an example of good life, he would find one in the Gospel; if of vice, would that he could find one nowhere; if of mortality, there and everywhere.

"His death," says Lady Masham, "was, like his life, truly pious, yet natural, easy, and unaffected; nor can time, I think, ever produce a more eminent example of reason and religion than he was, living and dying."

CHAPTER VIII.

ESSAY ON THE HUMAN UNDERSTANDING.

"WERE it fit to trouble thee,” says Locke in his Epistle to the Reader, "with the history of this Essay, I should tell thee that five or six friends meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand by the difficulties that rose on every side. After we had a while puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course; and that, before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with. This I proposed to the company, who all readily assented and thereupon it was agreed that this should be our first inquiry.'

This passage may serve not only to describe the occasion of Locke's Essay, but also to indicate the circumstance which constitutes the peculiar merit and originality of Locke as a philosopher. The science which we now call Psychology, or the study of mind, had hitherto, amongst modern writers, been almost exclusively subordinated to the interests of other branches of speculation. Some exception must, indeed, be made in favour of Hobbes and Gassendi, Descartes and Spinoza; but all these authors treated the questions of psychology somewhat cursorily, while the two former seem usually to have had in view the illustration of some favourite position in physics or ethics, the two latter the ultimate establishment of some proposition relating to the nature or attributes of God. We may say then, without much exaggeration, that Locke was the first of modern writers to attempt at once an independent and a complete treatment of the phenomena of the human mind, of their mutual relations, of their causes and limits. His object was, as he himself phrases it, "to inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge: together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent." This task he undertakes not in the dogmatic spirit of his predecessors, but in the critical spirit which he may be said to have almost inaugurated. As far as it is possible for a writer to divest himself of prejudice, and to set to his work with a candid and open mind, seeking help and information from all quarters, Locke does so. And the effect of his candour on his first readers must have been enhanced by the fact, not always favourable to his precision, that, as far as he can,

he throws aside the technical terminology of the schools, and employs the language current in the better kinds of ordinary literature and the well-bred society of his own time. The absence of pedantry and of the parti pris in a philosophical work was at that time so rare a recommendation that, no doubt these characteristics contributed largely to the rapid circulation and the general acceptance of the Essay.

The central idea, which dominates Locke's work, is that all our knowledge is derived from experience. But this does not strike us so much as a thesis to be maintained as a conclusion arrived at after a vast amount of patient thought and inquiry. Have we any ideas independent of experience? or, as Locke phrases it, are there any Innate Principles in the mind ?

"It is an established opinion amongst some men that there are in the Understanding certain Innate Principles, some Primary Notions, Kovai evvocal, characters, as it were, stamped upon the mind of man, which the Soul receives in its very first being and brings into the world with it.”

This is the opinion which Locke examines and refutes in the first, or introductory, book of the Essay. It has often been objected that he mistakes and exaggerates the position which he is attacking. And so far as his distinguished predecessor, Descartes, Is concerned (though to what extent Locke has him in mind, his habit of not referring to other authors by name prevents us from knowing), this is undoubtedly the case. For Descartes, though he frequently employs and accepts the expression "innate notions" or "innate ideas," concedes, as so many philosophers of the same school have done since, that this native knowledge is only implicit, and requires definite experiences to elicit it. Thus, in his notes on the Programme of Regius, he expressly compares these innate notions or ideas with the nobility which is characteristic of certain ancient stocks, or with diseases, such as gout or gravel, which are said to be “innate" in certain families, not "because the infants of those families suffer from these diseases in their mother's womb, but because they are born with a certain disposition or tendency to contract them." Here Descartes seems to have been on the very point of stumbling on the principle of heredity which, in the hands of recent physiologists and psychologists, has done so much towards reconciling rival theories on the nature and origin of knowledge and clearing up many of the difficulties which attach to this branch of speculation. It must be confessed, however, that in his betterknown works he often employs unguarded and unexplained expressions which might easily suggest the crude form of the à priori theory attacked by Locke. Still more is this the case with other authors, such as Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Dr. Ralph Cudworth, whose works were in general circulation at the time when Locke was composing his Essay. Lord Herbert, though indeed he acknowledges that "common notions" (the expression by which he designates à priori principles) require an object to elicit them into consciousness, seems invariably to regard them as ready-made ideas

