An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

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AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING JOHN LOCKE (1632–1704) was born at Wrington, Somerset, and educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford. He held various academic posts at that university, lecturing on Greek and rhetoric, but his interests lay in medicine and the new experimental sciences being developed by Robert Boyle and others. In 1667 he became personal physician to the rst Earl of Shaftesbury and a member of his household, and in that year wrote an essay on toleration, in which he rst developed arguments which were to appear in his famous Letter concerning Toleration (1689). Under the in uence of Shaftesbury, Locke developed his ideas on politics, property, trade, monarchy, and the mind. Shaftesbury (the Achitophel of Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel) became a bitter opponent of Charles II, seeking legislation to prevent the eventual succession of his brother James, a Catholic. When constitutional means failed, Shaftesbury began to plan a coup d’état. Discovery of the plot in 1683 (Shaftesbury himself had died a few months before) forced Locke to ee into exile in Holland. After the Revolution of 1688, however, Locke prospered. In 1689 he published his Two Treatises of Government, and in the same year his most famous work appeared, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, a work which led John Stuart Mill to call him the ‘unquestioned founder of the analytic philosophy of mind’. He also wrote on theology, on education, and in defence of religious toleration. In 1695 he was consulted about the re-coinage and in 1696 he became a Commissioner of Trade. His last years were spent in Essex at the home of Sir Francis and Lady Masham. Locke’s ideas had an immense e ect on succeeding generations; his empiricist theory of knowledge and his commitment to the inalienable rights of all human beings are still in uential today.

was educated at Upleatham Street School, Saltburn, and at University College London. He has taught at a number of universities, most recently at Princeton, Rutgers, and the University of York, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy. He is the author of Locke’s Philosophy of Science and Knowledge (1971), Locke (1983), The Empiricists (1988) and Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz (1993). ROGER WOOLHOUSE

JOHN LOCKE An Essay concerning Human Understanding Edited by ROGER WOOLHOUSE

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Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered O ces: 80 Strand, London WC2 0RL, England www.penguin.com This edition rst published 1997 Reprinted with a Chronology and revised Further Reading 2004 9 This edition copyright © Roger Woolhouse, 1997, 2004 All rights reserved The moral right of the editor has been asserted Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it

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CONTENTS Introduction Further Reading Bibliographical Abbreviations Chronology A Note on the Text Title-page of the Fifth Edition

AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING The Epistle Dedicatory The Epistle to the Reader The Contents

BOOK I: OF INNATE NOTIONS Chapter

I Introduction II No Innate Principles in the Mind III No Innate Practical Principles IV Other Considerations concerning Innate Principles, both Speculative and Practical

BOOK II: OF IDEAS Chapter I Of Ideas in General, and their Original II Of Simple Ideas III Of Ideas of One Sense IV Of Solidity V Of Simple Ideas of Divers Senses VI Of Simple Ideas of Re ection VII Of Simple Ideas of both Sensation and Re ection VIII Some further Considerations concerning our Simple Ideas

IX Of Perception X Of Retention XI Of Discerning, and other Operations of the Mind XII Of Complex Ideas XIII Of Simple Modes; and rst, of the Simple Modes of Space XIV Of Duration, and its Simple Modes XV Of Duration and Expansion, considered together XVI Of Number XVII Of In nity XVIII Of other Simple Modes XIX Of the Modes of Thinking XX Of Modes of Pleasure and Pain XXI Of Power XXII Of Mixed Modes XXIII Of our Complex Ideas of Substances

XXIV Of Collective Ideas of Substances XXV Of Relation XXVI Of Cause and E ect, and other Relations XXVII Of Identity and Diversity XXVIII Of other Relations XXIX Of Clear and Obscure, Distinct and Confused Ideas XXX Of Real and Fantastical Ideas XXXI Of Adequate and Inadequate Ideas XXXII Of True and False Ideas XXXIII Of the Association of Ideas

BOOK III: OF WORDS Chapter I Of Words or Language in General II Of the Signi cation of Words

III Of General Terms IV Of the Names of Simple Ideas V Of the Names of Mixed Modes and Relations VI Of the Names of Substances VII Of Particles VIII Of Abstract and Concrete Terms IX Of the Imperfection of Words X Of the Abuse of Words XI Of the Remedies of the Foregoing Imperfections and Abuses

BOOK IV: OF KNOWLEDGE AND OPINION Chapter I Of Knowledge in General II Of the Degrees of our Knowledge III Of the Extent of Human Knowledge

IV Of the Reality of Knowledge V Of Truth in General VI Of Universal Propositions, their Truth and Certainty VII Of Maxims VIII Of Tri ing Propositions IX Of our Knowledge of Existence X Of our Knowledge of the Existence of a God XI Of our Knowledge of the Existence of other Things XII Of the Improvement of our Knowledge XIII Some further Considerations concerning our Knowledge XIV Of Judgement XV Of Probability XVI Of the Degrees of Assent XVII Of Reason XVIII Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces

XIX Of Enthusiasm XX Of Wrong Assent, or Error XXI Of the Division of the Sciences

APPENDIX: John Locke’s Debate with Edward Stilling eet, Bishop of Worcester, as it gures in footnotes in the Fifth Edition of the Essay Index to the Fifth Edition Notes

