John Dryden - Delphi Poets Series

by John Dryden

  The Letter on Toleration, as already mentioned, had appeared anonymously in Holland in 1689. In 1690 the Essay on the Human Understanding was published, and also the two Treatises on Government; the first, a reply to Filmer, the advocate of divine right, composed, in Professor Fowler’s opinion, between 1680 and 1685; the second written during the last years of Locke’s residence in Holland. The Letter on Toleration, the authorship of which was not acknowledged during Locke’s lifetime, was followed by three defences against assailants, two of which appeared respectively in 1690 and 1692, the third was posthumous. The Essay on the Human Understanding, adopted from the first as a text-book at Trinity College, Dublin, but ineffectually proscribed in the writer’s own university, called forth criticisms from Norris of Bemerton, to which Locke replied in two essays allowed to remain unpublished during his life, ‘for,’ he said, ‘I love not controversy.’ He could not, however, avoid a controversy with John Edwards and Bishop Stillingfleet, on his Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). After writing five pamphlets, Locke ultimately remained in possession of the field, the drift of opinion being entirely in his favour, though few of the official ministers of religion ventured to come forward openly in his defence. The Treatise on Education (1693), written at the request of William Molyneux, excited comparatively little controversy. Another very important class of the productions of his affluent maturity were those on trade and finance, by which he rendered the utmost service to the state. By his Considerations on the Value of Money (1691), and other tracts, he contributed largely to the reform of the currency, the condition of which had become intolerable, but was in great danger of being corrected by remedies worse than the disease. Several other publications contributed to disseminate enlightened views on trade, manufactures, and the interest of money. He could not always be right; it is both painful and ludicrous to find so wise and good a man obliged ex officio as a Commissioner of Trade to find reasons for discouraging the woollen manufacture in Ireland; which Swift seems to ridicule in describing the Laputan philosophers who had devised means to remove the wool from a sheep’s back, and hoped shortly to propagate the breed of naked sheep over the kingdom. This, nevertheless, is but a slight inconsistency with the general tenor of Locke’s views on economical subjects, which, no less than his political and religious convictions, tended irresistibly towards unrestricted freedom. In 1700 he was released from public life, and spent his few remaining years undisturbed by controversy, in the society of the amiable family of Sir Francis Masham, of High Laver, Essex, of whose house he had long been an inmate. Lady Masham, singularly enough, was the daughter of Ralph Cudworth, the great English champion of the ideal school of philosophy, and therefore as far removed as possible from Locke in opinion. He died on October 28, 1704.

  Locke’s intellectual character must be considered along with his writings; of his moral character it may justly be said, that no English writer of equal eminence stands so high. Butler and Berkeley may have been equally faultless, and the latter, no doubt, possessed more of the spell of personal fascination; but neither was, like Locke, exposed to the storms of a corrupt and factious age; neither was called upon to encounter such perils and make such sacrifices; neither had the same opportunity of exercising fortitude in adversity and moderation in success. Whether as public patriot or private friend, Locke appears ‘a spirit without spot,’ and his resolute temper, his intellectual ardour, and his brilliant achievements, effectually preserve him from the insipidity which so frequently mars the moral physiognomies of good men. His countenance, indeed, is not illumined by the spirituality of a Channing; but the robuster virtues stand forth in even bolder relief, and his apparent exemption from the minor failings which beset even a Newton, is the more remarkable as he wanted neither for enemies nor biographers.

