Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/780

 756 LOCKE ableness of Christianity from Mr Edwards s Reflexions, 1695. (3) A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity, 1697. (4) A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul to the Galatians, First and Second Corinthians, Romans, and Ephcsians. To which is prefixed an Essay for the understanding of St Paul s Epistles by consulting St Paul himself, 1705-7 (posthumous). III. EDUCATION. (1) Some Thoughts concerning Education, 1693. (2) The Conduct of the Understanding, 1706 (posthumous). (3) Some Thoughts concerning Heading and Study for a Gentleman, 1706 (posthumous). (4) Instructions for the Conduct of a Young Gentleman, 1706 (posthumous). (5) Of Study (written in France in Locke s journal, and published in L. King s Life of Locke in 1830). IV. PHILOSOPHY. (1) An Essay concerning Human Understand ing, in four books, 1690. (2) A Letter to the Bishop of Worcester concerning some j)assages relating to Mr Locke s Essay of Human Understanding in a late Discourse of his Lordship s in Vindication of the Trinity, 1697. (3) Mr Locke s Reply to tJte Bishop of Worces ter s Answer to his Letter, 1697. (4) Mr Locke s Reply to the Bishop of Worcester s Ansiver to his Second Letter, 1699. (5) A Discourse of Miracles, 1706 (posthumous). (6) An Examination of Father Malebranche s opinion of Seeing all Things in God, 1706 (posthu mous). (7) Remarks upon Some of Mr Norris s Books, wherein he asserts Father Malebranche s opinion of Seeing all Things in God, 1720 (posthumous). The following are Miscellaneous Tracts: (1) A New Method of a Common Place Book, 1686 (this was Locke s first article in the Bibliotheque of Le Clerc ; his other contributions to it are uncertain, except the Epitome of the Essay, in 1688). (2) The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (prepared when Locke was Lord Shaftesbury s secretaiy at Exeter House about 1673 ; remarkable for its recognition of the principle of toleration, and published in 1706, in the posthumous collection). (3) Memoirs relating to the Life, of Anthony, First Earl of Shnftcsbury, 1706. (4) Elements of Natural Philosophy, 1706. (5) Observations upon the Growth and Culture of Vines and Olives, 1706. (6) Rides of a Society which met once a Week, for their improvement in Useful Knowledge, and for the promotion of Truth and Christian Charity, 1706. (7) A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country, published in 1875 (included by Des Maizeaux in his Collection of Several Pieces of Mr John Locke s, 1720), and soon afterwards burned by the common hangman by orders from the House of Lords, was disavowed by Locke himself. It may have been dictated by Shaftesbury. There are also various writings of Locke first published in the biographies of Lord Haig and of Mr Fox Bourne. Locke s numerous Letters to Thoynard, Limborch, Le Clerc, Guenellon, Molyneux, Collins, Sir Isaac Newton, the first and the third Lord Shaftesbury, Lords Peterborough and Pembroke. Clarke of Chipley, and others, many of them unpublished, are models in their kind. They express the courtesy and humour which were natural to him, and his varied interests in human life. Those to Molyneux and Limborch in particular throw light on the Essay, and his works on Toleration and Christianity. I. It has been truly said that all Locke s writings, even the Essay on Human Understanding itself, were &quot;occasional, and intended directly to counteract the enemies of reason and freedom in his own age.&quot; This is obviously true of his works on Social Polity, written in an age when the principles of democracy and toleration were struggling with passive obedience and divine right of kings, and when even the popular assertors of public liberty were the greatest engrossers of it too.&quot; The state with Locke was the issue of free contract, and was not a natural organism. That the people, in the exercise of their sovereignty, have the right to govern themselves in the way they judge expedient for the common good, and that the civil government, whatever form it assumes, has no right to interfere with religious beliefs not expressed in actions inconsistent with civil society, is the essence of his political philo sophy. He based the ultimate sovereignty of the people on a virtual consent or contract on the part of the people themselves to be so governed. The precise terms of contract, he allowed, might and should be modified by the sovereign people from time to time, in accommodation to ever changing circumstances. He saw that things in this world were in so constant a flux that no society long remained in the same state, and that &quot;the grossest absurdities&quot; must be the issue of &quot; following custom when reason has left the custom.&quot; With an English love of compromise in the working of political affairs, he was always disposed towards liberal ecclesiastical concessions for the sake of religious unity and peace, and recom mended obedience to the civil magistrate in all indifferent things in worship and government, not otherwise expressly determined by supernatural revelation. His attack on Sir Robert Filmer in the First Treatise on Govern ment was an anachronism, even when it was published ; in the democratic principle argued for in the Second Treatise, while in advance of the practice of his age, he was anticipated by Aquinas and Bodin, as well as by Grotius and Hooker. His philosophical defence of the social rights of religious beliefs was the most original ind important of his contributions to polity, and the most far-reach ing in its ultimate assumptions. Locke had a more modest esti mate of human resources, natural and supernatural, for forming true judgments in religion, and a less pronounced judgment of the im morality of religious error, than either the Catholic or the Puritan. The toleration which he spent his life in arguing for meant a revolution from the absolute to a relative point of view in the theory of knowledge. It was a protest against those who in theology peremptorily require demonstration, and demand certainty where probability only is to be had.