VII

LOCKE'S ESSAY ON THE HUMAN

1

UNDERSTANDING 1

Ir may reasonably be doubted whether any writer on philosophical subjects ever produced such a broad, solid effect on the minds of the English people as Locke. Nor do we think that his influence has been or will be much diminished, although no one has ever produced a more vigorous reaction against his teaching. Read the Essay on the Human Understanding, and you will be continually under the impression that you are reading the commonplaces of all contemporary literature reduced to a philosophical shape. Read the Essay on Civil Government or the Letters on Toleration, and the same reflection continually presents itself-this is the doctrine which I have heard all my life, on which people all round me are continually acting, and against which more aspiring forms of philosophy are only protests which

1 An Essay concerning Human Understanding. By John Locke, Gent.

have not as yet succeeded, and do not seem likely to succeed, in reaching the minds of the great body of people who think about philosophy.

There is, indeed, no one of the great departments of life in which Locke has not exercised, and does not to this day exercise, a degree of influence which is perhaps, in itself, the strongest evidence supplied by the history of modern speculation, of the practical importance of philosophical inquiries. Hardly any writer, too, has been made the subject of so much comment of the controversial kind. Reid, Dugald Stewart, Sir William Hamilton, De Maistre, M. Victor Cousin and many others almost every one, in a word, who has believed in any of the various forms of idealism which have succeeded each other for the last century or more in England, Germany, and France has criticised Locke, with more or less dissent, and more or less justice to his great qualities.

He has, indeed, been made the centre of so extensive a literature that a man who forms his opinion of him from reading his books for himself can hardly fail to be conscious of a certain presumption. It seems too coarse and blunt a way of making acquaintance with books about which so much has been said. Still it is difficult not to feel that the question which the Count in the Soirées de St. Petersburg asks of his interlocutor, before they go into the subject of Locke, 'l'avez vous lu?' might be not altogether superfluous with respect to many

of his modern critics, for the Essay on the Human Understanding is one of those books which has been so thoroughly assimilated by that part of the world which cares in the most cursory manner for speculative subjects, that large numbers of people naturally suppose themselves to have read it, when in point of fact they never have.

I will, therefore, give a very short account of the arrangement and sequence of its parts, before making a few observations on some points connected with it. One of the most ingenious and striking criticisms ever made upon it is the one which was made by Horne Tooke in the Diversions of Purley. He speaks of the essay as 'a grammatical treatise, or a treatise on words or on language,' and describes its title as 'a lucky mistake' which attracted readers who would not have cared to read it, if it had been called, as it should have been, a Grammatical Essay.

Like most vigorous paradoxes, this has a good deal of truth in it, though it is very far from being entirely true. The book may fairly be said to consist mainly of an inquiry into the meaning of those words which are most usually employed in philosophical speculations, followed up by an inquiry into the general theory of language, and the states of mind which different kinds of language refer to, such as knowledge, doubt, and assent in its various degrees. It is not, as its title would imply, an essay on the thinking faculty itself; and the difficulty which has been found in

understanding certain parts of it has arisen principally from the circumstance that it does not contain, as is the case with several other works which may properly be compared with it-Hobbes's Leviathan, for instance, and Tucker's Light of Nature - any attempt to describe clearly the faculties of the mind itself. So far at least as they are the subject of inquiry at all, they are spoken of, not as they are in themselves, but as they are displayed in their operation upon particular subjects and collections of thoughts. We are told, for instance, of the manner in which the mind compares and compounds together, or in which it separates from each other, particular ideas, but no separate names are assigned to the faculties by which it performs these operations.

The whole book would have been wonderfully cleared up, and the true relation of its author to other philosophers would have been set in a much clearer light than that in which it stands at present, if it had contained a chapter on the Imagination, another on the Memory, another on the Judgment, considered as functions or operations of the mind itself, in the place of the 9th, 10th, and 11th chapters of the Second Book, on Perception, Retention, and Discerning, each of which is regarded, not as it is felt by the mind, but in its effects upon particular thoughts.

The obscurity and confusion which, as all Locke's critics have observed, is introduced into the whole. work by the indefinite and inconsistent manner in which he uses the word 'idea' might have been almost

entirely avoided if he had given a clear account of his view of the province of the imagination, and had said plainly whether he recognised any other 'immediate object of the mind in thinking' (this is his own definition of 'ideas' in his answer to Stillingfleet) than mental pictures.

Whoever reads his book carefully will find that much might be said on both sides of this question. In almost innumerable instances he uses the word as if it were synonymous with 'mental picture.' He says, for instance, 'The ideas of our youth often die before us. The pictures drawn in our minds are laid in fading colours.' So 'the idea of the particular colour of gold is not to be got by any description of it, but only by the frequent exercise of the eyes about it.' But elsewhere he says, 'There is an eternal, most powerful, most knowing Being, which whether any one will please to call God it matters not. The thing is evident, and from this idea, duly considered, will easily be deduced all those other attributes which we ought to ascribe to this Eternal Being.'

The contrast between the two senses in which the word idea is used in these passages is only one out of a very large number which might be taken, and the want of a definite psychology which this indicates may perhaps be considered as the principal defect of a book which ought never to be mentioned without admiration.

It must, however, be observed, on the other hand, that this defect gives Locke's work wider con