Alexander Campbell Fraser

“ For Locke saw that the ultimate questions about our knowledge and its extent presuppose questions about ideas. Without ideas knowledge is impossible. “Idea” is thus a leading term in the Essay. It is used in a way peculiar to himself—“the term which, I think, stands best for whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks” or “whatever it is which the mind can be employed about.” But ideas themselves are, he reminds us, “neither true nor false, being nothing but bare appearances,” phenomena as we might call them. ”

“ Locke was perhaps too little read in the literature of philosophy to do full justice to those more subtle thinkers who, from Plato downwards, have recognized the need for categories of the understanding and presuppositions of reason in the constitution of knowledge. “Innate,” Lord Shaftesbury says, “is a word Mr Locke poorly plays on.” For the real question is not about the time when ideas entered the mind, but “whether the constitution of man be such that, being adult and grown up, the ideas of order and administration of a God will not infallibly and necessarily spring up in him.” ”

“ The attempt to conceive it is like the attempt positively to conceive immensity or eternity: we are involved in an endless, ultimately incomprehensible, regress. We fail when we try either positively to phenomenalize substance or to dispense with the superphenomenal abstraction. Our only positive idea is of an aggregate of phenomena. And it is only thus, he says, that we can approach a positive conception of God, namely by “enlarging indefinitely some of the simple ideas we received from reflection.” Why man must remain in this mental predicament, Locke did not inquire. ”

“ For natural science depends, he thinks, on knowledge of the relations between their secondary qualities on the one hand, and the mathematical qualities of their atoms on the other, or else “on something yet more remote from our comprehension.” Now, as perception of these atoms and their relations is beyond us, we must be satisfied with inductive presumptions, for which “experimental verification” affords, after all, only conclusions that wider experience may prove to be inadequate. But this moral venture Locke accepts as “sufficient for our purposes.” ”

“ All that is strictly knowledge is reached in these two ways. But there is a third sort, namely sense-perception, which hardly deserves the name. For “our perceptions of the particular existence of finite beings without us” go beyond mere probability, yet they are not purely rational. There is nothing self-contradictory in the supposition that our perceptions of things external are illusions, although we are somehow unable to doubt them. ”

“ Turning from abstract mathematical and moral relations to concrete relations of coexistence and succession among phenomena—the third sort of knowable relation—Locke finds the light of pure reason disappear; although these relations form “the greatest and most important part of what we desire to know.” Of these, including as they do all inductive science, he reports that demonstrable knowledge “is very short, if indeed we have any at all”; and are not thrown wholly on presumptions of probability, or else left in ignorance. Man cannot attain perfect and infallible science of bodies. ”

“ IV. Philosophy.—The Essay Concerning Human Understanding embodies Locke’s philosophy. It was the first attempt on a great scale, and in the Baconian spirit, to estimate critically the certainty and the adequacy of human knowledge, when confronted with God and the universe.
The “Introduction” to the Essay is the keynote to the whole. The ill-fortune of men in their past endeavours to comprehend themselves and their environment is attributed in a great measure to their disposition to extend their inquiries into matters beyond the reach of human understanding. ”

“ Locke begins with our complex ideas of Space, Succession or Time, and Number.
Space, he says, appears when we use our senses of sight and touch; succession he finds “suggested” by all the changing phenomena of sense, and by “what passes in our minds”; number is “suggested by every object of our senses, and every thought of our minds, by everything that either doth Immensity and endlessness and infinity. exist or can be imagined.” ”

“ We find ourselves inevitably “conscious of a different sort of perception,” when we actually see the sun by day and when we only imagine the sun at night.
Locke next inquired to what extent knowledge—in the way either of intuitive certainty, demonstrative certainty, or sense perception—is possible, in regard to each of the four (already mentioned) sorts of knowable relation. There is only one of the four in which our knowledge is co-extensive with our ideas. ”

“ The uneducated mass of mankind, he complains, either “seldom reason at all,” or “put passion in the place of reason,” or “for want of large, sound, round-about sense” they direct their minds only to one part of the evidence, “converse with one sort of men, read but one sort of books, and will not come in the hearing of but one sort of notions, and so carve out to themselves a little Goshen in the intellectual world, where light shines, and, as they conclude, day blesses them; but the rest of the vast expansion they give up to night and darkness, and avoid coming near it.” ”

“ Locke’s thoughts about Causality and Active Power are especially noteworthy, for he rests our knowledge of God and of the external universe on those ultimate ideas. The intellectual demand for “the cause” of an event is what we find we cannot help having; yet it is a demand for what in the end the mind cannot Causality. fully grasp. Locke is content to trace the idea of “cause and effect,” as far as mere natural science goes, to our “constant observation” that “qualities and finite substances begin to exist, and receive their existence from other beings which produce them.” ”

“ The primary, which are quantities rather than qualities, are inseparable from matter, and virtually identical with the ideas we have of them. On the other hand, there is nothing perceived in the mathematical relations of bodies which in the least resembles their secondary qualities. If there were no sentient beings in existence, the secondary qualities would cease to exist, “except perhaps as unknown modes of the primary, or, if not, as something still more obscure.” ”

