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can rest. Locke accepted the Scripture as infallible with the reverence of a Puritan, but he did not, like so many Puritans, mean only Scripture as interpreted by himself. Confidence in Biblical infallibility was also combined in Locke with a distrust in the pretensions of "enthusiasm," which predisposed him to regard miracles as a criterion needed for distinguishing reasonable religious convictions from mere "inclinations, fancies, and strong assurances." Assent in religion as in every thing else he could only justify on the grounds of its evident rationality; "illumination without search, and certainty without proof and without examination," was to him a sign of the absence of the divine spirit. Fanatical confidence that we are right, he would say, is no proof that we are right; when God makes us assent to the truth of a proposition in religion, he either discovers to us its intrinsic rationality by the ordinary means of scientific insight, or offers miraculous signs, of the existence of which we must have sufficiently probable presumption. Reasonableness somehow must at last be our guide. His own faith in Christianity rested on its moral excellence when it is rightly understood in its primitive simplicity, and on the extraordinary signs in nature which he believed to have accompanied its first promulgation. "Even in those books which have the greatest proof of revelation from God, and the attestation of miracles to confirm their being so, the miracles," he says, "are to be judged by the doctrine, and not the doctrine by the miracles." All this sort of argument became commonplace in books about the "evidences" in the 18th century. The Reasonableness of Christianity was an attempt to recall religion from verbal reasonings of theological schools, destructive of peace among Christians, to its original simplicity, but it no doubt involved an abatement of its transcendent mystery and ultimate incomprehensibility. The book was probably written to promote a comprehension of the dissenters. All who practically acknowledge the supremacy of Jesus as the Messiah accept all that is essential to the Christianity of Locke, whatever other theological opinions they may individually or collectively add to this only catholic one.
Christian teachers and apologists in the succeeding age, as well as the assailants of Christianity, alike appealed to the Essay on Human Understanding, and the catholic tradition of Anglican theology was thus interrupted in the church for more than a hundred years. His own Christian belief, sincere and earnest, was more the outcome of the sort of common sense sagacity which through him moulded the prudential theology of England in the 18th century, than of the nobler elements present in More, Cudworth, and other religious philosophers of the preceding age, or afterwards in Law and Berkeley, Coleridge and Schleiermacher.
III. Locke takes his place in the succession of great writers on the theory and art of Education. His educational writings might be regarded either as an immediate introduction to or as an application of the Essay on Human Understanding. In his Thoughts on Education imaginative sentiment is never allowed to weigh against prudential utilitarianism; information and mere learning are subordinated to the formation of character and practical wisdom; the part which habit plays in individuals is always kept in view; the dependence of conscious mind, which it is the purpose of education to improve, upon the health of the corporeal organism is steadily inculcated; to make those happy who are undergoing education is a favourite precept; accumulating facts in the memory without using the power to think, and without accustoming the youthful mind to apply reason to the evidence by which individual thoughts must be tested, is always referred to as the cardinal vice in teaching. Wisdom more than learning is what he requires in the teacher. In the knowledge to be communicated he gives the first place to "that which may direct us to heaven," and the second to "the study of prudence, or discreet conduct and management of our selves in the several occurrences of our lives," which most assists our "quiet prosperous passage through this present life." The infinity of knowable existence in contrast with the narrowness of human understanding and experience is always in his thoughts. This "disproportionateness" is one reason given for due deliberation in the choice of studies, and for declining those which lie out of the way of a really wise man, however much they may have been favoured by custom. Among these last lie warns especially against "that maze of words and phrases which have been employed only to instruct and amuse people in the art of disputing, and which will be found perhaps, when looked into, to have little or no meaning, ... words being of no value nor use, but as they are the signs of things; when they stand for nothing they are less than ciphers, for, instead of augmenting the value of those they are joined with, they lessen it and make it nothing." Knowledge of what the opinions of other men have been is another study which Locke depreciates. "Truth needs no recommendation, and error is not mended by it; in our inquiry after knowledge it little concerns us what other men have thought. ... It is an idle and useless thing to make it one's business to study what have been other men's sentiments in matters where reason is only to be judge." Realism and individual rationality are two essential educational principles with Locke. In his Conduct of the Understanding the pupil is to be led to the point at which "a full view of all that relates to a question" is to be had, and at which alone a rational discernment of the truth is possible. The uneducated mass of mankind, on the contrary, either "seldom reason at all," or else "put passion in the place of reason," or "for want of large, sound round-about sense" they direct their minds only to one part of the evidence, "converse with one sort of men, read but one sort of books, and will not come in the hearing of but one sort of notions, and so carve out to themselves a little Goshen in the intellectual world, where light shines, and, as they conclude, day blesses them; but the rest of the vast expansion they give up to night and darkness, and avoid coming near it." It is a treatise on the wisdom needed for the management of the individual mind, so as that it may overcome the idola or common tendencies to error against which Bacon had warned mankind. Hasty judgment, bias, or want of an a priori "indifference" to what evidence may require us to conclude, undue regard for authority or love for custom and antiquity, indolence and sceptical despair, are among the states of mind marked by him as most apt to interfere with the formation of our individual thoughts in harmony with the Universal Thought that is latent in nature. The development of vigorous intellect in each person is the aim of this admirable tract.
