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In the autumn of 1697, while the controversy with Stillingfleet was at its hottest, Locke wrote to Molyneux:—"I had much rather be at leisure to make some additions to my book of Education and my Essay on Human Understanding, than be employed to defend myself against the groundless, and, as others think, trifling quarrel of the bishop." He was at this time engaged on preparing the fourth edition of theEssayfor the press. In addition to this task, or rather as part of it, he was also employing himself on writing the admirable little tract on the Conduct of the Understanding, the contents of which I shall notice in a subsequent chapter. This treatise, which was not published till after his death, was originally intended as an additional chapter to theEssay. Speaking of it in one of his letters to Molyneux, he says:—"I have written several pages on this subject; but the matter, the farther I go, opens the more upon me, and I cannot yet get sight of any end of it. The title of the chapter will be 'Of the Conduct of the Understanding,' which, if I shall pursue as far as I imagine it will reach, and as it deserves, will, I conclude, make the largest chapter of my Essay." It didnot, however, appear in the new edition, nor did Locke ever reduce its parts into order, or put the finishing stroke to it. He may, perhaps, have intended to revise it for a subsequent edition of theEssay, but the fourth was the last which appeared during his lifetime.
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Before speaking of the literary labours which occupied the last years of Locke's life, I may here conveniently recur to his domestic history. Of his quiet life with the Mashams little more need be said. Had Lady Masham been his daughter, she could not have tended him more carefully or lovingly; and had he been her father, he could not have entertained a more sincere solicitude for the welfare of her and her family. All Locke's friends were welcome at Oates, and seem to have been regarded quite as much as friends of the Mashams as of his own. And Oates appears in every respect to have been as much Locke's home as that of its owners. In the whole of his correspondence, there does not appear the slightest trace of those petty piques and annoyances, those smalldésagréments, which are so apt to grow up among people who live much together, even when, at bottom, they entertain a deep love and admiration for each other. On the side of the Mashams we know that the tide of affection ran equally smooth. Lady Masham and Esther acted as his nurses, and with one or other of them he seems to have shared all his pursuits. The intimacy and sweetness of these relations surely imply as rare an amount of amiability of temper and power of winning regard on the one side, as of patience and devotion on the other. But then Locke possessed the inestimable gift of cheerfulness, which renders even the invalid's chamber a joy to those who enter it. All the glimpses we obtain of the life, at Oatesrepresent it as a gay and pleasant one, none the less gay and pleasant because its enjoyments were modest and rational. After complaining to Molyneux of the persistent asthma which confined him a close prisoner to the house during the winter of 1697-98, he adds, "I wish, nevertheless, that you were here with me to see how well I am; for you would find that, sitting by the fireside, I could bear my part in discoursing, laughing, and being merry with you, as well as ever I could in my life. If you were here (and if wishes of more than one could bring you, you would be here to-day) you would find three or four in the parlour after dinner, who, you would say, passed their afternoons as agreeably and as jocundly as any people you have this good while met with." Locke's conversation is reported to have been peculiarly fascinating. He had a large stock of stories, and is said to have had a singularly easy and humorous way of telling them.
Among the more frequent guests at Oates at this time were Edward Clarke and his daughter Betty, Locke's "little wife," now fast growing up to womanhood, a son of Limborch, and a son of Benjamin Furly, both engaged in mercantile pursuits in London, and a young kinsman of Locke's own, Peter King, of whom I shall have more to say presently. One of the most anxiously expected guests, whose visits had been often promised and often deferred, was the correspondent of whom we have heard so much, William Molyneux. At length, after the rising of the British Parliament in the summer of 1698, the two friends met. Even on this occasion, Molyneux had been obliged to defer his promised visit for some weeks, on account of a recent trouble which he had brought on himself by the publication of a "home-rule" pamphlet, protesting against the interference of the English Parliament in Irishaffairs. Both Houses had joined in an address to the king, praying for punishment on the offender; but the king, possibly through Locke's intervention, had wisely taken no notice of the petition. Any way, after the prorogation, Molyneux seems to have felt sufficiently secure to venture on a journey across the Channel. He and Locke were together for some time both in London and at Oates. The friends, though they had been in such constant and intimate correspondence for six years, had never met before. We may easily imagine how warm was their greeting, how much they had to talk about, and how loath they were to separate. "I will venture to assert to you," wrote Molyneux on his return to Dublin, "that I cannot recollect, through the whole course of my life, such signal instances of real friendship as when I had the happiness of your company for five weeks together in London. That part thereof especially which I passed at Oates has made such an agreeable impression on my mind that nothing can be more pleasing." Shortly after writing this letter, Molyneux died at the early age of forty-two. "His worth and his friendship to me," writes Locke, in a letter to Burridge, the Latin translator of theEssay, "made him an inestimable treasure, which I must regret the loss of the little remainder of my life, without any hopes of repairing it any way." He then characteristically goes on to ask if there is any service he can render to Molyneux's son. "They who have the care of him cannot do me a greater pleasure than to give me the opportunity to show that my friendship died not with his father." One of the most amiable and attractive traits in Locke's character is the eagerness which he always displayed in advising, encouraging, or helping forward the sons of his friends. Any opportunity of doing so alwaysgave him the most evident satisfaction, as, from his correspondence, we see in the case of Frank Masham, the two young Furlys, young Limborch, and numerous others.
