John Locke was born in 1632 at Wrington in Somerset. In 1652 he entered Christ Church College, Oxford, where he received his MA in 1658. In that same year he was elected student of Christ Church; in 1660 he became lecturer in Greek, lecturer in Rhetoric in 1662, and censor of Moral Philosophy in 1664. From 1667 to 1681 Locke was physician and secretary to Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley (later First Earl of Shaftesbury). He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1668, and was secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina from 1668 to 1675. In 1684 he was deprived of his appointment to Christ Church by royal decree. He lived in Holland from 1683 to 1689, was Commissioner on the Board of Trade from 1696 to 1700, and died at Otes (Oates) in the parish of High Laver, Essex, in 1704.
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) made a major contribution to psychology and to philosophical psychology. That work offered the outlines of a genetic epistemology, and a theory of learning. Locke’s interest in children is reflected not only in his pedagogical work, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), but in many passages of the Essay where he traced the development of awareness in children. The oft-quoted metaphor used by Locke to characterize the mind as a blank tablet should not blind us to the fact that the Lockean mind comes equipped with faculties, that the child has specific ‘tempers’ or character traits which the educator must learn to work with, and that human nature for Locke has basic self-preserving tendencies to avoid pain and seek pleasure. These tendencies were even called by Locke ‘innate practical principles’. The innate claim that his psychology rejected was for truths (moral and intellectual) and specific ideational contents.
Much of the Essay is occupied with discussing how we acquire certain ideas, with showing how a combination of physical and physiological processes stimulate and work with a large number of mental operations (for example, joining, separating, considering, abstracting, generalizing) to produce the ideas of particular sense qualities and many complex notions, such as power, existence, unity. One such complex notion is the idea of self or person.
The account of the idea of self—or rather, my idea of my self, for Locke’s account of this notion is a first-person account—emerges out of a discussion of the question, ‘Does the soul always think?’ That question had been answered in the affirmative by Descartes. For Locke, not only was it empirically false that the soul always thinks, but also that question suggested wrongly that something in me (my soul), not me, thinks. I am the agent of my actions and the possessor of my thoughts. Moreover, all thinking is reflexive, when I think, I am aware that I am thinking, no matter what form that thinking takes (sensing, willing, believing, doubting or remembering). It is the awareness of my act of thinking which also functions in awareness of self. Consciousness appropriates both thoughts and actions. The self or person for Locke consists in that set of thoughts and actions which I appropriate and for which I take responsibility through my consciousness.
Appropriation is a fundamental activity for Locke. I appropriate my thoughts and actions to form my concept of self. The Essay details the appropriation by each of us of ideas and knowledge. Education is also an appropriation of information, but more importantly of habits of good conduct. Education is a socializing process. It takes place usually within the family, with a tutor (for Locke writes about the education of a gentleman’s son). But the account of the socialization process extends to Locke’s political writings, Two Treatises on Government (1690), where he discusses the family, duties that parents have to their children and to each other (a marriage contract is part of his account of the family), and the rights and duties of citizens in a political society. The appropriation of land, possessions and eventually money by the activities of the person constitutes an early stage in Locke’s account of the movement from the state of nature to a civil (political) society.
The political society, as the pre-political state of nature, is grounded in law and order; order is respect and responsibility to each other and ultimately to God whose law of nature prescribes these duties. Locke’s law of nature is a Christianized version of that tradition. The individual laws which he cites on occasion prescribe and proscribe the actions sanctioned or denied by the liberal religion of his day. These laws differed little in content from those innate moral truths Locke attacked; it was not the truths he rejects, only the claim that they were innate. Locke’s society is fairly slanted in favour of the individual: preservation of the person, privacy of property, tacit assent, the right of dissent. At the same time, the pressures towards conformity and the force of majority opinion are also strong. The structure of his civil society, with its checks and balances, its separation of powers, its grounding on the law of nature, is designed to achieve a balance between the rights and needs of the individual and the need for security and order. His views on toleration (which were expressed in a series of tracts), while directed mainly against religious in toleration, match well with his insistence that government does not have the right to prescribe rites, rituals, dress and other practices in religion. Locke’s toleration did not, however, extend to unbelief, to atheism.
The methodology for acquiring knowledge recommended by Locke and illustrated in his Essay stressed careful observation. Both in the physical sciences and in learning about ourselves and others, it was the ‘plain, historical method’ (that is, experience and observation) which holds the promise of accurate knowledge, or sound probability. Knowledge was not limited to demonstrative, deductive processes. Truth claims were always open to revision through further reports and observations. These concepts of knowledge and this experiential method were extended by Locke to what was later termed (for example, by Hume) ‘the science of man’ or ‘of human nature’. His detailed attention to his own thought processes enabled him to map the wide variety of mental operations and to begin the development of a cognitive psychology. His interest in children, throughout his life, led to observations and descriptions of their behaviour. He had many friends who had children, and lived for several years on different occasions with families who had several young children. The Essay uses some of these observations as the basis for a brief genetic learning theory, and his Some Thoughts contains many remarks and recommendations for raising children based upon his firsthand experience with children in their natural environment.
Locke’s social theory grew out of his reading and (more importantly) out of these habits of observing people in daily life. In his travels in France and Holland, he often recorded details of activities and practices, religious, academic and ordinary. Where direct observation was not possible, he used the new travel literature for reports on other societies, other customs and habits. He had his own biases and preferences, to be sure, but with his dedication to reason and rationality, he seldom allowed emotions to affect his observation or his conclusions. He was an articulate representative of the Royal Society’s attitudes in the sciences, including what we know as the social sciences.
John W.Yolton
Rutgers University
References
Locke, J. (1689) Epistola de Tolerantia, Gouda.
——(1689) Letter Concerning Toleration, London.
——(1690) Essay Concerning Human Understanding, London.
——(1690) A Second Letter Concerning Toleration, London.
——(1690) Two Treastises of Government, London.
——(1692) Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money, London.
——(1692) A Third Letter for Toleration, London.
——(1693) Some Thoughts Concerning Education, London.
——(1695) The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures, London.
——(1695) Short Observations on a Printed Paper, Intituled ‘For Encouraging the Coining Silver Money in England, and After, for Keeping it Here’, London.
——(1695) Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money, London.
——(1697) A Letter to Edward Lord Bishop of Worcester, London.
——(1714) Works, 3 volumes, London.
Further reading
Aaron, R.I. (1971) John Locke, 3rd edn, Oxford.
Colman, J. (1983) John Locke’s Moral Philosophy, Edinburgh.
Cranston, M. (1957) John Locke: A Biography, New York.
Dunn, J. (1969) The Political Thought of John Locke, Cambridge, UK.
Tully, J. (1980) A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries, Cambridge, UK.
Yolton, J.W. (1956) John Locke and the Way of Ideas, Oxford.
——(1970) Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding, Cambridge, UK.
