An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Second Treatise of Goverment

John Locke

An Essay concerning Human Understanding

with the

Second Treatise of Government

with an introduction by

Mark G. Spencer

WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

OF WORLD LITERATURE

This edition of An Essay concerning Human Understanding with the Second Treatise of Government first published by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2014

Introduction © Mark G. Spencer 2014

Published as an ePublication 2015

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Contents

Introduction

Further Reading

An Essay concerning Human Understanding

The Epistle Dedicatory

The Epistle to the Reader

Book 1: Of Innate Notions

Analytical Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: No innate principles in the mind

Chapter 3: No innate practical principles

Chapter 4: Other considerations concerning innate principles, both speculative and practical

Book 2: Of Ideas

Analytical contents

Chapter 1: Of ideas in general, and their original

Chapter 2: Of simple ideas

Chapter 3: Of ideas of one sense

Chapter 4: Of solidity

Chapter 5: Of simple ideas of divers senses

Chapter 6: Of simple ideas of reflection

Chapter 7: Of simple ideas of both sensation and reflection

Chapter 8: Some further considerations concerning our simple ideas

Chapter 9: Of perception

Chapter 10: Of retention

Chapter 11: Of discerning, and other operations of the mind

Chapter 12: Of complex ideas

Chapter 13: Complex ideas of simple modes: and first, of the simple modes of the idea of space

Chapter 14: Of duration and its simple modes

Chapter 15: Of duration and expansion, considered together

Chapter 16: Of number

Chapter 17: Of infinity

Chapter 18: Of other simple modes

Chapter 19: Of the modes of thinking

Chapter 20: Of modes of pleasure and pain

Chapter 21: Of power

Chapter 22: Of mixed modes

Chapter 23: Of our complex ideas of substances

Chapter 24: Of collective ideas of substances

Chapter 25: Of relation

Chapter 26: Of cause and effect, and other relations

Chapter 27: Of identity and diversity

Chapter 28: Of other relations

Chapter 29: Of clear and obscure, distinct and confused ideas

Chapter 30: Of real and fantastical ideas

Chapter 31: Of adequate and inadequate ideas

Chapter 32: Of true and false ideas

Chapter 33: Of the association of ideas

Book 3: Of Words

Analytical Contents

Chapter 1: Of words or language in general

Chapter 2: Of the signification of words

Chapter 3: Of general terms

Chapter 4: Of the names of simple ideas

Chapter 5: Of the names of mixed modes and relations

Chapter 6: Of the names of substances

Chapter 7: Of particles

Chapter 8: Of abstract and concrete terms

Chapter 9: Of the imperfection of words

Chapter 10: Of the abuse of words

Chapter 11: Of the remedies of the foregoing imperfections and abuses

Book 4: Of knowledge and probability

Analytical Contents

Chapter 1: Of knowledge in general

Chapter 2: Of the degrees of our knowledge

Chapter 3: Of the extent of human knowledge

Chapter 4: Of the reality of knowledge

Chapter 5: Of truth in general

Chapter 6: Of universal propositions: their truth and certainty

Chapter 7: Of maxims

Chapter 8: Of trifling propositions

Chapter 9: Of our knowledge of existence

Chapter 10: Of our knowledge of the existence of a God

Chapter 11: Of our knowledge of the existence of other things

Chapter 12: Of the improvement of our knowledge

Chapter 13: Some further considerations concerning our knowledge

Chapter 14: Of judgment

Chapter 15: Of probability

Chapter 16: Of the degrees of assent

Chapter 17: Of reason

Chapter 18: Of faith and reason, and their distinct provinces

Chapter 19: Of enthusiasm

Chapter 20: Of wrong assent, or error

Chapter 21: Of the division of the sciences

Second Treatise of Government

1764 Editor’s note

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2: Of the state of nature

Chapter 3: Of the state of war

Chapter 4: Of slavery

Chapter 5: Of property

Chapter 6: Of paternal power

Chapter 7: Of political or civil society

Chapter 8: Of the beginning of political societies

Chapter 9: Of the ends of political society and government

Chapter 10: Of the forms of a commonwealth

Chapter 11: Of the extent of the legislative power

Chapter 12: Of the legislative, executive, and federative power of the commonwealth

Chapter 13: Of the subordination of the powers of the commonwealth

Chapter 14: Of prerogative

Chapter 15: Of paternal, political, and despotical power, considered together

Chapter 16: Of conquest

Chapter 17: Of usurpation

Chapter 18: Of tyranny

Chapter 19: Of the dissolution of government

Introduction

John Locke and his World

John Locke (1632–1704) was perhaps the most influential non-fiction writer of the English eighteenth century. His most important literary masterpieces, the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Two Treatises of Government (1690), were published before the eighteenth century began. Both works were products of the particular environments in which they were written, but they weighed heavily on the general development of the history of ideas in the eighteenth century. They did so long after Locke’s life came to an end and often in much different environments than they were formulated and written. Indeed, Locke and his works are regularly and rightly presented as foundations for the Age of Enlightenment. Locke’s primary epistemological message – that the mind at birth is a blank sheet waiting to be filled by the experiences of the senses – complemented his primary political message – that human beings are free and equal and have the right to envision, create and direct the governments that rule them and the societies within which they live. In these respects, one might think of Locke as preparing the way for the eighteenth century. As we shall see, that is how he saw himself: in his Essay concerning Human Understanding he remarked that he was ‘employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge’.

