LOCKE 755
clergyman. The Essay was all the while spreading over Europe, impelled by the great name of its author as the chief friend and philosophical defender of civil and religious liberty. The fourth edition (the last while Locke was alive) appeared in 1700. It contained two important new chapters on "Association of Ideas" and "Enthusiasm." What was originally meant for a third chapter was prepared but withheld. It appeared among Locke's posthumous writings, under the now well-known title of Conduct of the Understanding, in some respects the most characteristic of his works. The French translation of the Essay by Pierre Coste, Locke's amanuensis at Oates, was almost simultaneous with the fourth edition. The Latin version by Burridge of Dublin appeared the year after, reprinted in due time at Amsterdam and at Leipsic.
After 1700 Locke was gathering himself up for the end, in the rural repose of family life at Oates. The commission at the Board of Trade was resigned, and the visits to London ceased. Scriptural studies and religious medita tion engaged most of his available strength in the four years that remained. The Gospels had been much searched by him when he worked in theology years before. He now turned to the Epistles of St Paul, and applied the spirit of the Essay, and the rules of critical interpretation which apply to other books, to interpret a literature which he still venerated with the submissiveness of the pious Puritans who surrounded his youth. The results of these studies were ready for the printer when he died, and were published about two years afterwards. A few pages on Miracles, written in 1702, in connexion with Fleetwood's essay, also appeared posthumously. More adverse criticism was now reported to him, and the Essay 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, a neighbouring Essex squire, then a frequent visitor at Oates, and afterwards a leader of free thought, "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 unexpectedly revived their old controversy. Locke in consequence began a Fourth Letter on Toleration. The few pages in the posthumous volume, ending in an un finished sentence, seem to have exhausted his remaining strength in the weeks before he died. Thus the theme which had employed him at Oxford more than forty years before, and had been his ruling idea throughout the long interval, was still dominant in the last days of his life. All that summer of 1704 he continued to decline, tenderly nursed by Lady Masham and her step-daughter. On the 28th of October he passed away, as he declared, "in perfect charity with all men, and in sincere communion with the whole church of Christ, by whatever names Christ's followers call themselves." The tomb of Locke may be seen 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, bearing a Latin inscription prepared by his own hand. At the distance of a mile are the garden and park where the manor house of Oates once stood, sur rounded by a green undulating country, in the lanes of which the slender delicate figure, with the refined reflective countenance made familiar to us by Kneller, was so often seen in the last years of the 17th century.
Locke's history, combined with his writings, has made his intellectual and moral features not less familiar. The reasonableness of taking probability for our ultimate guide in all the really important concerns of life was the essence of his philosophy. The desire to see for himself what is really true in the light only of its reasonable evidence, and that others should do the like, 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." The knowledge which one man possesses is "a treasure which cannot be lent or made over to another." This repugnance to believe blindly what rested on 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 rational consciousness, in his tendency to turn away from purely abstract speculation and merely verbal reasonings, in his suspicion of mysticism, in his calm reasonableness, and in his ready submission to truth, even when the truth was incapable of being reduced to system, provided only that it served a human purpose. The delight he took in making use of his reason in everything he did, and a wise use of it too, was what his friend Pierre Coste found most prominent in Locke's daily life at Oates. "He went about the most trifling thing 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, and 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 any one the least good." Large, "round-about," even prosaic common sense, with intellectual strength solidly directed by a virtuous purpose, much more than subtle or daring speculation sustained by an idealizing faculty, in which he was deficient, is what we find conspicuous in Locke's conduct, correspondence, and books. A defect in speculative imagination undoubtedly appears when he encounters the vast and complex problem of human knowledge in its organic unity, and when he is obliged to recognize the need for philosophy as an additional inquiry to that within the scope of any one, or all, of the special sciences.
In the inscription on his tomb Locke refers to his printed works as the true representation of what he really was. They are concerned with Social Polity, Christianity, Education, and Philosophy. It may be convenient to arrange them under these four heads, in the order in which they were published, and then to give some account of his opinions under each head.
I. Social Polity. – (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 Hate 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 (this was occasioned by a Report containing an "Essay for the Amendment of Silver Coins," published that year by William Lowndes, a secretary for the Treasury; Locke anticipates some later views in political economy). (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 Reason-
