LOCKE'S LIFE AND WORK
LOCKE'S LIFE AND TIMES
John Locke lived during a particularly turbulent period of English history and was personally
associated with some of its most dramatic episodes, despite possessing a rather quiet and retiring
character. He was born in Somerset in 1632, the son of a small landowner and attorney, also named
John (1606-61), and his wife Agnes (1597–1654). In spite of these relatively humble beginnings, he
received an excellent education, first at Westminster School and then at Christ Church, Oxford. These
advantages were made possible through connections that his father had with people richer and more
influential than himself. Patronage of this sort was one of the few means available in seventeenthcentury England for people of little wealth to advance themselves, and Locke was to rely on it for a
good deal of his life, ultimately rising to positions of considerable importance. Perhaps the most
lasting legacy that Locke received from his parents, however, was his strong Protestant faith, which
was to exercise a very large influence on his future intellectual development and political allegiances.
After receiving his B.A. degree at Oxford University in 1656, following a traditional course of study in
Arts, Locke retained his Studentship at Christ Church, entitling him to rooms in college and a stipend a position which he retained until he was expelled at the direct instigation of Charles II (1630–85) in
1684, as a consequence of Locke's involvement with political groups opposed to royal policies at the
time. At Oxford, Locke was engaged not only in philosophical and theological studies, but was also
particularly interested in medicine, and indeed in science quite generally (he became a Fellow of the
recently founded Royal Society in 1668). Locke's interest in medicine was fostered by his association
with the eminent physician Thomas Sydenham (1624–89), and he was eventually to receive the
medical degree of M.B. from Oxford University in 1675. His knowledge of medicine was to stand him
in good stead when, after a chance meeting in 1666 with Lord Ashley (1621–83), then the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, he became Lord Ashley's medical adviser, taking up residence in his London house
in 1667 and staying there until 1675. Locke was responsible for overseeing a serious liver operation
on Lord Ashley in 1668, from which the patient recovered, thereafter regarding Locke as one of his
closest friends and confidants.
Locke's association with Lord Ashley – soon to become the first Earl of Shaftesbury (1672) – was the
most momentous development in his career. Shaftesbury's influence at the court of Charles II was
very great until the King dismissed him in 1673, although he was briefly to return to public office in
1679. From this time onwards English politics were greatly disturbed by the problem of the
succession to the throne, Charles II having no children and his brother and heir, James II (1633–
1707), being known for his strong allegiance to Roman Catholicism. Whig politicians like Ashley and
his circle, which included Locke in a minor capacity, wanted a bill to be passed by Parliament
excluding James from the succession - a move very much opposed by Charles II and his court. At this
time royal power was still very considerable, and opposition like Shaftesbury's extremely dangerous.
Shaftesbury himself escaped to the Netherlands in 1682 after a charge of treason had been levelled
against him, but died soon after his arrival, early in 1683.
By this time Locke, who had been travelling abroad during 1675-9 but had not resumed his
membership of Shaftesbury's household upon his return, was still closely associated with
Shaftesbury's circle and hence in considerable personal danger himself. Government spies kept a
close watch on his activities, particularly looking for any evidence of seditious writings. In the
summer of 1683 matters came to a head with the Rye House plot, when leading members of
Shaftesbury's circle – Algernon Sydney, Lord William Russell and the Earl of Essex – were implicated
in an attempt to kidnap Charles II and his brother and were all three arrested for treason, two of
them subsequently being executed. Locke, though not directly involved in this conspiracy, was now
even more under suspicion, and escaped to the Netherlands in September 1683. From here he did
not return to England until 1689. Following the Revolutionary Settlement of 1688, which removed
James II from the throne after a disastrous reign of three years, the monarchy passed jointly to the
Dutch Prince of Orange, William (1650–1702), and his wife Mary (1662–94), who were James II's
nephew and daughter. With the reign of the Protestant William and Mary began the long period of
Whig ascendancy in English politics, a regime very much in tune with Locke's own political and
religious orientations.
