John Locke

“ His destiny was drawing him nearer and nearer to it, he thought, with slow and irresistible force. In a few years there would be Parliament, office, power, the awaking from stupor of an England hypnotized by malign influences. He saw himself at the table in the now familiar House of green benches, thundering out an Empire's salvation. If he thought more of the awakener than the awakening, it was because he was the same little Paul Kegworthy to whom the cornelian heart had brought the Vision Splendid in the scullery of the Bludston slum. ”

“ He stared at it stupidly as long as he could see it. The light on the Clock Tower announced that the House was sitting. It was all curiously familiar, and yet he felt like an alien. There was not a soul in London to welcome his home-coming. His heart sank with the sense of loneliness. He was as infinitesimal and as isolated a unit in this seething, swarming ant-hill of humanity as amid the starry solitudes of the African veldt.
As chance willed it, he found the house in Pimlico in the same hands as before, and his old room in the attics vacant. ”

“ As I came nearer I recognised the same man, Major Boyce. There were no lights in the lock-keeper's cottage. He and his wife had gone to bed long before. I was so interested that I forgot what I was doing and ran into the hedge so that I nearly came down. There was the noise of the scrape and drag of the machine which must have sounded very loud in the stillness. It startled him, for he looked all round, but he didn't see me, for I was under the hedge. Then suddenly he started running. He ran as if the devil was after him. I saw him squash down his Trilby hat so that it was shapeless. ”

“ John Locke (1632-1704) is famous as the author of a single great philosophical work, the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) . This is a study of the nature of the human mind and of the origin of ideas, which, far more than the work of Bacon and Hobbes, is the basis upon which English philosophy has since been built. Aside from their subjects, both works are models of the new prose, direct, simple, convincing, for which Dryden and the Royal Society labored. They are known to every student of philosophy, but are seldom included in a work of literature. ”

“ The situation was rendered more extraordinary because the Liberal candidate made no appearance in the constituency. Paul inquired anxiously. No one had seen him. After lunch he drove alone to his father's house. The parlour-maid showed him into the hideously furnished and daub-hung dining-room. The Viennese horrors of plaster stags, gnomes and rabbits stared fatuously on the hearth. No fire was in the grate. Very soon Jane entered, tidy, almost matronly in buxom primness, her hair as faultless as if it had come out of a convoluted mould, her grave eyes full of light. ”

“ You have nothing to stand on, you unscientific dogmatists with your positive science which you are always lugging about into places it has no right to be. Long before the school of materialistic monism arose, the ground was removed so that there could be no foundation. Locke was the man, John Locke. Two hundred years ago—more than that, even in his ‘Essay concerning the Human Understanding,’ he proved the non-existence of innate ideas. ”

“ An idea struck him. He remembered that his father, most methodical of men, kept the stubs of his cheque-books ranged along a shelf of an old press between the fireplace and the window. For a moment he hesitated. He had never looked at one of his father's papers in his life. His intention seemed almost criminal.
“I beg your pardon, my dear, but I must,” he said, half aloud, and then finding the key he opened the cupboard. A rapid examination showed him the stub he wanted. The dates on the counterfoils were of three years back. With trembling fingers he ran through the numbers. ”

“ This makes it lawful for a man to kill a thief, who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life, any farther than, by the use of force, so to get him in his power, as to take away his money, or what he pleases, from him; because using force, where he has no right, to get me into his power, let his pretence be what it will, I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me in his power, take away every thing else. And therefore it is lawful for me to treat him as one who has put himself into a state of war with me, i.e. ”

“ A man that walks is at liberty also, not because he walks or moves ; but because he can stand still if he wills it. But if a man sitting still has not a power to remove himself, he is not at liberty ; so likewise a man falling down a precipice, though in motion, is not at liberty, because he cannot stop that motion if he would. This being so, it is plain that a man that is walking, to whom it is proposed to give off walking, is not at liberty, whether he will determine himself to walk, or give off walking or not : he must necessarily prefer one or the other of them ”

