in his own age.” This appears in his works on social polity, written
at a time when the principles of democracy and toleration were
struggling with divine right of kings, and when “the popular assertors
of public liberty were the greatest engrossers of it too.” “The
state” with Locke was the deliberate outcome of free contract rather
than a natural growth or organism. That the people, in the exercise
of their sovereignty, have the right to govern themselves in the way
they judge to be for the common good; and that civil government,
whatever form it assumes, has no right to interfere with religious
beliefs that are not inconsistent with civil society, is at the foundation
of his political philosophy. He rested this sovereignty on
virtual mutual contract on the part of the people themselves to be
so governed. But the terms of the contract might be modified by
the sovereign people themselves, from time to time, in accommodation
to changing circumstances. He saw that things in this world
were in a constant flux, so that no society could remain long in the
same state, and that “the grossest absurdities” must be the issue
of “following custom when reason has left the custom.” He was
always disposed to liberal ecclesiastical concessions for the sake of
peace, and he recommended harmonious co-operation with the civil
magistrate in all matters of worship and government that were not
expressly determined by Scripture.
The attack on Sir Robert Filmer in Locke’s First Treatise on Government was an anachronism. The democratic principle argued for in the Second Treatise, while in advance of the practice of his age, was in parts anticipated by Aquinas and Bodin, as well as by Grotius and Hooker. Its guiding principle The social contract. is, that civil rulers hold their power not absolutely but conditionally, government being essentially a moral trust, forfeited if the conditions are not fulfilled by the trustees. This presupposes an original and necessary law of nature or reason, as insisted on by Hooker. But it points to the constitution of civil society in the abstract rather than to the actual origin of government as a matter of fact and past history. There is no historical proof that power was formally entrusted to rulers by the conscious and deliberate action of the ruled. Indeed Locke seems to allow that the consent was at first tacit, and by anterior law of nature conditional on the beneficial purpose of the trust being realized. His Treatises on Government were meant to vindicate the Convention parliament and the English revolution, as well as to refute the ideas of absolute monarchy held by Hobbes and Filmer. They are classics in the library of English constitutional law and polity.
Locke’s philosophical defence of religious liberty in the four Letters of Toleration is the most far-reaching of his contributions to social polity. He had a more modest estimate of human resources for forming true judgments in religion, and a less pronounced opinion of the immorality of religious Religious Toleration. error, than either the Catholic or the Puritan. The toleration which he spent his life in arguing for involved a change from the authoritative and absolute to the relative point of view, as regards man’s means of knowledge and belief. It was a protest against those who in theology “peremptorily require demonstration and demand certainty where probability only is to be had.” The practice of universal toleration amidst increasing religious differences was an application of the conception of human understanding which governs his Essay. Once a paradox it is now commonplace, and the superabundant argument in the Letters on Toleration fatigues the modern reader. The change is due more to Locke himself than to anyone else. Free thought and liberty of conscience had indeed been pleaded for, on various grounds, in the century in which he lived. Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, Glanvill and other philosophical thinkers in the Church of England urged toleration in the state, in conjunction with wide comprehension in the church, on the ground of our necessary intellectual limitation and inability to reach demonstration in theological debates. Puritans like Owen and Goodwin, whose idea of ecclesiastical comprehension was dogmatic and narrow, were ready to accept sectarian variety, because it was their duty to allow many religions in the nation, but only one form of theology within their own sect. The existence of separate nationalities, on the other hand, was the justification of national churches according to the latitudinarian churchmen with whom Locke associated: a national church comprehensive in creed, and thus co-extensive with the nation was their ideal. Locke went far to unite in a higher principle elements in the broad Anglican and the Puritan theories, while he recognized the individual liberty of thought which distinguishes the national church of England. A constant sense of the limits of human understanding was at the bottom of his arguments for tolerance. He had no objection to a national establishment of religion, provided that it was comprehensive enough, and was really the nation organized to promote goodness; not to protect the metaphysical subtleties of sectarian theologians. The recall of the national religion to the simplicity of the gospels would, he hoped, make toleration of nonconformists unnecessary, as few would then remain. To the atheist alone Locke refuses full toleration, on the ground that social obligation can have no hold over him, for “the taking away of God dissolves all.” He argued, too, against full toleration of the Church of Rome in England, on the ground of its unnational allegiance to a foreign sovereign. The unfitness of persecution as a means of propagating truth is copiously insisted on by Locke. Persecution can only transform a man into a hypocrite; belief is legitimately formed only by discernment of sufficient evidence; apart from evidence, a man has no right to control the understanding; he cannot determine arbitrarily what his neighbours must believe. Thus Locke’s pleas for religious toleration resolve at last into his philosophical view of the foundation and limits of human knowledge.
