and devoted himself to Biblical studies and religious meditation. The Gospels had been carefully studied when he was preparing his Reasonableness of Christianity. He now turned to the Epistles of St Paul, and applied the spirit of the Essay and the ordinary rules of critical interpretation to a literature which he venerated as infallible, like the pious Puritans who surrounded his youth. The work was ready when he died, and was published two years after. A tract on Miracles, written in 1702, also appeared posthumously. Fresh adverse criticism of the Essay was reported to him in his last year, and the book was formally condemned by the authorities at Oxford. “I take what has been done rather as a recommendation of the book,” he wrote to his young friend Anthony Collins, “and when you and I next meet we shall be merry on the subject.” One attack only moved him. In 1704 his adversary, Jonas Proast, revived their old controversy. Locke in consequence began a Fourth Letter on Toleration. A few pages, ending in an unfinished paragraph, exhausted his remaining strength; but the theme which had employed him at Oxford more than forty years before, and had been a ruling idea throughout the long interval, was still dominant in the last days of his life.
All the summer of 1704 he continued to decline, tenderly nursed by Lady Masham and her step-daughter Esther. On the 28th of October he died, according to his last recorded words, “in perfect charity with all men, and in sincere communion with the whole church of Christ, by whatever names Christ’s followers call themselves.” His grave is on the south side of the parish church of High Laver, in which he often worshipped, near the tombs of the Mashams, and of Damaris, the widow of Cudworth. At the distance of 1 m. are the garden and park where the manor house of Otes once stood.
Locke’s writings have made his intellectual and moral features familiar. The reasonableness of taking probability as our guide in life was in the essence of his philosophy. The desire to see for himself what is true in the light of reasonable evidence, and that others should do the same, was his ruling passion, if the term can be applied to one so calm and judicial. “I can no more know anything by another man’s understanding,” he would say, “than I can see by another man’s eyes.” This repugnance to believe blindly what rested on arbitrary authority, as distinguished from what was seen to be sustained by self-evident reason, or by demonstration, or by good probable evidence, runs through his life. He is typically English in his reverence for facts, whether facts of sense or of living consciousness, in his aversion from abstract speculation and verbal reasoning, in his suspicion of mysticism, in his calm reasonableness, and in his ready submission to truth, even when truth was incapable of being fully reduced to system by man. The delight he took in exercising reason in regard to everything he did was what his friend Pierre Coste remarked in Locke’s daily life at Otes. “He went about the most trifling things always with some good reason.” Above all things he loved order; and he had got the way of observing it in everything with wonderful exactness. As he always kept the useful in his eye in all his disquisitions, he esteemed the employments of men only in proportion to the good they were capable of producing; for which cause he had no great value for the critics who waste their lives in composing words and phrases in coming to the choice of a various reading, in a passage that has after all nothing important in it. He cared yet less for those professed disputants, who, being taken up with the desire of coming off with victory, justify themselves behind the ambiguity of a word, to give their adversaries the more trouble. And whenever he had to deal with this sort of folks, if he did not beforehand take a strong resolution of keeping his temper, he quickly fell into a passion; for he was naturally choleric, but his anger never lasted long. If he retained any resentment it was against himself, for having given way to so ridiculous a passion; which, as he used to say, “may do a great deal of harm, but never yet did anyone the least good.” Large, “round-about” common sense, intellectual strength directed by a virtuous purpose, not subtle or daring speculation sustained by an idealizing faculty, in which he was deficient, is what we find in Locke. Defect in speculative imagination appears when he encounters the vast and complex final problem of the universe in its organic unity.
Locke is apt to be forgotten now, because in his own generation he so well discharged the intellectual mission of initiating criticism of human knowledge, and of diffusing the spirit of free inquiry and universal toleration which has since profoundly affected the civilized world. He has not bequeathed an imposing system, hardly even a striking discovery in metaphysics, but he is a signal example in the Anglo-Saxon world of the love of attainable truth for the sake of truth and goodness. “If Locke made few discoveries, Socrates made none.” But both are memorable in the record of human progress.
