The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (26 page)

So Machiavelli offers us an incisive chapter on “the importance of giving religion a prominent influence in a state, and how Italy was ruined because she failed in this respect through conduct of the Church of Rome. . . . We Italians then owe to the Church of Rome and to her priests our having become irreligious and bad; but we owe her a still greater debt, and one that will be the cause of our ruin, namely that the Church has kept and still keeps our country divided. And certainly a country can never be united and happy, except when it obeys wholly one government, whether a republic or a monarchy, as is the case in France and in Spain; and the sole cause why Italy is not in the same condition and is not governed by either one republic or one sovereign is the Church; for having acquired and holding a temporal dominion, yet she has never had sufficient power or courage to enable her to seize the rest of the country, and make herself sole sovereign of all Italy.”

Machiavelli laments that while jurists and physicians in his time drew on the experience of the ancients, “yet to found a republic, maintain states, to govern a kingdom, organize an army, conduct a war, dispense justice, and extend empires, you will find neither prince, nor republic, nor captain, nor citizen, who has recourse to the examples of antiquity!” The main reason for this, he said, was less the weakness of education than “the evils caused by the proud indolence which prevails in most of the Christian states, and to the lack of real knowledge of history. . . . Thus the majority of those who read it take pleasure only in the variety of the events which history relates, without ever thinking of imitating the noble actions, deeming that not only difficult, but impossible; as though heaven, the sun, the elements, and men had changed the order of their motions and power, and were different from what they were in ancient times.” So in exploring ancient Rome he draws from “the variety of events” lessons for those who would transform the chaos of Italy in his day into a unified expression of “the might of an Italian genius.” His
Discourses
offer simple prescriptions for princes, republics, captains, and citizens toward that grand end, but not until three centuries had passed, in the age of Mazzini (1805-1872), had his hopes for a unified republican Italy, liberated from foreign dominion, begun to be realized.

John Locke Defines the Limits of Knowledge and of Government

The creators of dogma and champions of absolutes have a clear advantage before the bar of history. They offer attractive banners and clear targets. It is not as easy to give historic stature to the apostle of experience and of the modern liberal spirit John Locke. His life, buffeted by the winds of everyday politics, is lacking in drama or romance. His ideas were not strikingly original or subtle. His style was prosaic. So his career and his writings would illustrate the paradox of liberal thought. Openness to grand new ideas, the tradition of tolerant institutions, would be a by-product of the compromises of society’s daily problems, rather than of the sharp-edged visions of systems of philosophy. This man who provided a modern epistemology and leading ideas for democratic revolutions is one of the least systematic of the great social thinkers of modern times. Paradoxically, this prophet of revolutions would be a philosopher of limits. Yet if any modern thinker merits the title of a latter-day Aristotle, it is probably John Locke. He, too, offered ways of thinking equally applicable to science and society, ever ready to be arbitrated by common sense.

Born in 1632, son of a country attorney who had fought in the English Civil War on the side of Parliament, John Locke received the most conventional formal education. After Westminster School he took his B.A. at Christ Church College, Oxford (1656), which was still dominated by scholastic methods. Though his college offered advantages to those in orders, after reflection he decided not to become a clergyman.

His informal education awakened him to the new experiences of his age and encouraged him to seek a this-worldly solace. His growing interest in science was casually sparked by his providential contact with two of the most lively scientists of the day—the physicist Robert Boyle (1627-1691) and the physician Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689). Both provided antidotes to the scholastic methods still dominating the university. Not attached to any college, Boyle made his house on High Street in Oxford a laboratory and meeting place for experimental scientists whom he stimulated and encouraged. His air pumps (devised with the aid of Robert Hooke) made possible Boyle’s Law, and he showed how to make the barometer into a weather indicator. Passionately empirical and independent, Boyle had “purposely refrained” until he was thirty from reading Descartes’s works or Bacon’s
Novum organum
“that I might not be prepossessed with any theory or principles till I had spent some time in trying what things themselves would incline me to think.” Locke’s warm friendship with Boyle lasted till Boyle’s death.

After a brief tour as secretary to the British diplomatic mission in Brandenburg, Locke returned to Oxford to his experimental interests, and the influence of the eminent physician Thomas Sydenham, “the English Hippocrates,” a pioneer in clinical medicine and the treatment of smallpox and malaria. He became Sydenham’s intimate, and the doctor praised Locke’s intelligence as having “few equals and no superiors” in his time. Sydenham so bitterly opposed the professional dogmas that he was excluded from the College of Physicians. He believed the function of a physician to be “industrious investigation of the history of diseases, and of the effect of remedies, as shown by the only true teacher, experience.” Sharing this view, Locke—still without a medical degree—became a practicing physician.

It was as a physician that Locke began his momentous association with Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury (1621-1683). A leading Parliamentary figure in the Civil War, Cooper was one of the commissioners sent by the House of Commons to invite Charles II to resume the throne. And he sponsored legislation to grant toleration to Protestant Dissenters. Cooper brought Locke into his large household as staff physician, but Locke soon became counselor in politics as well. The affinity of their thinking strengthened Locke in his liberal attitudes. Both favored a constitutional monarchy, the Protestant succession, civil liberty, and religious toleration. Locke also enjoyed the spectacle of rising commerce and flourishing trade with the colonies, which he identified with toleration and a more open society. The example of Holland showed how toleration could nourish commerce, and how both could nourish culture. Locke was made secretary of Cooper’s group to promote trade with America, and he served as secretary of the newly founded Council of Trade and Plantations. Just as Boyle and Sydenham put Locke in the vanguard of new experience in the world of nature, so Anthony Ashley Cooper kept him in close touch with new currents in government and commerce.

