The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  ‘yet public affairs and the private concerns of friends somehow keep me so busy that I am entirely torn away from books ... I hope that my old and longed-for leisure will soon be restored to me, so that I may return to the Commonwealth of Learning.’5

  London exhilarated but also exhausted Locke. Worse, it had a ruinous effect on his health. An asthmatic, like William of Orange, he found two weeks of London smoke enough to bring him to death’s door. ‘I find I want still two things very dear to me, that is you and my health,’6 he wrote to Anne Grigg. He convinced himself that he had tuberculosis and sought relief most often with the Mordaunts, who had a famous garden at Parson’s Green. Increasingly, though, he retired even further afield, to the home of Damaris Masham at Oates in Essex.

  Perhaps Damaris, daughter of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, was the woman Locke should have married. Later he would describe her to a friend:

  ‘A remarkably gifted woman ... so much occupied with study and reflection on theological and philosophical matters, that you could find few men with whom you might associate with greater profit and pleasure. Her judgment is singularly keen, and I know few men capable of discussing with such insight the most abstruse subjects, such as are beyond the grasp, I do not say of women, but even of most educated men.’7

  Before his exile they had exchanged letters as Philoclea and Philander. Theirs was a friendship based both on deep affection and intellectual respect; their correspondence ranged from philosophical questions, through mild flirtation, to discussion of Damaris’s anxiety and depression. But Locke, too secretive a man, perhaps, ever to share his life, never proposed to her and during his period of hiding in Dr Veen’s house he received news that Damaris had married an Essex widower, Francis Masham, and moved to Oates to look after his family.

  The Mashams’ home was a small Tudor manor house, moated, with a lake. It seemed pleasant enough to a sickly refugee from London.

  ‘He had during the years ’89, ’90 and part of ’91 [Damaris wrote later] by some considerably long visits ... made trial of the air of this place ... and he thought that none would be so suitable to him. His company could not but be very desirable to us, and he had all the assurances that we could give him of being always welcome here ... Mr Locke then ... resolved (if it pleased God) here to end his days.’8

  Fussily, Locke insisted on paying rent of a pound a week, perhaps to lessen any guilt he felt at filling the house up with his books, furniture, and visitors like Isaac Newton, whom he had met and become close to immediately after the Revolution.* Damaris’s son Dab and Francis Masham’s offspring from his first marriage entertained this unlikely lover of children, who occupied a study, a bedroom and two rooms on the first floor.

  The refuge of Oates would become still more important to Locke when the implications of the Essay on Human Understanding finally did sink in. That could only be a matter of time, for ‘Shaftesbury’s secretary’ had done far more than shine a dim light on ‘certain truths’. To traditionalists, his thoughts about human understanding were destructive of morality, society and religion; they denied the human soul; they amounted to no less than an assault on God himself.

  ‘Truth so far as my shortsightedness could reach it’9 was the task Locke set himself in the Essay. It sounded modest enough in his preface:

  ‘The Commonwealth of Learning is not at this time without master builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity; but everyone must not hope to be a Boyle ... and in an age that produces such masters, as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr Newton ... it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish, that lies in the way to knowledge.’10

  Locke’s act of philosophical house-keeping would be carried out by applying the tools of Baconian enquiry not to Nature but to the enquiry itself. ‘The first step’, before any claims of human knowledge could be made (even by the Moderns), ‘was, to take a survey of our own understandings, examine our own powers, and see to what things they were adapted. Till that was done I suspected we began at the wrong end.’11 Instead of shining the torch of understanding on plants or planets, in other words, he would examine the torch. He took a step back to ask not How much do we know? but How much can we know? given that everything we understand must be grasped with that flimsy and imperfect tool, the human mind. What was open to our understanding? And what was beyond us – not because our theories were wrong but because our minds were unable to grasp it?

