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18 Locke, Essay Epistle and I.i.1-4,6-8;
I.ii.1-9,12,14-16; I.iii.1-6,9,22,24-25; I.iv.1-5,8-9,24-25 Innate Ideas
–
Locke, Essay I.iv.25 Though John Locke’s Essay concerning human understanding appeared three years after However, another, much more significant factor
behind the positive reception of Locke’s work was its agreement with the
increasingly republican and anti-authoritarian political views of the
day. Unlike Descartes, Locke was not
primarily motivated to write his book on human understanding in order to
provide a justification for a certain kind of philosophy of nature. Instead, he was motivated by social,
religious, and political concerns. The
introductory Epistle to the Essay
contains a famous allusion to these concerns.
Were
it fit to trouble thee with the History of this Essay, I should tell thee,
that five or six Friends, meeting at my Chamber, and discoursing on a Subject
very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the
Difficulties that rose on every side.
After we had a while puzzled our selves, 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 our selves upon Enquiries of
that Nature, it was necessary to examine our own Abilities, and see, what
Objects our Understandings were, or were not fitted to deal with. [Epistle, Nidditch 7, Winkler 1-2] James Tyrell, one of the “friends” present at
this famous meeting, later reported that the subject of discussion had not
been any topic in natural philosophy, but rather the principles of morality
and revealed religion. It was the
foundations of our knowledge of these topics that Locke was most concerned to
investigate. And Locke made no secret
of the conclusions he hoped to draw from that investigation. Rather than establish a particular doctrine
beyond any hope of contestation, Locke hoped that, by clearly drawing the
bounds between what it is actually possible to know and what can only be
entertained as a matter of opinion he would, “prevail with the busy Mind of
Man, to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its Comprehension;
to stop, when it is at the utmost Extent of its Tether; and to sit down in a
quiet Ignorance of those Things, which, upon Examination, are found to be
beyond the reach of our Capacities,” avoiding “Disputes about Things, to
which our Understandings are not suited” in favour of a general toleration of
the contrary opinions of others (I.i.4). For Locke, doing this was not tantamount to
arguing for scepticism or discounting the efficacy of all of our knowing
powers. He considered that there are
things that we can know, many of them concerning the moral matters of most
concern to us. By drawing the
boundaries between what can be known and what cannot he hoped to avoid the
sceptical funk that people often fall into when, having carried their
researches beyond anything they can hope to achieve and gotten nowhere, they
turn in disgust to the contrary opinion that nothing at all can be known. But he also hoped to prevent people from
disputing about things that we cannot hope to know for sure to be true and
mount a powerful argument for toleration of the contrary opinions of others
in cases where knowledge is beyond our reach and the best we can manage is to
form opinions. The general project of examining what things
our understandings are and are not capable of coming to know is one that
Locke found to be hindered, rather than helped, by the philosophy of
Descartes. Despite his avowedly great
concern to proceed from absolutely certain first principles, and not accept
anything that he could not clearly and distinctly perceive to be true,
Descartes was not very reflective about his own understanding or about the
other operations of his mind, such as imagining, willing, judging, and
believing. As has been noted in past
chapters, Descartes never really paused to consider how he could tell a clear
and distinct perception on the part of the understanding apart from a natural
instinct, or either apart from a hasty judgment. He had more or less simply helped himself
to these notions, as if they were patently evident. As far as Locke was concerned, this was
tantamount to an open invitation to others to do the same, and base their
most fondly cherished beliefs not on reasoning or evidence, but the bald
affirmation that these beliefs are patently evident to the understanding,
innately known, or divinely inspired through a special gift of Grace,
illuminating the understanding with a power it could not resist.
The natural concomitant of “enthusiastic”
religious practices was a belief in the priesthood of all believers (or at
least, those among them — the “Saints” — who had been elected for salvation
and chosen by God to receive his Grace).
These practices and beliefs were inimical to all forms of authority,
be they ecclesiastical, civil, or military.
