The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  He started with the peripateticism they had taught him at Oxford, which did not satisfy him. He was a long time feeling his way, with Bacon, Gassendi and Descartes as the guides of his choice, but, in the last resort, he relied on no one but himself. In the course of the winter of 1670—1671, talking over some philosophical questions with a party of friends, it dawned upon him that what was wanted was some sound rule, some trustworthy guiding principle. The principles of faith and morals could not be securely established until we had examined our own mental capacity and determined what things are, and what are not, within our intellectual grasp. It was, therefore, the intellectual faculties which, before we attempted anything else, had to be measured with accuracy. It was no use living on charity; no use calmly relying on the ideas of others, or asking what Plato or Aristotle has to say about the matter, no use swearing by what the masters have to tell us. No; what we had to do was to take Truth as our one and only aim, and to make our way towards it along the path of free enquiry. At the outset of Locke’s intellectual career, we notice the same determination to strike out an independent line, the same desire to begin again de novo, the same anxiety to be intellectually free and self-sufficient, which was working like leaven in the spirit of the age.

  This method is by no means that of a solitary, of one who kept to himself. You can almost imagine you hear the voices of those who have come to their friend Locke to ply him with questions, hoping he will set their minds at rest. Typifying the eager persistency of their epoch, they brought their questions to one they deemed most likely to provide them with a philosophy that would allay their doubts. Locke was at the mercy of his times. All through his apprenticeship, he remained in direct contact with his contemporaries, listening to the question which they never ceased to put to him, the eternal question, which, now that the answer of tradition was no longer held to suffice, again began to clamour for a solution. And that question was, Quid est Veritas? What is Truth? To him it fell to proclaim the new truth to the world. From 1671 onwards, he had been committing ideas to paper, ideas which soon began to fall into a coherent whole, and which he might have put forth then and there, had he been so minded. However, he spent nearly twenty more years developing them, putting them to the test, showing his manuscript now to one, now to another of his intimates. No solitary he, but a distinctly sociable person.

  Journeying along the highways of France, at the various hostelries where he put up; or in London, amid the preoccupations of his official duties; at Oxford, his haven of peace; at Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Cleves, he pondered and toiled, bringing by slow degrees his system to perfection. When, at length, he did give it to the world, people recognized that here indeed was a man endowed with the gift of making his subjects live; for he did not confine himself wholly and solely to philosophy; he liked to tell his readers what he himself thought about religion, political matters, education and so forth, and every time he brought out a new book, there was no end to the discussion it provoked. Of a writer who wrote, as he did, only what appeared to be essential, I can recall but one other example, Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, whenever he touched on religion, or politics, or education, inevitably started a conflagration. Locke, burning with a gentler flame, did not, like Rousseau, set fire to everyone who approached him. But, before Rousseau, he sensed the heart-hunger of his fellow-men, and responded to it. His writings are just so many personal talks which grip the reader, and never let him go till they have won him over. Back, again and again, they hark, with countless new and persuasive arguments; patiently, they force him to surrender; his sentences enmesh him like a net.

  His means are urbanity, ease, and an indefinably flowing and limpid style. No Sibylline mysteries for him; no excessive esotericism, no vertiginous profundities. He will have nothing that is not readily intelligible; it gives him pain to find himself at grips with a metaphysical thinker like Malebranche: “Wherein, I confess, there are many expressions, which carrying with them, to my mind, no clear idea, are like to remove but little of my ignorance by their sounds”.— “Here again I must confess myself in the dark”— “And methinks if a man would have studied obscurity, he could not have writ more unintelligibly than this”. Far be it from him to indulge in such obscurity! “My appearing in print being on purpose to be as useful as I may, I think it necessary to make what I have to say as easy and intelligible to all sorts of readers as I can. And I had much rather the speculative and quick-sighted should complain of my being in some parts tedious, than that any one, not accustomed to abstract speculations, or prepossessed with different notions, should mistake or not comprehend my meaning.” Such were his feelings and such was his mode of expressing them. Is it not yet another sign of the times that he should thus avow his intention not to address himself exclusively to specialists in philosophy, but to risk incurring the disapproval of speculative and esoteric thinkers, in order to be of service to all who were seeking a sound rule of life?

  At last, in the year 1690, the book appeared. Its title was unpretentious enough: An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Whatever may be said of it by those who care only for the high flights of philosophy, the date marks a definite change, a new orientation. Henceforth, man’s sphere of exploration was the mind of man and its unfathomable riches. Let us have done, said Locke, with these metaphysical conjectures; do we not realize how fruitless they are? Are we not tired of asking, and always asking in vain? Was there ever one able to reveal the nature and essence of the human soul, to show us what must be set in motion in the animal part of us to give birth, through our bodily organs, to our sensations and ideas? The body obeys the mind, the mind acts on the body. No sooner do the metaphysicians begin to interfere, than this fact, which is borne out by universal experience, and which is, in itself, self-evident, is transformed into a mystery whose obscurities even the most learned enquirers have only succeeded in making darker still. Let us, then, leave it at that, let us cudgel our brains no more about it. If there are substances external to us (as there certainly are), we have no means of grasping them in their essence; why then waste our energies in attempting to apprehend them? Let us abandon that vain endeavour.

