BOOKS.
JOHN LOCKE.*
(SECOND NOTICE.?
WE left Locke at Oxford, at the age of 33, in 1666, studying• medicine, and political, no less than moral and metaphysical, philosophy. It was in this year that, on the occasion of a visit by Lord Ashley to his son at the University, Locke was requested to provide a supply of the medicinal waters of Astrop for Lord Ashley, who was suffering from an internal abscess caused by a fall. The acquaintance between the statesman and the philosophic physician which thus began, ripened rapidly into a friendship which only ended with the death of Shaftes- bury. He became an inmate and member of Lord Ashley's family, as physician, tutor to his son, and trusted adviser alike in domestic and public affairs, while he was left free to spend a large portion of his time in his own pursuits. The third Lord Shaftesbury tells us that his grandfather's family "was in every respect so happy in him, that he seemed a good guardian. angel sent to bless it." And he proceeds to relate a singular• instance of this guardianship, in the selection of a wife for the son, of the first lord, the negotiations for which with the Lady Dorothy, daughter of the Earl of Rutland, were intrusted to Locke, and carried by him to a successful termination.. Bya skilful operation Locke saved the life of Lord Ashley when it was despaired of ; but from this time to the end of his life he had to keep up a continued struggle for his own life, though his ill-health did not prevent his continued activity in the service of his friends and his country. He assisted Lord Ashley in drawing up a Constitution for the new settlement of Carolina ; he became Secretary of Presentations and Secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations. After Shaftesbury had' been dismissed from the Chancellorship, Locke went to France for his health, where we find him gathering information on every subject, making new friends, and corresponding with old ones, and revising and expanding his notes which he had written in previous years in. preparation for his " Essay concerning Human Understanding." The political crisis which in 1678 brought' out Shaftesbury from his imprisonment in the Tower to become President of the Privy Council recalled Locke to England, that he might resume his former relations with that statesman as his political adviser. Mr. Fox Bourne says,—" The stray details that have come down to us fully justify the inference that he was intimately concerned in all the important business of the time, often serving Shaftesbury, not only as his adviser, but also• as his agent." The great question now in debate was that of the successor to the Throne after the death of Charles II. Locke- does not appear to have approved his patron's advocacy of the Duke of Monmouth in preference to the Prince of Orange ; he vainly endeavoured to dissuade Shaftesbury from taking part in the insurrection for placing the Duke at once on the throne, and retired to his medical studies at Oxford, while the Earl fled to Holland, where he soon after died. But Locke had become an object of suspicion to the Government. He left England, where his life was no longer safe, for Holland. He was expelled from his studentship by order of the Crown, after ti summons from Dr. Fell, then Bishop of Oxford as well as Dean of Christ- church, to return and answer to the charges against him. He prepared to return to meet those charges, not being aware that while Dr. Fell was corresponding with him in terms of affec- tionate friendship, he was secretly plotting with the Court to entrap his friend into some language which might justify the most rigorous treatment of him. But probably warned in time, he remained in Holland, only to quit it after the revolution which seated William and Mary on the throne, and when his- liberty and life were no longer in danger in England, from false accusations as to plots in which he had taken no part, language which he had never uttered, and pamphlets which he had never written.
Even in Holland Locke was not free from danger, and he was. obliged to remain for a considerable time in concealment, since he was among the proscribed whose surrender was deminded of the States by the English Government. He resided at Utrecht, at Amsterdam, and at Rotterdam, by turns. In Holland he became acquainted with the great teachers of undogmatio theology, Limborch and Le Clerc. Their political and theological sym- pathies were in harmony with his own, and the harmony was the
• The Life qf John Locke. By H. B. Fox Bourne. 2 vols. London: Henry S.. King and 0o. 1918.
greater as their mutual influence on each other developed into intimate and life-long friendship. In 1657 Locke had written, though he had neither published nor finished, an " Essay concern- ing Toleration," the existence of which (amongst the Shaftesbury Papers) was first discovered by Mr. Fox Bourne, who has printed it in these volumes. He now rewrote his thoughts on this sub- ject, in a letter addressed to Limborch. It was written in Latin, in 1685 ; but in the fashion which Locke's modesty and caution had made usual with him it remained in manuscript, to be circulated and read among his friends, till 1689, when it was almost imme- diately after published and translated into English, to be followed by a second and a third " Letter concerning Toleration," in reply to " Answers," by Jonas Praart. His time during these years of exile was occupied with incessant literary activity, including the finishing of his "Essay concerning Human Understanding," and his preparing and printing an epitome of this in Le Clerc's Bibliotheque Universelle. His letters to his many friends are numerous, and abounding, as always, with knowledge and wisdom, with fun and humour, and with affection and sympathy ; and meanwhile, says Mr. Fox Bourne :—
"He was ready to take part in public work where his services were wanted and could be made useful to the world, and the time had now
come for this It is quite clear that while the Revolution was being planned, a hearty friendship grew up between Locke and William, and perhaps a heartier friendship between Locke and William's amiable wife, the Princess Mary Though there is not much to be said about it, there can be no doubt that political work devolved more and more upon him, and at last chiefly occupied his attention, while he was in Holland?