“ Perhaps if a man did not sink lower than himself on some occasions, he could not rise higher than himself on others.
He drew a chair to the open French window. The room, being on the top storey, had no balcony, but a wrought-iron balustrade fixed on the outside of the jambs. He leant his arms over it and looked into the familiar street. He hated it. Geneva was intolerable. As soon as his father was able to travel, he would shake the dust of it from off his feet. A bantering letter had come that morning from his cousin, Mrs. Monteith, at Oxford. ”

“ Paul snapped three or four fingers. "Bah!" he cried. "Talk sense. Talk facts. Leave God out of the question for a while. It's blasphemy to connect Him with a sordid business like this. Tell me about myself—my parentage—let me know where I am."
"You're with three people as loves yer, sonny," said Barney Bill. "What passes in this room will never be known to another soul on earth."
"That I swear," said Silas Finn.
"You can publish it broadcast in every newspaper in England," said Paul. "I'm making no bargains. Good God! I'm asking for nothing but the truth. ”

“ Them pots was being used when William the Conqueror was a boy."
"Ten-sixty-six to ten-eighty-seven," said Paul the scholar. "They mun be nine hundred years old."
"Not quite," said Barney Bill, with an air of scrupulous desire for veracity. "But nearly. Lor' lumme!" he exclaimed, after a pause, "it makes one think, doesn't it? One of them there quart mugs—suppose it has been filled, say, ten times a day, every day for nine hundred years—my Gosh! what a Pacific Ocean of beer must have been poured from it! It makes one come over all of religious-like when one puts it to one's head." ”

“ He was very frigid and courtly when he bade the Princess good night at the door of her limousine.
"Ah, que vous etes bete!" she laughed.
He went to bed very angry. She had told him to his face that he was a silly fool. And so he was. He thought of all the brilliantly dignified things he might have said, if the relentless engine had not whirred her away down the drive. But the next morning Lord Francis met him in the wintry garden and smiled and held out a winning hand. Paul hid his hatred beneath the mask of courtesy. ”

“ He went on talking. But Raine heard no more. His brain was in a whirl, a nausea was at his heart. His prized meerschaum fell from his hand, and, knocking against the seat, dropped broken on to the ground; but he was unconscious of it. Everything blazed before him in a livid light. A horrible repulsion from the inert, ignoble figure sprawling beneath him grew into a loathing anger. His fingers thrilled to seize the American again by the collar and shake the life out of him like a rat.
“You damned little cad—betraying her to a stranger—you infernal, drunken little cad!” ”

“ Paul, his head against the lintel of the van door, looked up at them, enthralled by the talk of Barney Bill. The vagabond merchant had the slight drawling inflection of the Home Counties, which gave a soothing effect to a naturally soft voice. To Paul it was the pipes of Pan.
"It mightn't suit everybody," said Barney Bill philosophically. "Some folks prefer gas to laylock. I don't say that they're wrong. But I likes laylock."
"What's laylock?" asked Paul.
His friend explained. No lilac bloomed in the blighted Springs of Bludston. ”

“ On the appointed day he waited, with a four-wheeled cab, by the prison gate. The early morning sunshine of midsummer flooded the world with pale glory, its magic even softening the grim, forbidding walls. A light southwest wind brought the pure scents of the down from many a sleeping garden and woodland far away. The quiet earth sang its innocence, for wickedness was not yet abroad to scream down the song. Even John Risca, anti-sentimentalist, was stirred. What sweeter welcome, what gladder message of hope, could greet one issuing into the upper air from the gloomy depths of Hades? ”

“ Paul scudded off, his heart aflame, his hand, as he ran, tucking in the shirt whose evasion from the breeches was beyond the control of the single brace. Besides, crawling on your stomach is dislocating even to the most neatly secured attire. But his action was mechanical. His thoughts were with his goddess. In his inarticulate mind he knew himself to be her champion. He sped under her consecration. He knew he could run. He could run like a young deer. Though despised, could he not outrun any of the youth in Budge Street? ”

