Locke, JOHN, one of the most conspicuous figures in the intellectual history of modern Europe, in whom, directly or indirectly, the course of opinion, especially in the 18th century, is probably more represented than by any other man. Locke was a native of Somerset; Beluton, the rural home of his youth, is 6 miles from Bristol. It was at Wrinton, 10 miles from Beluton, that he was born, on the 29th of August 1632. Our picture of his boyhood is faint. He lost his pious mother when he was a child. His father, a country attorney, was a considerable factor in the formation of his mind, during fourteen years of home-training in the small Puritan household, which consisted of the father and an only brother, who died young. In Locke's tenth year the Civil War broke out. He was at Westminster School in the years in which the assembly of Puritan divines was discussing Calvinistic theology, and in one of which he may have seen the tragedy at Whitehall in which the Puritan revolution culminated. In 1652 we find Locke at Oxford, after which the picture becomes more distinct. Christ Church was then ruled by John Owen, the Puritan divine, and Cromwell was chancellor of the university. The Aristotle of the schoolmen still determined the course of study, much to the dissatisfaction of young Locke, who preferred facts to words, and persons to books. But free experiential inquiry was finding its way into Oxford, though not into college lectures, and Locke afterwards confessed the early influence of the spirit of Descartes upon himself. The Restoration found him in 1660 a senior student in Christ Church. For a time he lectured as a college tutor, till the little property of Belhton became his by inheritance after the death of his father in 1661. He had now to determine his career. Notwithstanding an inclination to theology, his growing sympathy with free inquiry, in reaction against scholasticism, and against the intolerance and fanaticism of which he complained among the Puritans, discouraged an ecclesiastical career. 'I found,' he says sarcastically, 'that a general freedom is but a general bondage, and that the popular asserters of liberty are the greatest engrossers of it too, and not unjustly called its keepers.' Experiments in medicine, which much engaged him in these years, show his bent to the inductive interpretation of external nature, and aversion to the 'vermiculate' questions of the schools. Before 1666 he was in a sort of amateur practice in Oxford, and, although he never took this degree, he was in after-life familiarly known among his friends as 'Doctor Locke.' The philosophic temperament is apt to make a merely professional career irksome; and, besides, he inherited a delicacy unfavourable to medical practice, which ended in the chronic consumption and asthma against which he bravely struggled in later years. Thus medicine did not absorb his attention. Problems of society, the relations of church and state, and above all the right and duty of religious toleration, as his commonplace books prove, were revolved in his thoughts in those Oxford years, always in sympathy with individual freedom and in a spirit of prudential utilitarianism.
It was in the summer after his return from Germany, where he had spent the winter of 1665, that an incident occurred which finally determined this last disposition, for thenceforward he was 'often a man of business, and always a man of the world, without much undisturbed leisure.' Medical practice accidentally brought him into connection with Lord Ashley, soon after first Earl of Shaftesbury, who was visiting Oxford for his health. The meeting ended in a lasting friendship, sustained by common interest in liberty; and in the following year Locke, at Exeter House, became Lord Ashley's confidential secretary. The change did not check his scientific experiments, in which he was encouraged by Sydenham and other savants with whom life in London opened intercourse, while the political experience of Exeter House was in the line of previous interests. It was not long after he entered it that the turning-point in his intellectual career was reached. A reunion of friends, meeting in the winter of 1670-71 for the discussion of problems social and theological, perplexed in certain inquiries, welcomed Locke's suggestion, that before pursuing them they should face a previous investigation—as to what questions the human understanding was or was not fitted to deal with. This problem, then undertaken by Locke himself, proved unexpectedly large. His best energies, given to it during the seventeen following years, issued in 1690 in the famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Those seventeen years were spent partly in England, amidst the tumult of public affairs, partly on the Continent in comparative retirement. In 1672, when Shaftesbury became chancellor, Locke was made Secretary to the Board of Trade. The fall of Shaftesbury three years later enabled his secretary to retire to France, where he lived till 1679, for health and study, chiefly at Montpellier and at Paris. In France he formed friendships with physicians, naturalists, and travellers more than with metaphysicians; although it was the brilliant era when French metaphysic was represented by Arnauld and Malebranche, whilst Spinoza was (till 1677) in Holland and Leibnitz in Germany. In 1679 Locke returned to London and to Shaftesbury, who was restored to power for a short time, and lived with him in the years of plots and counterplots which preceded the earl's flight to Holland in November 1682. Locke, under suspicion in England, as the confidant of Shaftesbury, became before the end of 1683 an exile in Holland, then the European home of religious and civil liberty. There, during five years of exile, he resumed the studies which affairs in England had often interrupted, and matured voluminous writings for the press. At Amsterdam Limborch, the leader of liberal theology in Holland, and Le Clerc, its most eminent man of letters, became his intimate friends. The intercourse strengthened Locke's theological liberalism, and soothed the pains of exile, aggravated by the withdrawal of his senior studentship in Christ Church, of which he was suddenly deprived in 1684 by the king's command. His first home in Holland was at Amsterdam; his last was at Rotterdam, where the Essay was finished.