&quot; The practice of universal tolera tion amidst increasing religious differences was the most important application to the circumstances of his own age of the theory about human knowledge which pervaded his Essay. This paradox is now a commonplace, and the superabundant argument and irony in the Letters on Toleration fatigue the modern reader. The change of opinion is more due to Locke himself than to any one else. The rights of free thought and liberty of conscience bad indeed been pleaded for, on various grounds, throughout the century in which he lived. Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, Cudworth, Glanvill, and other philosophical thinkers in the Church of England urged toleration in the state, in conjunction with a wide comprehension in the church, on grounds which implied intellectual limitation and even un certainty in religious matters. Puritan Independents and Baptists, like Owen, Goodwin, and Richardson, whose idea of ecclesiastical comprehension was dogmatic and narrow, were ready to accept sectarian variety within the state, on the ground that it was possible to have many religions in the land, but only their own form within their sect. The existence of separate Christian nationalities, on the other hand, was the only justification of separate religious societies to the latitudinarian churchmen with whom Locke associated ; in each nationality they would have a comprehensive church co extensive with the nation. Locke went far to unite in a higher principle what was best in the broad Anglican and in the Puritan theories, while he recognized the individual liberty which has ever distinguished the national church of England, (a) In his reasonings for toleration he insists on the fact that all human theologies must consist more of beliefs determined on pre sumptions of probability than of knowledge founded on what is either self-evident or demonstrable in the light of reason. A pro found sense of the limits of human reason was at the bottom of his arguments for a tolerant comprehension by the state and also by the church. He had no objections to a national establishment of some form of religion, provided it was comprehensive enough, and was really the nation organized to promote goodness, and not to protect the metaphysical subtleties by which professional theologians spoil the original simplicity of Christianity. The recall of the national religion to this primitive simplicity, he hoped, would make toleration of nonconformists unnecessary, as few would then remain to ask for it. (b) The speculative, and therefore individually and socially harmless, nature of most persecuted beliefs and forms of worship is another point on which he insists. &quot; No man is hurt because his neighbour is of a different religion from his own, and no civil society is hurt because its members are of different religions from one another.&quot; The more various our beliefs are, the more probable it becomes that a complete view of truth may by degrees be reached at last by the human race. In the meantime beliefs in religion concern the individual only and not society. To the atheist alone Locke absolutely refuses toleration, on the ground that the social bonds can have no hold over him, for &quot;the taking away of God dissolves all.&quot; If atheism means the denial that reason is the ultimate regulative principle in the universe, then the consistent atheist without doubt &quot; dissolves all,&quot; and must reject physical science even, as well as morality, in an absolute nescience, so that he is incapable of citizenship as one who is insane. In Locke s own philosophy, as we shall see, the existence of God is represented as demonstrable, but the distinctive articles of Christianity are founded only on presumptions of probability. He argued too against full toleration to the Church of Rome, at least in the circumstances of the age in which the Toleration Act was passed, on the ground of its allegiance to a foreign sovereign, (c) The unfitness of force as a means of sending the light of truth into a human mind is a third argument urged by Locke, founded on the psychology of human understanding. Persecution can only transform a man into a hypocrite ; belief must be formed by individual discernment of evidence. Apart from evidence, a man cannot command his own understanding ; he cannot determine arbitrarily what opinions he is to hold. Thus all Locke s pleas for a universal toleration resolve at last into a philosophical view of the limits and origin of knowledge. II. The principles which determined Locke s social polity largely determined? his way of looking at Christianity. His latitudin- arianism&quot; was really the result of an extraordinary reverence for truth, and of his perception that in matters of religion knowledge may be sufficient for practice while it falls far short of perfection and demonstration. He insists on referring questions in religion to the reasoning individual, and never loses sight of the essential reasonableness of Christianity as the only ground on which it