“ He smiled again and looked at her with his calm, certain eyes. “A man does not live in the far Orient for nothing. I know you would. This way,” he said, as the lift-door opened. He led them down a corridor, Quixtus following, a step or two behind, like a man in a trance.
The awful moment was at hand, the moment which, in the tea-shop and in the hotel, had seemed far, far distant, hidden in the mists of some unreal devil-land; which at dinner had begun to loom through the mists ”

“ He led the way through the booking offices to the great glass-covered station, with its blue glare of electric light and babel of sounds.
“My heroic Ella,” he murmured. She raised her eyes somewhat appealingly. Then he saw she had been crying; her lashes were still wet.
“Those tears are the last you shall ever shed,” he whispered, bending down to her ear. In reply she held out the crumpled ball of paper which she had kept in her hand. He stood by the platform gate and read, and looking at the telegram, reflected. The instinct of the self-indulgent man prompted a reply. ”

“ Paul had never heard such exquisite tones from human lips. To his ears, accustomed to the harsh Lancashire burr, her low, accentless voice was music. So another of his senses was caught in the enchantment.
"Yo' speak so pretty," said he.
At that moment a spruce but perspiring young teacher came up. "We're going to have some boys' races, miss, and we want the ladies to look on. His lordship has offered prizes. The first is a boys' race-under eleven."
"You can join in that, anyhow," she said to Paul. "Go along and let me see you win." ”

“ For the civil government can give no new right to the church, nor the church to the civil government. So that, whether the magistrate join himself to any church, or separate from it, the church remains always as it was before — a free and voluntary society. It neither requires the power of the sword by the magistrate's coming to it, nor does it lose the right of instruction and excommunication by his going from it. This is the fundamental and immutable right of a spontaneous society — that it has power to remove any of its members who transgress the rules of its institution; ”

“ Wherever any performance or forbearance are not equally in a man’s power ; wherever doing or not doing will not equally follow upon the preference of his mind directing it, there he is not free, though perhaps the action may be voluntary. So that the idea of liberty is, the idea of a power in any agent to do or forbear any particular action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, whereby either of them is preferred to the other : where either of them is not in the power of the agent to be produced by him according to his volition, there he is not at liberty ”

“ I thought she was getting on your nerves. But you want pulling together. That confounded place you've been to has utterly upset you.”
“On the contrary,” said I, “it has steadied and amplified my conception of sublunary affairs. It has shown me that motley is much more profitable wear than the edged toga of the senator—”
“Oh, for God's sake, dry up,” cried young England, “and tell me what answers I'm to give these people!”
He seemed so earnest about it that I humoured him; and my correspondents seemed so earnest that I humoured them. But it was a grim jest. ”

“ In the end Shaftesbury was committed to the Tower, tried and acquitted. More insurrectionary plots followed in the summer of 1682, after which, suspected at home, the versatile statesman escaped to Holland, and died at Amsterdam in January 1683. In these two years Locke was much at Oxford and in Somerset, for the later movements of Shaftesbury did not commend themselves to him. Yet the government had their eyes upon him. “John Locke lives a very cunning unintelligible life here,” Prideaux reported from Oxford in 1682. ”

“ Paul laughed, for she did not refer to the first meeting of all. "I'm afraid I was very young and fatuous," said he. "It was years ago. I hadn't grown up."
"Never mind. We talked about waking the country from its sleep."
"And you gave me a phrase, Lady Chudley—'the Awakener of England.' It stuck. It crystallized all sorts of vague ambitions. I've never forgotten it for five consecutive minutes. But how can you remember a casual act of graciousness to an unimportant boy?"
"No boy who dreams of England's greatness is unimportant," she said. "You've proved me to be right. ”