The Tudor and Stuart monarchs in Apprehensive of yet more violent consequences
were the enthusiastic “Country” and Episcopalian and Catholic “Court” parties
in England to continue to inflame one another’s passions, friends of Locke’s
such as Charles II’s one-time Prime Minister, Shaftesbury, had gotten
involved in plots to prevent James’s succession. When those plots had failed and been
discovered Locke himself, as an associate of the plotters, had been forced
into exile in As far as Locke was concerned, all of these
civil upheavals had arisen from people’s absolute conviction of the
correctness of their opposed beliefs on matters of morals and revealed
religion, a conviction that had fostered a spirit of intolerance and
disputation that was eventually carried to arms. And, to reiterate, as far as Locke was
concerned, the philosophy of Descartes, with its uncritical attitude towards
the difference between understanding, belief, faith, and opinion, had done
more to invite than to remedy this circumstance. Locke took the proper antidote to intolerance
and disputation to rest with a careful examination of the powers of our
understanding. Knowledge, as far as Locke was concerned, arises when we make
judgments about the significance and implications of the information
available to us. For Locke, as for
Descartes, this information was presumed to take the form of “ideas” that are
apprehended by the understanding. Judgments assert the existence of relations between ideas, and
are made true or false by whether the ideas actually prove upon inspection to
exhibit the relations affirmed in the judgment. The limits of our knowledge are accordingly
coincident with what ideas we can actually apprehend, and what content those
ideas exhibit. What was needed, therefore, was an examination
of the origin and nature of our ideas.
If we could once agree on what ideas we truly possess, precisely
ascertain the content of those ideas, reject those that are perhaps not even
ideas at all, but merely unintelligible nonsense or meaningless words
masquerading as rational thought, determine what in general can be inferred
from these ideas, and determine what can and cannot be accepted on the basis
faith or revelation in the absence of a clearly apprehended relation between
ideas, then perhaps, Locke hoped, a way would be cleared for us to end our
disputations or at least develop a more tolerant attitude to opposed beliefs. This, accordingly, was the project Locke set
himself at the outset of the essay. As
he put it, it was to “enquire into the Original, Certainty, and Extent of
humane Knowledge; together, with the Grounds and Degrees of Belief, Opinion,
and Assent” (Essay I.i.2). But Locke immediately went on to propose to
undertake this enquiry in a startling way.
“I shall not at present meddle with the Physical Consideration of the
Mind,” he wrote, “or trouble my self to examine, wherein its Essence
consists, or by what Motions of our Spirits, or Alterations of our Bodies, we
come to have any Sensations by our Organs, or any Ideas in our
Understandings; and whether those Ideas do in their Foundation, any, or all
of them, depend on Matter or no.” How,
we might well wonder, could Locke propose to examine the origin and nature of
our ideas without considering how sensory stimulation affects the brain or
the extent to which ideas are the products of alterations in the matter of
the brain? For Hobbes this would have
been inconceivable and even Descartes, dualist though he was, was nonetheless
intensely concerned to determine how alterations in the body affect the mind
and what the ideas that are present in the mind tell us about our own body
and its material states. It bears noting that, unlike Hobbes and Descartes, Locke had been trained as a physician and
worked in that capacity for a part of his life. He would have attended anatomical lectures
and have had a very clear sense of the dim prospects the science of his day
held out for making any progress in uncovering how sensory stimulation
affects the brain or how the brain works within itself. Rather than attempt to gain knowledge of the
origin and nature of ideas by the method of observing what goes on in the
sense organs, nerves, and brain, Locke proposed a rather different method:
the “Historical, plain Method,” as he famously called it (I.i.2). The “Historical, plain Method” is the
method of first-person, introspective observation or reflective
self-consciousness. It begins with
meditations on one’s own ideas as they appear in consciousness and then seeks
to uncover the ways in which those ideas are worked up into knowledge claims
by means of introspectively evident processing operations — operations that
we may not always attend to, but that we can, with a bit of effort, reflect
upon and observe in action within ourselves.
As Locke put it, it involves considering “the discerning Faculties of
a Man, as they are employ’d about the Objects,
which they have to do with” (I.i.2).
It does not really matter, Locke claimed, what physical processes
first gave rise to our ideas. All that
matters is what ideas we have to start with and what we can proceed to do
with them once we have them. The “Historical, plain Method” was coincidentally
paralleled by the method employed by However, the project of investigating the
limits of knowledge and opinion by means of the “Historical, plain Method”
could only get off the ground if all of our knowledge turns out to be a
product of operations that lend themselves to study by the method, such as
operations of the understanding performed upon raw materials given to us in
sensory experience. Were it allowed
that there are some things that we are just born knowing, an investigation
into the bounds or limits of our cognitive powers would be pointless. There are no constraints on what we could
be born knowing. So, even if we did
discover that there are limits to what we can come to know later on, by
sensory experience and reasoning from sensory experience, it would remain
possible that those limits could be surpassed by what we were born knowing to
begin with. Opening the door to innate
knowledge opens the door to anyone wanting to claim that their most cherished
beliefs, however remote from what can be ascertained by experience or
reasoning from experience, are evidently and certainly true and known. It allows anyone who sees their most
cherished convictions challenged by a critique of the limits of our powers of
knowledge to challenge that result by claiming that we are all born knowing
these things, and that those who think otherwise are either willfully
perverse (denying what deep down they know to be true) or the victims of some
sort of birth defect that has left them incapable of knowing something perfectly
evident to the rest of us.