The political struggle which had been going on for half a century in England was consummated by the Revolution of 1688-89, of which, then unknown to fame, he was to be the philosophical defender. This opened the way for his return, to play his part in authorship, with London at first as the stage of operations. Immediately afterwards, in February 1689, he declined, for health's sake, the post of ambassador at Brandenburg, contented with a modest Commissionership of Appeals as official recognition by the new government. The course of affairs after the Revolution fell short of his hopes. The Toleration Act of 1690 was inadequate, and the withdrawal of the Comprehension Bill, for uniting England in a liberal national church, was another disappointment. Locke made his first appearance as an author late in life. He turned to authorship in the public interest of individual freedom—religious, political, and intellectual. An Epistola de Tolerantia was his first contribution, written in 1685, addressed to his Dutch friend Limborch, published anonymously at Gouda in Holland in 1689, a few weeks after his return to England, and translated into English in the following summer by William Popple. A treatise on Civil Government, ready for publication when he came home, followed early in 1690; this was also anonymous, and, like the Epistola, a defence of individual liberty in another relation. Its economical principles anticipate Hume and Adam Smith, and its principles of jurisprudence are in advance of Grotius and Puffendorf. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding appeared in March 1690, unfolding the philosophy of which the treatises on Toleration and on Government were special applications. The Essay was Locke's first public acknowledgment of authorship. His philosophy is embodied in these three works.
His ailments had increased in London. It was then, in 1691, that the home of his old age, the brightest of all his homes, opened to receive him. This was the manor-house of Oates in Essex, near Epping, the country-seat of Sir Francis Masham. Lady Masham was the accomplished daughter of Cudworth (q.v.), the philosophical theologian: Locke had known her family before he went to Holland. Here, for the fourteen remaining years of his life, he enjoyed as much domestic peace, literary leisure, and social intercourse as was consistent with broken health and occasional public service in London, and his work in the study was resumed with characteristic industry and method. The abundant authorship of the two preceding years now involved him in controversies which lasted to the end of his life. The Answer of a certain Jonas Proast of Queen's College, Oxford, to the Epistola de Tolerantia had led to Locke's Second Letter in 1690. A rejoinder in 1691 was followed by an elaborate Third Letter in 1692. Questions of economics and the currency were subjects of other tracts in 1691 and 1695. When he was in Holland he had corresponded with his friend Edward Clarke of Chipley in Somerset about the education of his son, and those letters made the substance of the Thoughts on Education in 1693, a characteristic work which still holds its place among educational classics. Proposals for ecclesiastical comprehension, and his own desire for union among Christians, made him anxious to show how few and simple the essential facts of Christianity were, and to bring men to agree to differ about all beyond. One result was the anonymous volume, in 1695, on the Reasonableness of Christianity, in which he tried, in the spirit of the Essay, to recall Christianity from the verbal reasonings of dogmatic divines, which had disturbed the unity of the church, to its original simplicity in Scripture. This theological departure, followed by excursions in criticism in the last years of his life, which appeared as posthumous Commentaries on St Paul's Epistles, was a distinctive feature of the literary life at Oates. In 1696, as a Commissioner of the Board of Trade, with an income of £1000 a year, he was again involved for the four following years in official cares. But they were not years of literary idleness. Successive editions of the Essay, in 1694, 1695, and 1700, with important additional chapters in the first and last; defence of its philosophy against the adverse criticism of Norris, Stillingfleet, Sergeant, Burnet, Lee, and Leibnitz; an Examination of Malebranche, and Remarks on Norris, published posthumously; vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity against theological critics; and the well-known tractate on the Conduct of the Understanding, kept him busy in the study at Oates. The Essay, translated into Latin and French, was spreading over Europe. But he was now gathering himself for the end. In 1700 he ceased to publish. One attack only moved him in the four years which followed. In 1704 his old adversary Proast renewed the contest, and the fragment of a Fourth Letter on Toleration, published in the posthumous volume, exhausted Locke's remaining strength upon the theme that had engaged him at Oxford forty years before, and had been the ruling idea ever since. All that summer he declined, nursed by Lady Masham and her step-daughter Esther. On the 28th October 1704 he passed away, as he said, 'in perfect charity with all men, and in sincere communion with the church of Christ by whatever names Christ's followers call themselves.' His tomb may be seen on the south side of the parish church of High Laver, a mile from Oates, bearing a Latin inscription prepared by his own hand.
