LOCKE, JOHN. - Philosopher, b. 29 Aug. 1632 at Wrington (Bristol) of a Puritan family, d. 28 Oct. 1704 at Oates (Essex). He did his studies at Westminster College in Oxford, and then devoted himself to those of medicine; but he did not complete them, nor did he ever hold a doctoral degree. Meanwhile he collaborated assiduously on the works of R. Boyle and Th. Sydenham, and even afterward he always occupied himself with great attention with the works of the scientists, physicists and physiologists of his time. With a bold surgical operation he seemed to save the life of Lord Anthony Ashley, who was, shortly afterward, Earl of Shaftesbury. When the latter became chancellor, he wanted L. as his secretary. Thus he also gained experience of political life. These various directions of his culture were unified in his meditative intelligence, and in a memorable gathering of friends, in the winter of 1670-71, during a discussion on the principles of morality and religion, there flashed upon him the idea of the necessity of a "preliminary inquiry into the powers and objects of the human understanding"; hence the origin of his principal work, the Essay concerning human understanding (1690). Four editions came out during his lifetime, plus one in French, with the translation by P. Coste, made under his personal guidance. Of particular philosophical interest are also the short treatise entitled Conduct of the understanding and the long polemic contained in the Letters to E. Stillingfleet, bishop of Worcester, which clarify and elaborate the fundamental points of the Essay. The two critical writings entitled The theory of vision in God by Malebranche are also useful for understanding his doctrine. From a series of letters written around 1684-85 to his friend E. Clarke, who had asked him for advice on the education of his children, there issued, in 1693, the volume Some thoughts concerning education, which enjoyed enormous success, so that several editions were immediately made of it: it is, in fact, one of the masterpieces of modern pedagogy. In the same year as the Essay (1690) there appeared the Two treatises on government, of which the second is the more important and is still widely circulated today: it contains the theoretical justification of the new regime, and lays the foundations of liberal political doctrine. Also noteworthy are the writings, published between 1692 and 1693, on purely economic questions, on money, on the interest of money, on finance and commerce.
No less resonance among his contemporaries had the writings concerning the religious question and the relations of the Churches with the State: in 1695 there appeared the essay The reasonableness of Christianity, followed, likewise, by a long polemic; and between 1685 and 1704 he wrote the four Letters for toleration, of which the first, anonymous, in Latin, came out in 1689, is the most famous. Posthumously, A paraphrase and notes on the Epistles of St. Paul.
But already in 1691, needing assistance, he had accepted the hospitality of Sir Fr. Masham, at the manor of Oates, about twenty miles from London. In his last years he devoted himself entirely to the study of Holy Scripture. To the very end he preserved lucidity of mind, and departed from all his dear ones with moving serenity.
L. is the foremost representative of modern empiricism. But it must immediately be added that his importance derives precisely from the fact that he represents the clearest purification of previous empiricism from all its unwarranted presuppositions, and its reduction to its fundamental epistemological principle, which is the act of sense perception. What is called "the world of (cognitive) experience" is the world given in the act of perceiving it, or a derivation and construction of it that we carry out on the basis of this act. This alone is the world of which we are certain; beyond the limit of this absolutely certain knowledge there can only be a knowledge of probability, greater or lesser, according to the judgment of reason, which alone, in this case, can induce us to give our assent to this or that "belief" or "opinion" (Introduction to the Essay).
Hence the structure of the Essay. It opens, in Book I, with the famous refutation of innatism: there are no principles, knowledges, ideas or notions, theoretical or practical, that precede experience. The soul comes into the world as a tabula rasa: everything it acquires, it acquires by means of experience. L. does not deny that the soul has innately the faculty or disposition to know in general: he only wants it not to anticipate, as with innatism, the result. Book I is only negative, and serves as an introduction to Book II, where the origin of ideas is examined positively. This origin is traced to two sources only: sensation and reflection; by the first, L. means what is properly called today perception, which gives the existence of things outside us; by the second, beyond the capacity to take as an object of examination the data of the first (which is its most common meaning today), he means the consciousness of the acts or operations of the spirit (perceiving, remembering, comparing, judging, desiring, willing, etc.). And therefore he also calls those two sources, the one "external sense," the other "internal sense" (a distinction preserved by Kant: but for L. sense and intellect, or rather intelligence, are not two distinct faculties).
Let this capital consideration not be overlooked: that, while L.'s starting point is the concrete act of knowing (objective perception), he then, analyzing this act, resolves it into an aggregate or complex of ideas, which have a meaning, in themselves, that is only subjective. Hence a continuous interference between the two points of view, which give rise, the one, to a critical empiricism, aimed at clarifying the proper object of cognitive experience; the other, to a subjective idealism, which will have its most immediate application in Berkeley, and its reduction to skepticism with Hume. But in L. the position is different, nor did he ever doubt the existence of things outside us.
There follows a vast analysis of ideas, divided, first of all, into simple and complex. Simple ideas are those that are received either from a single sense, or from several senses together, or else concern the fundamental operations of the spirit, or else refer to data, together, of sense and reflection. Famous, in this part, is the distinction between the ideas of primary qualities and those of secondary qualities: the former, we consider as belonging to the reality of things (extension, solidity, figure, motion, etc.); the latter (sweet, bitter, hot, cold, etc.) are ideas that depend on our particular bodily constitution. L. expressly declares that he here follows the way of seeing of the physics of his time.