During his last years, from his return to England in 1689 to his death in 1704, Locke enjoyed public
esteem and royal favour, in addition to great intellectual fame as the author of the Essay Concerning
Human Understanding, which was published late in 1689. He performed a number of official duties,
notably as a Commissioner of the Board of Trade, though his greatest desire was to pursue his
literary and intellectual interests, including a good deal of correspondence. After some years of
failing health, Locke died, aged 72, at the Essex home of Sir Francis and Lady Masham, a wealthy
family with whom he had resided since 1692.
Locke never married and had no children of his own, although he was fond of them and was
influential in promoting more humane and rational attitudes towards their upbringing and education
– never forgetting, it seems, the severe treatment he had received at Westminster School. In
character he was somewhat introverted and hypochondriacal, but he by no means avoided company.
He enjoyed good conversation but was abstemious in his habits of eating and drinking. He was a
prolific correspondent and had a great many friends and acquaintances, on the continent of Europe
as well as in Britain and Ireland. If there was a particular fault in his character, it was a slight
tetchiness in response to criticism of his writings, even when that criticism was intended to be
constructive. Though academic in his cast of mind, Locke was strongly moved by his political and
religious convictions - especially by his concern for liberty and toleration - and had the good fortune
to live at a time when there was no great divide between the academic pursuit of philosophical
interests and the public discussion and application of political and religious principles. He thus
happily lived to see some of his most strongly held intellectual convictions realised in public policy,
partly as a consequence of his own writings and involvement in public affairs.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE ESSAY AND ITS PLACE IN LOCKE'S WORK
Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which was first published in full in December 1689,
was undoubtedly his greatest intellectual achievement. He had been working on it off and on since
the early 1670s, but most intensively during his period of exile in the Netherlands between 1683 and
1689. He continued to revise it after its first appearance, supervising three further editions of it in his
remaining years. The fourth edition of 1700 accordingly represents his final view, and is the version
most closely studied today.
The Essay is chiefly concerned with issues in what would today be called epistemology (or the theory
of knowledge), metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. As its title
implies, its purpose is to discover, from an examination of the workings of the human mind, just what
we are capable of knowing and understanding about the universe we live in. Locke's answer is that all
the materials of our understanding come from our 'ideas' – both of sensation and of reflection (that
is, of 'outward' and ‘inward' experience, respectively) - which are worked upon by our powers of
reason to produce such 'real' knowledge as we can hope to attain. Beyond that, we have other
sources of belief – for instance, in testimony and in revelation – which may afford us probability and
hence warrant our assent, but do not entitle us to certainty.
Given these concerns, we can readily understand the overall structure of the Essay, which is divided
into four books. Book I, Of Innate Notions', is devoted to an attack on the advocates of innate ideas,
who held that much of our knowledge is independent of experience. In Book II, 'Of Ideas', Locke
attempts to explain in some detail how sensation and reflection can in fact provide all the ‘materials'
of our understanding, even insofar as it embraces such relatively abstruse ideas as those of
substance, identity and causality, which many of Locke's opponents took to be paradigmatically
innate. In Book III, 'Of Words', Locke presents his account of how language both helps and hinders us
in the communication of our ideas. Without such communication we could not hope to achieve
mutual understanding, given Locke's view of the origins of our ideas in widely varying individual
experience. Finally, in Book IV, 'Of Knowledge and Opinion', Locke discusses the ways in which
processes of reason, learning and testimony operate upon our ideas to produce certain knowledge
and probable belief, and at the same time he tries to locate the proper boundary between the
province of reason and experience on the one hand and that of revelation and faith on the other.
