has told me," said Lady Masham, said Lady Masham, "which gave him a relish of philosophical things, were those of Descartes. He was rejoiced in reading these, because, though he very often differed in opinion from this writer, he yet found that what he said was very intelligible; from whence he was encouraged to think that his not having understood others had possibly not proceeded from a defect in his understanding."1

Had Locke not yet made acquaintance with the writings of Bacon, which could hardly have been beyond the understanding of such a student? or did he regard Bacon rather as the great herald and pioneer of the new philosophy than as himself a great philosopher? There would be some warrant for that view, and though Locke's philosophical debt to Bacon was a great one, Descartes was evidently a more attractive teacher for one situated and constituted as Locke was. We can readily understand with what relief he turned from the Aristotelian and scholastic dogmas to learn from Descartes all that was good in his teaching, until he was competent to set about correcting and controverting all that seemed to him to be not good.

Widely different as were both their careers and the philosophical conclusions at which they arrived, there was a close resemblance between the early intellectual circumstances of Locke and those of Descartes. The French philosopher, after referring to the scholastic education provided for him by his Jesuit teachers, said, "As soon as I had completed all that course of study at the termination of which one is usually admitted into the ranks of the learned, I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts

1 MSS. in the Remonstrants' Library; Lady Masham to Le Clerc, 12 Jan. 1704-5.

and errors, that, as it appeared to me, I had derived no other benefit from the pursuit of knowledge than this, that I had thoroughly discovered my own ignorance.' "For this reason," he continued, "as soon as my age permitted me to escape from my teachers, I quitted entirely the study of letters, and, resolving to seek no other science than such as I could find in myself, or rather in the great book of the world, I employed the rest of my youth in travel, in seeing courts and armies, in mixing with people of different humours and conditions, in collecting diverse experiences, in testing myself in the situations in which fortune placed me, and in striving to draw profitable convictions from all that offered itself to me. For it seemed to me that I should find more truth in the reasonings of different men in their own affairs, and which, if wrong, would be quickly punished with failure, than in such reasonings as the philosopher makes in his study upon speculations that have no effect on himself, and are of no immediate consequence to him."1

Locke, though setting quite as much value on the teaching of practical life, was satisfied with a somewhat narrower range of observation, and, besides having greater advantages in this way, was more willing to profit by the observation and teaching of other rebels from Aristotelianism; but he revolted quite as fearlessly, as we have seen, from the dogmas provided for him and forced upon him by his academical teachers.

Born in 1596, Renée Descartes had learnt before he was seventeen everything that his Jesuit masters at La Flèche could teach him, which was perhaps a good deal more than all the contemporary professors at Oxford could

1 'Discours de la Méthode,' part i.

have provided for their pupils. He had then gone out into that school of the world of which he thought so much; and at the age of twenty-three, he tells us, he began to plan the reformation of philosophy, the date, it should be noted, being about fifteen years after the appearance of Bacon's Advancement of Learning,' and apparently the same year in which the Novum Organum' was published. He continued his wanderings for ten years longer, however, and then spent eight years more in such complete privacy that even his most intimate friends did not know where to find him. It was in those eight years that his "great instauration " was projected and elaborated-an instauration that was to bring about quite as important a change in metaphysical studies as was the change due to Bacon's scheme for unfolding the secrets of the physical world. The 'Discours de la Méthode,' published in 1637, contained the germ of nearly all his philosophy, although that philosophy received considerable amplification in the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia,' which appeared in 1641, in the 'Principia Philosophiae,' dated 1644, and in the later works that were printed before and after his death in 1650.

Bacon, unless we except Giordano Bruno, was the first great rebel against the time-honoured rule, observed by all the rival schoolmen, by which philosophy was kept in subjection to theology. He did not set philosophy in opposition to theology; he quietly left it alone. “If I proceed to speak of theology," he said, "I shall step out of the barque of human reason, and enter into the ship of the church, which cannot, without the divine compass, properly direct its course; and for which the stars of philosophy, which have hitherto shone on us so brilliantly,

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afford no light. On this subject, therefore, it is well that

I should keep silence." 1

Descartes took a different view. Not satisfied with asserting the independence of philosophy, he proposed to make theology subject to it. "I have always thought," he wrote, “that the two questions of the existence of God and the nature of the soul were the chief of those which ought to be demonstrated by philosophy rather than by theology; for although it is sufficient for believers to have faith in the existence of God and in the immortality of the soul, it is hardly possible to convert unbelievers to any religion, unless we first convince them of these two matters by natural reason."2 In urging this, Descartes probably did not mean to be jesuitical; he may have been as blind to the logical outcome of his proposed invasion of the domain of faith by reason as were the orthodox persons who readily accepted it; but the invasion being allowed, there was not so very great a difference between the position of Descartes and the position of Spinoza.

Spinoza, however, being three months younger than Locke, made no public utterance till long after the period at which we have arrived, and exerted no influence at all on Locke while he was at Oxford. And Locke, though he may possibly have been at first attracted by the Cartesian attempt to prop up theology with philosophy, had utterly rejected the suggestion before he began to be himself a teacher. He had also rejected much else in the Cartesian philosophy, and much that he was doubtless ready enough to accept on his first reading of the works of Descartes.

1 De Augmentis,' lib. ix., cap. 1.

2 'Meditationes,' Dedication to the Deans and Doctors of the Sacred Faculty of Theology of Paris.

He, like Descartes, was weary of Aristotelianism and scholasticism. Descartes's "method" must have come to him like a revelation from heaven.

That method consisted in the repudiation of all external influences and artificial dogmas, and the building up of a complete new system of philosophy on the basis of consciousness. "Cogito, ergo sum," was Descartes's famous phrase. I am conscious of my own existence: that, if nothing else, is certain to me; and a like certainty must be with every other thinking individual. Consciousness is the foundation, the only foundation, of knowledge. Whatever consciousness clearly and distinctly proclaims must be true: in other words, every clear and distinct idea must be true; everything that can be clearly and distinctly conceived of as existing must exist.

The psychological system of Descartes was accordingly based by him on these four rules: "The first was, Never to accept anything as true but what is evidently so; carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to admit nothing but what, so clearly and distinctly presents itself as true that there can be no ground of doubt. The second, To divide every separate question into as many separate parts as may be necessary for its adequate solution. The third, To conduct the examination in such order as, beginning with objects the most simple, and therefore the easiest to be known, as it were step by step to ascend to knowledge of the most complex, assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature are not as antecedent and consequent. And lastly, To make such exact enumerations, and such general reviews, as to be confident that nothing essential has been omitted."

'Discours de la Méthode,' part ii.