Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/782

 758 LOCKE and falsehood belong only to the assertions or denials of the mind. The idea of a centaur has no more falsehood in it, when it appears in our minds, than the name centaur has falsehood in it when it is pronounced by our mouths, or written on paper. Truth and falsehood lie always in affirmations or negations, and the mere thoughts of which as individuals we happen to be conscious are not per so either true or false. They do not become either real knowledge or error &quot;till the mind affirms or denies something of them.&quot; That none of our knowledge is &quot;innate&quot; is the conclusion argued for in the First Book. But the drift of this famous argu ment has been overlooked by Locke s critics. It has been criticized as if it was a metaphysical discussion about the existence of trans cendental elements in human knowledge, like that at issue in the present day between empiricism and intellectualism. If it were so it would be an example of the fallacy of irrelevant conclusion. For this Locke himself is no doubt partly responsible. It is not easy to determine who or what he had in view in this polemic. Lord Her bert alone is made prominent as the defender of innateness, and Locke was perhaps too little read in the literature of ancient and modern philosophy to do full justice to those who, from Plato downwards, have recognized the intuitions of reason as well as the phenomena of sense in the constitution of knowledge. The positions which he assails would have been disclaimed by the most eminent defenders of the transcendental elements. &quot; Innate,&quot; as Lord Shaftesbury says, &quot; is a word Mr Locke poorly plays on,&quot; at least if he is to be understood as engaged in an intel lectual struggle against Plato or Descartes. The right word, though less used, is connatural. For what has birth, or the progress of the fcetus, to do in this case ? &quot; The real question, as Shaftesbury adds, is not about the time when the supposed inaate knowledge entered, but &quot; whether the constitution of man be such that, being adult and grown up, the ideas of (rational) order and ad ministration of a God will not infallibly and necessarily spring up in him. &quot; But this Locke himself does not deny. That there are cer tain propositions,&quot; we find him saying, &quot;which, though the soul from the beginning, or when a man is born, does not know, yet, by assistance from the outward senses, and the help of some previous cultivation, it may afterwards come certainly to know the truth of, is no more than what I have affirmed in my first book &quot; (see &quot;Epistle to Reader,&quot; in second edition). This further appears from the fact that, although the Essay opens with an attack on innateness in human knowledge, yet the self-evidence, in the light of educated reason, of much that we know is asserted elsewhere not less strenuously. Much of our knowledge he reports in the fourth book to be reached by purely rational insight and demon stration. What he really argues against in the first book is that any of it should be supposed to have a claim to protection against a free criticism of its reasonableness. He argues there against the innateness of our knowledge of God and of morality ; yet in the fourth book he reports, as a result of his search into our rational consciousness, in the &quot; plain historical method,&quot; that the existence of God is a demonstrable rational conclusion, involved in that causal necessity without which there could be no knowledge at all ; and he maintains in various places that morality may be found to be as demonstrably necessary as mathematics. The two posi tions are quite consistent. The demonstrable rational necessity of these and other sorts of knowledge often remains latent, he might say, in the share of reason that is potentially present in indi viduals, and therefore cannot be called &quot;innate&quot; knowledge; but, for all that, such truths carry their own evidence along with them &quot; in every mind that is rationally awake. Even in the first book he appeals to what might be called common reason, which he calls &quot; common sense.&quot; &quot; He would be thought void of common sense who asked, on the one side, or, on the other, went to give a reason, why it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be. It carries its own light and evidence with it, and needs no other proof ; he that understands the terms assents to it for its own sake, or else nothing else will ever be able to prevail with him to do it&quot; (bk. i. chap. 3, 4). The truth is neither Locke nor the intellectualists of the 17th century expressed their meaning with enough of precision; if they had, Locke s first book would probably have taken a form more consistent with its true intention. It is really to be read as an energetic argumentative protest against anything in human knowledge being supposed to be independent of rational criticism. Locke believed that in attacking innate principles he was really substituting conscious self-evidence and rational demonstration instead of blind repose on authority, and was thus, as he says himself, not &quot; pulling up the foundations of knowledge, but &quot;laying those foundations surer.&quot; Truth is to be found in &quot;the contemplation of things themselves,&quot; that is, by actual rational insight on the part of each individual. But when men heard of &quot; some general propositions that could not be doubted as soon as understood,&quot; it was a short and easy way to con clude that such propositions are &quot;innate,&quot; and that a personal perception of their rational self-evidence is unnecessary. This being once received, &quot;it eased the lazy from the pains of search and stopped the inquiry of the doubtful concerning all that was once styled innate.