Both the Essay and the Second Treatise (by far the more inter­esting of the Two Treatises) were widely read by Locke’s con­temp­­oraries and near-contemporaries, and not only in Britain. Locke, already known to Dutch and French intellectuals by reviews of the 1690s, was read on the Continent in the early Enlightenment. And, at the other end of the period his impact on Revolutionary America was significant, deep, and long-lasting. Everywhere, Locke’s eighteenth-century readers included learned philosophers, educators, historians and political thinkers, but also local community and political leaders, students, and many others eager to take advantage of the expanding world of print culture that was a central part of the Enlightenment. Today, Locke remains an accessible author whose Essay and Second Treatise can still be read with pleasure by an engaged public around the world. Some will read him to know more about the beginnings of the modern era; others will seek arguments to be used in present-day debates.

Locke’s life

John Locke was born 29 August 1632 at Wrington, in northern Somerset, near the city of Bristol, in the southwest of England. That part of England was wool country and Locke’s father and mother, John Locke (1606–1661) and Agnes Keene (1597–1654), came from families that had long been involved in the cloth trades. Both parents were also staunchly Puritan and might be aptly described as belonging to the lesser gentry. Locke’s father had strayed from the family business and was trained and employed as a country attorney. Otherwise he did not lead a notable life. Lady Damaris (Cudworth) Masham (1658–1708), a philosopher and one of Locke’s earliest biographers, recorded that when Locke mentioned his father it was always ‘with great respect and affection’. Of his mother, Locke recorded that she was ‘a very pious woman and an affectionate mother’.

Locke’s childhood and early family life (he had only one sibling, a younger brother, Thomas, born in 1637, who survived to adulthood) appear to have been secure, if uneventful. Such was not the case with the Britain that Locke was born into. When Locke was a boy of ten, long-simmering political tensions in England boiled over into full-out civil war. On one side in the English Civil War (1642–1651) were the Royalist supporters of King Charles I (1600–1649) and the Stuart monarchy; on the other side were the Parlimentarians, with Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) at the helm. In the background were the Scots who complicated life for both sides. Many ideas related to state and government were in the air in Britain and were in the background of Locke’s own developing political thought. The Civil War also had a more immediate impact on the young Locke. Locke’s father served against the king. His enlistment with Parliamentary forces during the war provided him, in 1647, with a scholarship, as a non-resident student, to enter Westminster School. That had been made poss­ible through Locke’s father’s war-time connections with Alex­ander Popham (1605–1669), MP for Bath.

At Westminster, along with some 200 schoolmates, Locke mostly studied languages: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The school’s headmaster, Richard Busby (1606–1695), was renowned as much for his liberal use of the birch as for his abilities as a teacher. Busby was also a staunch Royalist. Few of Locke’s biographers can resist recounting that Busby’s students could often be found praying for Charles I, even when the king was executed within earshot of the school on 1 January 1649. Locke appears to have been quite a good student (only the best studied Hebrew), but his later reflections cast Westminster in a negative light. It is hard to know what if any lasting impact these years had on the young philo­sopher and political theorist, but as a writer on education Locke always recommended gentleness, not beating, and for gentlemen he suggested a private, not public, education.

In 1650, an eighteen-year-old Locke was elected to a student­ship (as a King’s Scholar) to study at Christ Church, Oxford. He matriculated on 27 November 1652. He would remain at Oxford for most of the next fifteen years (until 1667) although he was not always in residence. Oxford was to change Locke’s life in lasting ways. For one thing, he began to mix with other young scholars whose intellectual attainments would be great, such as fellow King’s Scholar John Dryden (1631–1700). Importantly, it was at Oxford that Locke began to pursue scientific interests in a serious way. One of Locke’s notable twentieth-century bio­graphers, Maurice Cranston (1920–1993), casts Locke’s turn to science in this way:

When he looked back on the troubled history of his country, Locke saw two particularly potent sources of human error. One was unreflective adhesion to tradition: the fault especially of Royalists in political and social life and of philosophers in acad­emic life; the other was ‘enthusiasm’ or the reliance on emotional convictions as a basis of truth, the fault especially of Puritans and dissenters. Reacting against both these attitudes, Locke embraced science gratefully.

Science, as Locke understood it, was somewhat Baconian. It offered better methods of getting at truth, the possibilities of progress, and a model of collective endeavours which might transform the world. Locke graduated BA on 14 February 1656 and then, two years and a few months later, MA, on 29 June 1658. At Oxford he also began to study medicine, a pursuit which occupied him for many years and was one of the two ways to become a scientist in the seventeenth century.*

[* footnote: The other way was to study mathematics. Locke took the first, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) the second way.]

In 1660, King Charles II (1630–1685) was restored to the English throne, bringing an end to the Republican interruption. These were developments that Locke welcomed. At about the same time, Locke’s father died, on 13 February 1661, leaving a small inheritance of land and properties for his sons. These are also the years in which Locke increasingly turned his attention to writing, mostly on political topics; among the texts were what would become his Two Tracts on Government (work not published until the twentieth century).

In the early 1660s, Locke held a number of positions at Oxford, including, in 1664, an appointment as Censor of Moral Philosophy at Christ Church. He also worked as a tutor, and wrote – including the text of what would later be published as Essays on the Law of Nature – while he otherwise absorbed much that was going on in the intellectual life of the college. While today we often think of Locke as being a formal philosopher, it is important to remember that he was never so in a narrow way. Locke wrote philosophy, but he wrote on many other topics as well, including medicine, chemistry, political economy, theology and education. His first publications were poems. He was also active on the fringes of the political world, first in 1665 as a secretary to Sir Walter Vane who was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Elector of Brandenburg, at Cleves. Locke began then to know Europe.