Alternatively, following a line of thought that was very popular in
the predestinarian Presbyterian and Puritan
denominations, it could be maintained that God has only elected a chosen few
for salvation and that these alone have been granted the gift of innate
knowledge. The rest, being corrupted
by original sin, not remedied by God’s Grace, will remain forever reprobate
and unknowing. Needless to say, views
such as these go hand in hand with a license to persecute those who do not
share your beliefs — at the very least to regard them as defective and
sub-human. As Locke himself dryly
commented, we should not be surprised to find that “enthusiasts,” those who
are convinced they have been granted knowledge that surpasses the powers of
understanding granted to the rest of us, are persecutors. Having done violence to the most noble part of themselves, by denying the sovereignty
of their understanding and preferring to love their convictions more than
what their understanding reveals to be the truth, it is not surprising that
they should not hesitate to do violence to others, and persecute those who do
not share their beliefs. Not surprisingly, therefore, Locke devoted a
good deal of effort to a preliminary attack on the supposition that there are
certain principles that we are just born knowing. In opposition to this view, he maintained
that all our ideas are obtained from sensory experience, and that all our
knowledge is obtained from discerning relations between ideas that have
previously been obtained from sensory experience, or from some mental
processing operation (such as compounding, dividing, abstracting or naming)
performed on ideas previously received from experience. On this supposition, there is a criterion
that we can appeal to in order to determine whether we do or do not have a
certain idea: we need merely trace the purported idea back to its roots in
sensory experience, identify the sorts of circumstances under which the root
parts of the idea are supposed to have arisen, put ourselves in those
circumstances, and see what idea we get in those circumstances. Whatever idea we get, that is all that the name for that idea can
possibly refer to. Then we need merely
determine what can be inferred from that content. This is so much the case that Locke quite
consistently applied the principle to himself. He observed that his own results in the Essay concerning human understanding
are subject to being in conformity with what his own readers could justly infer
from their own sensory experience. And
he claimed no more certain validity for them (Essay I.iv.25). This is quite opposed to Descartes’s
insistence that we must start from absolutely certain first principles, but
as Locke saw it, if reasoning from sense experience is not recognized as the
one, solid source of our knowledge, then there can be no limits to what can
be supposed to be known. Cromwell’s
mystical illuminations would be on a par with Descartes’s conviction that he
must exist as a thinking thing. However, the “Historical, plain Method” faces
a challenge of a different order — one that Locke acknowledged, but never
addressed and that consequently remains a persistent source of ambiguity and
frustration throughout the pages of the Essay. The method begins with introspective
identification of the information originally available for us to process into
knowledge claims: information that for Locke takes the form of a collection
of “ideas.” But it is very difficult
to say exactly what an idea is for Locke.
At I.i.8 he defined “idea” as “whatsoever is the Object of the
Understanding when a Man thinks” or “whatever it is which the Mind can be employ’d about in thinking.” But these are ambiguous phrases that might
be understood in at least three different ways. At least some of the objects we are
concerned with when thinking are naturally taken to be the objects that exist
outside of us in the surrounding world.
And, as odd as it may be to speak of an external object as if it were
an “idea” the mind is working with, Locke at least seems to have done so on
some occasions (II.viii.8). But when
he gave examples of ideas Locke included on his lists things like colours,
tastes, and smells — things which most of his early modern contemporaries had
since the time of Galileo considered to have no
existence outside of the body or the mind of the being that senses them. And, as a matter of fact, Locke was fond of
describing ideas in terms that suggest that they are mental images or
pictures of external things — images or pictures that may not resemble their
objects in all respects (II.i.25, II,viii.3, II.xi.17, III.iii.7,
IV.xi.1). However, on yet other
occasions, Locke described ideas in terms that suggest that they are not any
sort of object, either external or internal, but are rather actions or
operations. Locke maintained that we
have ideas of our own mental operations, such as perceiving, remembering,
willing, imagining, and understanding.
But the way we get these ideas is simply by “taking notice” of those
operations (II.i.4). The idea is not
an image or picture of the operation.
Neither is it that very image or operation. It seems rather to consist in the further
operation of “taking notice” of the fact that one is
perceiving, remembering, willing, etc.
