Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/786

 762 L O C L C of nature can be only presumed probabilities not purely rational certainties. For him the vast region of reality beyond our im mediate sense-perceptions, memory, and the demonstrably neces sary causal connexion with Universal Mind is either presumed probability, grounded on faith, or else it is within that veil which separates what is behind it from reasonable belief as well as from knowledge. And he even fails to explain how anything at all above the world of sense can be &quot;known&quot; in a sense-perception that is restricted to the transitory actual present sensation &quot; of each moment. No past events and no future events can be known in the strict meaning of &quot;knowledge.&quot; It is unreasonable to demand a knowledge of more than abstract propositions and present momentary experiences. For the rest, we can only gradually con vert beliefs into certainties that are absolute for all practical purposes. Such is the outcome of the Essay. We might expect to learn from Locke something as to the rationale of the probable presumptions by which, as supplementary to our limited knowledge of real existence, we pass beyond the narrow sphere within which that knowledge is confined, according to his report of it, and possess ourselves so far of the unperceived past, distant, and future, in our experimental reasonings. He does little to satisfy us here. The concluding chapters of the fourth book contain judicious advice for human beings, whose lives are passed in a world of probabilities and presumptions, for avoiding the conse quent risks of error or misinterpretation in their reasonings about what they see, with or without the help of syllogism, the function of which, as an organ of discovery, he criticizes in the seventeenth chapter. Nothing is done to connect &quot;probable&quot; interpretations of the contingent phenomena of existence with the rational relations involved in the knowable part of its constitution, with which the preceding chapters were occupied. This subject was resumed by Hume, very much at the point where Locke left it. With a still humbler view of the possible extent of human knowledge than Locke s, Hume proposed as a subject &quot; worthy of curiosity,&quot; to inquire what is &quot; the nature of that evidence which assures us of any real existence and matter of fact, beyond the present testimony of our senses and the records of our memory, &quot; remarking that &quot;this part of philosophy has been little cultivated either by the ancients or the moderns.&quot; The result of the inquiry was his announcement that Custom and the associative tendencies are a sufficient practical explanation of the formation of our experience. All beyond each present transitory &quot;impression&quot; is connected with it, through &quot;ideas,&quot; by means of Custom and Association. Hume s solvent, in the form either of individual or of inherited associative tendency, has since been made the philosophical explanation of all human experience in the Empirical Philosophy to which his Inquiry conducted. As for Locke, the &quot;association of ideas&quot; either in the individual or as inherited was not alluded to in the first edition of the Essay. The short chapter on the subject now found at the end of the second book was introduced in the second edition, not as in any way philosophically explanatory either of the thoughts .or of the knowledge and probable beliefs of men, but as the chief source of human prejudices as a cause of human errors against which men, dependent largely on probable presumptions, need in an especial manner to be warned. This useful chapter was an afterthought caveat, regarding a tendency which Locke saw was apt to spoil the &quot;quality&quot; of our individual thoughts, apt, if one may put it so, to make them inconsistent with the Universal Thought latent in nature, by which our personal thoughts about what the laws in nature are must be tested. On the other hand, an analysis like Kant s of what is abstractly implied in knowledge is even more foreign to the design of Locke, and to the tone of his philosophy, than the attempts of 18th and 19th century associationists and evolutionists to account for know ledge as if it were a fact of physical science. To show, in the case of any self-evident conception or judgment, that without it know ledge could not exist at all, would be to show what Locke took for granted, for all the purposes he had in view. His aim was to determine to what extent experience, presumed to be rationally constituted, could come within the individual consciousness of man. On the one hand, to analyse in the abstract the rational constitution of knowledge, into which he found that man is able only very partially to subdue the universe, or, on the other hand, to seek for the physical causes of its (partial) realization in the human individual, were neither of them inquiries properly included in his enterprise. Locke s function was to present to the philosophical mind of the modern world, in his own &quot;historical plain method,&quot; the largest assortment ever made by any individual of the actual facts of sense consciousness and rational consciousness in man. The further 2 V 5? h f a ! lo l ( these facts &amp;gt; in Germany on the