Complex ideas are distinguished into modes, substances, relations: only the complex ideas of substances intend to refer to the reality of things outside us; the ideas of modes and of relations are our constructions (in general, for practical reasons), independent of the objective consideration of things. In this part, especially to be noted are: the critique of the idea of substance, as of a quid that lies beneath the qualities and properties of things, and of which L. seems that he would like to do without, declaring it confused and obscure, but from which in reality he cannot free himself because it involves existence itself: there follows the treatment of the ideas of space, of time, of cause, of identity (here is also that of human personality), and of others, on which Kantian criticism, indeed all modern philosophy, will later exercise itself, so that the merit belongs to L. of having pointed them out.
In Book III the relation of ideas to the words by which they are expressed is considered. Here ideas, insofar as they are mere "mental objects," are all general, and more or less abstract, insofar as they prescind, more or less, from the circumstances of time, place and other things in singular reality (abstraction here, since there is no intellectual faculty different from that of sense, is something other than the scholastic one). L. is not a nominalist in the medieval sense (of the flatus vocis), quite the contrary: for him, what counts is the idea expressed by the word. But he nevertheless gives so much importance to the question, as if the disparity of opinions and controversies could be reduced to the different use that is made of words.
To know it is not enough to have ideas: one must also perceive the relation between ideas, their connection. Hence Book IV, no less important than Book II (which is the most widely circulated). It can be divided into three parts. The first concerns absolutely certain knowledge, which is when one perceives the relation between two ideas either immediately (intuition) or through other intermediate ideas (demonstration). At this point, under the Cartesian influence dominant in this part, L. declares that science, properly speaking, is only mathematics, to which he wishes to add ethics, insofar as its ideas, like mathematical ones, are merely a production of our mind: on the other hand, in contrast with the original inspiration of his empiricism, it seems to him that experimental science can hardly ever constitute itself as certain science. The second part (chaps. 9-11) concerns the knowledge of existence, and is entirely bristling with difficulties (for existence too is here an idea), over which L., certainly without seeing them, glosses. First comes the existence of the self, which is known, says L., in Cartesian fashion, by immediate intuition; then follows the existence of God, which can be known by demonstration. Third comes the knowledge of the existence of things outside us, of which we have certainty in the act of perceiving: but only in that act (outside of it, he says, I am no longer sure of their existence...). Hume's skepticism, contrary to L.'s intention, is here prepared well in advance.
The third part of the book deals with probability (that is, when one does not have certainty of the relations between our ideas), and includes, besides the knowledge of physical facts, that of historical facts and of religious doctrines. Here L. also speaks of faith, but he speaks of it in the very sense of "opinions," that is, of knowledge that is not absolutely certain. For him, therefore, there do exist truths that go beyond the limits of our reason: such are those of Revelation; but the acceptance of them must always be presided over by our reason, which is like a lamp that the Lord has placed in us to discern, in every case, the true from the false. This concept, as is well known, is of Augustinian origin; but here it is only a lumen naturale, which goes to swell the current, already threatening in this century, of rationalism.
This philosophy has its center in the individual, in the autonomy of reason or personal conscience: it therefore succeeded better on political ground, where the idea of liberty had made its way, together with that of a "natural right" and of the contractual origin of civil society. The state by "divine" right declined: the source of sovereignty passes to society, that is, to the individuals who, by limiting their own liberty, constitute themselves into a social-political body. It is not a question, according to L., of a total alienation of one's rights (as in Hobbes's Leviathan), but of a partial alienation, limited to the purpose of the advantage that the individual promises himself from a common life regulated by law. Outside of such a purpose, the individual retains his natural rights, the liberty of conscience and the right of property justified by his labor, and therefore forming one with the life of the personality. Hence also the inspiring idea of his treatise on toleration, understood in the simply social-political sense, as the necessity of a clear separation between what concerns civil government and what belongs to religion: religion is a matter of conscience, and can in no case be imposed and determined by a civil power.
But where, above all, this individualism, understood as the very principle of the human personality, was able to lead to its best results, was in the pedagogical question. The Thoughts on Education derive their best originality from this concept of spiritual autonomy, to which the child's mind must be formed: to mastery of himself, of his own feelings and of his own reason. Hence the rigorously disciplinary method that L. advocates: of an internal discipline, it is understood, which must, however, be promoted with a firm and careful hand by the educator, by the father and by the tutor. Physical education, first of all, which gives the child mastery of his own body and accustoms him to endure inevitable discomforts; moral education, then, which gives the youth a character conformable to the laws of virtue and of social honor; finally, an intellectual education, which gives the young man the indispensable elements of culture for the formation of the intelligence and for the fullness of life (the Lockean ideal takes concrete form in that of the "gentleman," that is, of the man of the "bourgeois" class that was then coming into being).
This philosophy responded to a general movement of the spirit of that time, interpreted it in the simplest and most persuasive form, facilitated its further development. Hence its fortune in the 18th century, especially in France.