  The certitude which we need resides in the mind. Let us look therein and cease to probe those infinite spaces which do but breed deceiving visions; thereon let us concentrate our attention. Clearly recognizing that our understanding is limited, let us accept its limitations; nevertheless, we should make the most of it within the limits imposed, studying it and getting to know how it operates. We should observe how our ideas are formed and how they combine, one with another, and how the memory retains them. Of all this amazing activity we have hitherto been in total ignorance. That, and that alone, is the field of sure and certain knowledge, and so rich are the prospects it holds out to us, that the sum-total of our existence is not too long for their exploration.

  “It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean. It is well he knows that it is long enough to reach the bottom at such places as are necessary to direct his voyage, and caution him against shoals that may ruin him. Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct. If we can find out those measures whereby a rational creature, put in that state which man is in this world, may and ought to govern his opinions and actions depending thereon, we need not be troubled that some other things escape our knowledge”.[1]

  Or to put the matter in other words (for Locke is not shy of repeating himself—far from it!): What is our business here, in this world? To learn about the Creator by learning as much as we can about the creature; to learn what our duties are; to provide for our material needs; no more. Our faculties, rude and imperfect though they be, are adequate to the due performance of those functions. Therefore, putting aside the hope of attaining any perfect and absolute knowledge of the things around us as something beyond the range of finite beings, let us content ourselves with being what we are, with doing what we can do and wit
h knowing what we can know.

  The truth of the matter is that, as soon as the mind attempts to reach out beyond its allotted limits, and seeks to learn the causes of things, we realize that the only effect of our exploratory effort is to make us aware how limited is our range of vision; we are confronted by a wall of impenetrable darkness. On the other hand, if only we are content to confine our investigations to the sphere vouchsafed to us, we find ourselves in a world of marvels, and we find wisdom and happiness into the bargain. Should we, then, hesitate to make our choice? Let us give up the impossible. We need have no fear of falling into the abyss, so long as we keep firm hold of the certainties which our hands, weak though they be, are able to grasp.

  The real contribution which we owe to Locke’s philosophy does not lie in his abandoning metaphysics; that, a number of thinkers had already done, but in his way of circumscribing and protecting a little islet in the illimitable ocean whose horizon recedes for ever as we move.

  Still a task remained, the task of ordering the world so as to banish doubt. The a priori had to be treated as non-existent. A change indeed! Philosophy would have to be re-made all over again, and on a different plan; all philosophy, from Aristotle down to the latest comers, the Cambridge neo-Platonists, Cudworth and the rest of them, who were for reviving the theory of ideas. There was no such thing as an innate idea; the idea of infinity is not innate, nor is that of eternity, of identity, of the whole and the part, of worship, or of God. In the newly born it is impossible to distinguish any of these alleged realities, borne from one knows not whence, inventions of the speculative mind, which had expressed itself in many forms, Greek, scholastic, and modern, but which had never resulted in anything but words, words, words. Away with these phantoms. The mind is a piece of white paper, waiting for things to be written on it, a camera obscura, awaiting the coming of the sun’s rays.

  For this wholesale rebuilding work, there is one element available; one, but it suffices; and that is sensation. It comes from without, it impinges on the mind, arouses it, and, before long, takes possession of it. By juxtaposition, by combination, it produces those increasingly complex and abstract ideas which result from the mind’s working on its own sense-data. Starting with sensation, nothing is easier than to construct a theory of knowledge, intuitive, or demonstrative, which will bring with it indefectible certitude. The relationship now is not between subject and object, but—something much more simple—between subject and subject, and henceforth the struggle to eliminate the possibility of error is no more than a domestic concern, of taking and maintaining internal precautions. “Since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them . . . knowledge then seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas”. So that our knowledge, our human knowledge, is at once perfectly possible and infinitely sure.

  But now, no sooner do we concede to Locke his principle of initial sensation, than off he goes to reconstruct a system of morality. We feel pleasure, and we feel pain: hence we get the notion of the beneficial and the harmful; hence the notion of things permitted and things forbidden; hence a moral code based solely on psychological realities, a system which, for that very reason, is endowed with a character of certitude which it would not possess if it depended on some law external to itself. For inasmuch as certitude is no more than the perception of agreement or disagreement in our ideas, and as proof is merely the perception of this relationship arrived at through a series of intermediate ideas; as our moral ideas are, like the truths of mathematics, abstractions elaborated by the mind, it follows that there is no difference in kind between the one set of truths and the other, and that both are equally to be relied upon.

