gendzier, S.J., 46 George, B., 193 Gerhardt, C.I., 89, 119, 214 Gibb, J., 62 Gibbon, E., 243 Goldgar, A., 196, 200, 216, 218 Goldie, M., xiii, xvii, 128, 140, 171, 249 Gordon, J., 169 Gough, J.W., 48, 49, 54, 197 Grafton, A., 145 Grafton, T., 147 Greffier, E., 227 Griffiths, P., 140 Gros, J.-M., 229 Grotius, H., 2, 3, 139 Guenellon, P., 160 Guyer, P., 270, 272 H H¨aseler, J., 211 Hall, M.B., 81 Hamilton, B., 51 Hamilton, J., 256 Hampsher-Monk, I., 227 Hampton, J., 225 Hankinson, R.J., 7, 8 Harrington, J., 141 Harris, I., xiv, xv, xvii, 237, 238 Harris, J., 205, 206, 208, 209, 211 Harris, J.A., 228 Harrison, J., 145, 154, 200 Hatfield, G., 263 Hearne, T., 128, 130, 133 Heath, P., 263

285 Hedley, D., 21, 144 Hedworth, H., 164 Helmont, F. van, 161 Henry III, 50 Heyd, M., 226 Higgins-Biddle, J.C., 213 Hobart, J., 204 Hobbes, T., xi–xiii, 27–43, 49, 52, 56, 71, 81, 83, 89–93, 95–100, 102–105, 133–135, 137, 148–150, 154, 155, 191, 192, 214, 219, 237, 245 Hollis, T., 202 Hooker, B., 150 Hooker, R., 54 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 211 Hudde, J., 197 Huggard, E.M., 100 Hunter, M., 169 Hunton, P., 54 Hutton, S., ix, xiv, xviii, 21, 144, 145, 147, 148, 159, 161, 171 I Ibbett, K., 89 Inwood, B., 3, 9, 15 Israel, J., 228 J Jacobi, H.J., 273 Jacovides, M., 109 Jaffro, L., 211 James II, 54 James, E.D., 226 James, S., 3 Jaume, L., 96 Jenkinson, S.L., 227, 228 Jessop, T.E., 265 Jimack, P.D., 257–259 John, Saint, 167 Johnston, C., 178–180 Jolley, N., 83, 85, 118 Jossua, J.P., 227 Justel, H., 159, 160 K Kant, I., viii, xi, xv, 261–275 Kargon, R.H., 81 Kelsey, F.W., 139 Kenshur, O., 226, 227, 229 Kepler, J., 246 Kilcullen, J., 227, 228 Kim, H.-K., 126 King, P., 162, 171, 179–181, 200, 203, 205, 207, 208, 223

286 Kiplin, T., 198 Klever, W., 197 Kley, D. van, 46 Klibansky, R., 197, 236 Knight, M., 210 Koelln, F.C.A., 229 Kohlhans, T.L., 161 Kolbrener, W., 128 Kors, A.C., 227 Krausman Ben-Amos, I., 140 Kristeller, P., 3 Kroll, R., 145 Kukuthas, C., 228 L Labrousse, E., 227, 230, 236 Lactantius, 3 Laertius, D., 3 Lake, K., 6 Lascano, M., 126 Laslett, P., xii, 27, 159, 200–203, 205 Laursen, J.C., 228, 230 Lautenbach, M. of, 48 Lawson, G., 54 Lee, H., 129 Leibniz, G.W., xi–xiii, 89–91, 93, 95, 97, 99–105, 107, 108, 117–124, 126, 214, 217, 246, 247 Leitz, R.C., 86 Lennon, T.M., 181, 227 Lennox, see Richmond Leslie, C., 128, 142 Lessay, F., 92, 238 Leucippus, 148, 149, 152 Lewin, S., 206 Lewy, G., 51 Leyden, W. von, 5, 16 Lightfoot, J., 21 Lilburn, J., 52 Limborch, F. van, 171 Limborch, P. van, 160, 161, 168, 169, 171, 197, 198, 216, 222 Lipsius, J., 2, 3 Lodge, P., 124 Loemker, L.E., 119, 120, 123, 125 Long, A.A., 3, 4, 7–9 Long, P., 198 Lough, J., 178 Low, D.M., 243 Lowde, J., 129, 132 Lowe, E.J., 116 Luce, A.A., 265