INTRODUCTION ‘Were it t to trouble thee with the history of this Essay’, Locke writes in his introductory ‘Epistle to the Reader’, ‘I should tell thee that ve or six friends meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the di culties that rose on every side.’ It occurred to him that they should rst examine the nature of their own understandings: perhaps the di culties that faced them were insuperable and outstripped some inherent limitations of the human mind. For the next meeting with his friends Locke set down some ‘hasty and undigested thoughts’; and over the years these ‘were continued by entreaty; written by incoherent parcels; and, after long intervals of neglect, resumed again, as my humour or occasions permitted’. Eventually, his work ‘was brought into that order, thou now seest it’. The complete history of this lengthy process of writing the Essay concerning Human Understanding has yet to be worked out, but at any rate it spans nearly twenty years. Amongst its more obvious stages are two drafts dated 1671, a relatively complete manuscript by the end of 1686, and the publication in a French journal in 1688 of a lengthy summary. The Essay itself (dated 1690) was available to the world in December 1689. John Locke was fty-seven when his masterpiece was published. He was born in Wrington, Somerset, in 1632. His father, a lawyer, was a Puritan and Parliamentarian; but despite this background Locke attended Westminster School, whose headmaster was a dedicated Royalist. From there, in 1652, he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied a variety of subjects, such as Greek, grammar, Hebrew, history, logic, moral philosophy and rhetoric; and where he eventually became a college tutor and Lecturer in Greek. During his years in Oxford Locke became increasingly interested in science, particularly chemistry and medicine, and, though not

formally qualifying as a practitioner until 1674, he went in 1667 to London as physician to Lord Ashley, later Earl of Shaftesbury. Under Ashley’s in uence he became increasingly involved in political matters, both theoretical and practical, though he hardly gave up any of his interests in science and medicine. In 1675 ill-health took him to France for four years of travel and study, after which he returned into Shaftesbury’s service. Shaftesbury was heavily engaged in anti-Popish activities and was involved in the struggle to exclude King Charles’s Catholic brother James, Duke of York, from succession to the throne. He was forced to retreat to Holland in 1682, and the next year Locke too found it wisest to leave the country. Charles II died two years later and the accession of his brother James was followed by the Duke of Monmouth’s unsuccessful rebellion against him. Locke was cited as a Monmouth supporter, and an application for his extradition from Holland forced him to live under an assumed name. In 1689 the events of the ‘glorious revolution’ – the ight of James II and the arrival from Holland of the Protestant William of Orange – brought him, the day before William and Mary’s acceptance of the throne, back home to England. He declined o ers of ambassadorial posts, but played an important part, both publicly and behind the scenes, in national and international a airs; he worked, for example, for the Bank of England and the Board of Trade and Plantations. From 1691 until his death in 1704 he lived, a childless bachelor, near Harlow in Essex, at Oates, the house of his friend Lady Damaris Masham and her husband Sir Francis. Locke wrote and published on many subjects – education, economics, theology, medicine – as well as on various branches of philosophy. The three works that most secure his fame, Letter concerning Toleration, Two Treatises of Government and the Essay concerning Human Understanding, all appeared before the public (the rst two anonymously) in 1689, the year he returned to England for

good. They were followed by Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). The Essay itself made an immediate impression, exciting much discussion and criticism. It went through four editions in the remaining years of Locke’s life, and the fth (of 1706) had been worked on to the end. Since then it has gone through around three dozen English editions, and, particularly in nineteenth-century editions, it has been ‘abridged’, ‘analysed in question and answer form’, ‘catechized’, ‘condensed’, ‘contracted’, ‘edited’, ‘epitomized’, ‘issued with questions for examination’, ‘selected from’ and ‘summarized’. Locke’s explicit aim in the Essay is to ‘inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge’ (I.i.2). Just what had aroused his interest here? What could have been the ‘subject very remote from this’ which he and his friends were discussing around 1670 in his room in Exeter House, Shaftesbury’s London house in the Strand? According to James Tyrrell, one of the original ‘ ve or six’, their discussion had been about ‘the principles of morality and revealed religion’. Perhaps, then, the questions about which ‘di culties rose on every side’ concerned the manner in which the principles of morality are discovered and known to be true, and the role and authority of religious revelation as a source and foundation of morality. Questions about the possible sources of moral knowledge speci cally could certainly have exposed the need for a wider investigation into the extent to which knowledge of any kind is attainable by the human mind. In the Essay, then, Locke moves beyond questions about moral knowledge in particular. His lengthy investigation into the question as to what ‘objects our understandings were, or were not tted to deal with’ (‘Epistle to the Reader’) is often conducted in perfectly general terms. Moreover, even when particular kinds of knowledge are under discussion, empirical observational knowledge and natural philosophy are the topic rather more often than morality

and religion. The Essay’s contribution to the philosophy of perception, of empirical belief and of natural science is far more extensive than that to moral theory and philosophy of religion. Nevertheless, there is a marked ethical and religious dimension to the Essay. Locke’s investigation into the extent of knowledge and the nature and scope of the human understanding gets much of its energy from a quite evident concern with developing a considered and detailed view about man’s place in the scheme of things. It takes for granted, moreover, that there is a scheme of things. It takes for granted that we have been put here in this world by a good and wise God who holds out to us the hope of a future life. But Locke wishes to show that reason provides a basis and warrant for those beliefs, and to work out what consequences they have for the conduct of our lives in this world. How, Locke particularly wants to determine, should we properly and best make use of the intellectual faculty of understanding that God has given us? One clear point to be taken from the Essay’s endeavour ‘to take a survey of our own understandings’ and ‘examine our own powers’ (I.i.7) is that we are limited and nite creatures. Locke is in no doubt that ‘the comprehension of our understandings, comes exceeding short of the vast extent of things’ and that our knowledge falls short of ‘an universal, or perfect comprehension of whatsoever is’ (I.i.5). But this is no reason for pessimism and sceptical despair. On the contrary, the details of this general conclusion are such that we have ‘reason to be well satis ed with what God hath thought t’ (I.i.5) for us. Locke nds that what we do know or have abilities to come to know is just what we need to know concerning what is of crucial importance to us. Our real and longest-term interest is our salvation and the afterlife, and, so Locke argues, God has equipped us to come to know what actions and beliefs are required from us with respect to each other and to him. Moreover, Locke also nds, at least many of the things that in all strictness we cannot certainly know are, nevertheless, things about which we can have beliefs su ciently well founded for dealing with the everyday practicalities

