Chapter XXIX · (continued 2)

75. There can be no substance but God. Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be conceived without God.[827] For he is the sole substance, and modes cannot be conceived without a substance; but besides substance and mode nothing exists. God is not corporeal, but body is a mode of God, and therefore uncreated. God is the permanent, but not the transient cause of all things.[828] He is the efficient cause of their essence, as well as their existence, since otherwise their essence might be conceived without God, which has been shown to be absurd. Thus, particular things are but the affections of God’s attributes, or modes in which they are determinately expressed.[829]

76. This pantheistic scheme is the fruitful mother of many paradoxes, upon which Spinosa proceeds to dwell. There is no contingency, but everything is determined by the necessity of the divine nature, both as to its existence and operation; nor could anything be produced by God otherwise than as it is.[830] His power is the same as his essence; for he is the necessary cause both of himself and of all things, and it is as impossible for us to conceive him not to act as not to exist.[831] God, considered in the attributes of his infinite substance, is the same as nature, that is, natura naturans; but nature, in another sense, or natura naturata, expresses but the modes under which the divine attributes appear.[832] And intelligence, considered in act, even though infinite, should be referred to natura naturata; for intelligence, in this sense, is but a mode of thinking, which can only be conceived by means of our conception of thinking in the abstract, that is, by an attribute of God.[833] The faculty of thinking, as distinguished from the act, as also those of desiring, loving, and the rest, Spinosa explicitly denies to exist at all.

77. In an appendix to the first chapter, De Deo, Spinosa controverts what he calls the prejudice about final causes. Men are born ignorant of causes, but merely conscious of their own appetites, by which they desire their own good. Hence, they only care for the final cause of their own actions or those of others, and inquire no farther when they are satisfied about these. And finding many things in themselves and in nature, serving as means to a certain good, which things they know not to be provided by themselves, they have believed that someone has provided them, arguing from the analogy of the means they in other instances themselves employ. Hence, they have imagined gods, and these gods they suppose to consult the good of men in order to be worshipped by them, and have devised every mode of superstitious devotion to ensure the favour of these divinities. And finding in the midst of so many beneficial things in nature not a few of an opposite effect, they have ascribed them to the anger of the gods, on account of the neglect of men to worship them; nor has experience of calamities, falling alike on the pious and impious, cured them of this belief, choosing rather to acknowledge their ignorance of the reason why good and evil are thus distributed, than to give up their theory. Spinosa thinks the hypothesis of final causes refuted by his proposition, that all things happen by eternal necessity. Moreover, if God were to act for an end, he must desire something which he wants; for it is acknowledged by theologians that he acts for his own sake, and not for the sake of things created.

78. Men having satisfied themselves that all things were created for them, have invented names to distinguish that as good which tends to their benefit; and believing themselves free, have gotten the notions of right and wrong, praise and dispraise. And when they can easily apprehend and recollect the relations of things, they call them well ordered, if not ill ordered; and then say that God created all things in order, as if order were anything, except in regard to our imagination of it; and thus they ascribe imagination to God himself, unless they mean that he created things for the sake of imagining them.

79. It has been sometimes doubted whether the Spinosistic philosophy excludes altogether an infinite intelligence. That it rejected a moral providence or creative mind is manifest in every proposition. His Deity could at most be but a cold, passive intelligence, lost to our understandings and feelings in its metaphysical infinity. It was not, however, in fact, so much as this. It is true that in a few passages we find what seems at first a dim recognition of the fundamental principle of theism. In one of his letters to Oldenburg, he asserts an infinite power of thinking, which, considered in its infinity, embraces all nature as its object, and of which the thoughts proceed according to the order of nature, being its correlative ideas.[834] But afterwards he rejected the term, power of thinking, altogether. The first proposition of the second part of the Ethics, or that entitled, On the Mind, runs thus: Thought is an attribute of God, or, God is a thinking being. Yet this, when we look at the demonstration, vanishes in an abstraction destructive of personality.[835] And, in fact, we cannot reflect at all on the propositions already laid down by Spinosa, without perceiving that they annihilate every possible hypothesis in which the being of a God can be intelligibly stated.

80. The second book of the Ethics begins, like the first, with definitions and axioms. Body he defines to be a certain and determinate mode expressing the essence of God, considered as extended. The essence of anything he defines to be that, according to the affirmation or negation of which the thing exists or otherwise. An idea is a conception which the mind forms as a thinking being. And he prefers to say conception than perception, because the latter seems to imply the presence of an object. In the third axiom he says: Modes of thinking, such as love, desire, or whatever name we may give to the affections of the mind, cannot exist without an idea of their object, but an idea may exist with no other mode of thinking.[836] And in the fifth: We perceive no singular things besides bodies and modes of thinking; thus distinguishing, like Locke, between ideas of sensation and of reflection.

81. Extension, by the second proposition, is an attribute of God as well as thought. As it follows from the infinite extension of God, that all bodies are portions of his substance, inasmuch as they cannot be conceived without it, so all particular acts of intelligence are portions of God’s infinite intelligence, and thus all things are in him. Man is not a substance, but something which is in God, and cannot be conceived without him; that is, an affection or mode of the divine substance expressing its nature in a determinate manner.[837] The human mind is not a substance, but an idea constitutes its actual being, and it must be the idea of an existing thing.[838] In this he plainly loses sight of the percipient in the perception; but it was the inevitable result of the fundamental sophisms of Spinosa to annihilate personal consciousness. The human mind, he afterwards asserts, is part of the infinite intellect of God; and when we say, the mind perceives this or that, it is only that God, not as infinite, but so far as he constitutes the essence of the human mind, has such or such ideas.[839]

82. The object of the human mind is body actually existing.[840] He proceeds to explain the connection of the human body with the mind, and the association of ideas. But in all this advancing always synthetically and by demonstration, he becomes frequently obscure if not sophistical. The idea of the human mind is in God, and is united to the mind itself in the same manner as the latter is to the body.[841] The obscurity and subtlety of this proposition are not relieved by the demonstration; but in some of these passages we may observe a singular approximation to the theory of Malebranche. Both, though with very different tenets on the highest subjects, had been trained in the same school; and if Spinosa had brought himself to acknowledge the personal distinctness of the Supreme Being from his intelligent creation, he might have passed for one of those mystical theosophists, who were not averse to an objective pantheism.

