Toleration,' published a third book on the subject in 1704. Locke, surprised at this new utterance after a silence of twelve years, again took up his pen and wrote, at such intervals as his small remaining strength allowed, portions of 'A Fourth Letter for Toleration.' But he was not able to complete it; and the fragment need not here be described. It is noteworthy, however, that the great question of religious liberty, about which he had written his Essay concerning Toleration' nearly forty years before, was still such an important one with him that he chose to devote to it some portions of the last months, perhaps of the last weeks, of his life.

He had done work enough in his lifetime of two-andseventy years; and here, before we follow the story of that life to its close, we must pause and take account of what he had done and the way in which he had done it.

Locke will always be remembered, and very properly, especially as a metaphysician. Admirable and useful to the world as was all the work done by him in other ways than as an author, and admirable and useful as were his other writings, the Essay concerning Human Understanding' was his greatest gift to his own and later generations. By it modern philosophy has been revolutionised, and if many rival sects of thinkers have built upon the broad foundations that he laid and some of them ignore their debt to him, that debt is none the less for their ingratitude. The science of mind was in almost hopeless confusion, if it could then be called a science at all, when he began to study it. Truth was buried under a heap of

1 Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke,' pp. 235-277.

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scholastic jargon, and the quest of truth was altogether abandoned by all orthodox thinkers for the enunciation of meaningless maxims and of dogmas for which no valid authority could be given. Others had sought before his time, and continued in his time to seek, bravely and boldly to probe the mystery and to bring truth back again. Descartes, his first master, had done much; Gassendi had done perhaps as much; Hobbes had done a great deal more. But Descartes had used his talents chiefly in the substitution of new and unproved dogmas for the old Gassendi had lost himself in ingenious speculations clogged by traditions of the system he aspired to displace. Hobbes had contented himself with shrewd guesses, often expressed in such terms as drove away would-be disciples. Locke gathered up all that he found to be good in their teachings and in the teachings of all the other able teachers before and around him, and made it his own, and used it as the basis of speculations as bold as they were honest, as free from bias as they were free from dogmatism.

ones.

Probably intended by his father to be a theologian, certainly intending himself to be a physician, and deeply imbued all through his life by a religious spirit while he was as persistent in his devotion to medical pursuits, these diverse, though not in his case contrary, influences greatly affected his philosophical studies. It was at no time possible for him to believe that he could find out everything, or even to desire, in this life, to do so; least of all did he desire, or was it possible for him, so to reject all that he could not understand as to lose his belief in God or to take no account of him in his studies; he only thought that he should serve God best by striving to find out what powers of intellect he

had endowed men with and how they ought to use them. This may have been to a certain degree a bias, and may to some extent have led him towards dogmatism; but never was an avowed theologian more free from either fault. His studies in physical science helped him here, and helped him immensely in his inquiries "concerning human understanding." Repudiating from the first the Cartesian as well as the pre-Cartesian assumptions as to innate ideas that is, of a mind having separate existence and endowments from the body-he maintained that the mind, in this state of its existence at any rate, can be nothing and know nothing without the body. Into the materialistic and idealistic speculations growing necessarily out of his views, and started before his time on the one part by Hobbes and on the other by Malebranche, it hardly occurred to him to engage, or if he was to some extent forced into them by his controversy with Bishop Stillingfleet, his observations thereupon were not very profound or satisfactory. They had no place, however, in his scheme of mental science. It satisfied him to argue and to prove that we can have no ideas that are not derived from our senses.

That, if not exactly a discovery or a revelation of Locke's, was a doctrine important enough to place the propounder of it in the foremost rank of philosophers. No one before him had propounded it with any approach to the clearness, vigour and completeness shown in his exposition; and it was the basis of his teaching as regards the science of mind. His explanation of the development of ideas of reflection, as he called them, out of ideas of sensation was not adequate to the requirements of modern students who have grown wise by his guidance, but no serious opposition was offered to it in his

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day; and the conqueror of a new world is not to be blamed for not at once mastering every inch of its territory, or endeavouring to quell, in anticipation, any insurrections that may afterwards arise in it. That Locke did conquer his new world, far more thoroughly than Columbus conquered his, and showed how prosperous colonies might be planted in it, albeit to contend with one another until one grand empire should be constructed out of them under the sway of truth alone, was praise enough.

To pursue his conquest he found it necessary almost to invent, out of the rusted materials handed down from the days of Aristotle, with much new and bright material of his own unearthing, the art of logic. Then, having shown, according to his light, what ideas are, and how words are to be used as their weapons, he showed what use is to be made of them in the acquisition of knowledge. What he taught about the degrees and extent of knowledge, its reality and the grounds of certainty, its limits and the relations between reason and faith, cannot be prized too highly. Much of it may have been superseded, but, it must again be remembered, only by those whom he taught to super

sede him.

In all that his strongest desire has been gratified. All he sought was truth. All he desired was that others should join in the noble quest. He never thought-he would have indignantly resented the supposition as the greatest insult that could be offered to him-of assuming that his teaching was final. All he aspired after was to be a pioneer in the war against ignorance, to plant the standard a little nearer to the far-off goal, hoping that others would go beyond him, caring little or not at all though he might be forgotten altogether, if truth

only truth, were reverenced. Truth as at best but a beautiful goddess to others. Truth was God himself to Locke.

No man ever strove more, or did more, to bring metaphysics out of the desert of idle speculation or the dreamland of foolish fancy into the domain of common-sense and every-day life; and no metaphysician ever concerned himself more, or more worthily, with the practical business of his own time and country. His first and unpublished writings gave evidence of his interest in public affairs, and nearly all his published works were mainly designed to promote the political, social and religious wellbeing of the world, and especially of his immediate contemporaries. They were, indeed, too much rather than too little in the nature of pamphlets. In all of them, however, profound views of permanent value, though offered only in the way of suggestions to be improved upon by others, were cogently advanced. In his work on Government he not only laid the foundations, but supplied much of the superstructure, of political science, and made an important contribution to the establishment of the yet undeveloped science of political economy, other and hardly less important contributions thereto being made in his tracts on Interest and Money. The relations of religion to politics were convincingly and conclusively defined in his writings on Toleration, and the relations of religion to theology were clearly enough indicated, and suggested with amazing boldness for a Christian of that time, in 'The Reasonableness of Christianity,' and in the commentaries on the Epistles of St. Paul. That he never performed his half-given promise to write in detail upon ethics may be regretted, but is not to be wondered at when we remember that he found for |