and problems of this life. That we lack a ‘perfect comprehension of whatsoever is’ therefore does not matter. God has provided for us on the two most important counts – he has given us the faculties su cient, rstly, for us to obtain adequate ‘conveniences of life’, and, secondly, for the ‘information of virtue’ (I.i.5). He has ‘put within the reach of [our] discovery’ not only ‘the comfortable provision for this life’ but also ‘the way that leads to a better’ (I.i.5). What we cannot know we have no need to know. With this as an underlying theme, the Essay presents to the reader a detailed and systematic account of the nature and activities of the human understanding. It explains how we can come to acquire the knowledge of which we are capable and form the beliefs we do; how and why there are unavoidable limits to that knowledge; and how (despite these limits) our knowledge may yet be improved. This account has led to Locke’s being categorized as an empiricist. As he himself forthrightly claims, ‘all our knowledge is founded; and… ultimately derives itself’ (II.i.2) from experience. The word ‘ultimately’ is of great importance here. What experience immediately provides is not knowledge as such, but its ‘materials’, the ‘ideas’ of which the Essay talks so much. This means that the content of all our thoughts must be ultimately traceable back to experience – a claim which Locke tries to make good in his Book II, ‘Of Ideas’. Here he discusses various mental operations and activities related to ideas (perception, memory, association); explains how ideas presented to us in experience can be abstracted, compounded and rearranged; and looks at various kinds (modes, substances) and features (reality, distinctness) of ideas. Also, and most importantly, he shows how various ideas whose source in experience may not be obvious (‘power’, ‘in nity’, ‘time’, ‘cause and e ect’, ‘personal identity’) can nevertheless be traced back to it. Ideas, then, are merely the materials of knowledge. Knowledge itself is not presented to us in experience, rather it is the result of some interplay between those ideas and our reason and understanding – a fact that leads to there being ‘rationalist’ as well as ‘empiricist’ elements in Locke’s thought. Knowledge is not the

result of mere observation of contingent empirical correlations amongst our experience-given ideas – that could lead only to what Locke calls ‘belief’ or ‘opinion’. It is, as Locke explains (in Book IV, which is devoted to the matter), the a priori intellectual perception of various necessary connections that are discernible between some of our ideas. These positive claims about the nature and origin of human knowledge are put forward after the rejection, in Book I, of an opposing doctrine about its genesis and acquisition. This is the doctrine that was held by some at the time according to which some important items of our knowledge are with us from birth: ‘there are in the understanding certain innate principles… as it were stamped upon the mind of man, which the soul receives in its very rst being; and brings into the world with it’ (I.ii.1). Though it does not constitute an argument against it, part of Locke’s animus against this doctrine of innatism derives from the thought that it hinders people from thinking for themselves and so tends to support the current orthodoxy of established parties and factions. If once it is accepted that there are innate principles, then people are ‘put… upon a necessity of receiving some doctrines as such; which was to take them o from the use of their own reason and judgement, and put them upon believing and taking them upon trust without further examination’ (I.iv.24). Locke’s own view, that any appeal to innateness is quite needless and that it is ‘barely by the use of their natural faculties, [that people] may attain to all the knowledge they have’ (I.ii.1), therefore connects with his insistence that truth should be sought for and authenticated by the individual, for himself, and not accepted at one remove. Our beliefs should be determined by what we can see to be true, not by what is handed down to us. ‘We may as rationally hope to see with other men’s eyes, as to know by other men’s understandings… The oating of other men’s opinions in our brains, makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true’ (I.iv.23).

Amongst the principles which were supposed to be ‘native’ or innate to the human mind were various moral or (as Locke calls them) ‘practical’ precepts – such as that parents have a duty of care for their children, or that promises should be kept. So, had Locke not rejected it, this doctrine would have provided some answer to the questions he and his friends were asking about morality at their original meeting. His own account of the acquisition of moral knowledge on the basis of our natural faculties and within his general empiricism is something we shall come to later. Also amongst supposed innate principles were certain so-called ‘speculative’ axioms or maxims. These were general truths of considerable abstractness, such as the law of non-contradiction that ‘it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be’. Their signi cance lay in the important foundational role they were believed to have in our reasoning and the whole fabric of our knowledge. For his part, Locke denies that our knowledge of these principles has any special source other than the use of our natural faculty of reason by which we see necessary connections between ideas derived from experience. He argues also that they occupy no special place as foundations of our knowledge, and that they are not the ‘ rst principles’ of reason they have been supposed to be. One thing that is involved here is the thought that they have no temporal or epistemic priority: children come to know that a man is not a horse before, and so also not on the basis of, knowing the more general truth that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be. But beyond this is the rejection of a complex theory about the structure of knowledge which accorded an important role to these ‘ rst principles’. This was the theory of ‘scienti c’ or ‘demonstrative’ knowledge which the medieval and later Scholastic philosophers had derived from Aristotle. In fact, an anti-Aristotelian, anti-Scholastic note sounds throughout the Essay as a whole. Running, sometimes implicitly but quite insistently, through it is a rejection of a number of aspects and