83. The mind does not know itself, except so far as it receives ideas of the affections of the body.[842] But these ideas of sensation do not give an adequate knowledge of an external body, nor of the human body itself.[843] The mind therefore has but an inadequate and confused knowledge of anything, so long as it judges only by fortuitous perceptions; but may attain one clear and distinct by internal reflection and comparison.[844] No positive idea can be called false; for there can be no such idea without God, and all ideas in God are true, that is, correspond with their object.[845] Falsity therefore consists in that privation of truth, which arises from inadequate ideas. An adequate idea he has defined to be one which contains no incompatibility, without regard to the reality of its supposed correlative object.

84. All bodies agree in some things, or have something in common: of these all men have adequate ideas;[846] and this is the origin of what are called common notions, which all men possess; as extension, duration, number. But to explain the nature of universals, Spinosa observes, that the human body can only form at the same time a certain number of distinct images; if this number be exceeded, they become confused; and as the mind perceives distinctly just so many images as can be formed in the body, when these are confused, the mind will also perceive them confusedly, and will comprehend them under one attribute, as Man, Horse, Dog; the mind perceiving a number of such images, but not their differences of stature, colours and the like. And these notions will not be alike in all minds, varying according to the frequency with which the parts of the complex image have occurred. Thus those who have contemplated most frequently the erect figure of man will think of him as a perpendicular animal, others as two-legged, others as unfeathered, others as rational. Hence, so many disputes among philosophers who have tried to explain natural things by mere images.[847]

85. Thus we form universal ideas; first, by singulars, represented by the senses confusedly, imperfectly and disorderly; secondly, by signs, that is, by associating the remembrance of things with words; both of which he calls imagination, or primi generis cognitio; thirdly, by what he calls reason, or secundi generis cognitio; and fourthly, by intuitive knowledge, or tertii generis cognitio.[848] Knowledge of the first kind is the only source of error; the second and third being necessarily true.[849] These alone enable us to distinguish truth from falsehood. Reason contemplates things not as contingent but necessary; and whoever has a true idea, knows certainly that his idea is true. Every idea of a singular existing thing involves the eternal and infinite being of God. For nothing can be conceived without God, and the ideas of all things, having God for their cause, considered under the attribute of which they are modes, must involve the conception of the attribute, that is, the being of God.[850]

86. It is highly necessary to distinguish images, ideas, and words, which many confound. Those who think ideas consists in images which they perceive, fancy that ideas of which we can form no image are but arbitrary figments. They look at ideas, as pictures on a tablet, and hence do not understand that an idea, as such, involves an affirmation or negation. And those who confound words with ideas, fancy they can will something contrary to what they perceive, because they can affirm or deny it in words. But these prejudices will be laid aside by him who reflects that thought does not involve the conception of extension; and therefore that an idea, being a mode of thought, neither consists in images nor in words, the essence of which consists in corporeal motions, not involving the conception of thought.[851]

87. The human mind has an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite being of God. But men cannot imagine God as they can bodies, and hence have not that clear perception of his being which they have of that of bodies, and have also perplexed themselves by associating the word God with sensible images, which it is hard to avoid. This is the chief source of all error, that men do not apply names to things rightly. For they do not err in their own minds, but in this application; as men who cast up wrong see different numbers in their mind from those in the true result.[852]

88. The mind has no free will, but is determined by a cause, which itself is determined by some other, and so for ever. For the mind is but a mode of thinking and, therefore cannot be the free cause of its own actions. Nor has it any absolute faculty of loving, desiring, understanding; these being only metaphysical abstractions.[853] Will and understanding are one and the same thing; and volitions are only affirmations or negations, each of which belongs to the essence of the idea affirmed or denied.[854] In this there seems to be not only an extraordinary deviation from common language, but an absence of any meaning which, to my apprehension at least, is capable of being given to his words. Yet we have seen something of the same kind said by Malebranche; and it will also be found in a recently published work of Cudworth,[855] a writer certainly uninfluenced by either of these, so that it may be suspected of having some older authority.

Spinosa’s theory of action and passion. 89. In the third part of this treatise, Spinosa comes to the consideration of the passions. Most who have written on moral subjects, he says, have rather treated man as something out of nature, or as a kind of imperium in imperio, than as part of the general order. They have conceived him to enjoy a power of disturbing that order by his own determination, and ascribed his weakness and inconstancy not to the necessary laws of the system, but to some strange defect in himself, which they cease not to lament, deride, or execrate. But the acts of mankind, and the passions from which they proceed, are in reality but links in the series, and proceed in harmony with the common laws of universal nature.

90. We are said to act when anything takes place within us, or without us, for which we are an adequate cause; that is, when it may be explained by means of our own nature alone. We are said to be acted upon, when anything takes place within us which cannot wholly be explained by our own nature. The affections of the body which increase or diminish its power of action, and the ideas of those affections, he denominates passions (affectus). Neither the body can determine the mind to thinking, nor can the mind determine the body to motion or rest. For all that takes place in body must be caused by God, considered under his attribute of extension, and all that takes place in mind must be caused by God under his attribute of thinking. The mind and body are but one thing, considered under different attributes; the order of action and passion in the body being the same in nature with that of action and passion in the mind. But men, though ignorant how far the natural powers of the body reach, ascribe its operations to the determination of the mind, veiling their ignorance in specious words. For if they alledge that the body cannot act without the mind, it may be answered that the mind cannot think till it is impelled by the body, nor are the volitions of the mind anything else than its appetites, which are modified by the body.

91. All things endeavoured to continue in their actual being; this endeavour being nothing else than their essence, which causes them to be, until some exterior cause destroys their being. The mind is conscious of its own endeavour to continue as it is, which is, in other words, the appetite that seeks self-preservation; what the mind is thus conscious of seeking, it judges to be good, and not inversely. Many things increase or diminish the power of action in the body, and all such things have a corresponding effect on the power of thinking in the mind. Thus, it undergoes many changes, and passes through different stages of more or less perfect power of thinking. Joy is the name of a passion, in which the mind passes to a greater perfection or power of thinking; grief, one in which it passes to a less. Spinosa, in the rest of this book, deduces all the passions from these two and from desire; but as the development of his theory is rather long, and we have already seen that its basis is not quite intelligible, it will be unnecessary to dwell longer upon the subject. His analysis of the passions may be compared with that of Hobbes.

