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It must not, however, be concluded from the apparent triteness of some of Locke's remarks, to the present generation of readers, that they were viewed in the same light by his own contemporaries. On the contrary, Leibnitz speaks of the Treatise on Education as a work of still greater merit than the Essay on Human Understanding.* Nor will this judgment be wondered at by those who, abstracted from the habits of thinking in which they have been reared, transport themselves in imagination to the state of Europe a hundred years ago. How flat and nugatory seem now the cautions to parents, about watching over those associations, on which the dread of spirits in the dark is founded! But how different was the case (even in Protestant countries) till a very recent period of the last century!

I have, ou a former occasion, taken notice of the slow but (since the invention of printing) certain steps by which Truth makes its way in the world; "the discoveries, which, in one age, are confined to the studious and enlightened few, becoming, in the next, the established creed of the learned; and, in the third, forming part of the elementary principles of education." The harmony, in the meantime, which exists among truths of all descriptions, tends perpetually, by blending them into one common mass, to increase the joint influence of the whole; the contributions of individuals to this mass (to borrow the fine allusion of Middleton)" resembling the drops of rain, which, falling separately into the water, mingle at once with the stream, and strengthen the general current." Hence the ambition, so natural to weak minds, to distinguish themselves by paradoxical and extravagant opinions; for these, having no chance to incorporate themselves with the progressive reason of the species, are the more likely to immortalize the eccentricity of their authors, and to furnish subjects of wonder to the common compilers of literary history. This ambition is the more general, as

things, which they have perhaps gleaned from frivolous writers." I know of few authors to whom this observation applies more forcibly and happily than to Locke, when he touches on the culture of the intellectual powers. His precepts, indeed, are not all equally sound; but they, in general, contain a large proportion of truth, and may always furnish to a speculative mind matter of useful meditation.

* Leib. Op. Tom. VI. p. 226.

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so little expense of genius is necessary for its gratification. "Truth," as Mr. Hume has well observed, "is one thing, but errors are numberless:" and hence (he might have added) the difficulty of seizing the former, and the facility of swelling the number of the latter.*

Having said so much in illustration of Locke's philosophical merits, and in reply to the common charge against his metaphysical and ethical principles, it now only remains for me to take notice of one or two defects in his intellectual character, which exhibit a strong contrast to the general vigor of his mental powers.

Among these defects, the most prominent is, the facility with which he listens to historical evidence, when it happens to favor his own conclusions. Many remarkable instances of this occur in his long and rambling argument (somewhat in the style of Montaigne) against the existence of innate practical principles; to which may be added, the degree of credit he appears to have given to the popular tales about mermaids, and to Sir William Temple's idle story of Prince Maurice's "rational and intelligent parrot." Strange! that the same person who, in matters of reasoning, had divested himself, almost to a fault, of all reverence for the opinions of others, should have failed to perceive, that, of all the various sources of error, one of the most copious and fatal is an unreflecting faith in human testimony!

The disrespect of Locke for the wisdom of antiquity, is another prejudice which has frequently given a wrong bias to his judgment. The idolatry in which the Greek and Roman writers were held by his immediate predecessors, although it may help to account for this weakness, cannot altogether excuse it in a man of so strong and enlarged an understanding. Locke (as we are told by Dr.

* Descartes has struck into nearly the same train of thinking with the above, but his remarks apply much better to the writings of Locke than to his own.

L'expérience m'apprit, que quoique mes opinions surprennent d'abord, parce qu'elles sont fort différentes des vulgaires, cependant, après qu'on les a comprises on les trouve si simples et si conformes au sens commun, qu'on cesse entièrement de les admirer, et par la même d'en faire cas: parce que tel est le naturel des hommes qu'ils n'estiment que les choses qui leur laissent d'admiration et qu'ils ne possèdent pas tout-à-fait. C'est ainsi que quoique la santé soit le plus grand de tous les biens qui concernent le corps, c'est pourtant celui auquel nous faisons le moins de réflexion, et que nous goutons le moins. Or la connoissance de la vérité est comme la santé de l'âme; lorsque on la possède on n'y pense plus." (Lettres, Tome I. Lettre xliii.)