Perceiving, remembering, willing, etc. are the objects we take notice
of, but the idea of these objects
seems to consist in the operation of taking notice of them. Did Locke mean to use the term “idea”
indifferently in all of these three senses, recognizing them each as a
distinct phenomenon that nonetheless deserves to be lumped in with the others
in a larger class? Or was his
considered view that one of the senses is primary and the others can be reduced
to it? The Essay does not say. Whatever difficulties there may be with
Locke’s project, its aim is one that merits a final comment. Locke was out to emancipate the individual
knower from the shackles of authority, just as many of his contemporaries were
out to emancipate the subject from the authority of the King. For Locke, republicanism was not just a
political doctrine, concerned with rights and powers within the state, but an
epistemological doctrine, concerned with the determination of truth. Locke’s own words put it best. And it was of no small advantage to
those who affected to be Masters and Teachers, to make this the Principle of Principles, That Principles must not
be questioned: For having once established this Tenet, That there are innate
Principles, it put their Followers upon a necessity of receiving some
Doctrines as such; which was to take [their followers] off from their own
Reason and Judgment, and put them upon believing and taking [these purported
principles] upon trust, without farther examination: In which posture of
blind Credulity, they might be more easily governed by, and made useful to
some sort of Men, who had the skill and office to principle [i.e., instruct]
and guide them. Nor is it a small
power it gives one Man over another, to have the Authority to be the Dictator
of Principles, and Teacher of unquestioned Truths; and to make a Man swallow
that for an innate Principle, which may serve to his purpose, who teacheth them. [Essay
I.iv.24] In contrast, Locke maintained that it is the
natural cognitive capacities of individuals exercised upon the things
themselves that are the best judges of truth, and he took this “republican”
epistemology so far as to hold that even expert opinion ought not to be
allowed to determine the views of individuals — though only on matters of
“probability” and at the cost of requiring that all individuals tolerate one
another’s contrary opinions on such matters. It was views such as these that made Locke’s Essay one of the most popular readings
among the founders of the American Revolution. QUESTIONS ON THE
1. What was the main
question that the Essay concerning human understanding was
written to answer?
2. What has so far served
as the main impediment to the advancement of knowledge?
3. In what does the
“Historical, plain Method” consist?
4. What are the main
consequences of a failure to inquire into the limits of what can be known by
our understanding?
5. What does the term,
“idea,” stand for?
6. What is the argument
from universal consent?
7. What, in general, is
wrong with the argument from universal consent?
8. What is wrong with
supposing that there might be certain truths that we have always known and
that were imprinted on our minds at birth, but that we are unconscious of?
9. Did Locke deny that we
have innate capacities? 10.
What is wrong with supposing that there might be certain
truths that we have always known and that were imprinted on our minds at
birth, but that we need to employ reason to discover what they are? 11.
What is wrong with supposing that there might be certain
truths that we have always known and that were imprinted on our minds at
birth, but that they only come into our consciousness when we attain the age
of reason? 12.
What is there about the fact that there are some truths
that we come to know very early in life that actually goes to prove that
these truths are not innately known? 13.
Did Locke believe that there are absolute truths
concerning what is right and wrong, or did he hold that moral rules are
purely conventional? 14.
What reasons did Locke offer for rejecting the view that
criminals still accept the truth of moral principles even though they do not
act in accord with them? 15.
Did Locke deny that we have innate dispositions and
tendencies? 16.
What are the main factors inducing people to take
principles upon trust? 17.
What special reason does a consideration of the “parts” of
principles give us for thinking that there could be no innate principles? 18.
What are the principal considerations leading Locke to
deny that ideas are innate? Note: Essay
I.iv.4-5. In this passage, Locke made a number of allusions to the ancient
Pythagorean doctrine of reincarnation, according to which our souls could be
born again, perhaps in the bodies of other kinds of animal. According to the classical historian of
philosophy, Diogenes Laertius, Pythagoras had
himself claimed to be the reincarnation of Euphorbus,
who was among those reported to have fought in the Trojan war. The reference to Pythagoras’s soul ending
up in the body of a cock may also be based on some historical source, though
I have as yet been unable to locate it.
The Pythagorean view that human souls are reincarnated in animal
bodies motivated many dietary restrictions but not, so far as the historical
record shows, one against fowl, so this may have been the matter for a joke
of some kind. Locke’s suggestion is
that even were the Pythagorean doctrine generally accepted, there would be
some who would hesitate to maintain that when the soul that previously
occupied the body of Pythagoras is reincarnated in the body of a cock, the
cock deserves to be considered to be “the same” as Pythagoras. He also notes that anyone who thinks these
speculations outlandish would have to confront similar problems when
considering the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. Would the resurrected soul still be the
same were it placed in a different body? 19.
What is Locke’s principal reason for denying that the idea
of God is innate? NOTES
ON THE Locke devoted most of Book I of the Essay to a protracted attack on the
belief that we have innate knowledge.