Character of Spinosism. 92. Such is the metaphysical theory of Spinosa, in as concise a form as I found myself able to derive it from his Ethics. It is a remarkable proof, and his moral system will furnish another, how an undeviating adherence to strict reasoning may lead a man of great acuteness and sincerity from the paths of truth. Spinosa was truly, what Voltaire has with rather less justice called Clarke, a reasoning machine. A few leading theorems, too hastily taken up as axiomatic, were sufficient to make him sacrifice, with no compromise or hesitation, not only every principle of religion and moral right, but the clear intuitive notions of common sense. If there are two axioms more indisputable than any others, they are that ourselves exist, and that our existence is exclusive of any other being. Yet both these are lost in the pantheism of Spinosa, as they had always been in that delusive reverie of the imagination. In asserting that the being of the human mind consists in the idea of an existing thing presented to it, this subtle metaphysician fell into the error of the school which he most disdained, as deriving all knowledge from perception, that of the Aristotelians. And, extending this confusion of consciousness with perception to the infinite substance, or substratum of particular ideas, he was led to deny it the self, or conscious personality, without which the name of Deity can only be given in a sense deceptive of the careless reader, and inconsistent with the use of language. It was an equally legitimate consequence of his original sophism to deny all moral agency, in the sense usually received, to the human mind, and even, as we have seen, to confound action and passion themselves, in all but name, as mere phenomena in the eternal sequence of things.

93. It was one great error of Spinosa to entertain too arrogant a notion of the human faculties, in which, by dint of his own subtle demonstrations, he pretended to show a capacity of adequately comprehending the nature of what he denominated God. And this was accompanied by a rigid dogmatism, no one proposition being stated with hesitation, by a disregard of experience, at least as the basis of reasoning, and by an uniform preference of the synthetic method. Most of those, he says, who have turned their minds to those subjects have fallen into error, because they have not begun with the contemplation of the divine nature, which both in itself and in order of knowledge is first, but with sensible things, which ought to have been last. Hence, he seems to have reckoned Bacon, and even Descartes, mistaken in their methods.

94. All pantheism must have originated in overstraining the infinity of the divine attributes till the moral part of religion was annihilated in its metaphysics. It was the corruption, or rather, if we may venture the phrase, the suicide of theism; nor could this strange theory have arisen, except where we know it did arise, among those who had elevated their conceptions above the vulgar polytheism that surrounded them to a sense of the unity of the Divine nature.

95. Spinosa does not essentially differ from the pantheists of old. He conceived, as they had done, that the infinity of God required the exclusion of all other substance; that he was infinite ab omni parte, and not only in certain senses. And probably the loose and hyperbolical tenets of the schoolmen, derived from ancient philosophy, ascribing, as a matter of course, a metaphysical infinity to all the divine attributes, might appear to sanction those primary positions, from which Spinosa, unfettered by religion, even in outward profession, went on “sounding his dim and perilous track” to the paradoxes that have thrown discredit on his name. He had certainly built much on the notion that the essence or definition of the Deity involved his actuality or existence, to which Descartes had given vogue.

96. Notwithstanding the leading errors of this philosopher, his clear and acute understanding perceived many things which baffle ordinary minds. Thus, he well saw and well stated the immateriality of thought. Oldenburg, in one of his letters, had demurred to this, and reminded Spinosa that it was still controverted whether thought might not be a bodily motion. “Be it so,” replied the other, “though I am far from admitting it; but at least you must allow that extension, so far as extension, is not the same as thought.”[856] It is from inattention to this simple truth that all materialism, as it has been called, has sprung. Its advocates confound the union between thinking and extension or matter (be it, if they will, an indissoluble one) with the identity of the two, which is absurd and inconceivable. “Body,” says Spinosa in one of his definitions, “is not terminated by thinking, nor thinking by body.”[857] This also does not ill express the fundamental difference of matter and mind; there is an incommensurability about them, which prevents one from bounding the other, because they can never be placed in juxtaposition.

Glanvil’s Scepsis Scientifica. 97. England, about the æra of the Restoration, began to make a struggle against the metaphysical creed of the Aristotelians, as well as against their natural philosophy. A remarkable work, but one so scarce as to be hardly known at all, except by name, was published by Glanvil in 1661, with the title, the Vanity of Dogmatizing. A second edition, in 1663, considerably altered, is entitled Scepsis Scientifica.[858] This edition has a dedication to the Royal Society, which comes in place of a fanciful preface, wherein he had expatiated on the bodily and mental perfections of his protoplast, the father of mankind.[859] But in proportion to the extravagant language he employs to extol Adam before his lapse, is the depreciation of his unfortunate posterity, not, as common among theologians, with respect to their moral nature, but to their reasoning faculties. The scheme of Glanvil’s book is to display the ignorance of man, and especially to censure the Peripatetic philosophy of the schools. It is, he says, captious and verbal, and yet does not adhere itself to any constant sense of words, but huddles together insignificant terms, and unintelligible definitions; it deals with controversies, and seeks for no new discovery or physical truth. Nothing, he says, can be demonstrated but when the contrary is impossible, and of this there are not many instances. He launches into a strain of what may be called scepticism, but answered his purpose in combating the dogmatic spirit still unconquered in our academical schools. Glanvil had studied the new philosophy, and speaks with ardent eulogy of “that miracle of men, the illustrious Descartes.” Many, if not most, of his own speculations are tinged with a Cartesian colouring. He was however far more sceptical than Descartes, or even than Malebranche. Some passages from so rare and so acute a work may deserve to be chosen, both for their own sakes, and in order to display the revolution which was at work in speculative philosophy.

98. “In the unions which we understand the extremes are reconciled by interceding participations of natures, which have somewhat of either. But body and spirit stand at such a distance in their essential compositions, that to suppose an uniter of a middle construction, that should partake of some of the qualities of both, is unwarranted by any of our faculties, yea, most absonous to our reasons; since there is not any the least affinity betwixt length, breadth, and thickness, and apprehension, judgment, and discourse; the former of which are the most immediate results, if not essentials of matter, the latter of spirit.”[860]

99. “How is it, and by what art does it (the soul), read that such an image or stroke in matter (whether that of her vehicle or of the brain, the case is the same), signifies such an object? Did we learn an alphabet in our embryo state? And how comes it to pass that we are not aware of any such congenite apprehensions? We know what we know; but do we know any more? That by diversity of motions we should spell out figures, distances, magnitudes, colours, things not resembled by them, we must attribute to some secret deduction. But what this deduction should be, or by what medium this knowledge is advanced, is as dark as ignorance. One that hath not the knowledge of letters may see the figures, but comprehends not the meaning included in them; an infant may hear the sounds and see the motion of the lips, but hath no conception conveyed by them, not knowing what they are intended to signify. So our souls, though they might have perceived the motions and images themselves by simple sense, yet, without some implicit inference, it seems inconceivable how by that means they should apprehend their anti-types. The striking of divers filaments of the brain cannot well be supposed to represent distances, except some kind of inference be allotted us in our faculties; the concession of which will only stead us as a refuge for ignorance, when we shall meet what we would seem to shun.”[861] Glanvil, in this forcible statement of the heterogeneity of sensations, with the objects that suggest them, has but trod in the steps of the whole Cartesian school, but he did not mix this up with those crude notions that halt half way between immaterialism and its opposite; and afterwards well exposes the theories of accounting for the memory by means of images in the brain, which, in various ways, Aristotle, Descartes, Digby, Gassendi, and Hobbes had propounded, and which we have seen so favourite a speculation of Malebranche.