Some of Locke’s varied and wide-ranging interests come through in his friends. One of these was James Tyrrell (1642–1718), who like Locke would later publish an attack on Sir Robert Filmer (c. 1588–1653) in The Patriarch Unmonarch’d (1681) and again in his much-read 5-volume historical work, The General History of Eng­land, both Ecclesiastical and Civil (1700–1704). Another friend was Robert Boyle (1627–1691) who, like Locke, had varied interests of his own. Today we remember Boyle as the ‘father of modern chemistry’ and for ‘Boyle’s Law’, but his wide-ranging interests included many aspects of natural philosophy and its relation to other topics, including theology. At Oxford, Boyle maintained a laboratory and gathered around him like-minded scholars. An important forum here was the Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club, whose members included John Wilkins (1614–1672), John Wallis (1616–1703), Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and others who became founders of the Royal Society. Wilkins, later a bishop, wrote its history; Wallis was an important mathematician, and Hooke its experimenter and one of the most important English scientists of the time.

Another lasting acquaintance dating from his Oxford years was Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621–1683), later the first Earl of Shaftesbury. In 1666, Locke was introduced to Lord Ashley by his friend Dr David Thomas, an Oxford scholar in Boyle’s circle with whom Locke had earlier made chemical experiments. Locke and Lord Ashley got on well; so well that in 1667, Locke was invited to live at Exeter House in the Strand, Lord Ashley’s London resid­ence. He accepted. He acted as Ash­ley’s personal doctor, tutored various family members (including the future third Earl, later author of the Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times [1711] ) and also widened his circle of friends, which now included many of the leading physicians of the age, such as Dr Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689). Sydenham had been a surgeon during the Civil Wars and had recently published a controversial book based partly on his exper­iences, Methodus curandi febres [the method of curing fevers]. Locke mixed with other medical experts and his own skills had im­proved such that when his patron became ill with a life-threatening liver problem, Locke successfully operated on him, inserting a silver pipe to drain the abscess. The move to London also brought Locke to the center of England’s political life in the turbulent 1660s and 1670s. Ashley was a Whig in a world more conservative than he.

By the late 1660s, Locke had published a number of medical tracts, had produced his An Essay concerning Toleration (Ashley, an early champion of toleration, had been instrumental here), and had begun to be noted by the learned world. One indication of this was his election, on 23 November 1668, to the Royal Society. That same year, on Ashley’s urging, Locke became involved in the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, although what precise role he played in the drafting of The Fundamental Constit­utions for the Government of Carolina remains unclear. By the early 1670s, probably as early as 1671, writing in what he described as a ‘discontinued way’, Locke had produced a complete draft of what would later be published as the Essay concerning Human Under­standing. In fact, two early manu­scripts of the Essay have survived that date to this period. About this time he also became acquainted with John Aubrey (1626–1697), a close friend of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). The authoritarianism and contract theory of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) demonstrably impacted on Locke’s developing political ideas. In 1675, partly due to ill-health, Locke toured parts of France, staying for times at Mont­pellier, Toulouse and Paris, before making his way back to Oxford in 1679. He brought with him a fascinating travel diary and gave thought to his Essay, but there were other things on his mind during these years too.

As Shaftesbury became more and more embroiled in English politics, so did Locke. He had begun as medical advisor and house­hold tutor but increasingly became one of Shaftesbury’s advisors and collaborators on all things political. Along with a group of similarly minded Whigs, Shaftesbury was intent that King Charles II exclude his brother James, a Catholic, from any right to succeed to the throne of England. The Parliamentary debates and pamphlet war which resulted gave rise to what is known as the ‘Exclusion Crisis’. Shaftesbury and Locke were playing a danger­ous game. Shaftesbury came under suspicion for high treason and found himself imprisoned for a time in the Tower of London. When released in 1682, he made his way to the Netherlands, dying there in 1683. Some time in the late 1670s or early 1680s, Locke appears to have sketched out the bulk of his Two Treatises, although scholars continue to debate precisely when that project was com­pleted. In 1683, fearing for his own life because of his connections with Shaftesbury, Locke also fled to the Netherlands, living there until 1689. In the Netherlands, he continued to work on the text of his Essay, especially on what would be Books 3 and 4. When the events of the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) made William and Mary England’s rulers, Locke returned to England. He did so with completed drafts of the Essay and Two Treatises. In November 1689, the Two Treatises was advertised; in December 1689, the Essay was first published (although the date on the title page was 1690) in an edition dedicated to Thomas Herbert, eighth earl of Pembroke (c. 1656–1733).

In 1691, Locke, now in his late 50s, accepted an invitation to live with Sir Francis Masham (c. 1646–1723) and his wife Lady Dam­aris (Cudworth) Masham, mentioned earlier in this essay as one of Locke’s early biographers. In the Masham’s manor house, Oates, located in High Laver, Essex, Locke occupied several rooms and found housing for his personal library which by that time con­tained over 5,000 volumes. In this setting, he continued to write, publish­ing Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), among other smaller things. He also continued to revise what he had previously published, and all the time he remained gainfully employed in political life. He acted for the Carolina Company and was a Commissioner of the Board of Trade and Plantations. Locke died on 28 October 1704.

