philip abrams

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Review: The Locke Myth Author(s): Philip Abrams Review by: Philip Abrams Source: Past & Present, No. 15 (Apr., 1959), pp. 87-90Published by: on behalf of Oxford University Press The Past and Present SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/649835Accessed: 04-07-2015 02:40 UTC

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Review Article

THE LOCKE MYTH* UNTIL QUITE RECENTLY WE WERE ENCOURAGED TO THINK OF JOHN LOCKE as existing in that pure philosophic atmosphere through which we still tend to approach Aquinas and his contemporaries. "Sweet reasonableness", moderation and the pale, ascetic countenance of the official portraits, constituted the familiar image of the philosopher of English political democracy. At least it was an image that could be lived with without too much awkward historical questioning. And since in England's major intellectual revolution Locke had replaced the prophets as the basis for moral and political speculation, it was necessary to be able to live with him. Intellectually, Locke has perhaps now ceased to matter so much; it is possible to discourse without reference, for or against, to the Lockeian categories. And with this intellectual emancipation a historical freedom has been won. The Locke myth being no longer required, Locke himself may be brought down to earth. The historical problem, the motives, reception and uses of his thought, has become an acceptable subject of investigation.

Locke's latest biographer certainly brings his subject to earth. The philosophic image is replaced by that of a man who was furtive, small-minded, calculating and not infrequently cruel; a man whose life was devoted to details and whose tastes were ludicrously bourgeois. Asceticism gives way to hypochondria, plagiarism and lack of conviction are added to reasonableness, a great capacity for friendship with both sexes thwarted by a strange emotional colourlessness takes the place of his former moderation. Some minor additions to Mr. Cranston's picture may be suggested - at least one of Locke's many women friends seems also to have been his mistress; on occasion he was capable of a bawdy lavatorial humour which, however unfashionable to-day, is better than nothing perhaps - but in general the Locke archive abundantly confirms the new impression of the philosopher. Or rather, it would do so had he been a man of the twentieth and not of the seventeenth century.

For, unfortunately, the impression is constructed mainly on contemporary values. Mr. Cranston is not concerned with Locke as a historical problem and measured by the standards of a modern and liberal empiricism he can only be deflated. He lived in a genera- tion for whom poverty was the negation of value and goods were the necessary token of a precarious status. He was of a class and

* M. Cranston, John Locke, Longmans I958, 480 pp.


PAST AND PRESENT

profession whose resources could seldom maintain their pretensions. Consequently he appears parsimonious. He lived in a society for which conspicuous physical suffering was an everyday matter and moved in a tradition of social thought which held such suffering to be both normal and inevitable. Consequently he seems cruel. Other comments on his personality can be traced to similar failures to allow for his situation. Possibly it is not the task of the biographer to answer the questions of the historian. To have wrested any narrative at all from a collection as complicated and dispersed as the Locke papers have become is a considerable achievement. But this insensitivity to the context of Locke's life does more than suggest irrelevant personal judgments, it eliminates a more useful and interest- ing method of biographical approach. Removed from the pressures of his time, Locke emerges as a collection of episodes, a bundle of events and responses from which the necessary connection, a developing character, is lacking. We have a mass of traits but, since they remain unarranged, no personality. He is now romantic, now rigidly methodical, now genial, now cantankerous, now reticent and now aggressive - but the details remain without co-ordination.