100. It would be easy to quote many paragraphs of uncommon vivacity and acuteness from this forgotten treatise. The style is eminently spirited and eloquent; a little too figurative, like that of Locke, but less blameably, because Glanvil is rather destroying than building up. Every bold and original thought of others finds a willing reception in Glanvil’s mind, and his confident, impetuous style gives them an air of novelty which makes them pass for his own. He stands forward as a mutineer against authority, against educational prejudice, against reverence for antiquity.[862] No one thinks more intrepidly for himself; and it is probable that, even in what seems mere superstition, he had been rather misled by some paradoxical hypothesis of his own ardent genius, than by slavishly treading in the steps of others.[863]

101. Glanvil sometimes quotes Lord Bacon, but he seems to have had the ambition of contending with the Novum Organum in some of its brilliant passages, and has really developed the doctrine of idols with uncommon penetration, as well as force of language. “Our initial age is like the melted wax to the prepared seal, capable of any impression from the documents of our teachers. The half-moon or cross are indifferent to its reception; and we may with equal facility write on this rasa tabula Turk or Christian. To determine this indifferency our first task is to learn the creed of our country, and our next to maintain it. We seldom examine our receptions, more than children do their catechisms, but by a careless greediness swallow all at a venture. For implicit faith is a virtue, where orthodoxy is the object. Some will not be at the trouble of a trial, others are scared from attempting it. If we do, ’tis not by a sun-beam or ray of light, but by a flame that is kindled by our affections, and fed by the fuel of our anticipations. And thus, like the hermit, we think the sun shines nowhere but in our cell, and all the world to be darkness but ourselves. We judge truth to be circumscribed by the confines of our belief and the doctrines we were brought up in.”[864] Few books, I think, are more deserving of being reprinted than the Scepsis Scientifica of Glanvil.

His Plus Ultra. 102. Another bold and able attack was made on the ancient philosophy by Glanvil in his “Plus Ultra, or the Progress and Advancement of Knowledge since the days of Aristotle, 1668.” His tone is peremptory and imposing, animated and intrepid, such as befits a warrior in literature. Yet he was rather acute by nature, than deeply versed in learning, and talks of Vieta and Descarte’s algebra so as to show he had little knowledge of the science, or of what they had done for it.[865] His animosity against Aristotle is unreasonable, and he was plainly an incompetent judge of that philosopher’s general deserts. Of Bacon and Boyle he speaks with just eulogy. Nothing can be more free and bold than Glanvil’s assertion of the privilege of judging, for himself in religion;[866] and he had doubtless a perfect right to believe in witchcraft.

Dalgarno. 103. George Dalgarno, a native of Aberdeen, conceived, and, as it seemed to him, carried into effect the idea of an universal language and character. His Ara Signorum, vulgo Character Universalis et Lingua Philosophica, Lond., 1661, is dedicated to Charles II. in this philosophical character, which must have been as great a mystery to the sovereign as to his subjects. This dedication is followed by a royal proclamation in good English, inviting all to study this useful art, which had been recommended by divers learned men, Wilkins, Wallis, Ward, and others, “judging it to be of singular use for facilitating the matter of communication and intercourse between people of different languages.” The scheme of Dalgarno is fundamentally bad, in that he assumes himself, or the authors he follows, to have given a complete distribution of all things and ideas; after which his language is only an artificial scheme of symbols. It is evident that until objects are truly classified, a representative method of signs can only rivet and perpetuate error. We have but to look at his tabular synopsis to see that his ignorance of physics, in the largest sense of the word, renders his scheme deficient; and he has also committed the error of adopting the combinations of the ordinary alphabet, with a little help from the Greek, which, even with his slender knowledge of species, soon leave him incapable of expressing them. But Dalgarno has several acute remarks; and it deserves especially to be observed, that he anticipated the famous discovery of the Dutch philologers, namely, that all other parts of speech may be reduced to the noun, dexterously, if not successfully, resolving the verb substantive into an affirmative particle.[867]

The verb-substantive, he says, is equivalent to ita. Thus, Petrus est in domo, means, Petrus—ita—in domo. That is, it expresses an idea of apposition or conformity between a subject and predicate. This is a theory to which a man might be led by the habit of considering propositions logically, and thus reducing all verbs to the verb-substantive; and it is not deficient, at least, in plausibility.

Wilkins. 104. Wilkins, bishop of Chester, one of the most ingenious men of his age, published in 1668 his Essay towards a Philosophical Language, which has this advantage over that of Dalgarno, that it abandons the alphabet, and consequently admits of a greater variety of characters. It is not a new language, but a more analytical scheme of characters for English. Dalgarno seems to have known something of it, though he was the first to publish, and glances at “a more difficult way of writing English.” Wilkins also intimates that Dalgarno’s compendious method would not succeed. His own has the same fault of a premature classification of things; and it is very fortunate that neither of these ingenious but presumptuous attempts to fasten down the progressive powers of the human mind by the cramps of association had the least success.[868]