“ Faith in the existence of God is virtually with Locke an expression of faith in the principle of active causality in its ultimate universality. Each person knows that he now exists, and is convinced that he had a beginning; with not less intuitive certainty he knows that “nothing can no more produce any real being than it can be equal to two right angles.” ”

“ The second sort of knowable relation is sometimes intuitively and sometimes demonstrably discernible. Morality, Locke thinks, as well as mathematical quantity, is capable of being demonstrated. “Where there is no property there is no injustice,” is an example of a proposition “as certain as any demonstration in Euclid.” Only we are more apt to be biassed, and thus to leave reason in abeyance, in dealing with questions of morality than in dealing with problems in mathematics. ”

“ Turning from our knowledge of Spirit to our knowledge of Matter, nearly all that one can affirm or deny about “things external is,” according to Locke, not knowledge but venture or presumptive trust. We have, strictly speaking, no “knowledge” of real beings beyond our own self-conscious existence, Knowledge of the external world. the existence of God, and the existence of objects of sense as long as they are actually present to sense. “When I see an external object at a distance, a man for instance, I cannot but be satisfied of his existence while I am looking at him. ”

“ Persecution can only transform a man into a hypocrite; belief is legitimately formed only by discernment of sufficient evidence; apart from evidence, a man has no right to control the understanding; he cannot determine arbitrarily what his neighbours must believe. Thus Locke’s pleas for religious toleration resolve at last into his philosophical view of the foundation and limits of human knowledge.
II. The Reasonableness of Christianity.—The principles that governed Locke’s social polity largely determined his attitude to Christianity. ”

“ The “light of reason,” the “candle of the Lord,” that is set up in us may be found to shine bright enough for all our purposes. If human understanding cannot fully solve the infinite problem of the universe, man may at least see that at no stage of his finite experience is he necessarily the sport of chance, and that he can practically secure his own wellbeing.
The last book of the Essay, which treats of Knowledge and Probability, is concerned more directly than the three preceding ones with Locke’s professed design. It has been suggested that Locke may have begun with this book. ”

“ Such are modes of quantity in space, and time and number, under which Locke reports that we find ourselves mentally impelled towards immensity, eternity and the innumerable—in a word, towards Infinity which seems to transcend quantity; then there is the complex thought of Substance, to which we find ourselves mysteriously impelled, when the simple phenomena of the senses come to be regarded as qualities of “something”; again there is the obscure idea of the identity of persons, notwithstanding their constant changes of state ”

“ In bodies we observe no active agency, only a sustained natural order in the succession of passive sensuous phenomena. The true source of change in the material world must be analogous to what we are conscious of when we exert volition. Locke here unconsciously approaches the spiritual view of active power in the physical universe afterwards taken by Berkeley, forming the constructive principle of his philosophy.
Locke’s book about Ideas leads naturally to his Third Book which is concerned with Words, or the sensible signs of ideas. ”

“ The “verification” of this hypothesis, offered in the thirteenth and following chapters of the second book, goes to show in detail that even those ideas which are “most abstruse,” how remote soever they may seem from original data of outward sense, or of inner consciousness, “are only such as the understanding frames to itself by repeating and joining together simple ideas that it had at first, either from perceiving objects of sense, or from reflection upon its own operations.” ”

“ The Fourth Book, about Knowledge proper and Probability, closes the Essay. Knowledge, he says, is perception of relations among ideas; it is expressed in our affirmations and negations; and real knowledge is discernment of the relations of ideas to what is real. ”

“ As he always kept the useful in his eye in all his disquisitions, he esteemed the employments of men only in proportion to the good they were capable of producing; for which cause he had no great value for the critics who waste their lives in composing words and phrases in coming to the choice of a various reading, in a passage that has after all nothing important in it. ”

“ In his Conduct of the Understanding the pupil is invited to occupy the point at which “a full view of all that relates to a question” is to be had, and at which alone a rational discernment of truth is possible. ”

“ He tries to phenomenalize it, and thus resolve it into simple ideas; but he finds that it cannot be Substance and personality. phenomenalized, and yet that we cannot dispense with it. An unsubstantiated succession of phenomena, without a centre of unity to which they are referable as qualities, is unintelligible: we cannot have a language of adjectives without nouns. Locke had some apprehension of this transcendent intellectual obligation. According to his report, “the mind” always obliges us to suppose Something beyond positive phenomena to which the phenomena must be attributed ”

“ The demonstrable rational necessity, instead of being innate, or conscious from our birth, may lie latent or subconscious in the individual mind; but for all that, when we gradually become more awake intellectually, such truths are seen to “carry their own evidence along with them.” ”

“ Although the second book is a sort of inventory of our ideas, as distinguished from the certainty and boundaries of our knowledge, Locke even here makes the assumption that the “simple ideas” of the five senses are practically qualities of things which exist without us, and that the mental “operations” discovered by “reflection” are those of a person continuously existing. ”