&quot; Dogmas became protected against rational criticism. &quot;It was no small advantage to those who affected to be masters and teachers to make this the principle of principles that principles must not be questioned. &quot; The mere assumption that they are &quot; innate&quot; was enough &quot;to take men off the use of their own reason and judgment, and to put them upon believing and taking upon trust without further examination. . . . Nor is it a small power it gives a man over another to have the authority to make a man swallow that for an innate principle which may serve his pur pose who teacheth them &quot; (bk. i. chap. 4, 24). Locke s examina tion of the way in which the rational consciousness of self-evident truths is actually reached refers them to &quot;the being of things themselves duly considered, and to the application of those faculties that are fitted to receive and judge of them when duly employed.&quot; Thus the reasoning which runs through the first book is a return, in a more general and therefore more philosophical way, to that defence of individual rational insight against blind dependence on authority which was offered in the Letters on Toleration. The Second Book opens with the suggestion of a general proposi tion regarding the genesis and constitution of ideas or thoughts ; it closes after a laboured endeavour to verify it. This hypothetical proposition is that all human thoughts, even the most complex and abstract, are due to &quot;experience.&quot; If so, the significance of all abstract words, and the objective truth of all individual thoughts, must be tested by the elements of which &quot; experience&quot; consists, and cannot in any instance claim protection against this test. The important point is what &quot;experience&quot; consists of. Locke says that it all comes either from external sources or from the mind itself ; and he promises to show that even our most abstract thoughts, which seem to reach to infinity, may be traced to one or other or both of these constituents. In his own words, our most &quot;complex ideas&quot; are all made up of &quot;simple ideas,&quot; either from without or from the mind ; they are due to phenomena of which we are percipient in the five senses, or else due to reflexion upon &quot;the operations of mind.&quot; The &quot;verification&quot; of this position, in the central chapters of the second book, is to the effect that even those thoughts which are &quot;most abstruse, how remote soever they may seem from sense, or from any operations of our minds, are yet only such as the understanding frames to itself by repeating and joining together ideas that it had either from objects of sense, or from its own operations about objects of sense,&quot; so that even large and abstract ideas arc derived from one or other of the two sources (bk. ii. chap. 12, 8). For this purpose our thoughts of space, time, infinity, power, substance, personal identity, causality, and several others which seem most remote from the supposed original,&quot; are examined one after another, in the &quot;historical plain method,&quot; and their complex constitution is resolved into (a) perceptions of things external, through the five senses, or into (b) perceptions of operations of our own minds. The source of experience which depends upon the five senses Locke calls sensation ; the other, through which mind is reflectively aware of its own operations, he calls reflexion. This last, &quot; though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects,&quot; is yet, he says, &quot;very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense.&quot; The suggestion that &quot;sense&quot; might designate both the springs of experience is misleading, when we find in the sequel how much Locke tacitly credits &quot;reflexion&quot; with, in the way of rational tendencies and intellectual obligations ; it may be ob jected to on grounds like those on which the somewhat analogous employment by Eeid and others of common sense &quot; for common reason has been condemned. They both mean to say that we may call that &quot;sense&quot; in which reason at once carries the light of its own evidence, and does not even admit of external proof. Pieason in its own evidence is thus analogous to what sense is popularly assumed to be. The elasticity of Locke s language in explaining his thesis makes the most opposite interpretations of the Essay possible, and all we can do is to compare one part with another, and in doubtful cases to give him the benefit of the doubt His vacillation in the use of words is unfortunate. It was partly caused by a determination to avoid rigid technicality and pedantry. &quot;Sensation&quot; for instance is, in one definition, confined to &quot;im pressions or motions made in some part of the body which produce perceptions in the understanding&quot; (bk. ii. 1, 23) ; yet, when treated as one of the two springs of experience, it is made equivalent to what philosophers now call sense-perception, while &quot;reflexion&quot; turns out to be another name for sclf-cmisciousncss. Accordingly, although the second book is professedly limited to the examination of our ideas or thoughts only, it by implication makes the (pro visional) assumption that the &quot;ideas&quot; of which we are conscious in &quot; sensation &quot; are at the same time to be regarded as &quot; qualities &quot; of sensible things which in some sort of way exist &quot; without us,&quot; and also that the successive &quot; operations &quot; presented in &quot; reflexion &quot; are those of an individual mind, presumed to exist somehow independ ently of them. Locke thus starts as a common sense pcrccptionist, and likewise relieves himself of the difficulty of having at the outset to show how the data abstracted by each sense are united in real