I must now no longer delay the introduction to the reader of Locke's young cousin, Peter King. Locke had an uncle, Peter Locke, whose daughter Anne had married Jeremy King, a grocer and salter in a substantial way of business at Exeter. Such a marriage was not necessarily any disparagement to Anne Locke's family, as the present line of demarcation between professional men and the smaller gentry, on the one side, and substantial retail tradesmen, on the other, hardly existed at that time. They had a son, Peter, born in 1669, who was consequently Locke's first cousin once removed. The boy seems for some time to have been employed in his father's business, but he had a voracious appetite for books, and showed a decided talent for the acquisition of learning. Locke, on one of his visits to Exeter, discovered these qualities, and persuaded Peter King's parents to allow him to change his mode of life, and study for one of the learned professions. Whether he went to any English school does not appear; but, during Locke's stay in Holland, he resided for some time in the University of Leyden. His studies there embraced at least classics, theology, and law; and when he returned to England, apparently in 1690, he brought back with him a pamphlet entitledAn Enquiry into the Constitution and Discipline of the Primitive Church. As in this treatise he maintained that Presbyterianism was the original form of Church government, he probably never had any serious intention, notwithstanding his theological proclivities of entering holy orders in the Established Church. Any way, in October, 1694, he was entered a student of the Middle Temple; and in TrinityTerm, 1698, he was called to the bar. During his residence in London as a law student, he must have been frequently at Oates, and Locke must have frequently visited him in his chambers in the Temple. The first extant letter from Locke to King, dated June 27, 1698, at any rate, assumes intimacy and frequency of intercourse. "Your company here had been ten times welcomer than any the best excuse you could send; but you may now pretend to be a man of business, and there can be nothing said to you." Very sound was the advice with which the elder relative concluded his letter to the young barrister: "When you first open your mouth at the bar, it should be in some easy plain matter that you are perfectly master of." King's success in his profession was very rapid, and he soon became one of the most popular counsel on the Western Circuit. In the general election of 1700 he attained one of the first objects of ambition at which a rising young barrister generally aims—a seat in the House of Commons. Owing, probably, to his cousin's influence with the Whig leaders, he was returned for the small borough of Beer Alston, in Devonshire, which he continued to represent in several successive Parliaments. Locke, writing to him shortly before the meeting of Parliament, entreats him not to go circuit, as he had intended to do, but to devote himself at once to his Parliamentary duties. "I am sure there was never so critical a time, when every honest member of Parliament ought to watch his trust, and that you will see before the end of the next vacation." The loss to his pocket, his good relative intimates, delicately enough, shall be amply made up to him. King took his cousin's advice on this point, but, fortunately and wisely, did not take it on another. "My advice to you is not to speak at all in the House for some time, whateverfair opportunity you may seem to have." King was advised to communicate his "light or apprehensions" to some "honest speaker," who might make use of them for him. Locke, we must remember, was now becoming old, and though not, like many old men, jealous of his juniors, he could not escape the infirmity of all old men, that of exaggerating the youthfulness of youth, and so of insisting too stringently on the modesty becoming those in whom he was interested. King broke the ice soon after the meeting of Parliament, and Locke had the prudence and good-nature to show no resentment at his advice having been neglected. His cousin, however, never became a great Parliamentary speaker; but he soon gained a reputation for being a thoroughly sound lawyer and a thoroughly honest man. He rose successively to be Recorder of London, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and Lord High Chancellor of England. He was also ennobled as Lord King of Ockham, and, by a very curious coincidence, his four sons in succession bore the same title. To one of his descendants, his great-grandson, also named Peter, we owe the publication of many documents and letters connected with Locke, and the biography so well known asLord King's Life of Locke. The present representative of the family, and the direct descendant in the male line of Peter King, is the Earl of Lovelace. As Peter King was, to all intents, Locke's adopted son, we may thus regard Locke as the founder of an illustrious line in the English peerage, and there are certainly few, if any, of our ennobled families who can point to a founder whose name is so likely to be the heritage of all future ages.