Locke on human Understanding. 105. But from these partial and now very obscure endeavours of English writers in metaphysical philosophy we come at length to the work that has eclipsed every other, and given to such inquiries whatever popularity they ever possessed, the Essay, of Locke on the human Understanding. |The merits.| Neither the writings of Descartes, as I conceive, nor perhaps those of Hobbes, so far as strictly metaphysical, had excited much attention in England beyond the class of merely studious men. But the Essay on Human Understanding was frequently reprinted within a few years from its publication, and became the acknowledged code of English philosophy.[869] The assaults it had to endure in the author’s lifetime, being deemed to fail, were of service to its reputation; and considerably more than half a century was afterwards to elapse before any writer in our language (nor was the case very different in France, after the patronage accorded to it by Voltaire) could with much chance of success question any leading doctrine of its author. Several circumstances no doubt conspired with its intrinsic excellence to establish so paramount a rule in an age that boasted of peculiar independence of thinking, and full of intelligent and inquisitive spirits. The sympathy of an English public with Locke’s tenets as to government and religion was among the chief of these; and the reaction that took place in a large portion of the reading classes towards the close of the eighteenth century turned in some measure the tide even in metaphysical disquisition. It then became fashionable sometimes to accuse Locke of preparing the way for scepticism; a charge which, if it had been truly applicable to some of his opinions, ought rather to have been made against the long line of earlier writers with whom he held them in common; sometimes, with more pretence, to alledge that he had conceded too much to materialism; sometimes to point out and exaggerate other faults and errors of his Essay, till we have seemed in danger of forgetting that it is perhaps the first, and still the most complete chart of the human mind which has been laid down; the most ample repertory of truths relating to our intellectual being; and the one book which we are compelled to name as the first in metaphysical science. Locke had not, it may be said, the luminous perspicacity of language we find in Descartes, and, when he does not soar too high, in Malebranche; but he had more judgment, more caution, more patience, more freedom from paradox, and from the sources of paradox, vanity and love of system, than either. We have no denial of sensation to brutes, no reference of mathematical truths to the will of God, no oscillation between the extremes of doubt and of positiveness, no bewildering mysticism, no unintelligible chaos of words. Certainly neither Gassendi nor even Hobbes could be compared with him; and it might be asked of the admirers of later philosophers, those of Berkeley, or Hume, or Hartley, or Reid, or Stewart, or Brown, without naming any on the continent of Europe, whether in the extent of their researches, or in the originality of their discoveries, any of these names ought to stand on a level with that of Locke. One of the greatest I have mentioned, and one, who though candid towards Locke, had no prejudice whatever, in his favour, has extolled the first two books of the Essay on Human Understanding, which yet he deems in many respects inferior to the third and fourth, as “a precious accession to the theory of the human mind; as the richest contribution of well-observed and well-described facts which was ever bequeathed by a single individual; and as the indisputable, though not always acknowledged, source of some of the most refined conclusions with respect to the intellectual phenomena, which have been since brought to light by succeeding inquirers.”[870]

Its defects. 106. It would be an unnecessary prolixity to offer in this place an analysis of so well-known a book as the Essay on the Human Understanding. Few have turned their attention to metaphysical inquiries without reading it. It has however no inconsiderable faults, which, though much over-balanced, are not to be passed over in a general eulogy. The style of Locke is wanting in philosophical precision; it is a very fine model of English language; but too idiomatic and colloquial, too indefinite and figurative, for the abstruse subjects with which he has to deal. We miss in every page the translucent simplicity of his great French predecessors. This seems to have been owing, in a considerable degree, to an excessive desire of popularising the subject, and shunning the technical pedantry which had repelled the world from intellectual philosophy. Locke displays in all his writings a respect which can hardly be too great, for men of sound understanding unprejudiced by authority, mingled with a scorn, perhaps a little exaggerated, of the gown-men or learned world; little suspecting that the same appeal to the people, the same policy of setting up equivocal words and loose notions, called the common sense of mankind, to discomfit subtle reasoning, would afterwards be turned against himself, as it was, very unfairly and unsparingly, by Reid and Beattie. Hence he falls a little into a laxity of phrase, not unusual, and not always important, in popular and practical discourse, but an inevitable source of confusion in the very abstract speculations which his Essay contains. And it may perhaps be suspected, without disparagement to his great powers, that he did not always preserve the utmost distinctness of conception, and was liable as almost every other metaphysician has been, to be entangled in the ambiguities of language.

Origin of ideas, according to Locke. 107. The leading doctrine of Locke, as is well known, is the derivation of all our ideas from sensation and from reflection. The former present no great difficulty; we know what is meant by the expression; but he is not very clear or consistent about the latter. He seems in general to limit the word to the various operations of our own minds in thinking, believing, willing, and so forth. This, as has been shown formerly, is taken from, or at least coincident with, the theory of Gassendi in his Syntagma Philosophicum. It is highly probable that Locke was acquainted with that work; if not immediately, yet through the account of the Philosophy of Gassendi, published in English by Dr. Charleton, in 1663, which I have not seen, or through the excellent and copious abridgment of the Syntagma by Bernier. But he does not strictly confine his ideas of reflection to this class. Duration is certainly no mode of thinking; yet the idea of duration is reckoned by Locke among those with which we are furnished by reflection. The same may perhaps be said, though I do not know that he expresses himself with equal clearness, as to his account of several other ideas, which cannot be deduced from external sensation, nor yet can be reckoned modifications or operations of the soul itself; such as number, power, existence.

Vague use of the word idea. 108. Stewart has been so much struck by this indefiniteness, with which the phrase “ideas of reflection” has been used in the Essay on the Human Understanding, that he “does not think, notwithstanding some casual expressions which may seem to favour the contrary supposition, that Locke would have hesitated for a moment to admit, with Cudworth and Price, that the understanding is the source of new ideas.”[871] And though some might object that this is too much in opposition, not to casual expressions, but to the whole tenor of Locke’s Essay, his language concerning substance almost bears it out. Most of the perplexity which has arisen on this subject, the combats of some metaphysicians with Locke, the portentous errors into which others have been led by want of attention to his language, may be referred to the equivocal meaning of the word idea. The Cartesians understood by this whatever is the object of thought, including an intellection as well as an imagination. By an intellection they meant that which the mind conceives to exist, and to be the subject of knowledge, though it may be unimaginable and incomprehensible. Gassendi and Locke limit the word idea to something which the mind sees and grasps as immediately present to it. “That,” as Locke not very well expresses it “which the mind is applied about while thinking being the ideas that are there.” Hence, he speaks with some ridicule of “men who persuade themselves that they have clear comprehensive ideas of infinity.” Such men can hardly have existed; but it is by annexing the epithets clear and comprehensive, that he shows the dispute to be merely verbal. For that we know the existence of infinities as objectively real, and can reason upon them, Locke would not have denied: and it is this knowledge to which others gave the name of idea.

109. The different manner in which this all-important word was understood by philosophers is strikingly shown when they make use of the same illustration. Arnauld, if he is author of L’Art de Penser, mentions the idea of a chiliagon, or figure of 1,000 sides, as an instance of the distinction between that which we imagine, and that which we conceive or understand. Locke has employed the same instance to exemplify the difference between clear and obscure ideas. According to the former, we do not imagine a figure with 1,000 sides at all; according to the latter, we form a confused image of it. We have an idea of such a figure, it is agreed by both; but in the sense of Arnauld, it is an idea of the understanding alone; in the sense of Locke, it is an idea of sensation, framed, like other complex ideas, by putting together those we have formerly received, though we may never have seen the precise figure. That the word suggests to the mind an image of a polygon with many sides is indubitable; but it is urged by the Cartesians, that as we are wholly incapable of distinguishing the exact number, we cannot be said to have, in Locke’s sense of the word, any idea, even an indistinct one of a figure with 1,000 sides; since all we do imagine is a polygon. And it is evident that in geometry we do not reason from the properties of the image, but from those of a figure which the understanding apprehends. Locke, however, who generally preferred a popular meaning to one more metaphysically exact, thought it enough to call this a confused idea. He was not I believe, conversant with any but elementary geometry. Had he reflected upon that which in his age had made such a wonderful beginning, or even upon the fundamental principles of it, which might be found in Euclid, the theory of infinitesimal quantities, he must, one would suppose, have been more puzzled to apply his narrow definition of an idea. For what image can we form of a differential, which can pretend to represent it in any other sense than as d x represents it, by suggestion, not by resemblance?