The Essay

Biographers of Locke often discuss his Second Treatise before they discuss his Essay. However, there are compelling reasons for looking at the philosophical work before the political one. Certainly it was the Essay concerning Human Understanding that secured Locke’s reputation in the history of ideas in the eighteenth century. As the Locke scholar Alexander Campbell Fraser (1819–1914) once put it: ‘Few books in the literature of philosophy have so widely represented the spirit of the age and country in which they appeared, or have so influenced opinion afterwards, as Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding’. How do we explain that impact? What was it that Locke said that was so compelling? And how did his philosophical thought inform what he wrote on political theory?

The starting point for much of Locke’s philosophy was his keenness to explore how it was that humans arrived at their knowledge of the world. What do humans know? How do they know what they know? These are the basic questions that inter­ested him. As he put it in the ‘Epistle to the Reader’, a sort of preface to the Essay (reprinted below), Locke’s starting point was to ‘examine our own abilities, and see what objects our under­standings were, or were not, fitted to deal with.’ His intended reading audience was not one of scholars and philosophers shut up in their closets. He writes:

I pretend not to publish this Essay for the information of men of large thoughts and quick apprehensions; to such masters of know­ledge I profess myself a scholar, and therefore warn them beforehand not to expect anything here but what, being spun out of my own coarse thoughts, is fitted to men of my own size, to whom, perhaps, it will not be unacceptable that I have taken some pains to make plain and familiar to their thoughts some truths which established prejudice, or the abstractness of the ideas themselves, might render difficult.

Locke’s was philosophy with a purpose. As John W. Yolton (1921–2005) has shown, ‘the Essay is about human understanding’, but ‘it is also an essay on man. Man is both a physical and rational Being, an actor in the material and social worlds, and a moral Being striving to live in a way that earns him a place in the next life.’ Locke saw himself as part of a larger endeavour here. As he put it in an often-quoted passage:

The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity; but everyone must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.

Locke’s Essay is divided into four books: Of Innate Notions, Of Ideas, Of Words, and Of Knowledge and Opinion. The intro­ductory section to Book 1 might usefully be thought of as an ‘Introduction’ to the whole. Locke there explains that he will follow what he calls an ‘historical, plain method’. In short he will look at the facts given in collections of them, his histories. He will attempt to ‘search out the bounds between opinion and knowledge; and examine by what measures, in things whereof we have no certain knowledge, we ought to regulate our assent and moderate our persuasion.’ This method, he writes, might efficiently be divided into three prongs:

First, I shall inquire into the original of those ideas, notions, or whatever else you please to call them, which a man observes, and is conscious to himself he has in his mind; and the ways whereby the understanding comes to be furnished with them.

Secondly, I shall endeavour to show what knowledge the under­standing hath by those ideas; and the certainty, evidence, and extent of it.

Thirdly, I shall make some inquiry into the nature and grounds of faith or opinion: whereby I mean that assent which we give to any proposition as true, of whose truth yet we have no certain knowledge. And here we shall have occasion to examine the reasons and degrees of assent.

What lessons will these inquiries teach us? Locke’s message partly is one of moderation. He says he wants to

prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities.

But setting these limits to the human capacity to know ought not to freeze, or even slow, human initiative; it should not lead us to skeptical resignation. Far from it: ‘If we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do as wisely as he who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly.’ Knowing one’s limits, then, is a liberating thing. In Locke’s system, human agency is a winner.

In Book 1, Locke shows that, contrary to what was commonly believed to be the case – in writers such as René Descartes (1596–1650) or Locke’s own contemporaries, the Cambridge Platonists – there are no ‘innate principles’ or ‘primary notions’ that are ‘stamped upon the mind of man’. Locke’s approach is an empirical one that harks back to Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) and even Malebranche (1638–1715), and to scientists like Galileo (1564–1642). For them and him observation is the place to start one’s investigation. Look about and measure. Man­kind as he is found in the world is what we can know. In the Essay, Locke appeals to those who look to the ‘history of mankind’, casting their eyes ‘abroad beyond the smoke of their own chim­neys’. Doing so shows that there are no innate ideas implanted in the human mind. Where do those ideas come from?

Book 2, ‘Of Ideas’, is the longest book of the volume. But its premise can be put quite simply. Locke asks at the outset: ‘Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished?’ His answer: ‘in one word, from experience’. He explains:

Our observation, employed either about external sensible ob­jects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflec­ted on by ourselves, is that which supplies our under­standings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.

First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them.’

This process Locke denotes as ‘Sensation’. A second source of ideas Locke labels ‘Reflection’. Reflection is ‘the perception of the operations of our own minds within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got’. Or, in a sentence, ‘These two, I say, viz., external material things, as the objects of Sensation, and the operations of our own mind within, as the objects of Reflection, are to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings.’ Much of the remainder of Book 2 is an elaboration of this central point and an effort to define types, or sorts, of ideas (simple, complex, clear, obscure, distinct, complex, fantastical, adequate, inadequate, true, false, etc.) and to differentiate them one from the other. The concluding chapter, ‘Of the Association of Ideas’, is an important one. Here, Locke argues that ‘some of our ideas have a natural correspondence and connexion one with another’; so much so that our reason might ‘hold them together’. As well, he argues, ‘there is another connexion of ideas wholly owing to chance or custom.’

