separate from the atheism that was always revolting to him, he appears to have repudiated with some unconscious. injustice his debt to the first English teacher of the philosophy of experience. Through at least sixteen years the Essay concerning Human Understanding' was growing in Locke's mind and in his note books. Those note books, from which a few characteristic extracts have been given in former pages, show how accurate was his statement that "it was written by incoherent parcels ; " each new book that he read, each fresh person with whom he conversed, suggesting thoughts that he put on paper, to be afterwards refined or rejected according to the value that, on calm consideration, he found in them. From books he learnt much, from persons more; his purpose being, not to build up a metaphysical theory, but to ascertain by actual observation what were the means and methods by which ordinary people acquired knowledge and developed their thinking faculties. His theory was "imagined" in outline in 1671; he proved and elaborated it by personal observation. It can only have been in the writing out that there were "long intervals of neglect;" and he was evidently more anxious to think out than to write out his work. Till late in life, when the entreaties of his friends prevailed with him, Locke seems never to have had any design of formally publishing his opinions to the world. He made no secrets of them. While still a young man he wrote elaborate treatises like the Essay concerning Toleration;' and probably that essay was not the only work that he showed freely to men of influence and in public position, with the distinct purpose of guiding legislation and the national mind. But he preferred to . 39-55 discuss these matters with his friends, to profit by their criticisms, and to make as sure as might be that his views were sound before he ventured to persuade others to accept them. So it was even-we might say especiallywith the 'Essay concerning Human Understanding.' Believing that he saw more clearly than his neighbours how the human intellect might be developed, he was anxious to bias no one-least of all ignorant readers who would be apt, if their fancy prompted them, blindly to adopt his arguments without seeing, or being able to see, what real force was in them-till he had probed them to the utmost, and subjected them to the test of experience and the searching judgment of the wisest men whom he knew. Most persons, when they get hold of a new thought which pleases them, are either so charmed with it themselves that they unconsciously shrink from carefully weighing it by standards that might prove it false and worthless, or so eager for applause that they purposely clothe it in all the specious rhetoric at their command, and glory in the triumph, not in the truth, of their dogma. Locke cannot be placed in either category. "Those who have not thoroughly examined to the bottom all their own tenets," he said, "must confess they are unfit to prescribe to others, and are unreasonable in imposing that as truth on other men's belief which they themselves have not searched into, nor weighed the arguments of probability on which they should receive or reject it."1 "There is nobody in the commonwealth of learning," he also said, "who does not profess himself a lover of truth; and there is not a rational creature that would not take it amiss to be thought otherwise of. 1 Concerning Human Understanding,' b. ii., ch. xvi., § 4. And yet, for all this, one may truly say that there are very few lovers of truth, for truth's sake, even amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so. How a man may know whether he be so in earnest is worth inquiry; and I think there is one unerring mark of it, namely, the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant. Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain, receives not the truth in the love of it-loves not truth for truth's sake-but for some other bye-end. For the evidence that any proposition is true (except such as are self-evident) lying only in the proof a man has of it, whatsoever degrees of assent he affords it beyond the degrees of that evidence, it is plain that all the surplusage of assurance is due to some other affection, and not to the love of truth; it being as impossible that the love of truth should carry my assent above the evidence there is to me that it is true, as that the love of truth should make me assent to any proposition for the sake of that evidence which it has not that it is true; which is in effect to love it as a truth because it is possible or probable that it may not be true. Whatsoever credit or authority we give to any proposition more than it receives from the principles and proofs it supports itself upon is owing to our inclinations that way, and is so far a derogation from the love of truth as such, which, as it can receive no evidence from our passions or interests, so it should receive no tincture from them. The assuming an authority of dictating to others, and a forwardness to prescribe to them opinions, is a constant concomitant of this bias and corruption of our judgments; for how at most can it be otherwise but that he should be ready to impose on another's belief who has already imposed on his own? Who can reasonably expect arguments and conviction from him in dealing with others whose understanding is not accustomed to them in his dealing with himself, who does violence to his own faculties, tyrannises over his own mind, and usurps the prerogative that belongs to truth alone, which is to command assent by only its own authority, that is, by and in proportion to that evidence which it carries with it?"1 Locke rigidly subjected himself to the canon that he prescribed for others. Anxious to know what are the faculties of the human mind, and how they may best be developed, he thought out the subject with all the attention he could give it during a good many years before he ventured to do more than make occasional entries thereupon in his private note books; after that he devoted the leisure of a good many other years to further consideration and note-making before he ventured to build up his thoughts into an orderly treatise; and after that again he pondered over the matter during yet a good many other years before he ventured to give his ripened conclusions to the world. It is evident that Locke, having begun his notes in or near 1671 and continued them at intervals, took them to France in 1675. There he made so many additions that he was able, writing to Thoynard in 1679, to say, “I think too well of my book, which is completed, to let it go out of my hands."2 The manuscript did not go out of his hands into those of the public for some time; but he showed it to his friends. Shaftesbury, as we have seen, 1 Concerning Human Understanding,' b. iv., ch. xix., §§ 1, 2. This chapter, first included in the fourth edition, was not written till near the e nd of Locke's life. Additional MSS., no. 28836; Locke to Thoynard, 6 June, 1679. 7 had read it before his death in 1683, and therefore not later than 1682, when he saw the last of Locke, as on his death-bed he attributed the change in his religious opinions to the memorable tenth chapter of its fourth book. After that time, however, Locke certainly re-wrote, and probably much enlarged it. It was to the period of his residence in Holland that he referred when he said in his prefatory epistle to the reader, "In a retirement where an attendance on my health gave me leisure, it was brought into that order in which thou now seest it." It was so far in order that he was able in the autumn of 1687 to prepare the epitome of it, which, translated into French, was published in the Bibliothèque Universelle, and to send a portion of it and apparently a proof-sheet of the epitome to the Earl of Pembroke, with a request that he might dedicate the work to him. "I have received the second part," Pembroke wrote from London in November, "and with it the names of all the rest in print. Such thoughts need no epistle to recommend them. I do not say so to excuse my name to it; for I shall always be as desirous by my name to testify the satisfaction I have in anything you are pleased to write, as I am and ever will be by my person ready to vindicate anything you do. But pray do not let the hopes of seeing this in print defer the satisfaction of seeing the whole at large, which I hope you will send me as soon as possibly you can."1 The French version of the epitome, filling ninety-two pages, was published by Le Clerc in the number of the Bibliothèque Universelle for January, 1687-8, with this heading, 'Extrait d'un Livre Anglais qui n'est pas encore publié, intitulé, Essai Philosophique concernant l'Entende 1 Lord King, p. 158; Pembroke to Locke, 25 Nov., 1687. |