110. The case is, however, much worse when Locke deviates, as in the third and fourth books he constantly does, from this sense that he has put on the word idea, and takes it either in the Cartesian meaning or in one still more general and popular. Thus, in the excellent chapter on the abuse of words, he insists upon the advantage of using none without clear and distinct ideas; he who does not this “only making a noise without any sense or signification.” If we combine this position with that in the second book, that we have no clear and distinct idea of a figure with 1,000 sides, it follows, with all the force of syllogism, that we should not argue about a figure of 1,000 sides at all, nor, by parity of reason, about many other things of far higher importance. It will be found, I incline to think, that the large use of the word idea for that about which we have some knowledge, without limiting it to what can be imagined, pervades the third and fourth books. Stewart has ingeniously conjectured that they were written before the second, and probably before the mind of Locke had been much turned to the psychological analysis which that contains. It is however certain that in the Treatise upon the Conduct of the Understanding, which was not published till after the Essay, he uses the word idea with full as much latitude as in the third and fourth books of the latter. We cannot, upon the whole, help admitting that the story of a lady who, after the perusal of the Essay on the Human Understanding, laid it down with a remark, that the book would be perfectly charming were it not for the frequent recurrence of one very hard word, idea, though told, possibly, in ridicule of the fair philosopher, pretty well represents the state of mind in which many at first have found themselves.

An error as to geometrical figure. 111. Locke, as I have just intimated seems to have possessed but a slight knowledge of geometry; a science which, both from the clearness of the illustrations it affords, and from its admitted efficacy in rendering the logical powers acute and cautious, may be reckoned, without excepting physiology, the most valuable of all to the metaphysician. But it did not require any geometrical knowledge, strictly so called, to avoid one material error into which he has fallen; and which I mention the rather, because even Descartes, in one place, has said something of the same kind, and I have met with it not only in Norris very distinctly and positively, but, more or less, in many or most of those who have treated of the metaphysics or abstract principles of geometry. “I doubt not,” says Locke,[872] “but it will be easily granted that the knowledge we have of mathematical truths is not only certain but real knowledge, and not the bare empty vision of vain insignificant chimeras of the brain; and yet if we well consider, we shall find, that it is only of our own ideas. The mathematician considers the truth and properties belonging to a rectangle or circle only as they are in idea in his own mind; for it is possible he never found either of them existing mathematically, that is, precisely true, in his life.... All the discourses of the mathematicians about the squaring of a circle, conic sections, or any other part of mathematics, concern not the existence of any of those figures; but their demonstrations, which depend on their ideas, are the same, whether there be any square or circle in the world or no.” And the inference he draws from this is, that moral as well as mathematical ideas being archetypes themselves, and so adequate and complete ideas, all the agreement or disagreement which he shall find in them will produce real knowledge, as well as in mathematical figures.

112. It is not perhaps necessary to inquire how far, upon the hypothesis of Berkeley, this notion of mathematical figures, as mere creations of the mind, could be sustained. But on the supposition of the objectivity of space, as truly existing without us, which Locke undoubtedly believed, it is certain that the passage just quoted is entirely erroneous, and that it involves a confusion between the geometrical figure itself and its delineation to the eye. A geometrical figure is a portion of space contained in boundaries determined by given relations. It exists in the infinite round about us, as the statue exists in the block.[873] No one can doubt, if he turns his mind to the subject, that every point in space is equidistant, in all directions, from certain other points. Draw a line through all these, and you have the circumference of a circle; but the circle itself and its circumference exist before the latter is delineated. The orbit of a planet is not a regular geometrical figure, because certain forces disturb it. But this disturbance means only a deviation from a line which exists really in space, and which the planet would actually describe, if there were nothing in the universe but itself and the centre of attraction. The expression therefore of Locke, “whether there be any square or circle existing in the world or no,” is highly inaccurate, the latter alternative being an absurdity. All possible figures, and that “in number numberless,” exist everywhere; nor can we evade the perplexities into which the geometry of infinities throws our imagination, by considering them as mere beings of reason, the creatures of the geometer, which I believe some are half disposed to do, nor by substituting the vague and unphilosophical notion of indefinitude for a positive objective infinity.

The geometer uses not the same obedient hand, but he equally feels and perceives the reality of that figure which the broad infinite around him comprehends con suo soverchio.

113. This distinction between ideas of mere sensation and those of intellection, between what the mind comprehends, and what it conceives without comprehending, is the point of divergence between the two sects of psychology which still exist in the world. Nothing is in the intellect which has not before been in the sense, said the Aristotelian schoolmen. Every idea has its original in the senses, repeated the disciple of Epicurus, Gassendi. Locke indeed, as Gassendi had done before him, assigned another origin to one class of ideas; but these were few in number, and in the next century two writers of considerable influence, Hartley and Condillac, attempted to resolve them all into sensation. The Cartesian school, a name rather used for brevity, as a short denomination of all who, like Cudworth, held the same tenets as to the nature of ideas, lost ground both in France and England; nor had Leibnitz who was deemed an enemy to some of our great English names, sufficient weight to restore it. In the hands of some who followed in both countries, the worst phrases of Locke were preferred to the best; whatever could be turned to the account of pyrrhonism, materialism, or atheism, made a figure in the Epicurean system of a popular philosophy. The names alluded to will suggest themselves to the reader. The German metaphysicians from the time of Kant deserve at least the credit of having successfully withstood this coarse sensualism, though they may have borrowed much that their disciples take for original, and added much that is hardly better than what they have overthrown. The opposite philosophy to that which never rises above sensible images is exposed to a danger of its own; it is one which the infirmity of the human faculties renders perpetually at hand; few there are who in reasoning on subjects where we cannot attain what Locke has called “positive comprehensive ideas” are secure from falling into mere nonsense and repugnancy. In that part of physics which is simply conversant with quantity, this danger is probably not great, but in all such inquiries as are sometimes called transcendental, it has perpetually shipwrecked the adventurous navigator.