This failure to relate the aspects of Locke's life to one another is most apparent in the handling of his medical thought and activity. Medical interests must have occupied almost half, at times nearly the whole, of his attention; and medicine for Locke as for his age was but one facet - the most immediately moral perhaps - of the general science of physical nature, the search, in the pages not of Scripture but of the liber naturae, for the true order of the universe. Locke's starting point was "chemistry" as defined by Boyle, and as Walter Pagel has shown, the concern of chemistry as much as that of theology was with the causa finalis. In i66o Locke wrote his first political works, two essays against religious toleration argued in the terms of traditional academic theology and scholastic logic. In i66o also his medical notebooks suggest a mind immersed in the system building categories of the alchemists with a bias towards the archei of van Helmont and the Paracelsan tria prima. In I667 after six years spent mainly in turning himself into a virtuoso, he had become an aggressive empiricist in his medicine; at the same time he produced the first of his familiar pragmatic and utilitarian defences of religious toleration. Both the Essay Concerning Toleration (I667) and the unfinished De arte medica (I669) argue from the intractability of the facts - individuals and natural phenomena - and the futility of a priori systems in favour of an "experimental" and permissive approach to both types of reality. It is hardly probable that such close parallel developments were no more than coincidental.

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Thus, though the biography ends with the just claim, "Locke did not merely enlarge men's knowledge, he changed their ways of thinking", we are shown so little of the structure of those ways of thinking that the claim is here hardly more than rhetorical. Locke's own contention in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that he was working only "as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little and removing some of the rubbish on the way to knowledge", is quoted by Mr. Cranston but the intellectual situation it implies is ignored. Typically, Boyle's alchemical researches, themselves essential ground-clearing work, are dismissed as "foolish"; there is no awareness of the way in which, when their work began in the i66os, the enthusiasts of the experimental philosophy were involved with their own intellectual past, or of the characteristic movement of hypothesis and experiment which then emerged as scientific method.

This is the more surprising in that Mr. Cranston himself underlines what is possibly the most important historical information about his subject - that Locke was a man not of the Great Revolution but of the Restoration, of a period of insecurity not of confidence, that his most creative thinking and major work belong before and not after i688 when he began to publish. His biographer makes little use of this discovery; but to see Locke as an intellectual of the Restoration is to suggest a model which may well prove more useful as an explanatory device than the eclectic and incidental approach favoured by Mr. Cranston.

Locke himself hailed the Restoration with a poem which might have been written as an exercise to illustrate the "Elizabethan World Picture", an elaborate analogical development of a fairly obvious conceit whereby Charles II becomes the Creator. And obviously he was bound as much to the questions as to the ways of expression of his age. On each level of thought and experience the problem for the Restoration intellectual was itself to restore - to restore the moral and cosmic order which a century of individualism had pulverised. For Leibniz, Kenelm Digby, Henry More and others this feeling for order was explicit; almost everything in Locke's life is implicitly a response to it, and to the need, as R. W. Meyer puts it, for a "moral and ethical reconstitution of the individual" in relation to himself and to others. Thus whatever form his thought takes we find Locke aspiring to be a systematic thinker; a plausible and continuing motive emerges for his endless charts and tables and classifications (hardly mentioned by his biographer), for his obsessive concern for method, the meticulousness in organising his personal affairs, and even for his

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revulsion from public controversy and his secrecy. Public discourse meant committing himself to an individual view which he knew by definition to be only a partial truth. His efforts to regulate and define his friendships, to substitute civility for emotion become not so much a want of passion but a passion against passion, the social counterpart of his permanent intellectual inability to come to terms with the contrary attractions of a geometrical ethics and the integrity of the individual's acts of will.

So much of the action of Locke's life in short, can be drawn together and given some sort of historical meaning by reference to such a model that it seems absurd not to use it - at least as Locke himself would have done, experimentally.

Cambridge Philip Abrams


Article Contentsp. [87]p. 88p. 89p. 90

Issue Table of ContentsPast and Present, No. 15 (Apr., 1959) pp. 1-94Front Matter [pp. 1-1]Hydraulic Society in Ceylon [pp. 2-26]The Zwinglian Reformation in Zurich [pp. 27-47]The Market for Italian Art in the 17th Century [pp. 48-59]Review ArticleThe People in the French Revolution [pp. 60-72]Religion and Politics in Central Africa [pp. 73-81]Oost-Indie [pp. 82-86]The Locke Myth [pp. 87-90]

Editorial Notes [pp. 91-94]Back Matter

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