King kept Locke well posted in all that went on in Parliament, and seems also to have been a constant visitorat Oates. Soon after his election, Sir Francis Masham had considerately proposed to Locke that his cousin should "steal down sometimes with him on Saturday, and return on Monday." On one of these occasions, in the Easter holidays of 1701, King was accompanied by young Lord Ashley, now become the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Locke had then surmounted his winter troubles, and his old pupil pronounces him as well as he had ever known him.
Amongst Locke's correspondents in these years was the celebrated physician, Dr. Sloane, now Secretary of the Royal Society, afterwards created Sir Hans Sloane. In writing to him at the end of the century, evidently in answer to a request, Locke proposes a scheme for rectifying the calendar. Notwithstanding the reformation which had already taken place in many foreign countries, it will be recollected that the English year then began on the 25th of March, instead of the 1st of January, and that, by reckoning the year at exactly 365¼ days, or at 11 m. 14 sec. longer than its actual length, our time lagged ten days behind that of most other European countries, as well as the real solar time. The inconvenience, especially in transactions with foreign merchants, had become very great. The advent of the new century, inasmuch as the centenary year would be counted as a leap-year in England, but not in other countries where the new style or Gregorian calendar prevailed, would add an eleventh day to the amount of discrepancy, and hence the subject was now attracting more than ordinary attention. Locke's remedy was to omit the intercalar day in the year 1700, according to the rule of the Gregorian calendar, as also for the ten next leap-years following, "by which easy way," he says, "we should in forty-four years insensibly return to the new style." "This," he adds, "I call an easy way, becauseit would be without prejudice or disturbance to any one's civil rights, which, by lopping off ten or eleven days at once in any one year, might perhaps receive inconvenience, the only objection that ever I heard made against rectifying our account." He also suggested that the year should begin, as in most other European countries, on the 1st of January. No change, however, was made till, by an Act of Parliament passed in 1750-51, it was ordered that the year 1752 should begin on the 1st of January, and that the day succeeding the 2nd of September in that year should be reckoned as the 14th. Locke's other correspondence with Sloane shows the interest which he still took in medical matters, and how ready he always was to expend time and thought on attending to the ailments of his poor neighbours at Oates.
During the latter years of Locke's life his principal literary employment consisted in paraphrasing and writing commentaries on some of St. Paul's epistles. He thought that this portion of Scripture offered peculiar difficulties, and finding, as he says, that he did not understand it himself, he set to work, rather for his own sake, and perhaps also that of the household at Oates, than with any view of publication, to attempt to clear up its obscurities. The labour was a work of love; and to a man of Locke's devout disposition, with almost a child-like confidence in the guidance of Scripture, the occupation must have afforded a peculiar solace in the intervals of his disease, and as he felt that he was rapidly approaching the confines of that other world which had so long been familiar to his thoughts. Though he was induced to consent to the publication of these commentaries, and though he himself prepared an introduction to them, they did not appear till after his death. They were then issued by instalments,coming out at intervals between 1705 and 1707 inclusively.
