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Initiation Into Philosophy
The English Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century
by Faguet, Émile
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Locke: His Ideas on Human Liberty, Morality, General
Politics, and Religious Politics.
LOCKE.--Locke, very learned in various sciences--physics, chemistry,
medicine, often associated with politics, receiving enlightenment from
life, from frequent travels, from friendships with interesting and
illustrious men, always studying and reflecting until an advanced old age,
wrote only carefully premeditated works: his Treatise of Government
and Essay on the Human Understanding
Locke appears to have written on the understanding only in order to refute
the "innate ideas" of Descartes. For Locke innate ideas have no
existence. The mind before it comes into contact with the external world is
a blank sheet, and there is nothing in the mind which has not first come
through the senses. What, then, are ideas? They are sensations registered
by the brain, and they are also sensations elaborated and modified by
reflection. These ideas then commingle in such a manner as to form an
enormous mass of combinations. They are commingled either in a natural or
an artificial manner. In a natural manner, that is in a way conforming to
the great primary ideas given us by reflection, the idea of cause, the idea
of end, the idea of means to an end, the idea of order, etc., and it is the
harmony of these ideas which is commonly termed reason; they become
associated by accident, by the effects of emotion, by the effect of custom,
etc., and then they give birth to prejudices, errors, and
superstitions. The passions of the soul are aspects of pleasure and pain.
The idea of a possible pleasure gives birth in us to a desire which is
called ambition, love, covetousness, gluttony; the idea of a possible pain
gives birth in us to fear and horror, and this fear and horror is called
hatred, jealousy, rage, aversion, disgust, scorn. At bottom we have only
two passions, the desire of enjoyment, and the fear of suffering.
THE FREEDOM OF MAN.--Is man free? Appealing to experience and
making use only of it and not of intimate feeling, Locke declares in the
negative. A will always seems to him determined by another will, and this
other by another to infinity, or by a motive, a weight, a motive power
which causes a leaning to right or left. Will certainly exists--that is to
say, an exact and lively desire to perform an action, or to continue an
action, or to interrupt an action, but this will is not free, for to
represent it as free is to represent it as capable of wishing what it does
not wish. The will is an anxiety to act in such or such a fashion, and this
anxiety, on account of its character of anxiety, of strong emotion, of
tension of the soul, appears to us free, appears to us an internal force
which is self-governed and independent; we feel consciousness of will in
the effort. This tension must not be denied, but it must be recognised as
the effect of a potent desire which the obstacle excites; this tension,
therefore, is an indication of nothing except the potency of the desire and
the existence of an obstacle. Now this desire, so potent that it is
irritated by the obstacle, and, so to speak, unites us against it, is a
passion dominating and filling our being; so that we are never more swayed
by passion than when we believe ourselves to be exercising our will, and in
consequence the more we desire the less are we free.
It is not essential formally and absolutely to confound will with
desire. Overpowered by heat, we desire to drink cold water, and because we
know that that would do us harm we have the will not to drink; but although
this is an important distinction it is not a fundamental one; what incites
us to drink is a passion, what prevents us is another passion, one more
general and stronger, the desire not to die, and because this passion by
meeting with and fighting another produces in all our being a powerful
tension, it is none the less a passion, even if we ought not to say that it
is a still more impassioned passion.
LOCKE'S THEORY OF POLITICS.--In politics Locke was the adversary of
Hobbes, whose theories of absolutism have already been noticed. He did not
believe that the natural state was the war of all against all. He believed
men formed societies not to escape cannibalism, but more easily to
guarantee and protect their natural rights: ownership, personal liberty,
legitimate defence. Society exists only to protect these rights, and the
reason of its existence lies in this duty to defend them. The sovereign
therefore is not the saviour of the nation, he is its law-maker and
magistrate. If he violates the rights of man, he acts so directly contrary
to his mission and his mandate that insurrection against him is
legitimate. The "wise Locke," as Voltaire always called him, was the
inventor of the Rights of Man.
In religious politics he was equally liberal and advocated the separation
of Church and State; the State, according to him, should not have any
religion of its own, its province being only to protect equally the liberty
of all denominations. Locke was discussed minutely by Leibnitz, who,
without accepting the innate ideas of Descartes, did not accept the ideas
through sensation of Locke, and said: "There is nothing in the intelligence
which has not first been in the senses," granted ... "except the
intelligence itself." The intelligence has not innate ideas born ready
made; but it possesses forms of its own in which the ideas arrange
themselves and take shape, and this is the due province of the
intelligence. And it was these forms which later on Kant was to call the
categories of the intellect, and at bottom Descartes meant nothing else by
his innate ideas. Locke exerted a prodigious and even imperious influence
over the French philosophers of the eighteenth century.
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