His notions as to the soul. 114. In the language and probably the notions of Locke as to the nature of the soul there is an indistinctness more worthy of the Aristotelian schoolmen than of one conversant with the Cartesian philosophy. “Bodies,” he says, “manifestly produce ideas in us by impulse, the only way which we can conceive bodies to operate in. If then external objects be not united to our minds, when they produce ideas in it, and yet we perceive these original qualities in such of them as singly fall under our senses, it is evident that some motion must be thence continued by our nerves, or animal spirits, by some parts of our bodies to the brain, or the seat of sensation, there to produce in our minds the particular ideas we have of them. And since the extention, figure, number, and motion of bodies of an observable bigness may be perceived at a distance by the sight, it is evident some singly imperceptible bodies must come from them to the eyes, and thereby convey to the brain some motion which produces those ideas, which we have of them, in us.” He so far retracts his first position afterwards, as to admit, “in consequence of what Mr. Newton has shown in the Principia on the gravitation of matter towards matter” that God not only can put into bodies powers and ways of operation above what can be explained from what we know of matter, but that he has actually done so. And he promises to correct the former passage, which however he has never performed. In fact, he seems, by the use of phrases which recur too often to be thought merely figurative, to have supposed that something in the brain comes into local contact with the mind. He was here unable to divest himself, any more than the schoolmen had done, of the notion that there is a proper action of the body on the soul in perception. The Cartesians had brought in the theory of occasional causes and other solutions of the phenomena, so as to avoid what seems so irreconcilable with an immaterial principle. No one is so lavish of a cerebral instrumentality in mental images as Malebranche; he seems at every moment on the verge of materialism; he coquets, as it were, with an Epicurean physiology; but if I may be allowed to continue the metaphor, he perceives the moment where to stop, and retires, like a dexterous fair one, with unsmirched honour to his immateriality. It cannot be said that Locke is equally successful.

And its immateriality. 115. In another and a well-known passage, he has thrown out a doubt whether God might not superadd the faculty of thinking to matter; and though he thinks it probable that this has not been the case, leaves it at last a debatable question, wherein nothing else than presumptions are to be had. Yet he has strongly argued against the possibility of a material Deity upon reasons derived from the nature of matter. Locke almost appears to have taken the union of a thinking being with matter for the thinking of matter itself. What is there, Stillingfleet well asks, like self-consciousness in matter? “Nothing at all,” Locke replies, “in matter as matter. But that God cannot bestow on some parcels of matter a power of thinking, and with it self-consciousness, will never be proved by asking how it is possible to apprehend that mere body should perceive that it doth perceive.” But if that we call mind, and of which we are self-conscious, were thus superadded to matter, would it the less be something real? In what sense can it be compared to an accident or quality? It has been justly observed that we are much more certain of the independent existence of mind than of that of matter. But that, by the constitution of our nature, a definite organization, or what will be generally thought the preferable hypothesis, an organic molecule, should be a necessary concomitant of this immaterial principle, does not involve any absurdity at all, whatever want of evidence may be objected to it.

116. It is remarkable that in the controversy with Stillingfleet on this passage, Locke seems to take for granted that there is no immaterial principle in brutes; and as he had too much plain sense to adopt the Cartesian theory of their insensibility, he draws the most plausible argument for the possibility of thought in matter by the admitted fact of sensation and voluntary motion in these animal organizations. “It is not doubted but that the properties of a rose, a peach, or an elephant superadded to matter change not the properties of matter, but matter is in these things matter still.” Few perhaps at present who believe in the immateriality of the human soul, would deny the same to an elephant; but it must be owned that the discoveries of zoology have pushed this to consequences which some might not readily adopt. The spiritual being of a sponge revolts a little our prejudices; yet there is no resting-place, and we must admit this, or be content to sink ourselves into a mass of medullary fibre. Brutes have been as slowly emancipated in philosophy as some classes of mankind have been in civil polity; their souls we see, were almost universally disputed to them at the end of the seventeenth century, even by those who did not absolutely bring them down to machinery. Even within the recollection of many, it was common to deny them any kind of reasoning faculty, and to solve their most sagacious actions by the vague word instinct. We have come of late years to think better of our humble companions; and as usual in similar cases, the predominant bias seems rather too much of a levelling character.

His love of truth and originality. 117. No quality more remarkably distinguishes Locke than his love of truth. He is of no sect or party, has no oblique design, such as we so frequently perceive, of sustaining some tenet which he suppresses, no submissiveness to the opinions of others, nor what very few lay aside, to his own. Without having adopted certain dominant ideas, like Descartes and Malebranche, he follows with inflexible impartiality and unwearied patience the long process of analysis to which he has subjected the human mind. No great writer has been more exempt from vanity, in which he is very advantageously contrasted with Bacon and Descartes; but he is sometimes a little sharp and contemptuous of his predecessors. The originality of Locke is real and unaffected; not that he has derived nothing from others, which would be a great reproach to himself or to them, but in whatever he has in common with other philosophers, there is always a tinge of his own thoughts, a modification of the particular tenet, or at least a peculiarity of language which renders it not very easy of detection. “It was not to be expected,” says Stewart, “that in a work so composed by snatches, to borrow a phrase of the author, he should be able accurately to draw the line between his own ideas and the hints for which he was indebted to others. To those who are well acquainted with his speculations it must appear evident that he had studied diligently the metaphysical writings both of Hobbes and Gassendi, and that he was no stranger to the Essays of Montaigne, to the philosophical works of Bacon, and to Malebranche’s Inquiry after Truth. That he was familiarly conversant with the Cartesian system may be presumed from what we are told by his biographer, that it was this which first inspired him with a disgust at the jargon of the schools, and led him into that train of thinking which he afterwards prosecuted so successfully. I do not however recollect that he has anywhere in his Essay mentioned the name of any one of those authors. It is probable that when he sat down to write, he found the result of his youthful reading so completely identified with the fruits of his subsequent reflections, that it was impossible for him to attempt a separation of the one from the other, and that he was thus occasionally led to mistake the treasures of memory for those of invention. That this was really the case may be further presumed from the peculiar and original cast of his phraseology, which though in general careless and unpolished, has always the merit of that characteristical unity and raciness of style, which demonstrate that while he was writing he conceived himself to be drawing only from his own resources.”[874]

