Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/353

No. 3.] of the human personality as an end in itself, as the supreme good. It is to be hoped that Mr. Whittaker will supplement this able little volume by a thorough study of justice and liberty. It would also be helpful to the reader of the present work if he would take up the notion of the 'good' in its relation to the idea of 'obligation.'

In this book Dr. Krakowski attempts to lay bare the medieval sources of Locke's philosophy. He finds that the English thinker made a fairly careful study of certain medieval philosophers, and that the teachings which his successors believed to be peculiarly his own came to him from his predecessors. There can be no doubt that Locke became acquainted with the theological and philosophical thought of the Middle Ages both at Westminster School and at Christ College, Oxford, and that he was particularly attracted to the doctrines of such writers as William of Occam and Pierre de la Ramée. Indeed, not one of the early modern philosophers ignored the traditions of the past and created absolutely new ways of thinking; all of them reveal traces of the influence of the great medieval speculators. Even those elements in their conceptions which strike us as specifically modern are not always wholly new; the modern spirit, which moves the thinking of men like Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hobbes, and Leibniz, did not appear suddenly, as if shot out of a pistol; and the Middle Ages are not as black as they are painted. The truth is we find tendencies to modernism in medieval thought as well as tendencies to medievalism in the modern era; and we find both of them together in many a leader of thought. Locke's religious faith is, as Dr. Krakowski says, like that of a medieval man; and his attempts to harmonize reason and revelation and to prove the existence of angels make one wonder how he could have become the father of English deism. If he had confined himself to such tasks, he would not have left a very deep impress upon his times. Dr. Krakowski regards as his chief claim to originality his successful synthesis of the old theories and modern science. This does not seem to me to tell the whole story, unless, perhaps, we interpret his synthesis in the Hegelian sense. It must not be forgotten that after all Locke's chief work was "an essay concerning human understanding," and that he regarded as his most important problem the theory of knowledge, the examination of the nature and origin of knowledge, with a view to discovering its validity. It is significant that Dr. Krakowski pays little attention to Book IV of the Essay; he cites a number of references to this important phase of the work at the end of his fourth chapter, in which he discusses primary and secondary qualities, in order to show that Locke criticized the scholastic teaching and must therefore have known it in part; but he does not show that Locke's own conclusions here are rooted in medieval thought. To be sure, we must not lose