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he could be sarcastically charitable. "Notwithstanding the great noise made in the world about errors and opinions," he said in almost the last paragraph of his book, "I must do mankind the right to say there are not so many men in errors and wrong opinions as is commonly supposed. Not that I think they embrace the truth, but indeed because concerning those doctrines they keep such a stir about they have no thought, no opinion at all. For, if any one should a little catechise the greatest part of the partizans of most of the sects in the world, he would not find concerning those matters they are so zealous for that they have any opinions of their own; much less would he have reason to think that they took them upon the examination of arguments and appearance of probability. They are resolved to stick to a party that education or interest has engaged them in; and there, like the common soldiers of an army, show their courage and warmth as their leaders direct, without ever examining, or so much as knowing, the cause they contend for. If a man's life shows that he has no serious regard for religion, for what reason should we think that he beats his head about the opinions of his church and troubles himself to examine the grounds of this or that doctrine ? It is enough for him to obey his leaders, to have his hand and his tongue ready for the support of the common cause, and thereby approve himself to those who can give him credit, preferment, or protection in that society. Thus men become professors of, and combatants for, those opinions they were never convinced of nor proselytes to-no, nor ever had so much as floating in their heads; and though one cannot say there are fewer improbable or erroneous opinions in the world than there are, yet this is certain, there are fewer that actually assent to them and mistake them for truths than is imagined." 1

In the foregoing account of Locke's 'Essay concerning Human Understanding,' in the shape in which he first published it, effort has been made only to show what was its general scope and meaning as an index to his own mind and an appeal to the good sense of the readers and thinkers around him. "It was not meant," he said, "for those who had already mastered this subject, and made a thorough acquaintance with their own understandings;

1 Concerning Human Understanding,' b. iv., ch. xx., § 18.

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but for my own information and the satisfaction of a few friends who acknowledged themselves not to have sufficiently considered it;" and he only offered it to a wider circle because he thought that perhaps it might be useful "in clearing the ground a little and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge." He professed to give in it no more than the results of his own long and honest inquiries into the working of his own mind and the minds of those with whom he came in contact or could get information about from books. He would have been the first to acknowledge his obligations to the many writers of his own and earlier days who had propounded to him doctrines or offered to him suggestions that he found worth accepting; but he could fairly claim that all the thoughts he had derived from others had been made his own by the careful consideration that he gave to them and by the altered form that they generally assumed in his mind, and that, by combining these thoughts of others with his own more strictly original opinions, he had built up a structure that was altogether his own workmanship."

1 'Concerning Human Understanding,' Epistle to the Reader.

2 It must be remembered that the work grew up gradually as a private exercise not intended for publication. Had Locke from the first meant to publish it, however, he would probably have taken no greater care than he did to specify his debts to earlier thinkers. In not specifying his debts, he only did as all other writers then did. When any author had to be criticised or quoted as a distinct authority for any statement or view, he was referred to; but when his opinions were adopted, with or without modification, it was no more thought incumbent on the writer who did so to specify the obligation than it would now be expected of any one that he should inform the public concerning the builder of his house or the maker of his clothes. A different and a very commendable rule has since come into force; but they who charge Locke or other writers with not, at every turn, quoting their 'authorities" show an entire ignorance of the custom of the times. I

The great value of the essay consisted in the freshness. and force with which it set itself against the so-called Aristotelianism and scholasticism that had crippled men's intelligence throughout many centuries, and also against the new sort of dogmatism encouraged by Descartes and growing rapidly into favour with many besides the Cartesians. Much in it has been superseded; much else has been renovated. Many faults in it, which Locke himself might have corrected, can be pointed out by any tyro in psychological studies, and there are yet more numerous faults which, however apparent now, no honest critic can blame him for having fallen into. But these detract nothing from the importance of the work as the chief leader of the modern philosophical revolution, the greatest stimulant of modern thought that European literature can boast of.1 had intended in this section to distinguish, as regards the more important passages in his work, Locke's obligations to others and his own most original views. To do this at all adequately, however, would be such a lengthy task, involving so many quotations, and, when done, the result would be so much more appropriate to a new edition than to a brief popular description of the essay, that I shall not here venture upon it. The same remark applies with yet more force to the much larger task of endeavouring to trace in detail Locke's influence upon subsequent philosophical thought.