The attack is executed under three heads: I.ii
attacks the supposition that we have innate factual or “speculative”
knowledge (for example, knowledge that God exists and is no deceiver, that
the essence of body is extension, or that the mind is distinct from the
body); I.iii attacks the supposition that we have
innate practical or moral knowledge (for example, the knowledge that suicide
is immoral), and I.iv attacks the notion that we
have innate ideas (for example, the idea of an all perfect being or of the
ideas perfect geometrical shapes). Locke’s comments on the second of these topics
caused a great deal of consternation in certain circles of British
society. In his chapter on innate
practical principles Locke drew attention to the variation in ethical customs
that is evident to anyone who has “look’d abroad
beyond the Smoak of their own Chimneys” (I.iii.2),
and appealed to this evidence to undermine the claim that people are born
knowing certain ethical principles.
Locke was no relativist. He
believed that ethical propositions have an absolute foundation. But he also believed that this foundation
is not to be found in a little voice of conscience or an innate sense of the
natural law. It is rather to be found
in reasoning from the relations we are able to discern between our ideas —
reasoning that is no more innate than the reasoning that establishes any
other demonstration in geometry or logic or mathematics, but that is much
less evident and easy to obtain. The
wide variety of opinion in moral matters is not due to the fact that morals
are merely conventional, but rather to the fact that they are so difficult to
figure out. As a consequence, many
peoples and cultures have simply gotten them wrong. To many in Locke’s day, this looked like an
attempt to supplant an ethics based on the divinely revealed commandments
with a purely secular morality based on rational principles. The proposal was not one that endeared
Locke to partisans of either the puritanical or the “high” church forms of
Christianity in England, but it was one of a half dozen features that helped
earn his Essay concerning human
understanding the status of the bible of enlightened thought in Europe
(the others will be discussed in following chapters). Locke’s general attack on innate principles is
drawn from one basic argument. The
argument proceeds by first establishing a kind of reverse onus: it is
incumbent on those who believe in innate knowledge to prove there is such a
thing. After all, it is evident that
we do have senses and understanding and learn things from sensory experience
and from reasoning from sensory experience.
Anyone who wants to go beyond this, and postulate that in addition to
reasoning sensory experience we have some special, extra-sensory source of
knowledge, is first obliged to tell us why sensory experience and reasoning
from sensory experience are not alone adequate to give us all the knowledge
we have. Locke proceeded to observe that there has only
been one argument ever offered for innate knowledge: what we can call the
argument from universal consent. This
argument claims that there are some principles that all people in all times
and cultures have always known and agreed upon. These include speculative principles, such
as the principle of non-contradiction, and practical principles, such as the
principle that you ought to treat others as you would want them to treat
you. From the fact that there is
universal knowledge of and agreement to these principles, the argument goes
on to conclude that these principles must be innate or inborn in us all. Somewhat more formally laid out, the
nativist’s argument is as follows:
Locke charged that each of the premises of
this argument is false. The second premise is false because there is no principle
that is accepted by all people, at all times, and in all cultures. Even the principle of non-contradiction is
not such a principle, because it is not known by children and idiots. Neither are any other supposedly innate
principles. The first premise is false because, even were
we to grant its antecedent, its consequent could still be false. That is, even were we to grant that there
is some principle that everyone knows and agrees to, this could still be because
they learned it from sensory experience. For example, the principle that the
sky is blue is probably known even more generally than the principle of
non-contradiction, but no one would think that this is because it is innate
in us. It is rather because the
blueness of the sky is one of the first and most easily discovered items of
knowledge learned from sensory experiences. Having taken things this far, Locke proceeded
to turn the argument on its head.
While it does not follow that if a principle is universally assented
to, then it must be innate, it does follow that if there were any innate
principles then everyone would have to assent to them. The fact that children and idiots do not
assent to any principles therefore proves that none are innate.