elements of Scholasticism – for example, a belief in substantial forms and essences that were supposed to form the basis for natural rather than conventional or nominal classi cation and de nition; an insistence on a certain rigid structure for de nitions; an insistence on the form of argument known as the syllogism; the acceptance of Aristotle as an unexamined authority; the use of formal disputation as a method of teaching. This anti-Scholasticism emerges as early as the ‘Epistle to the Reader’ where in a lengthy and passionate passage Locke contrasts the ‘abuse of language’ and ‘vague and insigni cant forms of speech’ of the Scholastics, which have ‘so long passed for mysteries of science’, with the ‘mighty designs’ of certain ‘ingenious’ and ‘industrious’ ‘master-builders’ of knowledge who will, Locke predicted, ‘leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity’. Locke was right in his prediction about the people he mentions. Robert Boyle, whom Locke knew from his Oxford days, is now known as ‘the father of modern chemistry’; Thomas Sydenham, with whom he collaborated, did much to further the understanding of epidemic diseases and the treatment of smallpox; Christian Huygens did important work in mathematics and mechanics; and above all, Isaac Newton, whom Locke knew, will always be famous for the theory of universal gravitation which he published in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a couple of years earlier than Locke’s Essay. One thing that unites these gures is that, with the exception of Sydenham, they were all Fellows of the recently founded (1662) Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge. Today a Fellow of the Royal Society, an FRS, is a pillar of the scienti c establishment, but when Locke was elected (1668) the Royal Society was a focus for new, revolutionary attitudes and ways of thought. In particular, it was a stronghold of opposition to the long-entrenched Scholasticism. Many of the doctrines of the Essay – its stress on plain language, its anti-authoritarianism, its empiricism, its attitude to religion, its theory of classi cation, its account of words and de nitions, its philosophy of natural science, can also be

found in the writings of other virtuosi (as the seventeenth century called those who took part in the activities of the Royal Society and busied themselves with its new ideas). Robert Boyle’s Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666), Joseph Glanvill’s Plus Ultra (1668) and Scepsis Scienti ca (1665), Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy (1664), Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), John Wilkins’s Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) are examples of this. One important aspect of the Aristotelianism which Locke and his Royal Society colleagues rejected was the theory, mentioned earlier, of ‘scienti c’ or ‘demonstrative’ knowledge, a theory of which the rst principles or speculative maxims whose innateness Locke rejects in Book I were a part. According to this, strict, reasoned scienti c knowledge of some fact (say, about some apparently characteristic property of human beings) consists in the demonstration from certain primary starting-points that that property really is a characteristic of human beings as such. These starting-points were either rst principles (such as the law of noncontradiction that nothing can both be and not be), principles which have to be known if anything at all is to be known; or they were de nitions of the substantial forms or essential natures of the species with which particular sciences deal. Moreover, these de nitions had to abide by strict criteria and had to be in terms of genus and di erentia: biology, for example, has as its subject-matter the genus animal, a genus one of whose species, man, is di erentiated from others by possession of reason. There were strict criteria, too, for the demonstrations that led to scienti c knowledge. That humans necessarily have a certain property (say, a sense of humour) had to be concluded from these starting-points by means of a particular form of syllogistic argument. A sense of humour, it would then have been shown, is a real characteristic which humans as such necessarily have because it follows from their substantial form or nature that they have it. In fact Locke does not wholly reject the idea that in subjects such as mathematics it is possible to acquire properly ‘scienti c’ and

certain knowledge. Certainly he inveighs against some of the details of the theory of scienti c demonstration, such as the restrictive requirement for syllogistic argument. But something of the Scholastic ideal as to what can properly be called ‘knowledge’ is still there in his view that knowledge of the strictest kind is attainable in cases where the ideas we are concerned with are those he calls ‘modes’, and where (according to his account of the di erences between various kinds of complex idea) we know their ‘real essence’. Geometry is such a case. The complex ideas (of a triangle, for example) which constitute our geometrical thinking are ‘modes’, which means, according to Locke’s account, that we know the real essences of the gures for which they stand. Consequently we can see how (as though from a Scholastic ‘substantial form’) various properties of these gures come about. Thus we know that a triangle, in essence, is a closed three-sided gure, and that a circle is a gure that bears a constant relation to a centre; and from this we can see why the external angle of a triangle is equal to its two internal opposites, and why the diameter of a circle should always subtend the same angle on the circumference. In sharp contrast, however, the study of nature and its phenomena, in subjects such as biology, medicine or chemistry, is not such a case. The reason for this lies in the nature of our sensory faculties and understandings which are not such as to allow us insight into the real essences or essential natures of ‘substances’ such as gold or silver, dogs or horses. All we know of them are the properties that they seem, by experiment or observation, characteristically to have. Unlike our complex ideas of modes, our complex ideas of substances are merely lists of observable properties and are not such as to give us a priori demonstrable knowledge that those substances necessarily do have those properties and of how those properties come about. In a compelling analogy, Locke portrays our relationship with the natural world as like that of the country peasants who, on market

day in Strasbourg, gazed at the show exhibited on the face of the famous complex astronomical clock in the cathedral there. Like those peasants in relation to the clock, we are restricted to the ‘outside’ of natural things. Unlike the cathedral horologist, who would know the mechanisms of the clock and understand how it works, we do not know how it comes about that the substances of the natural world have the properties they do. Geometers can produce demonstrations of the properties of various shapes, but natural philosophers (as was the term in the seventeenth century), must, because of their ignorance of the real essences of the substances with which they deal, adopt the so-called ‘plain, historical method’ in their investigations of nature. This method was the one advocated and followed by Robert Boyle and others in the Royal Society. It consisted of compiling what were called ‘natural histories’, lists of the observable and experimentally discovered properties of things. But following it will never give insight into the necessity of some substance such as gold having the properties experiment indicates it has; it cannot give us knowledge of the strictest kind. ‘Natural philosophy’, says Locke, ‘is not capable of being made a science’ (IV.xii.10). While mathematics consists of true and certain ‘knowledge’, natural philosophy consists of ‘belief’ and opinion. Our faculties are such that the insight we have into the essences of ‘modal’ geometrical gures is not paralleled by an insight into the essences of ‘substantial’ material things. ‘Real essences’ and our insight into or ignorance of them play a role in Locke’s theory of knowledge somewhat like the Scholastics’ ‘substantial forms’ do in theirs. But, at any rate in the case of substances, there are important di erences in the way they are understood. According to the Scholastics, the substantial form or nature of man from which all human properties, such as sensation, motion or a sense of humour are supposed to follow and be deducible, is that man is an animal, speci cally a rational one. To Locke’s mind, however, this amounts to no more than a merely nominal de nition of how we use the word ‘man’. It gives no account of the actual material constitution of human beings which