Remarkably, none of these practical concerns distracted Locke from wider speculations that would place him in the vanguard of Seekers. Somehow these experiences stimulated him to pursue the large questions of philosophy and political theory, which made him a prophet of the English empirical spirit. Locke’s checkered active life as he shared the volatile political career of Anthony Ashley Cooper delayed the leisure needed for his works of philosophy and political theory, but enriched his understanding. In his early years at Oxford, Locke had been stimulated to do his most important work when he explored problems of philosophy and science in regular meetings in his chamber with five or six friends. These meetings, he explained in the Introductory Epistle to his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
while “discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves at a stand by the difficulties that arose on every side.” Locke decisively led them “to examine our own abilities and see what objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with.” The group agreed that Locke had hit on the basic question—the limits of human knowledge.

Out of this casual beginning arose the work that would give Locke his repute as the philosopher of modern revolutions. By 1671 Locke had begun making drafts of his
Essay.
Four years in France would have as decisive an effect on his thinking as Locke himself would have on the French Voltaire a half century later. There he became acquainted through lectures with the ideas of the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), who had been a friend of Galileo and Kepler, and had attacked the ideas of both Aristotle and Descartes, urging a return to the Epicurean emphasis on sense experience. Locke had lost his powerful English patron when Shaftesbury, who had been tried for treason, after acquittal fled to Holland. In 1683, Locke, too, fled to Holland, where he found the tolerant commercial atmosphere congenial and made new friends. His five years in Holland gave him the leisure to draw together his thoughts and prepare for publication. In 1688 when Princess Mary crossed to England to be crowned queen beside William of Orange as king, Locke was in her party. He retired to the house in Essex of his friends Sir Francis and Lady Masham. There as guru of the Whigs he continued to counsel the leaders of Parliament, and saw the fulfillment of the bloodless Glorious Revolution that would be a basis of Western liberal societies in the next centuries. For England it meant a constitutional monarchy with Parliament supreme, the rule of law and an independent judiciary, and freedom of speech and the press.

* * *

Displacing theology by philosophy, Locke sought not a system of truths but something more modest—a definition of the limits of human knowledge. His political ideas, too, were a by-product of his refutation of divine absolutes. And his thoughts on education were simply letters of advice to a good friend on how to raise his son. Locke’s notions of toleration were based on his view of government as the protector of all persons and material interests. With some reason, detractors alleged that Locke favored toleration (as he saw it in Holland) because it “tended to the advancement of trade and commerce.”

Over all hovered Locke’s cautionary spirit and hostility to absolute government along with all other absolutes. “We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance,” he warned in his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
“and endeavor to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information; and not instantly treat others ill, as obstinate and perverse, because they will not renounce their own, and receive our opinions.” So “our assent ought to be regulated”—not by the dictates of some imagined Truth, but only “by the grounds of probability.”

Locke’s efforts as Seeker for the proper ends of thought and of government were thus not the product of sudden insight or inspiration but developed over decades, in the bright light of the scientific and political experience of his day.

In an age replete with pioneer scientists, Locke was alert to the advances of science yet not unaware of the quibbles of theologians and the visions of mystics. While he was a patient and loyal friend of “the incomparable Mr. Newton” (as Locke called him), it is not certain that Locke had a firm grasp of Newton’s
Principia.
But the broad interests of both Locke and Newton in religion and science brought them together. Newton shared with Locke his critical thoughts on the New Testament texts of John and Timothy and looked forward to Locke’s further “judgment upon some of my mystical fancies.”

When “the commonwealth of learning” boasted such “master-builders” as Boyle, Sydenham, Huygens, and Newton, Locke explained in his Epistle to the Reader of his
Essay,
“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.” With that modest profession, Locke sounded the leitmotif of the modern Seeker.

Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690-1700), the constantly revised product of his last thirty years, thus set out to define the limits of human knowledge, so man could economize his efforts by ventures into the possible. “If we can find out how far the understanding can extend its view, how far it has faculties to attain certainty, and in what cases it can only judge and guess, we may learn to content ourselves with what is attainable by us in this state.” The modesty and the limits of his project were displayed even in his title. This was no “treatise” but a mere “essay” or trial. Montaigne (1533-1592), had given the word French literary form and meaning, and in this sense the word had only lately come into the English language. The tentative spirit of the “essay” and the hope to reach beyond the learned was already expressed in Francis Bacon’s
Essays
(1597-1625). “Essays” would have increasing vogue in English literature—for Addison, Pope, Macaulay, Arnold, Lamb, and countless others. Locke’s focus, too, was not on Truth but only on “human understanding.” His day did not know our distinction between the philosopher and the scientist. Both shared Locke’s objective—“Nothing but the true knowledge of things.”

Incidentally, Locke expressed another modern obsession—not with the empyrean Truth to be known, but with the idiosyncrasies and vagaries of the knowing self. Here was a new, more ruthless, and more punishing application of the ancient Greek motto “Know thyself.” Locke revealed anew how modern man felt imprisoned in the self. The first “rubbish” that Locke set out to clear away from our paths to knowledge was the notion of “innate” knowledge—or ideas supposed to be inborn and universal. So he opens his
Essay
with an attack. If there were “some primary notions . . . as it were stamped upon the mind of men, which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it,” all men would have these same ideas. But, he argued, there are no ideas that are universally assented to—not even the idea of God. Innate ideas naturally had a special appeal to preachers and teachers. Such notions “eased the lazy from the pains of search and stopped the inquiry of the doubtful concerning all that was once styled innate.” A pioneer in the sociology of knowledge, Locke showed how liberation from the notion of innate ideas freed each man to do his own thinking. The path from the empirical mind to a liberal society was laid open.