A natural response to this counter-argument is
to attempt to dismiss the counterexample of children and idiots by claiming that
people can have an implicit knowledge of certain things that they do not
explicitly affirm. Being “innate” does
not (extravagantly) mean being assented to from the moment of birth. But Locke dismissed this with the charge
that nothing can be in the mind that it is not aware of. He had little more sympathy for a variant on
this response, according to which the fact that people assent to principles
as soon as they come to the use of reason proves that they must have been
implicitly known. The view is ambiguous,
he charged. Does it mean that when
people come to the use of reason, using their reason leads them to grasp and
assent these principles? In that case
the principles are confessedly not innate, but known only through deduction
and inference from something more fundamental (since that is just what reason
does: deduce unknowns from knowns by means of
argument and demonstration). Moreover,
the claim has the absurd consequence that it makes whatever is rationally
demonstrated into an innate truth. The
most abstract truths of mathematics — ones only recently discovered and
unknown to past generations are “innate” on this account because known
through reasoning. So might the view
instead just be that the age at which we come to be rational is the time when
these principles come to be known, even though it is not a process of
reasoning that discovers them? If so,
the claim is demonstrably false, since many people do not assent to these
principles when they come to the age of reason, but only do so much later, if
at all. Moreover, the claim is
extravagant, because it picks, as the cause of the recognition of innate
principles the point in time where we develop a capacity that, ex hypothesi,
has nothing to do with demonstrating or discovering these principles. Why pick on this faculty rather than any
other? If innate principles are not
known at the moment of birth, then the point in time when they emerge ought
to at least have something to do with the development of a capacity that
leads us to recognize them rather than one that confessedly has nothing to do
with this. Where moral principles are concerned, Locke
had the same points to make. Just as
the cases of children and idiots prove that there are no universally accepted
speculative principles, so the cases of those placed outside of the
constraints of laws and punishments (e.g., the members of an invading army
ransacking a town) or of people living in very different times and places,
prove that there are no universally accepted moral principles. If even thieves and villains observe
principles of justice and honesty within their own gangs, it is only because
they deduce that this is necessary if the gang is to hang together, not
because they have an innate knowledge of the truth of the principles. Such a knowledge
ought to make them reluctant to ever break the principles, not just to keep
them where their gang is concerned, as it ought to restrain the members of
invading armies, which it never does. As before it might be objected that thieves
and villains may still tacitly accept the principles of justice and honesty
even though they do not act on them.
But Locke insisted that failure to act on a principle is the best
indication that one does not really believe it, whatever one might say. Where some might object that thieves and
villains really know better and merely act differently out of weakness of the
will, being too strongly tempted by other considerations, Locke would respond
that what makes their will weak is that they can’t really bring themselves to
believe the moral principle, whatever they may say to the contrary. And, as a matter of fact, evil-doing
typically goes along with rationalizations offered to justify why the rule
deserves to be breached in this particular case, rather than an admission of
weakness of the will. It would be an
odd thing, Locke claimed, if some people were to accept the truth of a
practical principle and yet never act on it because it is of the very nature
of a practical principle that it is a principle governing action. Locke also had a few special remarks to make
about the weakness of the nativist position when applied to the case of
practical principles. He observed that
were moral principles truly innate, it would be absurd to ask for a
justification for them. Yet in fact
there is no moral principle that is so evident and so much beyond controversy
that people simply accept it and to not demand a justification. What is more, those moral principles that
seem most universally accepted, such as the principle that one ought to keep
one’s promises, are given different
justifications by different peoples, and this goes to prove that, even where
there might appear to be widespread agreement on a particular principle, it
is not because the principle is innate, but merely because a number of
different considerations all imply it. Locke claimed that all principles, even the
principle of non-contradiction, are actually learned from sensory
experience. As
noted earlier, Locke argued that all our knowledge arises from making
judgments about or, as he put it, discerning the relations among our
ideas. This means that knowledge
requires first obtaining ideas from sense experience, then comparing those ideas
with one another, and then describing the general results of those
comparisons. In the case of the
principle of non-contradiction, we first have to have an experience of more
than one idea. Then we need to compare
these two ideas with one another and discover that the one is not the other. This teaches us a kind of specific
principle of non-contradiction that applies just to the incompatibility
between those two ideas. We then need
to note a number of other instances of specific principles of
non-contradiction. At that point, we are put in a position to make an
induction from all of these specific principles to a general rule governing
them all: that everything is what it is and is not anything else. For example, the child suckles at its
mother’s breast and gets the idea of sweet, then tastes wormwood and gets the
idea of bitter. Reflection on these
ideas teaches it that sweet is not the same as bitter. Then it looks at one thing and gets the