Locke's political interests, always keen, were specially active in the winter of 1701-02. England was just then on the point of engaging in the war of the Spanish Succession. In the previous September an alliance against France and Spain had been concluded between the emperor and the two great maritime powers, England and Holland. Almost immediately after the conclusion of this treaty, James the Second had died at St. Germain, and not only had the French king allowed his son to be proclaimed King of England but had himself received him with royal honors at the court of Versailles. The patriotic and Protestant feeling of the country was thoroughly roused, and the new Parliament, which met on the 30th of December, was prepared to take the most energetic measures for the purpose of supporting the national honor and the Protestant succession. The king's speech, on opening the Parliament, excited an outburst of enthusiasm throughout the nation. He conjured the members to disappoint the hopes of their enemies by their unanimity. As he was ready to show himself the common father of his people, he exhorted them to cast out the spirit of party and division, so that there might no longer be any distinction but between those who were friends to the Protestant religion and the present establishment, and those who wished for a popish prince and a French government. The speech was printed in English, Dutch, and French, framed, and hung up, as an article of furniture, in the houses of good Protestants, both at home and abroad. Locke, writing to Peter King four days after the meeting of Parliament, asks him to send a copy of the king's speech, "printed by itself, and without paring off the edges." He suggests that, in addition to what thetwo Houses had done, the city of London and counties of England should, "with joined hearts and hands return his Majesty addresses of thanks for his taking such care of them." "Think of this with yourself," he says, "and think of it with others who can and ought to think how to save us out of the hands of France, into which we must fall, unless the whole nation exert its utmost vigour, and that speedily." He is specially urgent on his cousin not to leave town, or to think of circuit business, till the kingdom has been put in an effectual state of defence. "I think it no good husbandry for a man to get a few fees on circuit and lose Westminster Hall." By losing Westminster Hall he does not, apparently, mean losing the chance of a judgeship, but forfeiting those rights and liberties, and that personal and national independence which the Revolution had only so lately restored. "For, I assure you, Westminster Hall is at stake, and I wonder how any one of the house can sleep till he sees England in a better state of defence, and how he can talk of anything else till that is done." But a majority, at least, of the House of Commons was fully alive to its responsibilities; enormous supplies were voted, and almost every conceivable measure was taken for securing the Protestant succession to the crown. A few days after Locke wrote the letter last quoted, King William died. His reflections on that event or on the political prospects under William's successor, we do not possess.
As the war proceeded, Locke's old friend, the Earl of Monmouth, now become Earl of Peterborough, was entrusted with a naval expedition against the Spanish possessions in the West Indies. He had a great desire to see Locke before his departure, and, Locke being unable to come up to London, he and the Countess drove down toOates about the middle of November, 1702. It is characteristic of the times that Locke was "much in pain" about their getting back safely to town, the days being then so short. His young friend, Arent Furly, who was also a protégé and frequent correspondent of Lord Shaftesbury, went out as Lord Peterborough's secretary, and seems to have acquitted himself in the position with marked diligence and success. The early promise which he gave, however, was soon blighted. This young play-fellow and foster-child, as he might almost have been called, of Locke, died only a few years after him, in 1711 or 1712. Before accompanying Lord Peterborough on his expedition, he had been living for some time, first at Oates, and afterwards in lodgings in the neighbourhood, for the purpose of learning English.
It is gratifying to find that, during the autumn of this year, Locke had received a visit from Newton. During the discussion of the re-coinage question, and the active operations which followed for the purpose of carrying out the decisions of Parliament, they must have been thrown a good deal together. Montague declared that, had it not been for the energetic measures taken by Newton, as Warden of the Mint, the re-coinage would never have been effected. When, however, Newton came down to visit Locke at Oates, in 1702, their conversation seems to have turned mainly on theological topics. Locke showed Newton his notes upon the Corinthians, and Newton requested the loan of them. But, like most borrowers, he neglected to return them, nor did he take any notice of a letter from Locke, who was naturally very anxious to recover his manuscript. Peter King was asked to try to manage the matter. He was to call at Newton's residence in Jermyn Street, to deliver a second note, and to find out, if he could,the reasons of Newton's silence, and of his having kept the papers so long. But he was to do this "with all the tenderness in the world," for "he is a nice man to deal with, and a little too apt to raise in himself suspicions where there is no ground." The emissary was also, if he could do it with sufficient adroitness, to discover Newton's opinion of the Commentary. But he was by no means to give the slightest cause of offence. "Mr. Newton is really a very valuable man, not only for his wonderful skill in mathematics, but in divinity too, and his great knowledge in the Scriptures, wherein I know few his equals. And therefore pray manage the whole matter so as not only to preserve me in his good opinion, but to increase me in it; and be sure to press him to nothing but what he is forward in himself to do." In this letter Locke, notwithstanding the caution with which he felt it necessary to approach one of so susceptible a temperament, says, "I have several reasons to think him truly my friend." And in this generous judgment there can be little doubt he was right. The friends probably never met again, but Newton is said to have paid a visit, on one of his journeys perhaps from London to Cambridge, to Locke's tomb at High Laver. Peter King succeeded in recovering the manuscript, and at the same time or soon afterwards there came a letter, criticising one of Locke's interpretations, but expressing a general opinion that the "paraphrase and commentary on these two epistles is done with very great care and judgment."
