Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [47]
In social polity, he argued brilliantly, contravening Hobbes, certain natural rights, including liberty, are not given up when men move from a state of nature to one of social living. His ideas are embedded in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Locke’s liberalism was due partly to family background, partly to experience. His father was a Puritan attorney, and as a boy Locke knew what it was to be a member of a disfavored minority. But he was later disillusioned by the excesses of the victorious Puritans and eventually became an articulate spokesman for a balance of power between King and Parliament, and an advocate of religious toleration for all in England—well, not quite all; he drew the line, probably for politic reasons, at atheists, Unitarians, and Muslims.
At Oxford he studied philosophy, admired Descartes’ writings, but was attracted by experimental science. Staying on at Oxford for a while as a don, he met and worked with the great chemist Robert Boyle and with the eminent medical scientist Thomas Sydenham. This induced him to study medicine, and in 1667 he became personal physician and general adviser to Anthony Ashley Cooper—soon to become the first Earl of Shaftesbury—with whom he remained connected for some years. From then on Locke was involved in politics, and during the reign of William and Mary he held various government posts.
His portrait shows a long-featured and serious face, and we hear that he was, indeed, uncommonly orderly, controlled, parsimonious, and abstemious. But he was also a sociable man, had many good friends, and loved children. Although he never married—neither did Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, and a number of other seventeenth-century philosophers, a phenomenon worthy of a dissertation—he had a love affair during his Oxford years which, he said, “robbed me of the use of my reason.” When the affair ended, his reason returned; philosophy and psychology were the richer for his never again suffering such a loss.
Of Locke’s many works, the one that concerns us is his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In 1670, he and a handful of friends met informally in his quarters at Exeter House (Shaftesbury’s home) to discuss the view of a number of Platonists at Cambridge that our ideas of God and morality are innate. Locke tells of that meeting in the “Epistle to the Reader” prefacing the Essay:
Five or six friends, meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from [human understanding], found themselves quickly at a stand, by the difficulties that arose on every side. After we had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course; and that, before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to understand our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with. This I proposed to the company, who all readily assented.31
Locke guessed that one sheet of paper would be enough to contain the list he would offer, at the next meeting, of the mental processes that the mind itself is capable of understanding. As it turned out, he spent nearly twenty years at the task and filled hundreds of pages with his observations and conclusions.
The Essay, which he worked on in England and in exile, in peacetime and during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, was finally published in 1690; it immediately made him famous. It went through four editions in fourteen years, was the topic of drawing room conversation, and altered the course of British philosophy and psychology. It also made him infamous. His rejection of innate ideas and his insistence that the soul was unknowable aroused the wrath of Platonists and of divines who, already displeased with his advocacy of toleration, vociferously attacked him for playing into the hands of atheists. Time handed down the verdict: the Essay became part of the mainstream of