  Locke’s conclusions would be something of a disappointment to the more triumphalist of the Moderns. To the question of how much we could expect to know, even with telescope and microscope, the answer turned out to be very little, and imperfectly. All knowledge came through our senses, Locke decided. Yet if what we sensed lay outside us, we could never claim truly to know it. Look at a door and you take not the door into your mind, but only the impression, the idea of it. To second-hand knowledge of that kind there could be no certainty, only probability. Certainty was reserved only for abstract ideas: for mathematics, perhaps for virtue. For our knowledge of the external world, that world which astronomers and botanists were so painstakingly classifying – John Ray poring over his plant specimens, John Flamsteed peering through his telescope at Greenwich – we could claim only probability. Our conclusions were opinion. Sound opinion, perhaps, on which decisions could be formed and lives based, but ‘as to a perfect science of natural bodies, we are ... so far from being capable of any such thing, that I conclude it lost labour to seek after it’.12

  That was an unnerving starting-point for seventeenth-century readers, evicted from a world of certainties into the shadow realm of probability. From it, though, Locke’s next steps were more familiar, at least to any Modern. Like John Ray dissecting stamens and roots, John Locke set out to categorise thoughts. There were simple thoughts – ideas, Locke called them – representing things we saw (or felt, or touched) untainted by any fancies of our own. There were complex thoughts created when simple ideas were plaited together. There were sensitive ideas we received through perception, and introspective ideas which we created by ‘remembering, considering, reasoning etc’. The Essay was, in part, Locke’s natural history of the mind. Modern, too, was his Baconian sweeping away of higher authority, that power in anybody ‘to have the authority to be the dictator of principles, and teacher of unquestionable truths; and to make a man swallow that for an innate principle, which may serve to his purpose, who teacheth them’.13 Locke’s understanding was a free agent, receiving its own ideas, composing its own opinions, beholden to no higher authority on earth.

  Locke’s fascination with the world beyond Europe also belonged to modernity. That further world would have been all too visible in Amsterdam, where he wrote the Essay, and whose streets were full of silks, ceramics and travellers’ tales. The Mandarins at the Emperor’s court, the men picked up by the slave ships on the west coast of Africa, clearly did not think or believe as Europeans did. Fashionable collections of ‘curiosities’ spoke not just of different worlds of objects, but of a quite different architecture of human thought. All this went into Locke’s enquiry. He had written to Charles Cudworth, Damaris’s brother, for anthropological information about the East Indies, to Dr Henry Woodward for data on American ‘Indians’. And from their responses he derived the conclusion which would soon have traditionalists thundering at him from the pulpit.

  Since they thought and believed in such an astonishing variety of ways, it was impossible that all men and women began with the same basic set of ideas. The sheer diversity of human understanding could be accounted for only if our mindsets were formed by our different cultures and different circumstances. What we know, Locke concluded, we know through our experience. Instead of being pre-programmed by God with innate ideas, we learn only by our senses. We come into the world with nothing, our minds ‘white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas’.
14 Human life began with a clean slate, a tabula rasa.

  ‘I fancy I pretty well guess’, Locke’s Irish friend William Molyneux wrote to him when the controversy was at its height, ‘what it is that some men find mischievous in your Essay.’15 Even Damaris Masham found the notion of no innate ideas hard to swallow. What was the divine spark in man if it was not a gift of ideas? Surely there was at least a glimmer of pre-existing intelligence, ‘an active sagacity in the soul’, as Damaris put it,

  ‘her condition being like that of a sleeping musician who does not so much dream of, or has any representation of any thing musical in him, till being wak’d and desir’d to sing, somebody repeating two or three words of a song to him, he sings it all presently.’16

  The alternative, surely, was that man had no soul.