Ideas that in themselves are not all of kin, come to be so united in some men’s minds, that it is very hard to separate them; they always keep in company, and the one no sooner at any time comes into the understanding, but its associate appears with it; and if they are more than two which are thus united, the whole gang, always inseparable, show themselves together.

This ‘wrong connexion’ of ideas Locke holds responsible for many ills; and these he paints with a number of memorable examples. For instance, he says,

Many children, imputing the pain they endured at school to the books they were corrected for, so join those ideas together that a book becomes their aversion; and they are never reconciled to the study and use of them all their lives after; and thus reading becomes a torment to them, which otherwise possibly they might have made the great pleasure of their lives.

Such ‘wrong connexions’ are even the root of ‘hatreds’ that ‘are often begotten from slight and almost innocent occasions, and quarrels propagated and continued in the world.’

Book 3 traces parts of the natural history of language, the starting point of which is man’s sociability:

God, having designed man for a sociable creature, made him not only with an inclination and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind, but furnished him also with language, which was to be the great instrument and common tie of society.

Locke explores the signi­ficance of words and terms and the process of naming. He also gives considerable space to problems associated with language and words. Words are frequently imperfect as ‘the very nature of words makes it almost unavoidable for many of them to be doubtful and uncertain in their significations.’ But, even worse, words are often abused on purpose. As Locke puts it:

Besides the imperfection that is naturally in language, and the obscurity and confusion that is so hard to be avoided in the use of words, there are several wilful faults and neglects which men are guilty of in this way of communication, whereby they render these signs less clear and distinct in their signification than naturally they need to be.

That is especially so at the hands of so-called ‘learned disputants’ and ‘all-knowing doctors’ whose ‘parts and learning are estimated by their skill in disputing’, rather than by a true measure of knowledge. In a memorable passage worth quoting at length, Locke has a go at such false notions of human understanding linked to the penchant for disputing:

This, though a very useless skill, and that which I think the direct opposite to the ways of knowledge, hath yet passed hitherto under the laudable and esteemed names of subtlety and acuteness, and has had the applause of the Schools, and encouragement of one part of the learned men of the world. And no wonder, since the philosophers of old (the disputing and wrangling philosophers I mean, such as Lucian wittily and with reason taxes), and the schoolmen since, aiming at glory and esteem for their great and universal knowledge, easier a great deal to be pretended to than really acquired, found this a good expedient to cover their ignor­ance with a curious and inexplicable web of perplexed words, and procure to themselves the admiration of others by unintelligible terms, the apter to produce wonder because they could not be understood: whilst it appears in all history, that these profound doctors were no wiser nor more useful than their neighbours, and brought but small advantage to human life or the societies wherein they lived.

Precisely who Locke had in his crosshairs here, modern scholars continue to debate, but it is clear they included scholastics, Arist­otelians, and probably those who had presented great ‘systems’ immodestly explaining everything.

With this background established in the first three books of the Essay, Locke is ready to turn to his theory of knowledge. ‘Knowledge’, he writes, ‘seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas. In this alone it consists.’ Locke devotes a series of chapters to sorting out the degrees, extent, and reality of our knowledge. Other chapters explore topics such as our knowledge of the existence of God, the improvement of knowledge, probability, the distinction between faith and reason, and enthusiasm. All of those topics would be explored and debated by thinkers later in the eighteenth century.

Some of those debates started right away and involved Locke himself. For instance, Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester (1635–1699), published in 1697 his Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity, a volume that presented Locke as an enemy of Christianity. This led to a famous exchange between Locke and Stillingfleet. Locke first countered with his A Letter to the Right Reverend Edward, Lord Bishop of Winchester (1697); Stillingfleet replied, Locke replied . . . the battle of the books continued with several more shots until Stillingfleet died, in 1699.

One of Locke’s most lasting legacies was the turn to empiricism that he gave eighteenth-century philosophy generally and its British variety in particular. There, among many others, Locke’s impact is seen clearly in the philosophical treatises of George Berkeley (1685–1752) and David Hume (1711–1776). Locke’s Essay not only made an immediate splash, with lasting ripples, in Locke’s native Britain, but also on the continent, particularly in Holland and France where the book was quickly reviewed in some of the leading journals of the day, even though the first French edition was not published until 1700. Locke continued to revise the Essay, which saw four English editions (Second, 1694; Third, 1695; Fourth, 1700) during the author’s lifetime. The last edition over which Locke had say was the fifth edition, published post­humously in 1706. That is the edition reprinted below.

The Second Treatise

Locke’s Second Treatise of Government was equally influential. The First Treatise attacked what seems to us an absurd theory, but it was one widely held in his day when religion tinged every aspect of political thought; indeed in some places it persisted until 1918. For many believers in divine right theory, it seemed sensible to start a political book by looking at Adam and his sons. Locke demolished that view by showing its implausibility and inconsistency. The Second Treatise was more important, but its initial impact was somewhat muted. As many Locke scholars have aptly demonstrated (including the Canadian political scientist C. B. Macpherson [1911–1987] ), the Second Treatise is independent of the First Treatise. ‘Indeed,’ writes Macpherson, ‘Locke himself drew attention to the self-contained nature of the Second Treatise by inserting, apparently during the first printing of the Two Treatises, a new title for the Second: it had originally been simply Book II of the Two Treatises, and this subtitle was retained, but it was also given a separate title An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government.’ What is Locke’s argument here?