Index Lucretius, 147, 152 Lufneu, H., 161 M M´echoulan, H., 163, 171 Mably, M. de, 257 Mackie, J.L., 61, 66, 67 Maclean, A.H., 54 MacNeill, J.T., 5 Magdelaine, M., 161 Maimbourg, L., 165 Maimbourg, T. de, 165 Malebranche, N., xi, xiv, 61, 65, 94, 177–188, 193, 199, 246, 247 Malmesbury (family), 206 Malmesbury (papers), 201, 206, 221 Mandeville, B., 142 Mariana, J. de, xii, 49–51, 54, 56 Marshall, J., 167, 228 Martinich, A.P., 97 Mary II, 54 Mary, Queen of Scots, 51 Masham, Damaris, xiv, 76, 120, 121, 146, 150, 159, 163, 170, 171, 195, 204–207 Masham, E., 207 Masham, Francis Cudworth, 159, 195, 197, 206, 207 Masham, Sir Francis, 159, 195, 197, 206, 207 Mason, H.T., 226, 233 Mattern, R., 109, 111, 112 Mazel, D., 204 McKenna, A., 161, 211, 227, 230, 243 Mendus, S., 228 Menn, S., 118 Mercer, C., 6, 85 Merlat, E., 239 Michelson, M., 128 Miege, G., 142 Mill, J.S., 56 Miller, J., 15 Milton, J.R., xiv, xviii, 76, 197, 216 Milton, P., 215 Mitsis, P., 15 Molina, L. de, 51 Molyneux, W., 128, 129, 171, 180, 181, 195, 198, 212, 217, 255 Monmouth, Charles Mordaunt, Earl of (later third Earl of Peterborough), 171, 254 Montaigne, M. de, 257 Montuori, M., 197, 198 Moore, G.A., 50 Moore, W.G., 226 More, H., 145, 147

Index Moreau, P.F., 227 Mori, G., 227, 228 Moschus, 147, 152, 153 Moses, 23, 147, 167, 240 Motte, C. de la, 195, 198–207, 212, 214, 216, 221, 223 Moutaux, J., 94 Mulsow, M., 145 Murdoch, D., 77 N Nadler, S., 182, 228 Nedermam, C.J., 228 Nelson, A., 126 Neto, J.M., 227 Newton, I., 6, 75, 76, 129, 143, 171, 191, 216, 246 Nicole, P., xii Noah, 23 Noonan, H., 115 Norris, J., 178–181 Nuovo, V., xi, xviii, 144, 169 Nye, S., 165–169 O O’Higgins, J., 217 O’Neill, E., 6, 85 Oldfather, W.A., 135 Ollion, H., 197 Olscamp, P.J., 181 Origen (Origines Adamantius), 3 Orobio de Castro, I., 167 Osler, M.J., 78, 271 Overton, R., xii, 52, 53 Ovid, 101 P P´echarman, M., 90 Pˆaques, M., 89 Padfield, C.F., 92 Paets, A., 161 Paganini, G., 161, 226, 227, 243 Pahlan, H., 142 Paleologus, J., 169 Panaetius, 3 Paradis, M., 227 Parry, G., 259 Pascal, B., 246 Pateman, C., 136 Paul, Saint, 22, 24 Pawling, R., 207 Petitdemange, G., 89 Pettegrove, J.P., 229 Petty, W., 81, 138

287 Peyr`ere, I. de la, 137 Phemister, 120, 124, 126 Philodemius, E., 52 Pictet, B., 220 Pitassi, M.-C., 161, 169, 195, 197, 198 Plato, 12, 145, 147, 149–153, 264 Plotinus, 152 Plutarch, 3, 7 Popkin, R.H., 153, 163, 171, 189, 227 Popple, W., xi, xiv, 163–168, 171, 173 Porphyry, 64 Poser, H., 124 Posidonius, 152 Potts, D., 227 Power, H., 81, 82, 84, 118, 188 Pralard, A., 178 Priarolo, M., 168, 169 Primer, I., 226 Prior, A.N., 150 Proclus, 144, 146 Procop´e, J.F., 12 Protagoras, xiv, 149–154 Przypkowsky, S., 169 Pufendorf, S. von, 54, 135, 136, 138, 139 Pyle, A., 76 Pyrrho, 152, 153 Pythagoras, 38, 101, 151 Q Quina, A., 160 Quine, W., viii R R´egis, P.S., 178 R´etat, P., 228 Rabus, P., 161 Rainaud, 246 Rand, B., 208, 218 Rauscher, F., 272 Rawls, J., 49, 225 Ray, A., 120 Raymond, M., 245, 246 Razavi, M.A., 229 Remnant, J., 91, 108, 117 Remond, N., 217 Rex, W.E., 229, 230 Rey, A., 120 Rey-Debove, J., 120 Richmond, Charles Lennox, first Duke of, 165 Ricuperati, G., 163, 171 Riley, P., 259 Robertson, J., 228 Robinson, H., 226 Rodis-Lewis, G., 177, 178