  That was exactly what critics read into the Essay as its fame – or notoriety – spread in the years after publication, as virtuosi and churchmen across Europe discussed it, hesitated, and began to publish their responses. ‘What is most curious’, Locke wrote plaintively to van Limborch, ‘is their claim to find matter for religious controversy in this work where my intention was merely to treat questions of pure philosophical speculation.’17 But in drawing a line between the two Locke was either naïve or far ahead of his time. Of course there was a religious controversy. Locke’s human being was hardly the son of Adam, this thing of blood and skin, this mewling animal with an empty mind. Where was the soul in a creature who knew no more than it saw, sniffed and tasted? What was it? Such were the criticisms levelled by, among others, the distinguished Bishop of Worcester, Edward Stillingfleet, who was neither a fool, nor an enemy to new ideas. Where did the Essay leave God, who had, after all, created the human mind? Locke’s critics saw implications in his theory which Locke himself seemed far too reticent about. What kind of Jehovah was this who was unable – not unwilling, but unable – to imprint his clay dolls with thoughts? This disinterested creator seemed far too akin to Newton’s God, the divinity who set planets spinning through the universe but was then unable to change their course.

  Where, crucially, did men obtain their notion of virtue if it came not pre-loaded by God but from the clacking tongues of other men? At several points Locke veered dangerously close to implying, like a notorious controversialist of a previous generation, Thomas Hobbes, that religion had human and anthropological origins. Reject innate ideas and you should logically conclude that all morality was relative – which was exactly the accusation James Tyrrell heard in High Church Oxford when the book was first published:

  ‘If drunkenness ... should be in any country ... thought praiseworthy, [then] those that could drink most [would be thought virtuous] ... which seems to come very near to what is so much cried out in Mr Hobbes, when he asserts that in the state of nature and out of a commonwealth, there is no moral good or evil.’18

  The philosophical repercussions of Locke’s seminal work would extend far beyond his own lifetime, but in a Christian world, a world in which atheism was breathed as the name of a sin so rare and terrible as to be almost unheard-of, the immediate impact of the Essay was on religion. Locke’s God was not a God most Christians recognised. Locke had replaced certainty with probability, the Almighty with a vague and powerless creator who controlled neither men’s thoughts, their churches or their laws. For all Locke’s protestations of innocence, the Essay seemed to many of its readers a direct challenge to established faith. It was heresy opening the door to atheism. Christianity must either outlaw such ideas or be lost.

  That, certainly, was how churches throughout history had responded to such threats; Rome’s persecution of Galileo was notorious. And there was no doubt how traditional Christian faith saw the materialist vision of the Moderns:

  ‘Dark senseless matter, driven on by the blind impulses of fatality and fortune; [where] men first sprung up, like mushrooms, out of the mud and slime of the earth; and [where] all their thoughts, and the whole of what they call soul, are only various action and repercussion ... kept a while a moving by some mechanism and clockwork which finally ceases and perishes by death.’19

  Nor did Newtonian physics and Locke’s Essay represent the only challenges to traditional faith. Another came from exploration, which had shown the world quite different from how it was described in the Bible. In 1687 Confucius (‘the most learned, wise and virtuous of all the Chineses’20) was introduced to Europeans in French translation. The discovery that not all non-Europeans were ignorant and depraved raised difficult questions. Why would God create so many intelligent millions only to damn them by witholding from them his revelation? How were those outside Christendom to be saved? In 1641 the great Dutch theologian Vossius had published a massive compendium of global faiths, De Theologia Gentili, which raised further questions: how to account for the differences, and, still harder, the nagging similarities between world religions. Vossius suggested polytheistic religions were degenerate forms of original Judaism, prophets transmuted into Gods. But when the worship of Allah or Jehovah wore the same clothes of rite and myth as Christianity itself, what was it that separated true faith from these chimerae? It was hard to resist the conclusion that religion did, after all, have some anthropological element to it. Further anxiety was generated by the unravelling of biblical certainties about time. Pedantic divines would continue to calculate the day and hour of Creation for some years to come, but some of the religions scrutinised by Vossius showed troubling signs of being older than Judaism. This was no dry-as-dust academic controversy, nor were the hours which Isaac Newton spent on biblical chronology a sign of his eccentricity, considerable though that was. Christians had to face a worrisome possibility: if Adam was not the first man, what was left of Original Sin?