lies beneath and accounts for the properties that might be observed and listed in a natural history of man. According to Locke, such an account, if we were able to give it, would be in terms of the socalled corpuscularian theory, a theory which many other ‘modern’ philosophers of the seventeenth century (for example, Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi) advocated. This amounted to a revival of ideas that had been put forward centuries earlier by Epicurus and other Greek philosophers. Rejecting the Scholastic analysis of material things into a combination of so-called ‘prime matter’ and ‘substantial form’ from which properties ow, the modern Epicureans saw them as being composed of minute imperceptible material corpuscles or atoms, the mechanical interactions between which gave rise to observable properties. Thus whereas and as in Molieère’s satire Le Malade Imaginaire (1673) a Scholastic might claim that opium is a sopori c because a ‘dormitive virtue’ ows from its ‘substantial form’, a ‘modern’ would hypothesize that opium puts people to sleep because of the way in which the minute corpuscles that compose it react with the corpuscular constitution of the human body. One thing that Locke’s investigation into the human understanding therefore makes clear is that the establishment of ‘natural philosophy’ as a fully- edged demonstrable science like geometry is beyond our sensory and intellectual powers. We cannot form ideas of the requisite kind; our faculties are not such as to permit us insight into the real essences of the substances with which natural philosophy deals. Consequently we are restricted in this area to less than certain belief and opinion, arrived at on the basis of observation and experiment. As we saw earlier, however, these limits to our knowledge give us no reason for despair. It matters not that natural philosophy is not a true science. For the practical purposes of adequately feeding, clothing and sheltering ourselves, and of keeping ourselves alive and healthy, the observations and experimental trials of the natural philosopher, not to say of the ordinary person, are su cient. Since we have God to thank for having provided us with the faculties that allow for this, it would,

Locke thinks, be improper and unseemly for us to aspire to more, and to spend our time in vain pursuit of demonstratively certain knowledge in natural philosophy. ‘Speculations of this sort’, he recorded in his Journals, ‘are of no solid advantage to us nor help to make our lives the happier, they being but the useless employment of idle or over curious brains which amuse themselves about things out of which they can by no means draw any real bene t.’1 Demonstrative knowledge of material substances is no legitimate concern of ours. There are (as will be explained) other more important matters on which to spend our time.

Locke’s belief, then, is that there are things that God has not given us to know. The idea that pure scienti c research is not a good in itself which needs no further justi cation, but that it amounts to prying into areas that are none of our business, is not one that has been much shared in recent years. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is often promoted as an acceptable ideal, and perhaps pure intellectual curiosity is often the real motive in the minds of researchers who base their appeals for nancial support on the possibility of technological or medical spin-o . But if Locke would reject knowledge for knowledge’s sake as a proper human pursuit, if ‘our business here is not to know all things’ (I.i.6), then to what, beyond adequate health and comfort, ought our understandings and natural capacities be directed? His answer is clear: we should devote ourselves to ‘those [things] which concern our conduct’ (I.i.6). God holds out to us a conditional promise of an eternal afterlife and we should look to this now. It is in our real interest, therefore, to work to discover the requirements, in terms both of belief and action, which the ful lment of that promise demands. ‘Morality’, says Locke, ‘is the proper… business of mankind’ (IV.xii.11). But we have cause to be grateful to God in this connection too: not only is a knowledge of morality something that, from the point of view of ‘the condition of our eternal estate’, we need; it is also something that God has given us the ability to acquire. ‘Morality is the proper science… of mankind’ too.

Lying behind this claim, that moral knowledge is not only what it is in our real interest to have, but also something we are capable of getting, is the classi cation of the ideas of morality as modes. This means that, along with the modal ideas of geometry, we know or should be able to work out their real essences. This means, in its turn, that, at least in principle, morality is capable of being a demonstrative science like geometry. Thus (so Locke’s line of thought runs), on the basis of the materials of experience we can construct or form the idea of an in nitely powerful and good being on whom we depend and to whom, therefore, we owe duties and obligations and whose will we must obey. Next, reason enables us to prove that such a being actually exists, and reason makes it possible for us to work out what that being would will. So, due consideration of the idea of a good wise God and of ourselves as his creatures should, says Locke, ‘a ord such foundations of our duty and rules of action, as might place morality amongst the sciences capable of demonstration: wherein 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’ (IV.iii.18). The limits to our understandings and intellectual capacities that prevent natural philosophy from ever being a science do not apply to morality. We can have a rational insight into our duty and obligations to each other and to God of a kind we do not have into the workings of the material world. The answer to what may well have been one of the initial questions of Locke and his group, ‘How are the principles of morality discovered and known to be true?’, is ‘By means of our God-given understandings’. The idea that morality is not merely discoverable by reason, but also might be developed into a systematic science, caught the imagination of Locke’s friend William Molyneux, an Irish writer on astronomy and optics, who pressed him to produce it. In reply Locke said that perhaps he was not up to the task; Isaac Newton’s Principia would similarly have been beyond him to produce. But he stressed that to admit that human reason had so far failed to produce a