II. The Reasonableness of Christianity.—The principles that governed Locke’s social polity largely determined his attitude to Christianity. His “latitudinarianism” was the result of extraordinary reverence for truth, and a perception that knowledge may be sufficient for the purposes of human life while it falls infinitely short of speculative completeness. He never loses sight of essential reasonableness as the only ground on which Christian faith can ultimately rest. But Locke accepted Holy Scripture as infallible with the reverence of a Puritan. “It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter.” Yet he did not, like many Puritans, mean Scripture as interpreted by himself or by his sect. And faith in its infallibility was combined in Locke with deep distrust in “enthusiasm.” This predisposed him to regard physical miracles as the solid criterion for distinguishing reasonable religious conviction from “inclinations, fancies and strong assurances.” Assent in religion as in everything else he could justify only on the ground of its harmony with reason; professed “illumination without search, and certainty without proof” was to him a sign of absence of the divine spirit in the professor. Confidence that we are right, he would say, is in itself no proof that we are right: when God asks assent to the truth of a proposition in religion, he either shows us its intrinsic rationality by ordinary means, or he offers miraculous proof of the reality of which we need reasonable evidence. But we must know what we mean by miracle. Reasonableness, in short, must always at last be our guide. His own faith in Christianity rested on its moral excellence when it is received in its primitive simplicity, combined with the miracles which accompanied its original promulgation. But “even for those books which have the attestation of miracles to confirm their being from God, the miracles,” he says, “are to be judged by the doctrine, and not the doctrine by the miracles.” Miracles alone cannot vindicate the divinity of immoral doctrine. Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity was an attempt to recall religion from the crude speculations of theological sects, destructive of peace among Christians, to its original simplicity; but this is apt to conceal its transcendent mystery. Those who practically acknowledge the supremacy of Jesus as Messiah accept all that is essential to the Christianity of Locke. His own Christian belief, sincere and earnest, was more the outcome of the common sense which, largely through him, moulded the prudential theology of England in the 18th century, than of the nobler elements present in More, Cudworth and other religious thinkers of the preceding age, or afterwards in Law and Berkeley, Coleridge and Schleiermacher.
III. Education.—Locke has his place among classic writers on the theory and art of Education. His contribution may be taken as either an introduction to or an application of the Essay on Human Understanding. In the Thoughts on Education imaginative sentiment is never allowed to weigh against utility; information is subordinate to the formation of useful character; the part which habit plays in individuals is always kept in view; the dependence of intelligence and character, which it is the purpose of education to improve, upon health of body is steadily inculcated; to make children happy in undergoing education is a favourite precept; accumulating facts without exercising thought, and without accustoming the youthful mind to look for evidence, is always referred to as a cardinal vice. Wisdom more than much learning is what he requires in the teacher. In instruction he gives the first place to “that which may direct us to heaven,” and the second to “the study of prudence, or discreet conduct, and management of ourselves in the several occurrences of our lives, which most assists our quiet prosperous passage through this present life.” The infinity of real existence, in contrast with the necessary finitude of human understanding and experience, is always in his thoughts. This “disproportionateness” between the human mind and the universe of reality imposes deliberation in the selection of studies, and disregard for those which lie out of the way of a wise man. Knowledge of what other men have thought is perhaps of too little account with Locke. “It is an idle and useless thing to make it one’s business to study what have been other men’s sentiments in matters where only reason is to be judge.” In his Conduct of the Understanding the pupil is invited to occupy the point at which “a full view of all that relates to a question” is to be had, and at which alone a rational discernment of truth is possible. The uneducated mass of mankind, he complains, either “seldom reason at all,” or “put passion in the place of reason,” or “for want of large, sound, round-about sense” they direct their minds only to one part of the evidence, “converse with one sort of men, read but one sort of books, and will not come in the hearing of but one sort of notions, and so carve out to themselves a little Goshen in the intellectual world, where light shines, and, as they conclude, day blesses them; but the rest of the vast expansion they give up to night and darkness, and avoid coming near it.” Hasty judgment, bias, absence of an a priori “indifference” to what the evidence may in the end require us to conclude, undue regard for authority, excessive love for custom and antiquity, indolence and sceptical despair are among the states
