%(b) Practical Philosophy.%—­Locke contributed to practical philosophy important suggestions concerning freedom, morality, politics, and education.  Freedom is the “power to begin or forbear, continue or put an end to” actions (thoughts and motions).  It is not destroyed by the fact that the will is always moved by desire, more exactly, by uneasiness under present circumstances, and that the decision is determined by the judgment of the understanding.  Although the result of examination is itself dependent on the unalterable relations of ideas, it is still in our power to decide whether we will consider at all, and what ideas we will take into consideration.  Not the thought, not the determination of the will, is free, but the person, the mind; this has the power to suspend the prosecution of desire, and by its judgment to determine the will, even in opposition to inclination.  Four stages must, consequently, be distinguished in the volitional process:  desire or uneasiness; the deliberative combination of ideas; the judgment of the understanding; determination.  Freedom has its place at the beginning of the second stage:  it is open to me to decide whether to proceed at all to consideration and final judgment concerning a proposed action; thus to prevent desire from directly issuing in movements; and, according to the result of my examination, perhaps, to substitute for the act originally desired an opposite one.  Without freedom, moral judgment and responsibility would be impossible.  The above appears to us to represent the essence of Locke’s often vacillating discussion of freedom (II. 21).  Desire is directed to pleasure; the will obeys the understanding, which is exalted above motives of pleasure and the passions.  Everything is physically good which occasions and increases pleasure in us, which removes or diminishes pain, or contributes to the attainment of some other good and the avoidance of some other evil.  Actions, on the contrary, are morally good when they conform to a rule by which they are judged.  Whoever earnestly meditates on his welfare will prefer moral or rational good to sensuous good, since the former alone vouchsafes true happiness.  God has most intimately united virtue and general happiness, since he has made the preservation of human society dependent on the exercise of virtue.

The mark of a law for free beings is the fact that it apportions reward for obedience and punishment for disobedience.  The laws to which an action must conform in order to deserve the predicate “good” are three in number (II. 28):  by the divine law “men judge whether their actions are sins or duties”; by the civil law, “whether they be criminal or innocent” (deserving of punishment or not); by the law of opinion or reputation, “whether they be virtues or vices.”  The first of these laws threatens immorality with future misery; the second, with legal punishments; the third, with the disapproval of our fellow-men.