John Locke
“Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives of a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided.” – John Locke
Locke, John – (The Philosopher of Freedom)(Source2), 1632—1704, English philosopher, founder of British empiricism. Locke summed up the Enlightenment in his belief in the middle class and its right to freedom of conscience and right to property, in his faith in science, and in his confidence in the goodness of humanity. His influence upon philosophy and political theory has been incalculable.
Life and Work
Educated at Christ Church College, Oxford, he became (1660) a lecturer there in Greek, rhetoric, and philosophy. He studied medicine, and his acquaintance with scientific practice had a strong influence upon his philosophical thought and method. In 1666, Locke met Anthony Ashley Cooper, the future 1st earl of Shaftesbury, and soon became his friend, physician, and adviser. After 1667, Locke had minor diplomatic and civil posts, most of them through Shaftesbury. In 1675, after Shaftesbury had lost his offices, Locke left England for France, where he met French leaders in science and philosophy.
Returning to England in 1679, he soon retired to Oxford, where he stayed quietly until, suspected of radicalism by the government, he went to Holland and remained there several years (1683—89). In Holland he completed the famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which was published in complete form after his return to England at the accession of William and Mary to the English throne. In the same year he published his Two Treatises on Civil Government; part of this work justifies the Glorious Revolution of 1688, but much of it was written earlier. His fame increased, and he became known in England and on the Continent as the leading philosopher of freedom.
Philosophy
In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke examines the nature of the human mind and the process by which it knows the world. Repudiating the traditional doctrine of innate ideas, Locke believed that the mind is born blank, a tabula rasa upon which the world describes itself through the experience of the five senses. Knowledge arising from sensation is perfected by reflection, thus enabling humans to arrive at such ideas as space, time, and infinity.
Locke distinguished the primary qualities of things (e.g., solidity, extension, number) from their secondary qualities (e.g., color, sound). These latter qualities he held to be produced by the impact of the world on the sense organs. Behind this curtain of sensation the world itself is colorless and silent. Science is possible, Locke maintained, because the primary world affects the sense organs mechanically, thus producing ideas that faithfully represent reality. The clear, common-sense style of the Essay concealed many unexplored assumptions that the later empiricists George Berkeley and David Hume would contest, but the problems that Locke set forth have occupied philosophy in one way or another ever since.
Political Theory
Locke is most renowned for his political theory which he described in The Two Treatise of Civil Government. Contradicting Thomas Hobbes, Locke believed that the original state of nature was happy and characterized by reason and tolerance. In that state all people were equal and independent, and none had a right to harm another’s “life, health, liberty, or possessions.” The state was formed by social contract because in the state of nature each was his own judge, and there was no protection against those who lived outside the law of nature. The state should be guided by natural law.
Rights of property are very important, because each person has a right to the product of his or her labor. Locke forecast the labor theory of value. The policy of governmental checks and balances, as delineated in the Constitution of the United States, was set down by Locke, as was the doctrine that revolution in some circumstances is not only a right but an obligation. At Shaftesbury’s behest, he contributed to the Fundamental Constitutions for the Carolinas; the colony’s proprietors, however, never implemented the document.
Ethical Theory
Locke based his ethical theories upon belief in the natural goodness of humanity. The inevitable pursuit of happiness and pleasure, when conducted rationally, leads to cooperation, and in the long run private happiness and the general welfare coincide. Immediate pleasures must give way to a prudent regard for ultimate good, including reward in the afterlife. He argued for broad religious freedom in three separate essays on toleration but excepted atheism and Roman Catholicism, which he felt should be legislated against as inimical to religion and the state. In his essay The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), he emphasized the ethical aspect of Christianity against dogma.
Bibliography
See biographies by M. W. Cranston (1957) and R. Aaron (3d ed. 1971); R. S. Woolhouse, Locke’s Philosophy of Science and Knowledge (1971); J. W. Gough, ed., John Locke’s Political Philosophy; Eight Essays (2d ed. 1973); E. Tagart, Locke’s Writings and Philosophy Historically Considered (1977); R. W. Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism (1987).
Other Works:
A Letter Concerning Toleration
Of the Conduct of the Understanding
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Quotes:
“If any man err from the right way, it is his own misfortune, no injury to thee; nor therefore art thou to punish him in the things of this life because thou supposest he will be miserable in that which is to come.” – (A Letter Concerning Toleration)
“To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.” – (Letter to Anthony Collins, Oct 30, 1703)
“…there cannot any one moral Rule be proposed, whereof a Man may not justly demand a Reason.” – (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I, Ch. 3, Sec 4)
“He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.” – (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III, Ch. 10, Sec 31)
“I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.” – (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, Ch. 3, Sec 18)
“All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.” – (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, Ch. 20, sec. 17)
“If man in the state of nature be so free, as has been said; if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to no body, why will he part with his freedom?” – (Second Treatise of Government, Ch. IX, sec. 123)
“Wherever Law ends, Tyranny begins.” – (Second Treatise of Government, Sec. 202)
“To understand political power aright, and derive from it its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man.” – (Second Treatise of Government, Ch. II, sec. 4)
“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” – (Second Treatise of Government, Ch. II, sec. 6)
“And because it may be too great a temptation to human frailty, apt to grasp at power, for the same persons, who have the power of making laws, to have also in their hands the power to execute them, whereby they may exempt themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit the law, both in its making, and execution, to their own private advantage” – (Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. XII sec. 143)
“Thus parents, by humouring and cockering them when little, corrupt the principles of nature in their children, and wonder afterwards to taste the bitter waters, when they themselves have poison’d the fountain.” – (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Sec. 35)
“Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.” – (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Sec. 64)
“He that will have his son have a respect for him and his orders, must himself have a great reverence for his son.” – (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Sec. 65)
Epitaph – Stop Traveller! Near this place lieth John Locke. If you ask what kind of a man he was, he answers that he lived content with his own small fortune. Bred a scholar, he made his learning subservient only to the cause of truth. This thou will learn from his writings, which will show thee everything else concerning him, with greater truth, than the suspect praises of an epitaph. His virtues, indeed, if he had any, were too little for him to propose as matter of praise to himself, or as an example to thee. Let his vices be buried together. As to an example of manners, if you seek that, you have it in the Gospels; of vices, to wish you have one nowhere; if mortality, certainly, (and may it profit thee), thou hast one here and everywhere. – (translated from the original Latin)