Locke's view of our intellectual capacities is clearly a modest one. At the same time, he held a strong
personal faith in the truth of Christian religious principles, which may seem to conflict with the mildly
sceptical air of his epistemological doctrines. In fact, he himself perceived no conflict here – unlike
some of his contemporary critics – though he did regard his modest view of our intellectual
capacities as providing a strong motive for religious toleration. Reason, he thought, does not conflict
with faith, but in questions of faith to which reason supplies no answer it is both irrational and
immoral to insist on conformity of belief. We have it on record, indeed, that what originally
motivated Locke to pursue the inquiries of the Essay was precisely a concern to settle how far reason
and experience could take us in determining moral and religious truths.
Locke's concern with morality and religion, both intimately bound up with questions of political
philosophy in the seventeenth century, was one which dominated his thinking throughout his
intellectual and public career. His earliest works, unpublished in his own lifetime, were the Two
Tracts on Government (1660 and 1661) and the Essays on the Law of Nature (1664), both written in
Latin but now available in English translation. The position on issues of political liberty and religious
toleration that he adopted in those early works was, however, considerably more conservative than
the one that he later came to espouse, following his association with Shaftesbury, and made famous
in his Letter on Toleration and Two Treatises of Government (both published anonymously in 1689,
the former in Latin and the latter in English). The Second Treatise explicitly recognises the right of
subjects to overthrow even a legitimately appointed ruler who has abused his trust and tyrannises
his people – a doctrine which would almost certainly have led to Locke's being accused of sedition
had the manuscript been discovered by government spies. The First Treatise was an extended attack
upon an ultra-royalist tract written by Sir Robert Filmer (d. 1653), entitled Patriarcha (published
1680), in which the divine right of kings was defended as proceeding from the dominion first granted
by God to Adam. Algernon Sydney (1622–83), one of the Rye House plot conspirators, had been
convicted of sedition partly on the strength of a manuscript he had written attacking Filmer's work,
so one can well understand Locke's secrecy and caution in the years preceding his flight to the
Netherlands.
In addition to the works already mentioned, Locke published a good many other writings, notably on
religious and educational topics. Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) was the product of
advice he had provided in correspondence, over a number of years, to his friends Edward and Mary
Clarke concerning the upbringing of their children. This work went into many editions, proving to be
very popular and influential with more enlightened parents for a long time to come. Locke's interest
in the intellectual development of children is also plain to see in the Essay itself, where it has a direct
relevance to his empiricist principles of learning and concept-formation.
Locke's explicitly religious writings include The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) and the learned
and lengthy Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul (published posthumously, 1705-7). He
also wrote on economic and monetary issues connected with his various involvements in public and
political affairs. He even found time to compose a critique of the theories of the French philosopher
Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715, a contemporary developer of Cartesian philosophy), entitled An
Examination of P. Malebranche's Opinion of Seeing All Things in God. Other items included in his
collected Works, which have run to many editions, are extensive replies to Edward Stillingfleet
(1635–99), bishop of Worcester, answering hostile criticisms raised by the latter against the Essay,
and a long piece entitled 'Of the Conduct of the Understanding', which was originally intended for
inclusion in a later edition of the Essay.
From this brief survey of Locke's work, we can see that although his most important writings were
published in his fifties and sixties, during a comparatively short interval beginning in his most
momentous year of 1689, his thoughts were the product of a very long period of gestation stretching
back at least thirty years before that. It is quite fair to say, however, that the Essay was the
cornerstone of all his intellectual activity, providing the epistemological and methodological
framework for all his other views and enterprises. And although we are particularly fortunate in
having a remarkably complete collection of Locke's original manuscripts and letters as well as his
many other publications, it is on the Essay that his reputation as the greatest English philosopher
stands. Written in English at a time when English prose style was at the peak of its vigour, and Latin
had begun to wane as the language of intellectual communication, it is both a literary and a
philosophical masterpiece, which can still be read today for pleasure as well as enlightenment.
Although in reading the Essay it is helpful to know something of the historical and intellectual
background to its composition, it is a remarkable testimony to its durability and stature as a work of
philosophy, as well as to its appeal as a work of literature, that it can still be taken up and studied
with profit and pleasure, three hundred years after its first appearance, by anyone susceptible to the
intellectual curiosity that its pages provoke.