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Updated: June 12, 2025
Turning from this to the Social Contract, or to Locke's essay on Government, the identity in doctrine and correspondence in dialect may teach us how little true originality there can he among thinkers who are in the same stage; how a metaphysician of the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of the eighteenth hit on the same doctrine; and how the true classification of thinkers does not follow intervals of time, but is fixed by differences of method.
Midshipman," interrupted Brownson with an easy smile, "Locke's authority may have great weight among the young Middies at Annapolis, but it does not rank very high at present in the estimation of practical scientists."
He might also buy Lecky's Works, and Sir John Strachey's "India," and Buckle's "History of Civilization," for, whatever the faults of the last may be, the writer's style is admirable, and the book stirs up thought and inquiry in the mind. Addison's "Spectator," as it is commonly called, Amiel's "Journal," and Locke's "Conduct of the Understanding," might also be bought.
After Locke's time the negative view of the functions of Government gradually grew in strength, until it obtained systematic and able expression in Wilhelm von Humboldt's "Ideen," the essence of which is the denial that the State has a right to be anything more than chief policeman.
He says, "A line of teaching which concerns matters of more importance to society than all the ordinary branches of knowledge put together is allowed to have no formal provision made for it." This writer recommends the study of biographies. In Locke's system good principles were to be cared for first, intellectual activity next, and actual knowledge last of all.
If Locke's idea be just, and there is great reason to think that it is, evil seems to be necessary to create exertion, and exertion seems evidently necessary to create mind. The necessity of food for the support of life gives rise, probably, to a greater quantity of exertion than any other want, bodily or mental.
On the other two points Locke's convictions were implicit rather than speculative: he resisted the Cartesian theories without much developing his own, as after all was natural in a critic engaged in proving that our natural faculties were not intended for speculation. All knowledge came from experience, and no man could know the savour of a pineapple without having tasted it.
This doctrine of Locke's had some comic applications. The Bishop of Worcester was alarmed. If actions which a hardened sinner had forgotten were no longer his, a short memory would be a great blessing in the Day of Judgment. On the other hand, a theology more plastic than Stillingfleet's would one day find in this same doctrine a new means of edification.
It is a half-century earlier than Locke's "Treatise on Government," a century and a quarter earlier than Rousseau's "Contrat Social," and it precedes by one hundred and thirty-eight years the American Declaration of Independence.
His account of the speakers and their arguments is one of the most graphic pages of historical painting in our language; but it is said to have been drawn up at the desire, and almost at the dictation, of Locke's friend, Lord Shaftesbury, who himself took a prominent part against the Bill.
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