idea of red, at another and gets the idea of white. Comparing all these
ideas, it observes that they are distinct — that sweet is not the same as
bitter or red or white, that red is not the same as white or sweet or bitter,
and so on. It then generalizes these
discoveries and others like them to formulate the principle that each idea is
what it is and no idea is ever what it is not. In effect, the general law of
non-contradiction arises by induction from experience in the same way as the
law of universal gravitation, and the former is no more necessary and no less
dependent on observation and induction than the latter. Since young children are likely incapable
of thought processes at this level of sophistication, it is no wonder that they show no evidence of understanding this
principle. According to Locke, what holds for the
principle of non-contradiction holds for all supposedly innate principles,
including the principles of mathematics and geometry. These principles are known only by first
obtaining, through sensory experience, ideas of particular shapes and numbers
of things, isolating the general features of those ideas, and then comparing
and contrasting the features so isolated and making judgments about the
relations of identity, similarity and difference, or equality and inequality
that those ideas are shown by experience to exhibit. People do not recognize these facts, Locke
observed, because they mistake principles learned very early in life for
principles they were born with, especially if those principles are broadly
accepted and frequently repeated in their society. To this fact we must add the consideration
that most people simply do not have the leisure to sit back and reflectively
examine their principles. The needs of
life compel them to make quick decisions, and lacking the opportunity for
reflection, they simply act on the basis of what they have been taught,
discover that it generally proves reliable, and so conclude that they are
best off if they simply accept the principles they have been taught. (As
Locke put it, they accept the principle that principles ought not to be questioned.) These are practices that can be further
entrenched by laziness, impatience, ignorance of the existence of widespread
exceptions (in those who have not looked beyond the smoke of their own
chimneys, as Locke put it), and indoctrination, all of which can dispose even
those with the leisure to reflect on their principles to refrain from doing
so. It is much easier to justify one’s
practices and beliefs by simply insisting that they are innate and beyond
question than to go to the hard labour of investigating the justice of them. There is a further factor that leads people to
suppose that moral principles are innate: conscience. When people consider violating moral
principles, particularly ones that they have been indoctrinated in since earliest
childhood, they sometimes feel a little voice of conscience advising them to
stop and do the right thing. This
leads them to suppose that conscience is a special moral cognitive capacity
that they were born with, that knows moral rules, and that tells those rules
to them. Locke dismissed this
reasoning, claiming that conscience is not knowledge of right or wrong, but
merely a feeling of pride or guilt about doing those things we have
previously been taught are right or wrong.
Someone who had been taught at her parent’s knee that loyalty to
family comes before loyalty to the law would feel the same twinge of
conscience about betraying a family member as someone who had been taught the
opposite would feel about breaking the law for the sake of a family member. After these devastating attacks on innate
theoretical and practical knowledge, Locke turned, in the final chapter of
the first part of the Essay, to
consider innate ideas. That this is
the topic that should come up last is in a way surprising, if only because
Locke is more often described as someone who denied that we have innate ideas
than as someone who denied that we have innate knowledge. But, in fact, he was far more invested in
the latter claim than in the former, and he was only interested in the latter
claim because he thought it would contribute to establishing the former. No knowledge is innate, Locke claimed,
because knowledge consists of asserting or denying relations between ideas,
and no ideas are innate. It is just as well that he shunted this
argument off into what is in effect an appendix to the first part of Essay, because this argument suffers
from the same defects he found in the opposed argument for innate knowledge
by appeal to universal consent: the premise that no ideas are innate is not
obviously true, and even if it were true, it does not imply that knowledge
could not be innate. Even if we need to have experience to supply
us with all of our ideas, it does not follow that we need further experience
to learn of all the relations between those ideas. The ideas, once given, might become the
subjects of relations that the mind itself is innately disposed to impose on
them. As Kant was later to claim, just
because all knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that all knowledge
arises out of just what is supplied to us by experience. In order to make what William James was
later to call “the booming, bursting confusion” of all that is given to us in
sensory experience intelligible to ourselves, we
might need to bring this “matter” under forms or relations that are not
contained in experience. We might need
to draw distinctions between which of our experiences are experiences of
something new, that has just come into existence, and which are of something
old, that is only newly experienced by us but was in fact in existence all
along. Doing this might require
imposing a “objective” temporal, causal structure on
experience that is different from the actual temporal sequence of the
experiences and an “objective” spatial, part-whole structure on experience
that is again different from the part-whole structure of experience. In the process, we might need to invoke
concepts of cause and substance and principles of causality and identity that
have no clear origin in experience. But never mind whether or not knowledge could
be innate if ideas are not innate.