Locke's Essay presents the philosophical foundation of the right of the individual thinker to follow freely the findings of experience; and, partly even by its metaphysical defects, it has suggested the chief problems which have occupied modern thinkers since it appeared. Its 'design,' according to its own words, was, 'to inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent;'—and this as a means to correct the chief cause of human error, which its author found in men's proneness to ex- tend their inquiries to matters beyond their reach, and then to cover their ignorance by empty phrases, or by dogmas which they assumed to be 'innate,' and therefore out of the reach of criticism. He wanted to make a faithful report, founded simply upon mental facts, as to how far a merely human understanding can go, in the way either of certain knowledge or of more or less probable presumption; and in what man must be contented with ignorance. Although a true report might show that human knowledge must for ever 'fall far short of perfect comprehension of whatsoever is,' it might be 'sufficient for our state;' and at any rate we cannot overcome facts.
The Essay is divided into four books. Only the fourth deals directly with its 'design.' The first book is a preliminary argument against the innateness of any part of our knowledge, meant to open the way for the statement of Locke's main position—that whatever any man can know, or reasonably believe in, or even conceive, is dependent on human experience. The essence of the Essay is in its proof that knowledge cannot in any degree have been consciously innate in each man; for it must be in all cases a gradual growth, dependent upon experience, in which we are liable to error. The argument might be thus put: All truths and all errors are expressed in propositions, and every proposition contains two terms, which, if the proposition is intelligible, must each contain an 'idea' or meaning. We may have ideas without having knowledge, but we cannot have knowledge, or even opinion, without having ideas; for 'having ideas,' Locke tells us, means 'speaking intelligibly.' Propositions which contain idealess terms cannot express truth, or even error, and only connect empty sounds. Now, how do the ideas or meanings which can form the subjects and predicates of our propositions enter into human consciousness? All our ideas, the most complex and abstract, as well as the simplest, Locke undertakes to show, are ideas which refer either to data that happen to have been presented through our five senses, or to operations of mind which have been made objects of reflection. If we pretend in words to extend our range further, 'we shall succeed no better than if we went about to clear the darkness in the mind of one born blind, talking into him the ideas of light and colours.' Words which do not mean either what is sensuous or what is mental must be empty words. The proof of this fundamental thesis is offered throughout the second and third books, which thus prepare for the settlement of the proper problems of the Essay in the fourth. Much of the proof consists of logical and psychological analysis of the metaphysical ideas of space, duration, infinity, substance, personality, causality, and power, which are taken as 'crucial instances.' If even those ideas must depend upon experience in order to become ideas, a fortiori none others can have been consciously born with us before we had experience. The proof is that, if all elements due to experience are left out, the ideas now mentioned must disappear. In the 13th and most of the remaining chapters of the second book this argument is worked out. But here Locke seems too ready to take for granted that, if those crucial ideas are unrealisable without data of experience, it necessarily follows that they involve nothing else than accidents of external or spiritual experience. He was led to interpret 'innateness' as he did partly by his assumption that nothing can be 'in a mind' of which the mind is not at the moment conscious. He thus overlooks the fact that we are conscious at each moment only of a small part of what—because potentially involved in, and presupposed by, our spiritual experience of the universe—responds consciously in each man's mind on an adequate appeal.