  Thus, step by step, the dogmatic attitude is replaced by an empiricism which discovers and records all the facts of our psychological existence. What is the origin of language? Did God implant this wonderful intermediary within us by a single act of will? We cannot say. But what we do know perfectly well is that man possesses organs expressly designed for the creation of articulate sounds, that, by means of these sounds, he expresses the changes which his own sensibility experiences, and that words are the signs, first particular and then general, of ideas. All rhetoric and all the art of writing is there. Don’t talk to us about works on style, or the art of poetry, unless they are based on those obvious principles. An author who really knows anything about the origin and office of words will scrupulously avoid any that convey no clear idea; the words he uses, he will use with a uniform connotation, otherwise he would create confusion in the ideas of which words should be the unchanging symbols; he will avoid over-refinement, as he will over-emphasis, both of them arch-agents of falsification and distortion. The object of language being to get our ideas into the minds of others, and to do so promptly, he is to be accounted a good writer, or a good speaker, who always keeps these objects in view and adapts his style to their attainment. Grammar was not invented by pettifogging pedants for the purpose of harrying luckless schoolboys; it has its logic, an inward logic, which, beginning with the initial sensation, can be followed in its successive stages.

  To see the activities of the human spirit continually growing and expanding, and, with them, the beliefs which enable us to lead a happy life, with the consciousness that there is nothing, no science, no moral idea, no art which is not the outcome of its own activities—what subject for contemplation were better calculated than that to awaken our interest, our pleasure and our pride? Not, indeed, the pride of one who defies the gods, for none can be counted an initiate without sacrifice and humiliation of spirit, without acknowledging his fundamental ignorance, without bowing the head in unquestioning and limitless surrender; not pride in that sense, but the self-congratulation of one who has narrowly escaped drowning at sea and who, having managed to scramble ashore, has contrived to build himself a shelter with his own brave and hard-working hands. Locke’s title was a modest one; it was an essay; but it was an essay on that marvel of marvels, the Human Understanding. Two principles, and two only, sufficed him: the impression made by external objects on our senses, and the workings of the mind and spirit consequent upon such impressions. These two principles, contemplated in their active operation, studied and analyzed, suffice to satisfy all our curiosity; such are the miracles which they work, and genuine miracles to boot. Generation on generation of learned men will come and go before we get to know what the Will, for example, or the Memory, really is. The mine is inexhaustible, and the ore it contains indisputably pure. It deceives not, neither does it disappoint. “When men extend their enquiries beyond their capacities and let their thoughts wander into those depths where they can find no sure footing, it is no wonder that they raise questions and multiply disputes, which, never coming to any clear resolution, are proper only to continue and increase their doubts, and to confirm them at last in perfect scepticism.” On the other hand:

  “When we know our own strength we shall the better know what to undertake with hopes of success and when we have well surveyed the powers of our own minds we shall not be inclined to sit still and not set our thoughts on work at all in despair of knowing anything.”

  Pierre Coste is loud in his praises of the master’s work. In the preface he wrote for the second French edition of the Essay (1729), he says: “It is the masterpiece of one of the finest geniuses which England produced in the last century. Four English editions appeared under the author’s eye within the space of ten or a dozen years; and the French translation which I published in 1700, having made it known in Holland, France, Italy and Germany, it was, and still is, as highly esteemed in those countries as it is in England, and the breadth, the depth, the precision and the clarity which distinguish it from beginning to end are the subject of ceaseless admiration. Finally, as its crowning distinction, the book has been, so to speak, adopted b
oth at Oxford and Cambridge, where it is read and expounded to the students as being the book best fitted to form their minds and widen their knowledge. So Locke now fills the place which Aristotle and his principal commentators have occupied hitherto in both these famous universities.”

  It is always a considerable adventure, this bringing of a work of philosophy to the notice of the world in general. In this instance, the process was exceptionally swift and auspicious. Locke benefited by the services of those interpreters whom the changes then taking place in Europe, changes of which he himself had had experience, put at his disposal. The first to herald his importance were the Dutch journalists; and particularly Jean Le Clerc in his Bibliothèque Universelle, which published an “Extract from an English work not yet published, to be entitled ‘An Essay concerning the Human Understanding’ in which is set forth how far the field of certitude in human knowledge extends and the method by which that knowledge is to be arrived at”. Two refugees, David Mazel was one, the other the aforesaid Pierre Coste, who is perpetually evoked as his master’s very shadow, both interpreted his line of thought, the former in its political, the latter in its philosophical aspect. Locke died in 1704, and as far back as 1710 a translation of his various works afforded French readers a complete grasp of all that was essential in his writings. In Germany, it was about 1700 that Thomasius read the Essay and as a result of that perusal became one of the heralds of the age of enlightenment. Locke stands at the turning point whence the roads of Europe start for the New Age.