When William had reached England as its deliverer, Locke followed with the Princess, and there was thenceforth no obstacle but that of Locke's continually increasing ill-health to his be- coming one of the active as well as trusted statesmen of the new Sovereign. Just a week after William's accession, Locke was offered the post of Ambassador to the Elector of Brandenburg, no longer the insignificant personage of whose state Locke had made fun in his letters to Strachey three-and-twenty years before, but the ablest and most important of William's allies against Louis XIV. But Locke felt and explained in a letter to Lord Mor- daunt, through whom the post was offered to him, that his health might interfere with the vigorous despatch of the business which was required. Nor, with all his devotion to the king and to the service of the country in every way which was possible for him, would he be tempted by like offers of Vienna or any other embassy that he would himself choose. As an adviser, he was always at nand ; he accepted a small place as Commissioner of Appeals, and some years afterwards that of Commissioner of Trade and Plantations. He proposed schemes for encouraging the linen manufacture in Ireland, and (alas ! that we must say it) for sup- pressing that of wool; for reforming the poor-laws; for readjusting the calendar : and among other economical reforms, the plan for restoring the silver coinage from a condition which threatened the nation with ruin was mainly due to Locke.
About two years before his departure for Holland, Locke had become acquainted with Damaris, daughter of Dr. Cudworth, known as one of the " Cambridge Platonists." She became the second wife of Sir Francis Masham, and the old friendship of the lady was now shared by her husband. They received Locke con- stantly as a guest into their house at Oates in Essex, which county Sir Francis Masham represented in Parliament. And eventually, in the year 1691, he took- up his abode with them, and there made his home for the remaining thirteen years of his life. Of Lady Masham, Locke wrote to Limborch :—" The lady herself is so well versed in theological and philosophical studies, and of such an original mind, that you will not find many men to whom she is not superior in wealth of knowledge and ability to profit by it." That she was as good as she was wise was proved in all her care for Locke during the remainder of his life ; and her husband shared with her in kindness to their guest, if not in her ability to appreciate his intellectual capacity. We have no space to dwell on the beautiful picture of Locke's declining years which Mr. Fox Bourne has given us, and for which one of the main sources is Lady Masham's own narrative, written to Le Clerc after Locke's death. While he retained his affection for his old friends, and wrote continually to those he could not meet, he was making new ones to the last. To love and to seek truth and reason above all things, and in the smallest as well as in the greatest matters; to work for others as the habitual duty of life, and for the public good, no less than in private ; and thus to
live and work as in God's service,—these things Locke never ceased to inculcate on all around him, alike by example and precept. In controversy he was as moderate as he was strong, so that it was justly said of him that he laid his adversary on his back, but neither soiled nor even tumbled his clothes. In his intercourse with his friends he was as simple and modest as he was genial and affectionate, and expressed himself with a humility not less striking than his wisdom. He never married, and there is only alight indication (in the remaining letter to his father) that he had once thought of marriage ; but his devotion to Lady Masham, to her daughter, and to the little maiden he called " his wife," was as tender as it was refined and pure ; while this purity is the more noticeable, in a day when (as we know from Swift's letters) even virtuous women could tolerate a coarseness that would now be hardly endured by the vicious. The evening before his death he said, "My work here is almost at an end, and I thank God for it ;" and again, when the family were assembled to pray beside him and for him, as he had desired, he repeated, "I heartily thank God for all his good- ness and mercies to me, but above all for his redemption of me by Jesus Christ." He died next day, Lady Masham reading to him in the Psalms at his request : " he raised his hands to his eyes, closed them, and all was over." In the words of this his devoted friend, written while she was still in deepest grief for her loss, " his death was like his life, truly pious, yet natural, easy, and unaffected ; nor can time, I think, ever produce a more eminent example of reason and religion than he was, living and dying."
Locke was a great man, and especially a great Englishman. It is not too much to say that among the multitude of the unknown great and good who, age after age, have combined to create the English character, Locke stands as one of the few whom we can still call by name. Arriving at manhood in the crisis of our greatest national revolution, he saw what was the temperate middle course, and took it. He neither adhered to the Puritanism in which he had been brought up, nor passed over to the Royalism of reaction which was succeeding it. He rose above party and partial considerations and conclusions, and held on that higher but not less practical course which he lived to see opening upon the table-lands of constitutional monarchy in the State, and ecclesiastical and theological toleration in the Church. And to Locke himself we owe much of the still increasing and multiplying blessings of freedom, the seeds of which he then helped to sow. In philosophy and in theology, as in politics, he took the English middle course ; if he did not soar to the ideal regions of ontology, he did not sink into those of materialism, nor did he content himself with the compromises of scepticism or negation. Everywhere he essayed to discover and deal with facts, to observe them in the light of reason, and so to establish a trustworthy method by which those who would use it might make new and continual progress in the path which he thus pointed out. An honest and devout believer in the Christian revelation, he maintained that revelation was addressed to the reason, and not to some blind faculty of servile submission to unintelligible authority. A lover of truth above all things, he taught that it was in facts, and not in theory and hypothesis, that truth must be sought for. And in the form, as well as in the matter of his thoughts, as we see them in his books, and still more, perhaps, in his letters, there is the same English modera- tion, showing itself in a certain dry pathos, dry humour, and un- impassioned imagination, which are all so real, and yet so self- restrained. The importance which he attaches to " good-breed- ing," in his " Treatise on Education," as well as in his letters of advice to his younger friends, was illustrated by the habitual modesty as well as courtesy of his bearing to all men and women, in small as well as great things. And in this, too, he was English, —the bumble and gentle servant, not the imperious lord ; the knight, not the chevalier of romance. Lady Masham's words exactly describe the character of this great and good man ; but he was such as she describes him because his life was one of the noblest and completest, and therefore the humblest and most pious, self-training for that service of his country and of God in which he lived and died.
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