  Locke’s great work as a philosopher is the Essay on the Human Understanding, ‘the best chart of the human mind,’ says Hallam, one of the great representative books of the world. In Locke, as in his predecessor Hobbes, were united two endowments rarely combined, the sturdy prosaic common sense of the man of the world and the dexterity and subtlety of the practised logician. In his utter antipathy to everything in the slightest degree illumined, or, as he would have thought, distorted, by the glamour of imagination or fancy, Locke was the true representative of his age, and no subsequent change of mental attitude, as the world sweeps on into new and more genial climates of thought, can deprive his work of its representative historical importance. Nor is this all. Locke’s treatise was almost the first investigation of the mind which took note of facts, and was not purely metaphysical. It was also the first in which this study took a leading place. ‘The science which we now call Psychology, or the study of mind,’ says Dr. Fowler, ‘had hitherto, amongst modern writers, been almost exclusively subordinated to other branches of speculation. Locke was the first of modern writers to attempt at once an independent and a complete treatment of the phenomena of the human mind, of their mutual relations, of their causes and limits. This task he undertakes, not in the dogmatic spirit of his predecessors, but in the critical spirit which he may be said almost to have inaugurated. And the effect of his candour on his first readers must have been enhanced by the fact, not always favourable to his precision, that, as far as he can, he throws aside the technical terminology of the schools, and employs the language current in the better kinds of ordinary literature and the well-bred society of his time.’ In fact, as was said of Socrates, he brought philosophy down from heaven to earth; and this service, and the great influence which his work produced upon the future development of philosophy, are perhaps stronger claims to permanent distinction than the merits of a theory which can never be overlooked, but can never again command the almost universal assent which it received in its own day. For the application of physiology to psychological research, implicitly, at all events, advocated by Locke, has produced results of which neither he nor his opponents dreamed. The central point of his philosophy is the denial of innate ideas; the mind is to him a tabula rasa, a sheet of blank paper, and all the ideas which have been thought inherent in it are the result of experience. In a sense we now know this to be true; but we also know this experience not to be the experience of the individual, but of the race, or rather say of sentient existence for ages inconceivably remote. It follows that although Locke may be abstractedly right in denying the possibility of the acquisition of ideas except through experience, yet practically everyone comes into the world with a host of ideas derived from his ancestors, connate if not innate; and that, so far from the human mind resembling a sheet of blank paper, it is more like a palimpsest inscribed and reinscribed ad infinitum. It also follows that the discrepancies of mankind respecting points of morality do not, as Locke thought, disprove the existence of an ideal rule of right, for everyone must necessarily be born with inherited instincts by which such a rule is more or less deflected or obscured. In fact, Locke and his adversaries were both partly right and partly wrong — one party in denying intuition, the other in defining it. Neither had found, or at that period could have found, the real key to the difficulty; but it is to the immortal honour of Locke that all real advance in psychology has been effected by working in his spirit of observation and induction, rather than by the à priori method of his opponents. The third and fourth books of the essay, On Words and On Knowledge, contain but little controversial matter, and are chiefly devoted to illustrating the imperfection of human faculties, especially language, the necessity for clear and definite conceptions, and the countless impediments in the way of truth.

  Three others among Locke’s writings are regarded as classical: On the Reasonableness of Christianity, and On Education, and his Letters on Toleration. The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) is from one point of view an endeavour to render Christianity reasonable by eliminating its corruptions; from another an attempt to establish it on the basis of fulfilled prophecy and miracle. In both respects it was admirably adapted to the prevalent sentiment of Locke’s own da
y, and, although warmly attacked by Stillingfleet, exerted a great influence upon the theology of the eighteenth century. In our time the point of view has shifted so far as to expose Locke to the full weight of Dr. Martineau’s terse criticism, ‘The affidavit has become the brief.’ Its historical importance, however, can never be impaired, any more than that of the admirable Letters on Toleration, which seem commonplace because they are now esteemed irrefragable. It was otherwise in his own time, and for long afterwards. Their principal literary defects are that they are too polemical, and too long. Of all Locke’s works, Some Thoughts concerning Education is perhaps the most universally approved, and it is in truth a golden treatise, the very incarnation of good sense and right feeling; and more useful in its own time than it can be now that the errors which Locke especially assailed have become contrary, instead of congenial, to the general spirit of the age. The prevailing tone, the confidence in human nature rightly treated, the abhorrence of the merely arbitrary and despotic, render the work an epoch in the history of culture, and, compared with the coarse maxims of a Defoe, or even the Whole Duty of Man’s exclusive reliance upon authority, show how greatly Locke was beyond his contemporaries in enlightenment and the genuine spirit of humanity. The insight and penetration into children’s characters are surprising in a man who had no children of his own, or much direct concern with the education of the children of others. They prove that Locke must have been a most careful and accurate observer. If there is a fault in the treatise, it is that the range of view is not always sufficiently wide, and that the author’s precepts are too exclusively propounded with reference to the individual, and too little with a view to the general advantage of society. The disuse of Latin composition, for example, would have done little personal harm to the majority of the individual boys of whom Locke is thinking; but, in his day at all events, would have lowered the standard of culture throughout Europe. In general, however, Locke’s remarks are characterized by the soundest common sense; and there is perhaps no other production of the age so thoroughly in harmony with its pervading spirit.