Defended in two cases. 118. The writer however whom we have just quoted has not quite done justice to the originality of Locke in more than one instance. Thus, on this very passage we find a note in these words: “Mr. Addison has remarked that Malebranche had the start of Locke by several years in his notions on the subject of duration. Some other coincidences not less remarkable might be easily pointed out in the opinions of the English and of the French philosopher.” I am not prepared to dispute, nor do I doubt, the truth of the latter sentence. But with respect to the notions of Malebranche and Locke on duration, it must be said, that they are neither the same nor has Addison asserted them to be so.[875] The one threw out an hypothesis with no attempt at proof; the other offered an explanation of the phenomena. What Locke has advanced as to our getting the idea of duration by reflecting on the succession of our ideas seems to be truly his own. Whether it be entirely the right explanation, is another question. It rather appears to me that the internal sense, as we may not improperly call it, of duration belongs separately to each idea, and is rather lost than suggested by their succession. Duration is best perceived when we are able to detain an idea for some time without change, as in watching the motion of a pendulum. And though it is impossible for the mind to continue in this state of immobility more perhaps than about a second or two, this is sufficient to give us an idea of duration as the necessary condition of existence. Whether this be an objective or merely a subjective necessity, is an abstruse question, which our sensations do not decide. But Locke appears to have looked rather at the measure of duration, by which we divide it into portions, than at the mere simplicity of the idea itself. Such a measure, it is certain, can only be obtained through the medium of a succession in our ideas.

119. It has been also remarked by Stewart, that Locke claims a discovery rather due to Descartes—namely, the impossibility of defining simple ideas. Descartes, however, as well as the authors of the Port-Royal Logic, merely says that words already as clear as we can make them do not require, or even admit, of definition. But I do not perceive that he has made the distinction we find in the Essay on the Human Understanding, that the names of simple ideas are not capable of any definition, while the names of all complex ideas are so. “It has not, that I know,” Locke says, “been observed by any body what words are and what are not capable of being defined.” The passage I have quoted in another place (chap. xx., p. 500), from Descartes’ posthumous dialogue, even if it went to this length, was unknown to Locke; yet he might have acknowledged that he had been in some measure anticipated in other observations by that philosopher.

His view of innate ideas. 120. The first book of the Essay on the Human Understanding is directed, as is well known, against the doctrine of innate ideas, or innate principles in the mind. This has been often censured, as combating in some places a tenet which no one would support, and as, in other passages, breaking in upon moral distinctions themselves, by disputing the universality of their acknowledgment. With respect to the former charge, it is not perhaps easy for us to determine what might be the crude and confused notions, or at least language, of many who held the theory of innate ideas. It is by no means evident that Locke had Descartes chiefly, or even at all, in his view. Lord Herbert, whom he distinctly answers, and many others, especially the Platonists, had dwelt upon innate ideas in far stronger terms than the great French metaphysician, if indeed he can be said to have maintained them at all. The latter and more important accusation rests upon no other pretext, than that Locke must be reckoned among those who have not admitted a moral faculty of discovering right from wrong to be a part of our constitution. But that there is a law of nature imposed by the Supreme Being, and consequently universal, has been so repeatedly asserted in his writings, that it would imply great inattention to question it. Stewart has justly vindicated Locke in this respect from some hasty and indefinite charges of Beattie; but I must venture to think that he goes much too far when he attempts to identify the doctrines of the Essay with those of Shaftesbury. These two philosophers were in opposite schools as to the test of moral sentiments. Locke seems always to adopt what is called the selfish system in morals, resolving all morality into religion, and all religion into a regard to our own interest. And he seems to have paid less attention to the emotions than to the intellectual powers of the soul.

General praise. 121. It would by no means be difficult to controvert other tenets of this great man. But the obligations we owe to him for the Essay on the Human Understanding are never to be forgotten. It is truly the first real chart of the coasts; wherein some may be laid down incorrectly, but the general relations of all are perceived. And we who find some things to censure in Locke have perhaps learned how to censure them from himself; we have thrown off so many false notions and films of prejudice by his help that we are become capable of judging our master. This is what has been the fate of all who have pushed onward the landmarks of science; they have made that easy for inferior men which was painfully laboured through by themselves. Among many excellent things in the Essay on Human Understanding none are more admirable than the whole third book on the nature of words, especially the three chapters on their imperfection and abuse. In earlier treatises of logic, at least in that of Port-Royal, some of this might be found; but nowhere are verbal fallacies, and, above all, the sources from which they spring so fully and conclusively exposed.

Locke’s Conduct of Understanding. 122. The same praiseworthy diligence in hunting error to its lurking-places distinguishes the short treatise on the Conduct of the Understanding; which, having been originally designed as an additional chapter to the Essay,[876] is as it were the ethical application of its theory, and ought always to be read with it, if, indeed, for the sake of its practical utility, it should not come sooner into the course of education. Aristotle himself, and the whole of his dialectical school, had pointed out many of the sophisms against which we should guard our reasoning faculties; but these are chiefly such as others attempt to put upon us in dispute. There are more dangerous fallacies by which we cheat ourselves; prejudice, partiality, self-interest, vanity, inattention and indifference to truth. Locke, who was as exempt from these as almost any man who has turned his mind to so many subjects where their influence is to be suspected, has dwelled on the moral discipline of the intellect in this treatise better, as I conceive, than any of his predecessors, though we have already seen, and it might appear far more at length to those who should have recourse to the books, that Arnauld and Malebranche, besides other French philosophers of the age, had not been remiss in this indispensable part of logic.

123. Locke, throughout this treatise, labours to secure the honest inquirer from that previous persuasion of his own opinion, which generally renders all his pretended investigations of its truth little more than illusive and nugatory. But the indifferency he recommends to everything except truth itself, so that we should not even wish anything to be true before we have examined whether it be so, seems to involve the impossible hypothesis that man is but a purely reasoning being. It is vain to press the recommendation of freedom from prejudice so far; since we cannot but conceive some propositions to be more connected with our welfare than others, and consequently to desire their truth. These exaggerations lay a fundamental condition of honest inquiry open to the sneers of its adversaries; and it is sufficient, because nothing more is really attainable, first to dispossess ourselves of the notion that our interests are concerned where they are not, and next, even when we cannot but wish one result of our inquiries rather than another, to be the more unremitting in our endeavours to exclude this bias from our reasoning.

124. I cannot think any parent or instructor justified in neglecting to put this little treatise in the hands of a boy about the time when the reasoning faculties become developed. It will give him a sober and serious, not flippant or self-conceited, independency of thinking; and while it teaches how to distrust ourselves, and to watch those prejudices which necessarily grow up from one cause or another, will inspire a reasonable confidence in what he has well considered, by taking off a little of that deference to authority, which is the more to be regretted in its excess, that, like its cousin-german party-spirit, it is frequently united to loyalty of heart, and the generous enthusiasm of youth.