Something should here be said of two friends whom Locke had made in later life, one of whom seems to have been constantly about him during his last years. The less intimate of these was Samuel Bolde, a Dorsetshire clergyman, who had come forward, in 1697, to defend theReasonableness of Christianityagainst Edwards' attacks, and who afterwards did Locke a similar service in replying to the assailants of theEssay. He was one of Locke's correspondents, and once at least paid him a visit at Oates. Bolde's outspokenness and independence of judgment naturally excited Locke's admiration. There are some memorable sentences in a letter written to him in 1699. "To be learned in the lump by other men's thoughts, and to be in the right by saying after others, is the much easier and quieter way; but how a rational man, that should inquire and know for himself, can content himself with a faith or a religion taken upon trust, or with such a servile submission of his understanding as to admit all and nothing else but what fashion makes passable among men, is to me astonishing. I do not wonder you should have, in many points, different apprehensions from what you meet with in authors. With a free mind, which unbiassedly pursues truth, it cannot be otherwise." After expanding these thoughts, and applying them to the study of Scripture, he goes on to advise Bolde how to supply a mental defect that he had complained of, namely, that "he lost many things because they slipped from him." The simple method was to write them down as they occurred. "The great help to the memory is writing," Bacon had said. Locke emphasizes the dictum, and adds, "If you have not tried it, you cannot imagine the difference there is in studying with and without a pen in your hand." "The thoughts that come unsought, and as it were dropped into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have, and therefore should be secured, because they seldom return again."
The other friend, whose acquaintance had only been made during these later years, was Anthony Collins, whowas not more than twenty-eight years of age when Locke died. Collins afterwards attained great celebrity as a Deistical writer, but none of his theological works appeared till some time after Locke's death. Locke, with his sincere and simple belief in the divine origin of the Christian Revelation, would doubtless, had he lived to see them, have been shocked with their matter, and still more with their style. But at the present time Collins presented himself to him simply in the light of an ingenuous young man, with rare conversational powers and wide interests, and with what Locke valued far more, an eager desire to find out the truth. No one can have read the tracts,An Enquiry concerning Human Liberty, andLiberty and Necessity, without recognizing the acuteness and directness of Collins' intellect, and these, we know, were qualities always peculiarly acceptable to Locke. Moreover, to encourage and bring forward younger men had invariably been one of his main delights. Hence we may, perhaps, abate our surprise at the apparently exaggerated language in which he addresses this friend, who was so much his junior in age, and who must have become known to him only so recently. "Why do you make yourself so necessary to me? I thought myself pretty loose from the world; but I feel you begin to fasten me to it again. For you make my life, since I have had your friendship, much more valuable to me than it was before." "If I were now setting out in the world, I should think it my great happiness to have such a companion as you, who had a relish for truth, would in earnest seek it with me, from whom I might receive it undisguised, and to whom I might communicate freely what I thought true. Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world and the seed-plot of allother virtues, and, if I mistake not, you have as much of it as I ever met with in anybody." Then he adds pathetically, but with a tone of hopefulness in the labours of others which is not commonly found amongst old men, "When I consider how much of my life has been trifled away in beaten tracks, where I vamped on with others only to follow those that went before us, I cannot but think I have just as much reason to be proud as if I had travelled all England, and, if you will, France too, only to acquaint myself with the roads and be able to tell how the highways lie, wherein those of equipage, and even the herd too, travel. Now, methinks—and these are often old men's dreams—I see openings to truth and direct paths leading to it, wherein a little industry and application would settle one's mind with satisfaction, and leave no darkness or doubt. But this is at the end of my day, when my sun is setting; and though the prospect it has given me be what I would not for anything be without—there is so much irresistible truth, beauty, and consistency in it—yet it is for one of your age, I think I ought to say for yourself, to set about it." What were those "openings to truth and direct paths leading to it?" Were they merely the delusive visions of an old man's fancies, or had he really formed wider conceptions of science, and pictured to himself more precise and fertile methods of reaching it? The sciences, it is needless to observe, have grown vastly since Locke's day; the methods of scientific research are far more numerous, more accurate, richer in their results. Had Locke, in his thoughts at this time, at all anticipated the courses which inquiry and knowledge have since taken?