After this analysis of the possible range of man's ideas, Locke passes to the intuitive and demonstrable, the probable, and the erroneous judgments into which ideas enter. We are thus led into the fourth book, which reports upon the intuitive facts and principles which constitute knowledge. Locke's refusal of innateness (in his meaning of 'innate') to ideas, and a fortiori to knowledge which depends upon ideas, does not imply that he ignores intuition. On the contrary, after arguing strenuously against the innateness of our ideas of morality and of God, he is not less strenuous in arguing for our having an intuitive certainty of the truths of pure mathematics and abstract ethics, and for our being intuitively certain of the individual fact of our own existence as self-conscious, as well as of the existence of external things, as far as they are actually felt, and above all for our having a demonstrable knowledge of the existence of God or Eternal Mind 'as certain as any conclusion in pure mathematics.' Indeed, in his 'demonstration' of God's existence he presupposes in our idea of causality transcendental elements with which his description of that idea in the second book can hardly be reconciled. On the whole, we have intuitive knowledge (so Locke reports) in abstract logic, in abstract mathematics, and in abstract ethics; and we have also an intuitive knowledge of the facts of our own existence, of the existence of actually felt things of sense, and of the existence of an Eternal Spirit: it is on the light of intuition, he says, 'that all the certainty of this knowledge depends.' But all else upon which human understanding can be exercised is referred by the Essay to the spheres either of more or less probable presumption or of ignorance. All judgments about absent things of sense; about the relations among the qualities of matter, primary and secondary, or about its laws; and about the attributes of spirits human or divine, can at the most be probable presumptions. Hence probability is virtually the guide of human life. Science of absent facts of sense (if science means intuitively demonstrated truths) is beyond man's reach. The chief exercise of a human understanding must be balancing of probabilities and comparing the relative weight of objections, alike in the so-called physical sciences and in common life. Whether physical science, or even the probable propositions of ordinary life, could be formed without the latent presence in experience of universal and necessary judgments, presupposed in, while incapable of being referred to, its contingencies, Locke does not inquire. His aversion to presuppositions and maxims, to which he traced the empty verbalism and dogma against which he constantly warred, seems here to influence him. He sometimes wrote as if he failed to see that, without presuppositions and principles of some sort, intellectual and moral, being ready to spring out of their latency into experience, there could be neither reasoned scepticism nor reasonable faith. The most significant philosophical discussions of the last two centuries have been about the presence or absence of transcendental presuppositions and principles in our experience; and about man's consequent relation to the infinite and the eternal. Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge, Hume's Inquiry into the understanding, Reid's Inquiry into the principles of common sense, Kant's Kritik of Pure Reason, Hegel's ontological dialectic, Comte's positivism, and Herbert Spencer's generalisations of universal evolution and involution, are all in their respective ways concerned with questions about the roots of experience which Locke left indeterminate. Locke's teaching in his other works is influ- enced by what is taught in his Essay. Thus, his favourite idea of free toleration for the individual expression of religious belief—then a paradox, now a commonplace—is founded on the dependence of man's knowledge on experience and on the unfitness of persecution as a means of introducing truth to a human mind; while his refusal of toleration to atheists is in harmony with that 'mathematical certainty of God's existence' which he reports to be attainable by every man who uses his faculties enough. The same intellectual individualism pervades what he wrote about government, the education of the young, and the reasonableness of Christianity.
Locke's character is reflected in his works. In all that he wrote and did he is pre-eminently himself, in his caution and calculation with an approach to timidity, steady adherence to the concrete of experience, indifference to abstract speculation, suspicion of mystical enthusiasm, calm reasonableness, love for truth, and ready submission to facts even when they could not be reduced to system in a human understanding. His temperate aim was not to explain the universe, but to adapt his own intellectual life and that of others to the actual conditions. He sought to awaken the intellectual spirit, and to bring about an amendment of the operations of the understanding, more than to solve the enigmas of existence. Hence the lasting educational value of his authorship.
Numerous editions of Locke's works, individually and collectively, have appeared, about 40 of the Essay alone, besides translations into Latin, French, and German. Of the collected editions none are adequate, but the best is probably that of Bishop Law in 4 quarts (1777). Among criticisms of the Essay, the Nouveaux Essais of Leibnitz (1765) still takes the foremost place. Cousin's Lectures on Locke (1829), Webb's Intellectualism of Locke (1857), and Green's criticism in his Introduction to Hume (1874) are noteworthy. See also Fowler's Locke ('English Men of Letters,' 1880), and the present writer's Locke (1890), and his critical edition of the Essay (2 vols. 1894).