complete body of ethical knowledge was not to admit that it had completely failed in what he claimed was its proper business. There are, Locke clearly believes (I.iii.1, 4; II.xxviii.8), some moral truths to which our understandings have already given us access. In the meantime there is, apart from reason, another possible source of morality. Innateness, of course, has already been rejected, as has also the unthinking acceptance of human authority. But there still remains divine revelation – the question of the status of which had been raised by Locke and his friends in their discussion group. Earlier in the century, during the Civil War and Cromwell’s Commonwealth, there had been a tendency in religion towards fanaticism. The supernatural and mystical had been emphasized and importance had been given to emotionally charged experiences, supposedly personal communions with God. Locke, however, is aligned with the moderation that came with the Restoration in 1660 and, along with such as Glanvill and Sprat, dismissed such idiosyncrasies and excesses as ‘ungrounded fancies’ (IV.xix.3) and ‘the conceits of a warmed or over-weening brain’ (IV.xix.7). But the rejection of ‘enthusiasm’, as it was known, does not mean the rejection of revelation and a sole reliance on reason as the source of moral knowledge. The Gospel provides a more sober and public source. As Locke explains to Molyneux, it ‘contains so perfect a body of ethics, that reason may be excused from that inquiry since she may nd man’s duty clearer and easier in revelation than in herself’.2

At rst sight it may seem that in ‘excusing’ reason from its proper business in this way Locke is prepared ‘to subvert the principles, and foundations of all knowledge’ (IV.xviii.5). But he is not. He is not elevating faith above reason, or advocating the abandonment of our natural faculties. For, it is plainly his view, revelation has always to answer to reason. For one thing, the moral precepts suggested to us by the Bible can, once suggested, always be authenticated and veri ed by our reason. We need and should not accept them unthinkingly. For another, if we are to accept something as a

revealed truth we need to be certain that we really know just what it means, and also whether it is a genuine revelation from God. And here again, reason is the judge (III.ix.23; IV.xviii.10). Finally, many of the revelations of the Bible are not strictly necessary for salvation, and, Locke insists, what is required of us for an afterlife is open to discovery by all, by the use of their natural faculties. God has ‘given all mankind so su cient a light of reason, that they to whom this written word [the Bible] never came, could not (whenever they set themselves to search) either doubt of the being of a God, or of the obedience due to Him’ (III.ix.23). The precepts of what Locke calls ‘natural religion’ are ‘plain, and very intelligible to all mankind’ (III.ix.23). Locke’s plan, of assessing, against the background of our place in the scheme of things, the origin and extent of human knowledge, involves the whole of the Essay. The rst of its four Books, with its arguments against the doctrine of innate knowledge, is negative, while the other three seek to establish Locke’s own, positive, thesis that all our knowledge is ultimately derived from experience. Thus Book II is concerned with ‘ideas’, the materials of knowledge, and Book IV looks at knowledge itself. As Locke himself says, this would, on a ‘ rst general view’ (II.xxxiii.19), seem to cover the matter satisfactorily; Book III, ‘Of Words’, was conceived and written when he came to realize that there is a very close connection between words and ideas. But the interest and importance of these four Books go quite beyond the way they carry Locke’s overall project. Indeed, the Essay is often read, not as a systematic whole, but for its incidental, detailed contributions to various disparate topics and philosophical problems. Book II is particularly rich in this respect. The distinctions it makes between simple and complex ideas and between various kinds of complex idea (‘modes’, ‘substances’) are important from the point of view of the general argument. But beyond this it makes a much discussed distinction between primary and secondary qualities, contributes to the philosophy of space and time, and has come to be a locus classicus for the analysis of objects into qualities

supported by a substratum, ‘a something we know not what’. Furthermore, the value and interest of what it says about free will and personal identity is evident from the frequency with which discussions of these matters are shaped by it. The much-referred-to distinction of Book III between real and nominal essence is an important moment in the philosophy of classi cation and meaning. Locke’s stress that our classi catory general words are a product of convention and human interest rather than of insight into the real natures of things is, however, admired more frequently than is the theory he is supposed to advance that words get their meaning not from their public use, but initially by standing for ideas in our minds. One important but often hidden feature of some of this detail is a disagreement not merely with aspects of an older Scholastic philosophy (as we have seen), but with a philosopher who was alive when Locke was born, Renß Descartes. Like Locke, Descartes is a ‘modern’ philosopher too, and his rejection of Scholasticism had an important e ect on the younger man. It was to that ‘justly-admired gentleman’, said Locke, that ‘[I owe] the great obligation of my rst deliverance from the unintelligible way of talking of the philosophy in use in the Schools’.3 Nevertheless (as will be abundantly clear from the notes to the main text), Locke often takes issue with Descartes. Not always naming him, he either questions or shows caution about aspects of his account of the mind as an immaterial substance; doubts that we have insight into the nature of body; and rejects Descartes’s identi cation of body and space and his denial of the vacuum. Many of the early reactions to the Essay were critical. Locke’s polemic against innate ideas was taken to have dangerous consequences for religion and morality, as was the suggestion he makes at one point that thinking might not require the immaterial soul of Cartesian philosophy and perhaps could be a property of certain arrangements of matter. Berkeley, the rst great British philosopher after Locke, reacted against the sceptical and atheistical

consequences he thought he saw in aspects of Locke’s philosophy, such as its clockwork picture of the material world and the theory, which some have found in the Essay, that our perception and knowledge of the world is indirect and mediated by our ideas. Nevertheless, the Essay became a popular classic. It became a set text for university students. In 1700 when, as a young student, George Berkeley entered Trinity College, Dublin, it was already amongst the reading stipulated by the Provost. It was translated into French in 1700 and Latin in 1701 and ran into nearly two dozen editions in the eighteenth century. Locke, along with ‘the incomparable’ Newton, became one of the gureheads of the Age of Enlightenment and, with him, did much to foster the eighteenthcentury picture of the world as a vast mechanical assemblage of matter in motion, and of man as simply an element, a cog in a regularly ordered and determined universe. The picture of man as part of, not set aside from the rest of, nature derives from Locke too. Though he had been preceded by Hobbes in this, he treated man as a subject for unbiased objective investigation as suitable as anything else. He follows, in his examination of the human understanding, just the same ‘plain, historical’ method of careful observation as he recommends for the study of material substances. His rejection of innate ideas, his suggestion that the mind begins as ‘white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas’ (II.i.2), portray us as coming into the world beholden to no prior authority, answerable only to reason and experience for our consequent opinions and beliefs. His account of ‘all the materials of reason and knowledge’ as combinations of simple ideas derived from sensation and re ection parallels the corpuscularian account of the properties of things. This parallel may not hold in detail; but the idea that the workings of the mind can be atomized, explained, traced, and given a natural history along with any other part of the world is obviously signi cant. The framework of Locke’s approach to the human mind in uenced psychology and epistemology for a long time. Against the