In the inscription on his tomb, prepared by himself, Locke refers to his books as a true representation of what he was. They are concerned with Social Economy, Christianity, Education and Philosophy, besides Miscellaneous writings.
I. Social Economy.—(1) Epistola de Tolerantia (1689, translated into English in the same year). (2) Two Treatises on Government (1690) (the Patriarcha of Filmer, to which the First Treatise was a reply, appeared in 1680). (3) A Second Letter concerning Toleration (1690). (4) Some Considerations on the Consequence of Lowering the Rate of Interest and Raising the Value of Money (1691). (5) A Third Letter for Toleration (1692). (6) Short Observations on a printed paper entitled, “For encouraging the Coining of Silver Money in England, and after for Keeping it here” (1695). (7) Further Considerations concerning Raising the Value of Money (1695) (occasioned by a Report containing an “Essay for the Amendment of Silver Coins,” published that year by William Lowndes, secretary for the Treasury). (8) A Fourth Letter for Toleration (1706, posthumous).
II. Christianity.—(1) The Reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures (1695). (2) A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity from Mr Edwards’s Reflections (1695). (3) A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity (1697). (4) A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul to the Galatians, First and Second Corinthians, Romans and Ephesians. To which is prefixed an Essay for the understanding of St Paul’s Epistles by consulting St Paul himself (1705–1707, posthumous). (5) A Discourse of Miracles (1716, posthumous).
III. Education.—(1) Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693). (2) The Conduct of the Understanding (1706, posthumous). (3) Some Thoughts concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman (1706, posthumous). (4) Instructions for the Conduct of a Young Gentleman (1706, posthumous). (5) Of Study (written in France in Locke’s journal, and published in L. King’s Life of Locke in 1830).
IV. Philosophy.—(1) An Essay concerning Human Understanding, in four books (1690). (2) A Letter to the Bishop of Worcester concerning some passages relating to Mr Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding in a late Discourse of his Lordship’s in Vindication of the Trinity (1697). (3) Mr Locke’s Reply to the Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Letter (1697). (4) Mr Locke’s Reply to the Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Second Letter (1699). (5) An Examination of Father Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing all Things in God (1706, posthumous). (6) Remarks upon Some of Mr Norris’s Books, wherein he asserts Father Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing all Things in God (1720, posthumous).
Miscellaneous.—(1) A New Method of a Common Place Book (1686). This was Locke’s first article in the Bibliothèque of Le Clerc; his other contributions to it are uncertain, except the Epitome of the Essay, (in 1688). (2) The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (prepared in 1673 when Locke was Lord Shaftesbury’s secretary at Exeter House, remarkable for recognition of the principle of toleration, published in 1706, in the posthumous collection). (3) Memoirs relating to the Life of Anthony, First Earl of Shaftesbury (1706). (4) Elements of Natural Philosophy (1706). (5) Observations upon the Growth and Culture of Vines and Olives (1706). (6) Rules of a Society which met once a Week, for their improvement in Useful Knowledge, and for the Promotion of Truth and Christian Charity (1706). (7) A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country, published in 1875 (included by Des Maizeaux in his Collection of Several Pieces of Mr John Locke’s, 1720), and soon afterwards burned by the common hangman by orders from the House of Lords, was disavowed by Locke himself. It may have been dictated by Shaftesbury. There are also miscellaneous writings of Locke first published in the biographies of Lord King (1830) and of Mr Fox Bourne (1876).
Letters from Locke to Thoynard, Limborch, Le Clerc, Guenellon, Molyneux, Collins, Sir Isaac Newton, the first and the third Lord Shaftesbury, Lords Peterborough and Pembroke, Clarke of Chipley and others are preserved, many of them unpublished, most of them in the keeping of Lord Lovelace at Horseley Towers, and of Mr Sanford at Nynehead in Somerset, or in the British Museum. They express the gracious courtesy and playful humour which were natural to him, and his varied interests in human life.
I. Social Economy.—It has been truly said that all Locke’s writings, even the Essay on Human Understanding itself, were occasional, and “intended directly to counteract the enemies of reason and freedom