Locke’s point of departure for the nineteen chapters that com­prise the Second Treatise was to take mankind as it is to be found in its pre-civil state, in the ‘state of nature’. This is both a construct and imagined as the state of the Iroquois and other people thought to be living without states. There, men were free ‘to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit’. At its core, Locke’s state of nature should have been ‘a state of peace, good will, mutual assistance and preservation’. Reason ought to have ruled, and often did. It is very different from the state of nature Hobbes imagined in Leviathan, one of a perpetual war of all against all:

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Still, for Locke human nature was not in the long term con­sistent with this; the state of nature was fraught with pitfalls. One arose because ‘every one has the executive power of the law of nature’ and it is ‘unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases’ as their abiding self-love ‘will make men partial to themselves and their friends.’ Therefore, in order to safeguard their peace and happiness, in order to offer a ‘remedy to the inconveniencies of the state of nature’, man set upon ‘civil govern­ment’ which they entered into through a ‘social contract’. Entering into civil government through a social contract does not change the fact that the ‘natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.’ Civil government should abridge that natural freedom in the smallest way compatible with civil order and the security of lives and properties.

Few of Locke’s chapters have drawn as much comment from modern commentators as his chapter ‘Of Property’. Famously, Locke argues there that ‘every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.’ Contemporaries read that section with interest, as they did others. Revolutionary Americans, for instance, looked to Locke’s Second Treatise in the wake of the Stamp Tax (1765) and Townshend Duties (1767) and found there an ideological defence of their property. They claimed a Lockean right ‘to dispose, and order’ as they wished their property and ‘not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another’. Locke’s ninth chapter, ‘Of the Ends of Political Society and Government’, which returned to that theme, was also cited often.

The most frequently cited of Locke’s chapters in the eight­eenth century was his concluding chapter, the longest section of the book, ‘Of the Dissolution of Government’. There, Locke asserted that the ‘end of government is the good of mankind.’ If the governed, who had consented to be governed, find the governor to have violated the trust put in him, then the governed, the people, had a right, even a duty, to rebel. He put it this way in the book’s final paragraph:

To conclude, the power that every individual gave the society, when he entered into it, can never revert to the individuals again, as long as the society lasts, but will always remain in the com­munity; because without this there can be no community, no commonwealth, which is contrary to the original agreement: so also when the society hath placed the legislative in any assembly of men, to continue in them and their successors, with direction and authority for providing such successors, the legislative can never revert to the people whilst that government lasts; because having provided a legislative with power to continue for ever, they have given up their political power to the legislative, and cannot resume it.

That looks Hobbesian, but Locke went on to insist that govern­ment is a trust, a delegated authority to be used for the benefit of those who created the trust:

But if they have set limits to the duration of their legislative, and made this supreme power in any person or assembly, only temp­orary; or else, when by the miscarriages of those in authority it is forfeited; upon the forfeiture, or at the determination of the time set, it reverts to the society, and the people have a right to act as supreme, and continue the legislative in themselves; or erect a new form, or under the old form place it in new hands, as they think good.

As Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn pointed out in a volume published more than fifty years ago, in eighteenth-century America ‘Locke is cited often with precision on points of political theory, but at other times he is referred to in the most offhanded way, as if he could be relied on to support anything the writers happened to be arguing.’ For similar reasons, Merle Curti could write an inform­ative essay more than seventy-five years ago referring to ‘The Great Mr Locke: America’s Philosopher’. There is overstatement in that claim, but also a good deal of empirical truth.

Locke’s Second Treatise was reprinted three times during Locke’s lifetime: 1690, 1694, and 1698. To his copy of the third edition, Locke made substantial recommendations for revisions in a new edition. Those were taken into account in the sixth edition of 1764, the edition reprinted below. We might find in Locke not only a justification for the English people to have resisted Charles I in the Civil War, Charles II in the 1660s, and for the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89, but also for the Americans to resist George III in the 1770s. Indeed, the timelessness of Locke’s Second Treatise was such that it could, and did, become a pillar of what we have come to know as the modern liberal democratic state.

Mark Spencer

Brock University, Canada

Further Reading

Aaron, R. I. John Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937).

Ashcroft, Richard. Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Ashcroft, Richard, ed. John Locke: Critical Assessments, 4 vols (London: Routledge, 1991).

Attig, John C. The Works of John Locke: A Comprehensive Biblio­graphy from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).

Ayers, Michael. Locke. 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1991).

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967).

Brown, Gillian. The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Uni­versity Press, 2001).

Chappell, Vere, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Locke (Cam­bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Colman, John. John Locke’s Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edin­burgh University Press, 1983).

Cranston, Maurice. John Locke: A Biography (London and New York: Longman, 1957; reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Curti, Merle. ‘The Great Mr Locke: America’s Philosopher, 1783–1861’, Huntington Library Bulletin No. 11 (1937): 107–151.

Dewhurst, Kenneth. John Locke (1632–1704) Physician and Philo­sopher (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963).

Dunn, John. Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

Dunn, John. The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the Two Treatises of Government (Cam­bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

Goldie, Mark, ed. The Reception of Locke’s Politics, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999).

Gough, J. W. John Locke’s Political Philosophy: Eight Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950).

Hall, Roland and Roger Waterhouse. Eighty Years of Locke Scholarship: A Bibliographical Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983).

Harris, Ian. The Mind of John Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Harrison, John, and Peter Laslett. The Library of John Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965; second edition 1971).

Laslett, Peter. ‘The English Revolution and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government’, Cambridge Historical Journal 12 (1956): 40–55.

Lough, John. Locke’s Travels in France, 1675–1679 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).

Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

Marshall, John. John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and ‘Early Enlightenment’ England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Newman, Lex, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Pangle, Thomas. The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988).

Schochet, Gordon J., ed. Life, Liberty, and Property, Essays on Locke’s Political Ideas (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1971).

Schouls, Peter A. Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and the Enlight­enment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).

Shapiro, B. J. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

Tully, James. An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Context (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Vernon, Richard. The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997).

Walmsley, Peter. Locke’s Essay and the Rhetoric of Science (Lewis­burg: Bucknell University Press, 2003).

Ward, Lee. John Locke and Modern Life (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Woodhouse, R. S. Locke (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

Woodhouse, R. S. Locke’s Philosophy of Science and Knowledge (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971).

Yolton, Jean S. John Locke: A Descriptive Bibliography (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1998).

Yolton, Jean S. The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke: Man, Person, and Spirits in the ‘Essay’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

An Essay concerning Human Understanding

To the Right Honourable

THOMAS

Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery

Baron Herbert of Cardiff, Lord Rossof Kendal, Par, Fitzhugh, Marmion, St Quintin, and Shurland; Lord President of His Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council; and Lord Lieutenant of the County of Wilts, and of South Wales.

The Epistle Dedicatory

My Lord,

This Treatise, which is grown up under your lordship’s eye, and has ventured into the world by your order, does now, by a natural kind of right, come to your lordship for that protection which you several years since promised it. It is not that I think any name, how great soever, set at the beginning of a book, will be able to cover the faults that are to be found in it. Things in print must stand and fall by their own worth, or the reader’s fancy. But there being nothing more to be desired for truth than a fair unprejudiced hearing, nobody is more likely to procure me that than your lordship, who are allowed to have got so intimate an acquaintance with her, in her more retired recesses. Your lordship is known to have so far advanced your speculations in the most abstract and general knowledge of things, beyond the ordinary reach or com­mon methods, that your allowance and approbation of the design of this treatise will at least preserve it from being condemned without reading, and will prevail to have those parts a little weighed, which might otherwise perhaps be thought to deserve no consideration, for being somewhat out of the common road. The imputation of novelty is a terrible charge amongst those who judge of men’s heads, as they do of their perukes, by the fashion, and can allow none to be right but the received doctrines. Truth scarce ever yet carried it by vote anywhere at its first appearance: new opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. But truth, like gold, is not the less so for being newly brought out of the mine. It is trial and examination must give it price, and not any antique fashion; and though it be not yet current by the public stamp, yet it may, for all that, be as old as nature, and is certainly not the less genuine. Your lordship can give great and convincing instances of this, whenever you please to oblige the public with some of those large and comprehensive discoveries you have made of truths hitherto unknown, unless to some few, from whom your lord­ship has been pleased not wholly to conceal them. This alone were a sufficient reason, were there no other, why I should dedicate this Essay to your lordship; and its having some little correspondence with some parts of that nobler and vast system of the sciences your lordship has made so new, exact, and instruc­tive a draft of, I think it glory enough, if your lordship permit me to boast, that here and there I have fallen into some thoughts not wholly different from yours. If your lordship think fit that, by your encouragement, this should appear in the world, I hope it may be a reason, some time or other, to lead your lordship further; and you will allow me to say, that you here give the world an earnest of something that, if they can bear with this, will be truly worth their expectation. This, my lord, shows what a present I here make to your lordship; just such as the poor man does to his rich and great neighbour, by whom the basket of flowers or fruit is not ill taken, though he has more plenty of his own growth, and in much greater perfection. Worthless things receive a value when they are made the offerings of respect, esteem, and gratitude: these you have given me so mighty and peculiar reasons to have, in the highest degree, for your lordship, that if they can add a price to what they go along with, proportionable to their own greatness, I can with confidence brag, I here make your lordship the richest present you ever received. This I am sure, I am under the greatest obligations to seek all occasions to acknowledge a long train of favours I have received from your lordship; favours, though great and important in themselves, yet made much more so by the forwardness, concern, and kindness, and other obliging circumstances, that never failed to accompany them. To all this, you are pleased to add that which gives yet more weight and relish to all the rest: you vouchsafe to continue me in some degrees of your esteem, and allow me a place in your good thoughts, I had almost said friendship. This, my lord, your words and actions so constantly show on all occasions, even to others when I am absent, that it is not vanity in me to mention what everybody knows: but it would be want of good manners not to acknowledge what so many are witnesses of, and every day tell me I am indebted to your lordship for. I wish they could as easily assist my gratitude, as they convince me of the great and growing engagements it has to your lordship. This I am sure, I should write of the understanding without having any, if I were not extremely sensible of them, and did not lay hold on this opportunity to testify to the world how much I am obliged to be, and how much I am,

My Lord,

Your Lordship’s most humble and most obedient servant,

John Locke

Dorset Court

24th of May, 1689

The Epistle to the Reader

I have put into thy hands what has been the diversion of some of my idle and heavy hours. If it has the good luck to prove so of any of thine, and thou hast but half so much pleasure in reading as I had in writing it, thou wilt as little think thy money, as I do my pains, ill bestowed. Mistake not this for a commendation of my work; nor conclude, because I was pleased with the doing of it, that therefore I am fondly taken with it now it is done. He that hawks at larks and sparrows has no less sport, though a much less considerable quarry, than he that flies at nobler game: and he is little acquainted with the subject of this treatise – the UNDERSTANDING – who does not know that, as it is the most elevated faculty of the soul, so it is employed with a greater and more constant delight than any of the other. Its searches after truth are a sort of hawking and hunting, wherein the very pursuit makes a great part of the pleasure. Every step the mind takes in its progress towards knowledge makes some discovery, which is not only new, but the best too, for the time at least.