background of the idea that the mind is initially blank paper, others set themselves the problem of explaining how a maturing human acquires concepts, understandings, beliefs and knowledge. David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749), Joseph Priestley’s Disquisition relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) and Etienne Condillac’s Treatise on Sensations (1754) all approached this problem by analysing experience, after the manner of Locke, into elements and their combinations. Locke made an impact not just on philosophy and psychology in the eighteenth century, but on thought and literature more widely. Joseph Addison’s writings in the Spectator, Alexander Pope’s essays and poetry, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the many illustrative quotations from the Essay in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary all show this. Between the time of Locke’s immediate in uence and the present, the course of philosophy and of thought in general has seen many revolutions and reactions. We should not expect to nd his e ect on and importance for us now to be other than distant and indirect. The Essay is sometimes seen purely as a historical document, a classical expression of empiricism, a doctrine which, at least in philosophy, is not now greatly in vogue; or it is used, somewhat patronizingly, as a source of philosophical mistakes and errors to be used as target-practice. Nevertheless some aspects of his general spirit have not disappeared and are not completely foreign to this century. In 1789 Horace Walpole commented that Locke was almost the rst philosopher to introduce common sense into his writings. And earlier this century, Bertrand Russell (so Gilbert Ryle reports), explaining why Locke had ‘made a bigger di erence to the whole intellectual climate of mankind than anyone had done since Aristotle’, said that ‘no one ever had Common Sense before John Locke’.4 There is indeed a judiciousness which pervades both his expression and his explicit doctrine. Tending to write plainly, and to

avoid technical terms and jargon, he both displays and explicitly advocates a sober reasonableness in the adoption of beliefs, a due weighing of evidence, a lack of bias, prejudice or partiality in attitude or opinion, a proper caution, a thinking for oneself, and a refusal to accept anything on the basis of authority. He insists that opinions are carefully to be weighed, considered and judged on their own merits, by each individual for himself, in independence of what others, particularly those in majority or authority, might hold. Truth, he says in the ‘Epistle to the Reader’, is ‘like gold’, for ‘trial and examination must give it price, and not any… fashion’; and it is clear that the spirit of ‘common sense’ embodied in the desire to think for oneself, to weigh evidence and keep belief within its limits, and to put things to the test of reason and experience, is thought by many people today to be of paramount value. NOTES 1 An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay, together with Excerpts from his Journals, ed. R. I. Aaron & J. Gibb (Oxford, 1936), p. 85. 2 Corr., 5.595. 3 Works, 4.48. 4 Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers, 2 vols (London, 1971), p. 147.

FURTHER READING M. R. Ayers, Locke, 2 vols (London, 1991). An important and extensive work, which revives and deepens our understanding of Locke. It nds, too, that recent philosophy could pro t from his unrecognized insights. Vere Chappell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Locke (Cambridge, 1994). A collection of accessible chapters on all aspects of Locke’s thought: his intellectual development, his in uence on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his theory of knowledge, his philosophies of mind, language and religion. M. Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London, 1957). The best biography to date. John Dunn, Locke (Oxford, 1984). Mark Goldie (ed.), John Locke: Selected Correspondence (Oxford, 2002). Roland Hall & Roger Woolhouse, Eighty Years of Locke Scholarship: A Bibliographical Guide (Edinburgh, 1983). A systematic listing of the secondary literature on Locke. Nicholas Jolley, Locke: His Philosophical Thought (Oxford, 1999). R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns (St Louis, MO, 2nd edn 1961). A well-documented account of the intellectual cross-currents of the seventeenth century. Jonathan Lowe, Locke (London, 1995). An excellent, and very sympathetic, philosophical introduction to some central doctrines of the Essay.

Kenneth MacLean, John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1962). Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-century England (Princeton, 1983). An account of seventeenth-century ideas concerning natural science, religion, history, law and literature. R. S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-century England (New Haven, 1958). An excellent account of part of the intellectual background to the Essay. Roger Woolhouse, Locke (Sussex, 1983). John Yolton, Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford, 1956). A classic account of the early reception of the Essay. John Yolton, Locke and the Compass of the Understanding (Cambridge, 1970).

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ABBREVIATIONS Corr.

The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer, 9 vols (Oxford, 1976– )

CSMK

John Cottingham, Robert Stootho , Dugald Murdoch, Anthony Kenny, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1985–91)

Fraser

A. C. Fraser (ed.), An Essay concerning Human Understanding, by John Locke, 2 vols (Oxford, 1894)

Nidditch Peter H. Nidditch (ed.), John Locke: An Essay concerning Human Understanding (Oxford, 1975) Pringle- A. S. Pringle-Pattison (ed.), An Essay concerning Human Pattison Understanding, by John Locke (Oxford, 1924) Works

John Locke, Works, 10 vols (London, 1823; reprinted Aalen, 1963)

Yolton

John W. Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford, 1956)

CHRONOLOGY 1632 29 August: Born Wrington, Somerset. 1646 Admitted to Westminster School, London. 1652 Elected to studentship at Christ Church, Oxford. 1656 Graduates BA. 1658 Graduates MA. 1660 Writes rst tract on the Civil Magistrate. 1661 Father dies. 1661–2 Writes second tract on the Civil Magistrate. 1664 Censor of Moral Philosophy at Christ Church. Writes ‘Essays on the Law of Nature’. 1667 Joins household of Lord Ashley, future rst earl of Shaftesbury. Writes ‘An Essay concerning Toleration’. 1668 Elected Fellow of the Royal Society. 1671 Writes rst drafts of ‘Essay concerning Human Understanding’. 1673–4 Secretary to Council of Trade and Foreign Plantations. 1675 Graduates MB. 1675 –9 In France (Paris and Montpellier). 1680–82 Writes ‘Two Treatises of Government’.