  In sharp contrast to Locke and his school stand the small knot of Cambridge Platonists and their allies — Cudworth, Henry More, Culverwell, Cumberland, Glanvil, and Whichcote, which last may indeed be regarded as a connecting link between the rival thinkers. His place is rather with the divines, and Henry More (1614-1657) belongs more properly to the period of Vaughan in virtue of his poetry, though continuing to write to a late date. Culverwell and Cumberland scarcely rank in a literary history; so that the school is chiefly represented by Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688). Cudworth’s life was uneventful. One of those moderate men whom the excesses of party provoke to opposition, he sided mainly with the Puritans during the Civil War, but was no Puritan himself, and protested energetically against Puritan disparagement of sweetness and light. He had no difficulty in conforming to the Restoration, and accepting a living from Archbishop Sheldon, but his life was mainly spent in his study, in the production of vast folios, where the ingots of philosophy lay stored while Locke’s current coin passed nimbly from hand to hand. The contrast between the men and the systems is complete at every point; and it is assuredly one of the strangest ironies of fate that Cudworth’s daughter should have become the good angel of Locke’s old age. Cudworth is no doubt by much the more attractive figure to imaginative minds; but it must be conceded as an indisputable truth that his way of thinking could not possibly have produced nearly so much good, have so profoundly leavened men’s ideas on legislation and education, or have so contributed to build up the national character for sound common sense. This admitted, Cudworth may be heartily praised as a sublime and refined thinker, epithets inappropriate to Locke. His great work is The Intellectual System, published in 1678, only the first part of which ever appeared. A Treatise on Immutable Morality remained in manuscript until 1731. Cudworth’s purpose may briefly be defined as the expulsion of all materialistic and mechanical notions from theology, metaphysics, and ethics. He wages war upon atheism, fatalism, utilitarianism, whatsoever is opposed to elevating and poetical conceptions of the order of things. His erudition is only too extensive, and he is very candid. Dryden thought that he had stated the atheistic objections more powerfully than he had answered them; and his doctrine of plastic force in nature verges upon Pantheism, as indeed religious philosophies usually do. He is finely analyzed in the Types of Ethical Theory of Dr. Martineau, who says of his philosophy:

  ‘Embodied as it is in unfinished books, and buried in massive erudition, it has been distantly respected rather than closely studied; and has left upon few readers an adequate impression of the depth of the author’s penetration, the comprehensiveness of his grasp, the subtlety of his analysis, and the happy flashes of expression by which he flings light upon real though unsuspected relations.’

  Joseph Glanvil (1636-1680).

  Joseph Glanvil, although an Oxford man, practically belonged to the group of Cambridge Platonists, and was especially connected with Henry More. He is the author of two very dissimilar books, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1660), and Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), published after his death with additions by More, Horneck, and others. The former book, though containing no evidence of original power of thought, is remarkable as an evidence of the influence of Bacon in overthrowing the authority of Aristotle; for its idolatry of Descartes; for its many curious anticipations (not originating with Glanvil) of modern discoveries; above all, for its testimony of the ardent scientific curiosity then fermenting in England, and about to issue in the establishment of the Royal Society. ‘Methinks,’ Glanvil says, ‘this age seems resolved to bequeath posterity something to remember it.’ The following is a remarkable passage to have been written six years before Newton’s great discovery: ‘That heavy bodies descend by gravity, is no better an account than we might expect from a rustic; and again, that gravity is a quality whereby a heavy body descends, is an impertinent circle, and teacheth nothing.’ The other and much more celebrated work, on the other hand, is a most melancholy example of superstitious credulity, but full of striking stories of the supernatural. The contrast between the styles of the two books is instructive; the earlier might have been written in the days of James I.; the later, though still antiquated, is much nearer modern English prose.