For the understanding, like the eye, judging of objects only by its own sight, cannot but be pleased with what it discovers, having less regret for what has escaped it, because it is unknown. Thus he who has raised himself above the alms-basket, and, not content to live lazily on scraps of begged opinions, sets his own thoughts on work, to find and follow truth, will (whatever he lights on) not miss the hunter’s satisfaction; every moment of his pursuit will reward his pains with some delight; and he will have reason to think his time not ill spent, even when he cannot much boast of any great acquisition.

This, Reader, is the entertainment of those who let loose their own thoughts, and follow them in writing; which thou oughtest not to envy them, since they afford thee an opportunity of the like diversion, if thou wilt make use of thy own thoughts in reading. It is to them, if they are thy own, that I refer myself: but if they are taken upon trust from others, it is no great matter what they are; they are not following truth, but some meaner consideration; and it is not worth while to be concerned what he says or thinks, who says or thinks only as he is directed by another. If thou judgest for thyself I know thou wilt judge candidly, and then I shall not be harmed or offended, whatever be thy censure. For though it be certain that there is nothing in this treatise of the truth whereof I am not fully persuaded, yet I consider myself as liable to mistakes as I can think thee, and know that this book must stand or fall with thee, not by any opinion I have of it, but thy own. If thou findest little in it new or instructive to thee, thou art not to blame me for it. It was not meant for those that had already mastered this subject, and made a thorough acquaintance with their own under­standings; but for my own information, and the satisfaction of a few friends, who acknowledged themselves not to have sufficiently considered it. Were it fit to trouble thee with the history of this Essay, 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 awhile 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. Some hasty and undigested thoughts, on a subject I had never before considered, which I set down against our next meeting, gave the first entrance into this discourse; which having been thus begun by chance, was continued by entreaty; written by incoherent parcels; and after long intervals of neglect, resumed again, as my humour or occasions permitted; and at last, in a retirement where an attendance on my health gave me leisure, it was brought into that order thou now seest it.

This discontinued way of writing may have occasioned, besides others, two contrary faults, viz., that too little and too much may be said in it. If thou findest anything wanting, I shall be glad that what I have written gives thee any desire that I should have gone further. If it seems too much to thee, thou must blame the subject; for when I put pen to paper, I thought all I should have to say on this matter would have been contained in one sheet of paper; but the further I went the larger prospect I had; new discoveries led me still on, and so it grew insensibly to the bulk it now appears in. I will not deny, but possibly it might be reduced to a narrower compass than it is, and that some parts of it might be contracted; the way it has been writ in, by catches, and many long intervals of interruption, being apt to cause some repetitions. But to confess the truth, I am now too lazy, or too busy, to make it shorter.

I am not ignorant how little I herein consult my own reputation, when I knowingly let it go with a fault, so apt to disgust the most judicious, who are always the nicest readers. But they who know sloth is apt to content itself with any excuse, will pardon me if mine has prevailed on me, where I think I have a very good one. I will not therefore allege in my defence, that the same notion, having different respects, may be convenient or necessary to prove or illustrate several parts of the same discourse, and that so it has happened in many parts of this: but waiving that, I shall frankly avow that I have sometimes dwelt long upon the same argument, and expressed it different ways, with a quite different design. I pretend not to publish this Essay for the information of men of large thoughts and quick apprehensions; to such masters of knowledge I profess myself a scholar, and therefore warn them beforehand not to expect anything here but what, being spun out of my own coarse thoughts, is fitted to men of my own size, to whom, perhaps, it will not be unacceptable that I have taken some pains to make plain and familiar to their thoughts some truths which established prejudice, or the abstractedness of the ideas themselves, might render difficult. Some objects had need be turned on every side; and when the notion is new, as I confess some of these are to me; or out of the ordinary road, as I suspect they will appear to others, it is not one simple view of it that will gain it admittance into every under­standing, or fix it there with a clear and lasting impression. There are few, I believe, who have not observed in themselves or others, that what in one way of proposing was very obscure, another way of expressing it has made very clear and intelligible; though after­wards the mind found little difference in the phrases, and wondered why one failed to be understood more than the other. But every­thing does not hit alike upon every man’s imagination. We have our understandings no less different than our palates; and he that thinks the same truth shall be equally relished by every one in the same dress, may as well hope to feast every one with the same sort of cookery: the meat may be the same, and the nourishment good, yet every one not be able to receive it with that seasoning; and it must be dressed another way, if you will have it go down with some, even of strong constitutions. The truth is, those who advised me to publish it, advised me, for this reason, to publish it as it is: and since I have been brought to let it go abroad, I desire it should be understood by whoever gives himself the pains to read it. I have so little affection to be in print, that if I were not flattered this Essay might be of some use to others, as I think it has been to me, I should have confined it to the view of some friends, who gave the first occasion to it. My appearing therefore in print being on purpose to be as useful as I may, I think it necessary to make what I have to say as easy and intelligible to all sorts of readers as I can. And I had much rather the speculative and quick-sighted should complain of my being in some parts tedious, than that any one, not accustomed to abstract speculations, or prepossessed with different notions, should mistake or not comprehend