Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/217

Rh estate. The line through Hume and Voltaire to the French Encyclopædists naturally finds in him a link binding them back to Hobbes; while the line through the Scottish school as naturally finds in him a bitter opponent of materialism and its founder in England. Numerous passages may be cited in support of either position. It is to the latter class that Professor Curtis belongs. In agreement with this tendency he supplements the two generally recognized sources of ideas, sensation and reflection, by a third, the intellect, and argues ably in support of this interpretation of the "Essay." The most definite quotation by which he seeks to uphold it is found in Locke's First Letter to Stillingfleet, "General ideas (e.g. of substance) come not into the mind by sensation or reflection, but are the creatures or inventions of the understanding, as I think I have shown" (p. 35). It might have been better, had the author put over against the foregoing some one or more of the seemingly contradictory passages in the second book, e.g. "The understanding seems to me not to have the least glimmering of any ideas which it doth not receive from one of these two," i.e. sensation and reflection (Essay on Hum. Und. II, i, 5), and either attempted to reconcile them, or admitted that the contradiction was irreconcilable. We may admit the position taken by President Porter in a passage quoted (p. 37), "In the latter part of the Essay ... without asserting in form any new source of ideas, and without in the least abandoning his previous teachings ... he does in fact take the same ground with Reid and the Scottish school," but this does not justify the construction of Locke's ethical system without a careful balancing of conflicting passages. The author may have done so in his own study, but we should be glad to know more fully than he has enabled us to do his reasons for accepting one set and passing somewhat lightly over what makes against his interpretation. In no part of his monograph does he admit the existence of fundamental difficulties or contradictions in Locke's thought. Yet the conviction with which one leaves this interesting study may well be that such difficulties exist, and that no harmonious system of ethics can be constructed from his writings without doing violence to some parts of them. Is it not a possible and even a probable position that Locke embodied and expressed, perhaps unconsciously and at different periods of his twenty-five years of writing on these subjects, the opposing views which gradually came to more precise expression and a clearer consciousness in his successors? This possibility the author does not examine or suggest. On the whole, however, the thesis is an interesting and suggestive attempt to interpret in a systematic way all of Locke's writings on ethics including the "Treatises on Government" and the "Reasonableness of Christianity." .