288 Rogers, G.A.J., vii, viii, xv, 40, 45, 59, 75, 76, 82, 85, 87, 88, 126, 130, 132, 144, 159, 193, 225, 237, 238, 250, 271 Roper, A., 127 Rose, J., 142 Rousseau, J.-J., xi, xv, 46, 245–248, 256–260 Rumbold, M.E., 196, 216 S Salamonius, M., 48 Sandberg, K.C., 226 Santucci, A., 161 Sardanapalus, 213, 214 Sassen, B., 263 Savage, R., 20 Savonius, S.-J., 202, 245 Sch¨onfeld, M., 261 Schaffer, S., 82, 83 Schelte, H., 196, 204 Schlichtingius, J., 169 Schmaltz, T., 126 Schmitt, C., 156 Schneewind, J.B., 229 Schuhmann, K., 89 Schuster, J., 262 Schuurman, P., ix, xiv, xviii, 12 Schøsler, J., 196, 199 Scribano, E., 168, 169 Sedley, D.N., 4, 7, 9 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 3, 12, 13, 21 Serranus, I., 152 Serrurier, C., 226 Sextus Empiricus, 146, 152, 153 Shackleton, R., 222 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of, 141, 207, 208 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, fourth Earl of, 219 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of, 161, 171, 198, 200, 201, 204–223 Shapin, S., 82, 83 Sharp, A., 53 Shaw, W., 208 Sherlock, W., 129, 169 Simmons, A.J., 27 Simon, R., 167 Simonutti, L., xiv, xviii, 159, 161, 163, 168, 169, 171, 173 Sina, M., 171, 207 Sina, M.G., 207 Skinner, Q., 45, 48, 51, 91 Slade, M., 160 Socinus, F., 168, 169, 200

Index Socrates, vii, 93, 103 Sommerville, J.P., 134 Sonnemans, A., 161 Sorabji, R., 11, 12 Sorell, T., xii, xviii, 3 South, R., 169 Spellman, W.M., 168 Spinoza, B., 3, 5, 148, 149, 167, 192, 197, 271 Springborg, P., 91, 142 Stanhope, J., 218 Stankiewicz, W.J., 227 Statt, D., 138 Stephen, J.F., 226 Stephens, W., 164 Steucho, A., 147 Stewart, M.A., 167, 189, 221, 227 Stillingfleet, E., xiii, xiv, 108, 112, 113, 115, 129, 130, 145, 170, 177, 188–193, 196 Stone, L., 142 Stoohoff, R., 77 Strabo, 152 Strange, S.K., 12 Strauss, L., 9 Stuart, M., 115 Su´arez, F., 51 Sutton, J., 262 Sylvester, J., 21, 22 T T¨onnies, F., 91 Tannenbaum, A.G., 227 Tannery, P., 77 Taylor, A.E., 144 Thomas Aquinas, 48, 50 Thomas, K., 140, 141 Timmermann, J., 261 Tinsley, B.S., 228 Tomaselli, S., xv, xviii, 132, 142, 159 Tomida, Y., xv, xviii, 66, 264 Torrington, Arthur Herbert, Earl of, 256 Totaro, P., 159 Tuck, R., 31, 92, 228 Tully, J., 136 Turnbull, H.W., 216 Tyrrell, J., 129, 201 V Vair, G. du, 3 Vanbrugh, J., 142 Veen, E., 160 Vet, J. de, 227 Vincent, A., 225 Voitle, R., 197, 209, 212, 214 Volder, G. de, 120, 125

Index Vorl¨ander, K., 263 Voss, S., 78 W Wallis, J., 246 Wallis, John, 246 Walmsley, J., xii, 59–67, 69–73 ´ eonore, Baronne de, 247 Warens, Louise-El´ Watkins, E., 261, 265 Weil, R., 142 Whelan, R., 161, 227 Whipple, J., 126 Whitaker, S.F., 206 White, J., 164 William III, 54, 55, 133, 163 Wilson, M.D., 263 Winstanley, G., 141 Wissowaty, S., 169 Wollstonecraft, M., 249, 260

289 Wood, A.W., 270 Woodhouse, A.S.P., 52 Woolhouse, R.S., 76, 81, 85, 170 Wootton, D., 27, 54, 227 Wright, J.K., 46 Wyche, B., 211 Y Yolton, J.S., 13, 196, 202, 218, 222, 223, 250, 257 Yolton, J.W., 13, 128, 131, 177, 178, 250, 257, 259 Z Zagorin, P., 145, 228 Zalta, E.N., 227 Zarka, Y.C., 90, 92, 238 Zeus, 4, 15 Zupko, J., 12