1 Were Locke living now, he would probably be hardly more pained to find many eminent teachers still enforcing dogmas that he sufficiently controverted than to find his essay used, as it still is in the university of Dublin, as the only text-book and authority on the subject of which it treats. "The book," said John Stuart Mill, "which has changed the face of a science, even when not superseded in its doctrines, is seldom suitable for didactic purposes. It is adapted to the state of mind, not of those who are ignorant of every doctrine, but of those who are instructed in an erroneous doctrine. So far as it is taken up with directly combating the errors which prevailed before it was written, the more completely it has done its work, the more certain it is of becoming superfluous, not to say unintelligible, without a commentary. And even its positive truths are defended against such objections only as were current in its own times, and guarded only

Et. 55.

The most evident blemish of the work, and the only one that need now be referred to, was the occasional vagueness and inconsistency of its phraseology. Locke

against such misunderstandings as the people of those times were likely to fall into. Questions of morals and metaphysics differ from physical questions in this, that their aspect changes with every change in the human mind. At no two periods is the same question embarrassed by the same difficulties, or the same truth in need of the same explanatory comment. The fallacy which is satisfactorily refuted in one age reappears in another in a shape which the arguments formerly used do not precisely meet, and seems to triumph until some one, with weapons suitable to the altered form of the error, arises and repeats its overthrow. These remarks are peculiarly applicable to Locke's essay. His doctrines were new and had to make their way; he therefore wrote not for learners, but for the learned; for men who were trained in the systems antecedent to his-in those of the schoolmen or of the Cartesians. He said what he thought necessary to establish his own opinions, and answered the objections of such objectors as the age afforded; but he could not anticipate all the objections which might be made by a subsequent age; least of all could he anticipate those which would be made now, when his philosophy has long been the prevalent one; when the arguments of objectors have been rendered as far as possible consistent with his principles, and are often such as could not have been thought of until he had cleared the ground by demolishing some received opinion which no one before him had thought of disputing. To attack Locke, therefore, because other arguments than it was necessary for him to use have become requisite to the support of some of his conclusions is like reproaching the Evangelists because they did not write evidences of Christianity. . . . No work, a hundred and fifty years old, can be fit to be the sole or even the principal work for the instruction of youth in a science like that of mind. In metaphysics every new truth sets aside or modifies much of what was previously received as truth. Berkeley's refutation of the doctrine of abstract ideas would of itself necessitate a complete revision of the phraseology of the most valuable parts of Locke's book. And the important speculations originated by Hume and improved by Brown, concerning the nature of our experience, are acknowledged, even by the philosophers who do not adopt in their full extent the conclusions of those writers, to have carried the analysis of our knowledge and of the process of acquiring it so much beyond the point where Locke left it as to require that his work

had a healthy contempt for the meaningless definitions and pompous nonsense of the scholastic writers whom he chiefly opposed; but that contempt caused him to err in too much effort to set forth his thoughts in words with which every one was familiar, and thus, from an opposite motive, sometimes to commit the same sort of blunder for which he blamed his adversaries.

"I am apt to think," he said, "that men, when they come to examine them, find their simple ideas all generally to agree, though in discourse with one another they perhaps confound one another with different names. I imagine that men who abstract their thoughts, and do well examine the ideas of their own minds, cannot much differ in thinking, however they may perplex themselves with words according to the way of speaking of the several schools or sects they have been bred up in, though amongst unthinking men, who examine not scrupulously and carefully their own ideas, and strip them not from the marks men use for them, but confound them with words, there must be endless dispute, wrangling and jargon, especially if they be learned bookish men, devoted to some sect and accustomed to the language of it." No one was ever more careful than Locke to avoid wrangling and jargon; but in his determination to do that he often fell into slipshod ways of writing, and, what was more serious, even of thought. "It is not easy for the mind," he said, "to put off those confused notions and prejudices it has imbibed from custom, inadvertency and common conversation; it requires pains and assiduity to examine

should be entirely recast."-An article on 'Professor Sedgwick's Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge,' in the London Review, April, 1835; reprinted in Dissertations and Discussions,' vol. i. (1867), pp. 114-117.

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