1683–9 In Holland. 1689 Returns to London; anonymous publication of ‘A Letter concerning Toleration’ and of ‘Two Treatises of Government’; publication of ‘An Essay concerning Human Understanding’ (dated 1690). 1690 Moves from London to Oates, Essex; anonymous publication of ‘Second Letter concerning Toleration’. 1691 Publication of ‘Some Consideration of the Consequences of the lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money’. 1692 Anonymous publication of ‘Third Letter concerning Toleration’. 1693 Publication of ‘Some Thoughts concerning Education’. 1694 Publication of second edition of ‘Essay concerning Human Understanding’. 1695 Publication of ‘Further Considerations concerning Raising the Value of Money’ and of third edition of ‘Essay concerning Human Understanding’; anonymous publication of ‘The Reasonableness of Christianity’ and of ‘Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity’. 1696 Appointed to the Commission for Trade and Plantations (Board of Trade). 1697 Publication of ‘A Letter’ and ‘A Reply’ to Bishop Stilling eet; anonymous publication of ‘Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity’. 1698 Publication of a further ‘Reply’ to Stilling eet.

1699 Publication of fourth edition of ‘Essay concerning Human Understanding’. 1700 Resigns from Board of Trade. Publication of French translation of ‘Essay concerning Human Understanding’. 1701 Publication of Latin translation of ‘Essay concerning Human Understanding’. 1704 28 October: Dies Oates, Essex.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT The text of the Essay presented here is basically that of the fth edition (1706), following the copy in the British Library (cat. no. 8406h13). The fth was the last edition on which Locke worked and which (according to a codicil to his will) represents the Essay ‘in that estate that my last thoughts left it in’. However, a number of what seem to be obvious (often typographical) errors have been corrected; almost all of these can be identi ed by referring to the critical edition of the Essay in Nidditch. Spelling and capitalization have been considerably modernized, and some italics have been removed (for example, from proper names and from the word ‘idea’, which Locke always italicized). Locke gives an explanation of many of the remaining italics at the end of the rst and second edition versions of the ‘Epistle to the Reader’: ‘One thing more I must advertise my reader of, and that is, that the summary of each section is printed in italic characters, whereby the reader may nd the contents almost as well as if it had been printed in the margin by the side, if a little allowance be made for the grammatical construction, which in the text itself could not always be so ordered, as to make perfect propositions, which yet by the words printed in italic, may be easily guessed at.’ The fth edition of the Essay as printed in 1706 contained a number of lengthy footnotes, which may or may not have been authorized by Locke himself, containing extensive quotations from the printed debate that Locke had with Edward Stilling eet, Bishop of Worcester, concerning topics such as the term ‘idea’, an argument for the existence of God, the idea and being of substance, abstract ideas and essences, personal identity and the resurrection, the de nition of knowledge, and matter and thought. In this Penguin Classics edition these footnotes have been repositioned in an Appendix, their original references in the text being given by superscript small capital letters. Other footnotes in the 1706 edition are preserved with the text and referenced by conventional symbols.

Superscript numbers in the text refer to editorial notes, placed at the end of the volume. Acknowledgement must be made to Peter H. Nidditch (see Bibliographical Abbreviations) for the identi cation in these of various quotations from and references to the Bible and classical authors.

TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THOMAS EARL OF PEMBROKE AND MONTGOMERY, Baron Herbert of Cardi , Lord Ross of 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. 1

My LORD, This treatise, which is grown up under your Lordship’s eye, and has ventured into the world by your order,2 does now, by a natural kind of right, come to your Lordship for that protection, which you several years since promised it. ’Tis not that I think any name, how great soever, set at the beginning of a book, will be able to cover the faults 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,3 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 rst 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. ’Tis 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, to whom your Lordship has been pleased not wholly to conceal them. This alone were a su cient 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 draught 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 di erent from yours. If your Lordship think t, 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 owers, 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 o erings 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 con dence brag, I here make your Lordship the richest present, you ever received. This I am sure, I am under the greatest obligation 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, Dorset Court 24th of May, 1689 My Lord, Your Lordship’s Most Humble, and Most Obedient Servant, JOHN LOCKE

THE EPISTLE TO THE READER Reader, I here 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 ies 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,1 and not content to live lazily on scraps of begged opinions, sets his own thoughts on work, to nd 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 a ord thee an opportunity of the like

diversion, if thou wilt make use of thy own thoughts in reading. ’Tis to them, if they are thy own, that I refer myself: but if they are taken upon trust from others, ’tis no great matter what they are, they not following truth, but some meaner consideration: and ’tis 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 o ended, whatever be thy censure. For though it be certain, that there is nothing in this treatise, of the truth where of 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 ndest 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 su ciently considered it. Were it t to trouble thee with the history of this essay, I should tell thee that ve or six friends meeting at my chamber,2 and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the di culties that rose on every side. After we had a while 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 tted to deal with. This I proposed to the company, who all readily assented; and thereupon it was agreed, that this should be our rst inquiry. Some hasty and undigested thoughts, on a subject I had never before considered, which I set down against our next meeting, gave the rst ent