Locke’s argument depends on the truth of the antecedent,
that no ideas are innate, and his arguments on that score are
weak. He made his case by appeal to
the unlikelihood that children would form the highly abstract theoretical
ideas of possibility and identity that are involved in claims like the
principle of non-contradiction, the claim that it is impossible for the same
thing to both be and not be involve equally abstract concepts, like those of
identity, and had an easy time of it arguing that such ideas are not grasped
by children and so could not possibly be innate. But these are not the ideas he ought to
have been most concerned with. The
treatment of the ones he ought to have been most concerned with is something
of an embarrassment. For
I imagine any one will easily grant, That it would be impertinent to suppose,
the Ideas of Colours innate in a
Creature, to whom God hath given Sight, and a Power to receive them by the
Eyes from external Objects [Essay
I.ii.1] Locke cannot have meant this. He did not believe, any more than anyone
else did at the time, that colours exist outside of us in external objects
and are “received” from the eyes and the power of sight. Like all other early modern philosophers,
he believed that sensible qualities exist only in us, and not outside of us
in bodies. Admittedly, there is some
ambiguity in his use of terms. He is
capable of using the same word to refer to those qualities in bodies that
give them the power to produce ideas in us, and to refer to the ideas thus
produced. Nonetheless, as we will see
when we read Essay II.viii, he rather clearly and unambiguously maintained
that, when it comes to things like colour, understand that term how you will,
“There is nothing like our Ideas
existing in the Bodies themselves” (Essay
II.viii.15). If there is nothing like
the ideas existing in the bodies themselves, there is nothing
for the senses to “receive … from external objects” that is at like the ideas
produced in us when we are affected by those bodies. That leaves us having to confront the
consequence that we produce those ideas ourselves, out of our own inner
resources. We are innately
pre-disposed to form the ideas on the occasion of sensory stimulation. That having been said, Locke could still
maintain that sensory experience forms a necessary part of the antecedent
causal process leading us to produce our ideas of sensible qualities, and
that even though the ideas are produced by us and not conveyed into us from
the outside, we cannot produce them without having been first affected in the
right way by the right objects. Hume,
in a passage we will read later (Enquiry
II, note) was to comment that all Locke should have said is that we have no
power to imagine anything that is not compounded from simple elements
originally encountered in sensory experience, though Hume was himself capable
of equally ill-considered pronouncements (e.g., Enquiry 12.9 on the senses as “inlets” through which images are
“received”). It should be remarked in passing that though
Locke denied innate knowledge he did not deny either innate dispositions or
capacities, or innate tendencies of the will.
He was quite willing to admit that we are born with certain abilities
already developed in us, such as the ability to sneeze, the ability to make
judgments or the ability to learn.
(For obvious reasons, if we had to learn how to learn, we would be in
deep trouble.) Indeed, Locke was
willing to grant that we are born with all our cognitive capacities intact
and ready to work. But to be born with
the ability to learn or to make judgments is not at all the same thing as to
be born with a particular judgment already learned and in your head. The capacity may be innate, but for Locke
nothing emerges from that capacity until it is applied to sensory
experience. There can therefore be no
innate products of cognitive processes, even though there can be innate
cognitive capacities. Similarly, Locke was willing to admit that we
might be born with innate impulses or tendencies of will. We might be born, for instance, with an
innate tendency to curl our toes when the sole of the foot is stroked, or an
innate tendency to crawl back from a precipice, or an innate tendency to
pursue pleasure and avoid pain, that is, to act out of self-interest. But a tendency to motion is not a
belief. You do not curl your toes when
your sole is stroked because you believe anything. The sensory stimulus
simply elicits that motor response.
Similarly, the infant need not shrink back from a precipice because it
believes it will fall over the edge, or pursue pleasure and avoid pain
because it believes that pleasure is good for it, but simply because the
visual or tangible stimulus elicits that response. ESSAY
QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. Locke’s definition of
“idea” as “whatever it is, which the Mind can be employ’d
about in thinking,” (Essay I.i.8)
has long puzzled commentators. According
to one theory, Locke expressed himself so vaguely because he wanted to
include both images formed by the imagination and concepts grasped by the
intellect under the umbrella of the term, “idea.” However, other commentators have criticized
Locke’s definition for failing to provide adequate guidance on the question
of whether ideas are acts whereby the mind thinks of an object or “third
things” (in addition to the mind and the objects in the external world) that
are produced in the mind as a consequence of the activity of objects. These questions have recently been
judiciously reviewed by Michael Ayers, Locke,
2 vols. (London: Rougledge, 1991), vol. 1, chs. 5-7. Summarize and comment on Ayers’s
position.
2. The main objection
that Locke raised against innate knowledge in Essay I.ii-iii is that no good argument
has been offered for supposing that there is any such thing. However, Locke only ever considered one
argument for innate knowledge: the argument from universal consent, and it
might be objected that this is to attack a straw man, for there are better
and more convincing arguments for innate knowledge. Locke was attacked in just this way by
Leibniz, who wrote an extended commentary on Locke’s Essay, the New essays on human understanding. Leibniz’s New essays have been translated by Peter Remnant and Jonathan
Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Review Book I of Leibniz’s New essays (which comments on Book I of
Locke’s Essay) and write a paper
outlining Leibniz’s main objections to Locke.
Assess whether Leibniz or Locke has the better case. |