implanted in the human mind from its very origin. They are given by an independent faculty, Natural Instinct, which is to be distinguished from Internal Sense, External Sense, and Reasoning (discursus "), the sources of our other ideas. They are to be found in every man, and universal consent is the main criterion by which they are to be discriminated. In fact, there can be no doubt that the dogma of Innate Ideas and Innate Principles, in the form attacked by Locke, was a natural, if not the legitimate, interpretation of much of the philosophical teaching of the time, and that it was probably the form in which that teaching was popularly understood. It lay, moreover, as Locke's phrase is, along the common road,” which was travelled by the majority of men who cared about speculative subjects at all, and from which it was novel, and therefore dangerous, to diverge.

66

The most effective, perhaps, of Locke's arguments against this doctrine is his challenge to the advocates of Innate Principles to produce them, and show what and how many they are. Did men find such innate propositions stamped on their minds, nothing could be more easy than this. "There could be no more doubt about their number than there is about the number of our fingers; and 'tis like, then, every system would be ready to give them as by tale." Now "tis enough to make one suspect that the supposition of such innate principles is but an opinion taken up at random; since those who talk so confidently of them are so sparing to tell us which they are." (Bk. I., ch. iii., § 14.) The great majority, indeed, of those who maintain the existence of innate principles and ideas attempt no enumeration of them. Those who do attempt such an enumeration differ in the lists which they draw up, and, moreover, as Locke shows in the case of the five practical principles of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, give no sufficient reason why many other propositions, which they regard as secondary and derived, should not be admitted to the same rank with the so-called innate principles, which they assume to the primary and independent. Locke is here treading on safer ground than in many of his other criticisms. The fact is that it is impossible clearly to discriminate between those propositions which are axiomatic and those which are derived-or, in the language of the theory which Locke is combating, between those which are innate and those which are adventitious. Race, temperament, mental capacity, habit, education, produce such differences between man and man, that a proposition which to one man appears self-evident and unquestionable will by another be admitted only after considerable hesitation, while a third will regard it as doubtful, or even false. Especially is this the case, as Locke does not fail to point out, with many of the principles of religion and morals, which have now been received by so constant a tradition in most civilized nations that they have come to be regarded as independent of reason, and, if not "ingraven on the mind" from its birth, at least exempt from discussion and criticism. The circumstance, however, that they are not universally acknowledged shows that to mankind in general, at any rate, they are not

It

axiomatic, and that, however clear and convincing the reasons for them may be, at all events those reasons require to be stated. was this determined and vigorous protest against multiplying assumptions and attempting to withdraw a vast mass of propositions, both speculative and practical, from the control and revision of reason, that perhaps, constituted the most distinctive and valuable part of Locke's teaching.

Having cleared from his path the theory of Innate Principles, Locke proceeds, in the Second Book, to inquire how the mind comes to be furnished with its knowledge. Availing himself of a metaphor which had been commonly employed by the Stoics, but which reaches as far back as Aristotle and Plato, and even as Æschylus, he compares the mind to "white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas," and then asks:

"Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless Fancy of Man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from Experience: In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either about external or sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by our selves, is that which supplies our Understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the Fountains of Knowledge from which all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring."

"First, our Senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways in which those objects do affect them. And thus we come by those ideas we have of Yellow, White, Heat, Cold, Soft, Hard, Bitter, Sweet, and all those which we call Sensible Qualities, which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those Perceptions. This great source of most of the Ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the Understanding, I call SENSATION."

"Secondly, the other Fountain, from which Experience furnisheth the Understanding with Ideas, is the Perception of the operations of our own minds within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got; which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the Understanding with another set of ideas which could not be had from things without; and such are Perception, Thinking, Doubting, Believing, Reasoning, Knowing, Willing, and all the different actings of our own minds, which we being conscious of, and observing in our selves, do from these receive into our Understandings as distinct ideas as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself. And though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called Internal Sense. But as I call the other Sensation, so I call this RELECTION, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself. By Reflection, then, in the following part of this Discourse, I would be understood to mean that notice which the mind takes of its own operations and the manner of them, by reason whereof there come to be Ideas of these operations in the Understanding.