IV. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding contains Locke's Metaphysical Philosophy. It was the first attempt, on a great scale, and in the Baconian spirit, to show the certainty and inadequacy of human knowledge. This enterprise seemed to Locke to hold out the most reasonable hope of a solution of some sort for the perplexities which encompassed every department of inquiry.
The Introduction to the Essay is the keynote to the whole. The ill fortune of mankind in their endeavours to comprehend them selves and their surroundings is there attributed to their disposition to extend their inquiries into matters beyond the reach of our intelligence, letting their thoughts wander into depths where we can have no footing. "Whereas, were the capacities of our understandings well considered, the extent of our knowledge once discovered, and the horizon found which sets the bounds between the enlightened and the dark parts of things, between what is and what is not comprehensible by us, men would perhaps with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction on the other." To inquire into "the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent," is Locke's own account of the design of his Essay. He expressly excludes from his inquiry "the physical consideration of the mind," – the natural causes (and, one might add, the transcendental reasons) for our conscious experience being what in his own "plain historical method" he might find it to be. He wanted to be able to make a faithful report, based on what he actually found, as to how far a merely human understanding of the universe can extend, to what extent human beings can share in pure knowledge, and "in what cases they can only judge and guess" on grounds of probability. Although his report might show that the knowledge attainable by the individual must be "narrow," and far short of a "universal or perfect comprehension of whatsoever is," it might also convince us that it is "sufficient," because "suited to our individual state." The "light of reason," the "candle of the Lord" that is set up in us, "shines bright enough for all our purposes. If we will disbelieve everything because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do much as wisely as he who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish because he had no wings to fly." Locke thus opens his Essay in a tone which, with a more homely cheerfulness, reminds one in parts of the sublime conceptions of Pascal, and in others of the wise moderation of Bishop Butler. The outcome is that, if it should turn out on investigation that human understanding cannot solve the metaphysical problem of the universe, we may at least find that at no stage of our individual existence are we the sport of chance or of an evil power, that there is a way by which we can secure our final wellbeing, even within the inexorable causal connexions, conditioned by space and time, with their imperfectly calculable issues, by which we are environed.
The fourth book alone is concerned directly with the professed design of the Essay. It has been suggested by Stewart that Locke may have commenced with this book, especially as it contains few references to preceding parts of the Essay, so that "it might have been published separately without being less intelligible than it is." The inquiries in the preceding books are of a more abstract and scholastic nature, which probably opened gradually on his mind as he studied his subject more closely. The second and third books both relate to our individual ideas or thoughts. That each person has thoughts, and that without thoughts or consciousnesses there could be no knowledge for him, is Locke's postulate. This, he presumes, "will be easily granted"; for "everyone is conscious of ideas in himself, and men's words and actions will satisfy him that they are in others." Questions about knowledge and its extent therefore presuppose questions about ideas or thoughts. But our mere ideas are, as Locke reminds us, "neither true nor false, being nothing but bare appearances in our own minds." Truth