The letter to Collins, from which I have just quoted, was written on Oct. 29, 1703. Within a year of thatdate the end came. The wonder, indeed, is that, with his persistent malady, aggravated apparently in these latter years with other disorders, Locke's life had continued so long. The reasons are probably to be sought in his unfailing cheerfulness, in the variety of interests which diverted his mind from the thought of his own ailments, and in the judicious manner in which he regulated his exercise and diet. Of these personal traits something may conveniently here be said. The remarkable cheerfulness of his disposition, his lively sense of humour, and his power of extracting amusement from all that was going on around him, have frequently come before us in the course of this biography. His temper was not moody, like that of so many men of letters, but pre-eminently sociable. When not actually engaged in his studies, he always liked to be in company, and enjoyed especially the society of young people and children. He had a happy knack of talking to his companions for the time being on the subjects which interested them most, and in this way he gained a very extensive knowledge of the various kinds of business, and of a variety of arts and crafts. To working people he was often able to give very useful hints as to their own employments. This union of conversational qualities, grave and gay, invariably made him a welcome addition to any company, young or old, gentle or simple. An even temper, and a combination of happy gifts of this kind, will carry a man through much suffering, bodily and mental. From any mental troubles, on his own account, Locke seems, during these latter years of his life, to have been remarkably free. From bodily suffering he was rarely exempt, but he always endured it with resignation, and endeavoured to obviate its causes by every precaution, which his prudence or medical skill suggested. Thus, wehave seen that, whenever it was possible, he preferred the quiet life and pure air of the country to the many attractions which the capital must have offered to a man with his wide acquaintance, and with so many political and literary interests. In diet he practised an abstemiousness very rare among men of that age. His ordinary drink was water, and to this habit he attributed not only his length of years, but also the extraordinary excellence of his eyesight. Till recently, a curious relic of Locke's water-drinking habits was preserved in the shape of a large mortar of spongy stone, which acted as a natural filter, and which he used to call his brew-house. He was assiduous in taking exercise, and was specially fond of walking and gardening. In the latter years of his life he used to ride out slowly every day after dinner. When advising his friend Clarke about his health, he says, "I know nothing so likely to produce quiet sleep as riding about gently in the air for many hours every day," and then, like a truly wise doctor, he adds, "If your mind can be brought to contribute a little its part to the laying aside troublesome ideas, I could hope this may do much." At last, when he was no longer able to sit on horseback, he commissioned Collins to have an open carriage specially made for him, the principle on which it was to be constructed being that "convenient carries it before ornamental."
In November, 1703, the Heads of Houses at Oxford—who at that time constituted the governing body, and through whose repressive and reactionary administration the evil genius of Laud then and long afterwards continued to cast a blight on the University—resolved to discourage the reading of Locke'sEssay. The attempt was futile, as they relied, not on coercion, but on the influence of their authority, which appears to have been held verycheap. Locke was now far too eminent a man to be troubled by so anile a demonstration of folly. "I take what has been done as a recommendation of my book to the world," he says, in a letter to Collins; and then he promises himself and his friend much merriment on the subject when they next meet.
Locke's last literary labour appears to have been hisFourth Letter for Toleration. Jonas Proast, after a long interval, had returned to the charge in a pamphlet published in 1704; and Locke, unfortunately, thought it incumbent on him to reply, though he had long ceased to pay any regard to the assailants of theEssay. TheLetteris unfinished. Its last words cannot have been written long before Locke's death.
The winter of 1703-04 seems to have been peculiarly trying to his health. He hardly expected to live through it; but he still maintained his cheerfulness, and followed his usual employments. On the 11th of April, 1704, he made his will—perhaps not his first. To most of his friends, relatives, and dependents he left some remembrance; but the bulk of his personal property be left to Frank Masham and Peter King, the latter of whom was sole executor and residuary legatee. All his manuscripts were left to King. Many of these were published for the first time by the seventh Lord King, in hisLife of Locke. His land he designedly did not will, and so it devolved by law, in equal shares, on his two cousins, Peter King and Peter Stratton. His funeral was to be conducted without any ostentation, and what it would otherwise have cost was to be divided amongst four poor labourers at Oates.