Transcendental Method, in England and France on the Empirical Method, as well as by Butler and Reid, in Locke s own Common Sense Method- all under the stimulus of Hume s sceptical analysis has employed philosophers since the Essay on Human Understating collected materials for speculation. Literature. The Essay concerning Human Understanding, which was thus the philosophy of Locke s own life, and also of the century which followed, has passed through more editions than any similar book of ancient or modern times. Before the middle of the 18th century it had reached a thirteenth, and it has now passed through some forty editions, besides being translated into Latin, French. Dutch, German, and modern Greek, in various versions. There are also several abridgments, in which the attempt is made to remove some of its innumerable repetitions. A considerable philosophical library might be formed out of the criticisms and comments to .which it has given rise in the last hundred and ninety years. In addition to those which appeared when Locke was alive, some of which are mentioned above, among the most important arc Leibnitz s Nouvcaux Essais sur VEntendement Humain written about 1700 and published in 17G5, in which each chapter of the Essaii of Locke is examined in a corre- The Letters on Toleration, Thoughts on Education, and Reasonableness of Chris tianity have also gone through many editions, and been translated into different languages. The first collected edition of Locke s Works was in 1714, in three folio volumes. The best edition is that by Bishop Law, in four quartos, 1777. The one most commonly known is in ten volumes, 1812. The Essay, as well as the other treatises, needs textual revision and critical annotation. The Eloge of Le Cc-c ,(Bibliotlte&amp;lt;)ue Choisie, 1703) has been the basis of the memoirs of Locke prefixed to the successive editions of his Worts, and contained in the biographical dictionaries. In 1830 a Life of Locke, in two volumes, was published by his descendant Lord King. This adds a good deal to what was previously known, as Lord King was able to draw from the mass of corre spondence, journals, and commonplace books of Locke in his possession. In the same year Dr Thomas Foster published some interesting letters from Locke to Benjamin Furley. The most copious account of the details of Locke s life is contained in the two volumes by Mr Fox Bourne (187G), which are the results of laborious and faithful research in the Shaftesbury Papers, Locke MSS. in the British Museum, the Public Record Office, the Lambeth, Christ Church, and Bodleian libraries, and in the Remonstrants library at Amsterdam. (A. C. F.) LOCKHART, JOHN GIBSON (1794-1854), was born in the manse of Cambusnethan in Lanarkshire, where his father, Dr Lockhart, was minister. His mother was daughter of the Rev. John Gibson, minister of St Cuth- bert s, Edinburgh. In 1796 his father was transferred to Glasgow, where John Lockhart was reared and educated. He derived his rare abilities from his mother, and his first regular teaching from the High School of Glasgow. He appears to have been from the first distinguished as a clever, but by no means industrious boy. Like most clever boys he read everything that came in his way ; and what he had once devoured he never forgot ; for his memory was so retentive that, in after life, like Macaulay and Sir George Lewis, he seldom found it necessary to verify a passage for quotation. No livelier boy than John Lockhart ever lived ; in or out of school his sense of fun and humour, expressed in joke, sarcasm, and pencil caricatures, was irrepressible. At the same time, however merry and mischievous, he was a proud and reserved boy ; and this was the side he mostly turned to the outer world as a man. The struggle between a very affectionate nature and a determination not to show his feelings, or perhaps an incapacity to give way to them, cost him dear. A younger brother and sister were carried off within a few days of each other. John appeared to bear the loss like a stoic, but he fell seriously ill, and had to be removed finally from the High School. On his recovery, though still under twelve years of age, he was entered at college, where he sketched the professor for the amusement of his com panions, as he had sketched the masters before. When examination time came, he astonished all by a display of erudition, especially in Greek authors, of the acquisition of which he had given no signs ; a Snell exhibition, just vacant at Oxford, was accordingly offered to him and accepted. Lockhart was not turned fourteen when he was entered at Balliol. College, but he soon asserted his character and his powers. His fun and satire made him at once popular and formidable, while beyond the regular studies of the place he acquired a great store of extra knowledge. He read French, Italian, German, and Spanish, was curious in classical and British antiquities, and well versed in heraldic and genealogical lore. Lockhart went up to the schools in the Easter term of 1813 not nineteen years of age and, notwithstanding the most audacious employ ment of part of his time in caricaturing the examiners, he came out first in classics. The name of Henry Hart Milman, a subsequent friend through life, stood next his. For mathematics he never had the least inclination.