  Quite apart from the conceptual problems which suddenly faced Christianity, it had also to absorb the implications of the Revolution itself. Robert Filmer had located kings in a chain of being which led upwards to God. Break that chain and it was hard to avoid awkward questions about the power of the greatest absolute monarch of all. The Revolution had been, in part, an argument about the nature of power, and that debate could only throw its shadow over God’s own constitution. The God of Newton’s Principia, limited by his own laws, seemed rather a constitutional than an arbitrary monarch, and even if God himself avoided such impertinences, there was no such comfort for his churches: subjects who no longer obeyed their monarch at all times and in all places would hardly submit to the unquestioned authority of their bishop. There had been a shift in how ‘the people’ saw their own relation to authority. If they claimed the power to dispose crowns, they would scarcely then return to nestle like children at the monarch’s feet. If they could choose their place of worship on a Sunday morning, they were no longer the Church’s obedient flock, no longer God’s subjects but his citizens.

  New science, new knowledge about the world, new structures in politics – all of these presented major challenges to traditional religion. In the past, churches had always hastened to meet such threats. Throughout history religions had stamped out any challenge to their monopoly of belief, and there was no doubt that natural science posed such a challenge. Newton’s ideas, and Locke’s, were deeply subversive of traditional religion. John Ray knew many churchmen who ‘condemn[ed] the study of experimental philosophy as a mere inquisitiveness, and denounce[d] the passion for knowledge as a pursuit unpleasing to God’.21

  In the 1690s, however, many in the Church in England responded in a different way. Instead of trying to stamp out Modern ideas, they sought an accommodation with them. One cleric in particular, Richard Bentley, set out to demonstrate that the work of Newton and Locke could be reconciled with Christianity. This argument he developed between March and December 1692 in a series of lectures established by the will of the pioneering ‘scientist’, Robert Boyle.

  Boyle had died on 30 December 1691, a ‘pious admirable Christian’, as John Evelyn noted in his diary, ‘excellent Philosopher, & my worthy friend’.22 His funeral at St
Martin-in-the-Fields gathered all the great and good of England’s scientific community. Gilbert Burnet gave the address. Boyle’s funeral marked the end of an era, however. His life had spanned six and a half decades of extraordinary change. Born just one year after Bacon died, he had seen natural philosophy advance from experimental fringe to the mainstream of national life. The Royal Society had popularised a set of notions which had once seemed outlandish – scepticism, the sweeping away of authority, experiment. They had publicised clever gadgets like the microscope and vacuum chamber; they had turned abstract notions into exciting inventions, dissected cadavers, magnified fleas. They had spread the idea of an expanding world of thought, taught the principle of classification, and, for all the detritus of guesswork and entertaining nonsense caught up in the Society’s threshing blades,* they had broken boundaries. They had made science so fashionable that even the North brothers put their heads together and sent off a paper to explain the rise and fall of the barometer (it was politely returned).

  Boyle’s death marked the end of the Scientific Revolution’s first phase. In 1688, with London in chaos as William’s army advanced, the Royal Society had cancelled its annual meeting (although not the dinner after it), and for the moment its glory days were over. The first era of science had, in any case, received its crowning monument in Newton’s Principia. Isaac Newton would live and work for another thirty years, publishing his Optics in 1704 to explain his discoveries about light and his fluxional method in mathematics – calculus – but both key breakthroughs were made before 1692. Henceforth he would become one of the public men of the Revolution, no longer the unkempt loner living up a staircase in Cambridge. He would take on public office. He would be tenacious in promoting his public reputation (not least in the priority dispute with Leibniz over calculus), in pushing forward acolytes and preparing his legacy.