Warton)" affected to depreciate the ancients; which circumstance," he adds, "as I am informed from undoubted authority, was the source of perpetual discontent and dispute betwixt him and his pupil, Lord Shaftesbury; who, in many parts of the Characteristics, has ridiculed Locke's philosophy, and endeavoured to represent him as a disciple of Hobbes." To those who are aware of the direct opposition between the principles of Hobbes, of Montaigne, of Gassendi, and of the other minute philosophers with whom Locke sometimes seems unconsciously to unite his strength, and the principles of Socrates, of Plato, of Cicero, and of all the soundest moralists, both of ancient and of modern times, the foregoing anecdote will serve at once to explain and to palliate the acrimony of some of Shaftesbury's strictures on Locke's Ethical paradoxes.*

With this disposition of Locke to depreciate the ancients, was intimately connected that contempt which he every where expresses for the study of Eloquence, and that perversion of taste which led him to consider Blackmore as one of the first of our English poets.† That his own imagination was neither sterile nor torpid, appears sufficiently from the agreeable coloring and animation which it has not unfrequently imparted to his style: but this power of the mind he seems to have regarded with a peculiarly jealous and unfriendly eye; confining his view exclusively to its occasional effects in misleading the judgment, and overlooking altogether the important purposes to which it is subservient, both in our intellectual and moral frame. Hence, in all his writings, an inattention to those more attractive aspects of the mind, the study of which (as Burke has well observed,) "while it communicates to the taste a sort of philosophical solidity, may be expected to reflect back on the severer sciences, some of those graces and elegancies, without which the greatest

*"Plebeii Philosophi," says Cicero, “qui a Platone et Socrate, et ab eâ familiâ dissident."

"All our English poets, except Milton," says Molyneux in a letter to Locke, "have been mere ballad-makers in comparison to Sir Richard Blackmore." In reply to which Locke says, "There is, I with pleasure find, a strange harmony throughout between your thoughts and mine." (Locke's Works, Vol. IX. p. 423, 426.)

proficiency in these sciences will always have the ance of something illiberal."

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To a certain hardness of character, not unfrequently united with an insensibility to the charms of poetry and of eloquence, may partly be ascribed the severe and forbidding spirit which has suggested some of the maxims in his Tract on Education.* He had been treated, himself, it would with very appear, with little indulgence by his parents; and probably was led by that filial veneration which he always expressed for their memory, to ascribe to the early habits of self-denial imposed on him by their ascetic system of ethics, the existence of those moral qualities which he owed to the regulating influence of his own reason in fostering his natural dispositions; and which, under a gentler and more skilful culture, might have assumed a still more engaging and amiable form. His father, who had served in the Parliament's army, seems to have retained through life that austerity of manners which characterized his puritanical associates; and, notwithstanding the comparative enlargement and cultivation of Mr. Locke's mind, something of this hereditary leaven, if I am not mistaken, continued to operate upon many of his opinions and habits of thinking. If, in the Conduct of the Understanding, he trusted (as many have thought) too much to nature, and laid too little stress on logical rules, he certainly fell into the opposite extreme in every thing connected with the culture of the heart; distrusting nature altogether, and placing his sole confidence in the effects of a systematical and vigilant dicipline. That the great object of education is not to thwart and disturb, but to study the aim, and to facilitate the accomplishments of her beneficial arrangements, is a maxim, one should think, obvious to common sense; and yet it is only of late years that it has begun to gain ground even among philosophers. It is but justice to Rousseau to acknowledge, that the zeal and eloquence with which he has enforced it, go far to

* Such, for example, as this, that " A child should never be suffered to have what he craves, or so much as speaks for, much less if he cries for it!" A maxim (as his correspondent Molyneux observes)" which seems to bear hard on the tender spirits of children, and the natural affections of parents." (Locke's Works. Vol. IX. p. 319.)

compensate the mischievous tendency of some of his other doctrines.

To the same causes it was probably owing, that Locke has availed himself so little in his Conduct of the Understanding, of his own favorite doctrine of the Association of Ideas. He has been, indeed, at sufficient pains to warn parents and guardians of the mischievous consequences to be apprehended from this part of our constitution, if not diligently watched over in our infant years. But he seems to have altogether overlooked the positive and immense resources which might be derived from it, in the culture and melioration, both of our intellectual and moral powers;—in strengthening (for instance), by early habits of right thinking, the authority of reason and of conscience;-in blending with our best feelings the congenial and ennobling sympathies of taste and of fancy;— and in identifying with the first workings of the imagination, those pleasing views of the order of the universe, which are so essentially necessary to human happiness. A law of our nature, so mighty and so extensive in its influence, was surely not given to man in vain; and the fatal purchase which it has, in all ages, afforded to Machiavellian statesmen, and to political religionists, in carrying into effect their joint conspiracy against the improvement and welfare of our species, is the most decisive proof of the manifold uses to which it might be turned in the hands of instructers, well disposed and well qualified humbly to co-operate with the obvious and unerring purposes of Divine Wisdom.

A more convenient opportunity will afterwards occur for taking some notice of Locke's writings on Money and Trade, and on the Principles of Government. They appear to me to be connected less naturally and closely with the literary history of the times when they appeared, than with the systematical views which were opened on the same subjects, about fifty years afterwards, by some speculative politicians in France and in England. I shall, therefore, delay any remarks on them which I have to offer, till we arrive at the period, when the questions to which they relate began every where to attract the attention of the learned world, and to be discussed on those

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