The approach of summer had not its usual restorative effect upon him. On the other hand, all the bad symptomsof his disease increased. To use his own expression, "the dissolution of the cottage was not far off." In a letter, written on the 1st of June, he earnestly pressed King to come to him, that he might pass some of the last hours of his life "in the conversation of one who is not only the nearest but the dearest to me of any man in the world." Both King and Collins seem to have visited him frequently during the last months of his life; and their society being cheerful, and the topics of their conversation interesting, he appears to have taken great pleasure in their company. He did not, however, find equal enjoyment in the visit of Dr. Edward Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester, who, like himself, was in a bad state of health. "I find two groaning people make but an uncomfortable concert." The moral he draws is, that men should enjoy their health and youth while they have it, "to all the advantages and improvements of an innocent and pleasant life," remembering that merciless old age is in pursuit of them. The lamp of life was now dimly flickering, but once more it burnt up in the socket before going out forever. Peter King had been married on the 10th of September, and he and his bride must be received with all due honours at Oates. King was asked to cater for his own wedding feast, and goodly and dainty is the list of delicacies which he was to buy. But something, perhaps, might be omitted in which Mrs. King took special delight. "If there be anything that you can find your wife loves, be sure that provision be made of that, and plentifully, whether I have mentioned it or no." The feast was to be cooked by "John Gray, who was bred up in my Lord Shaftesbury's kitchen, and was my Lady Dowager's cook." The wedded pair arrived at Oates towards the end of the month, and well can we picture to ourselves the pride andpleasure with which the genial old man entertained the wife of his cousin and adopted son—the adopted son whom he had rescued from the grocer's shop at Exeter, and whose future eminence he must now have pretty clearly foreseen. A few days after King left Oates, he solemnly committed to him by letter the care of Frank Masham. "It is my earnest request to you to take care of the youngest son of Sir Francis and Lady Masham in all his concerns, as if he were your brother. Take care to make him a good, an honest, and an upright man. I have left my directions with him to follow your advice, and I know he will do it; for he never refused to do what I told him was fit." Then, turning to King himself, he says, "I wish you all manner of prosperity in this world, and the everlasting happiness of the world to come. That I loved you, I think you are convinced."
Peter King certainly executed the dying request of his cousin, so far as Frank Masham's material interests were concerned. Soon after he became Lord Chancellor, Frank Masham was appointed to the newly constituted office of Accountant-General in the Court of Chancery, a lucrative post, conferring the same status as a Mastership.
Locke retained his faculties and his cheerfulness to the last; but he grew gradually weaker day by day. "Few people," says Lady Masham, "do so sensibly see death approach them as he did." A few days before his death he received the sacrament from the parish minister, professing his perfect charity with all men, and his "sincere communion with the whole Church of Christ, by whatever name Christ's followers call themselves." In the last hours he talked much with the Mashams about their eternal concerns. As for himself he had lived long enough, and enjoyed a happy life; but he looked forward to abetter. At length, on the afternoon of the 28th of October, the spirit left him, and the earthly tabernacle was dissolved. His body is buried in the churchyard of High Laver, in a pleasant spot on the south side of the church. The Latin epitaph on the wall above the tomb was written by himself. It tells us that he had lived content with his own insignificance: that, brought up among letters, he had advanced just so far as to make an acceptable offering to truth alone: if the traveller wanted 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."
"Were it fit to trouble thee," says Locke in his Epistle to the Reader, "with the history of thisEssay, 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'sEssay, 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 andGassendi, 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 time. The absence of pedantry and ofparti prisin 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 theEssay.
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 maintainedas 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, κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι [Greek: koinai ennoiai], 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."
"It is an established opinion amongst some men that there are in the Understanding certain Innate Principles, some Primary Notions, κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι [Greek: koinai ennoiai], 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 theEssay. 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 thenature 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 better-known works he often employs unguarded and unexplained expressions which might easily suggest the crude form of theà prioritheory 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 hisEssay. Lord Herbert, though indeed he acknowledges that "common notions" (the expression by which he designatesà prioriprinciples) 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.
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 andhow 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 us 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 be 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 receivedby 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 axiomatic, and that, however clear and convincing the reasons for them may be, at all events those reasons require to be stated. It 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.