laid down in the Essay, and required both a rational and an empirical element for the securing of knowledge, is apparent from two of the comments he made upon Burnet. In one place he wrote: “If by moral principles you mean a faculty to find out in time the moral difference of actions (besides that this is an improper way of speaking to call a power principles), I never denied such a power to be innate; but that which I denied was that any ideas or connection of ideas was innate.” 30 In another place he wrote: "Prove the distinguishing sense of virtue and vice to be natural to mankind before they have learned the measures of virtue and vice from something besides the senses, and you will have proved something." 31 Thus Locke combined an insistence upon the innate faculty of reason with an equal insistence upon the need for ideas from experience. And Burnet's criticism was an altogether unwarranted isolation of one of these two equally vital elements, and a total disregarding of the other. (b) Burnet also brought the charge against Locke that he ignored "natural conscience." This criticism was closely related to the other one just discussed. Burnet supposed that since a knowledge of good and evil cannot be gained from the senses, it must be obtained from some other source which may be called conscience. Conscience is “a natural sagacity to distinguish moral good and evil;" 32 it is “an original principle, antecedently to any other collections and recollections." 33 To be sure, the voice of conscience may be obscured and perverted; but at least it is the best guide man has, and so should be appealed to sincerely. Without such a moral guide as the voice of an innate conscience, man would never learn the distinction between good and evil at all. Now Locke was perfectly willing to recognize conscience, even as in a certain sense innate. He had made an entry in his commonplace book, probably many years before he wrote the Essay, according to which he asserted that every man, however humble and uneducated, "has a conscience, and knows in those few cases which concern his own actions what is right and what is wrong." 34 But this conscience is not a unique faculty especially constructed for knowledge of moral affairs: it is reason engaged upon ethical problems. Conscience "is nothing else but our own opinion or judgment of the moral rectitude or pravity of our own actions." 35 Locke's objection to Burnet's criticisms was not that Burnet emphasized conscience, but that he treated conscience in a loose and uncritical fashion. Burnet called conscience "knowledge 30 Noah Porter: Marginalia Lockeana, p. 38. 31 Idem, p. 41. 32 Burnet: Third Remarks. Cf. Noah Porter: Op. cit, p. 37. 33 Burnet: Third Remarks, p. 4. 34 King: Life of Locke, p. 283. 35 Essay, I, 2, 8 (4th edition) or sense or instinct." He said that "it rises as quick as any of our passions, or as laughter at the sight of a ridiculous accident or object.” 36 He was thus guilty, in Locke's opinion, of two errors. In the first place, he varied in his treatment of it, identifying it sometimes with a mental faculty, but more often with the verdicts of that faculty. He made it equivalent to "the laws of nature" or "the supreme law," and then concluded that not only the moral faculty but also the moral laws. were innate. Against this careless kind of argument. Locke's keen mind could not but protest. Locke asked Burnet to distinguish between the moral law and that faculty by which a man judges of the conformity of his actions with that law. The faculty is innate, but the law is not. Hence only the faculty, i.e., reason engaged on moral problems, can be referred to as "natural conscience." Conscience must not be supposed to create moral distinctions-it only discovers them. "Conscience is not the law of nature, but judging by that which is taken to be the law." Or, "conscience is the judge, not the law." 37 In the second place, Burnet's resort to conscience without understanding just what it is was in Locke's opinion but "the laying down a foundation for enthusiasm.” 38 And such a method in ethics is most dangerous and undesirable: it is merely the attempt to erect another infallible guide without any better claims to obedience than the Roman Church.39 Because of the association of ideas which really do not belong together, men come to believe that the things which stir their emotions deeply are of corresponding moral value. But moral laws are meant to restrain and curb men's passions. Prejudice and emotional bias should be controlled by reason. The kind of conscience which Burnet extolled would lead to ruin. "Principles of actions indeed there are lodged in men's appetites; but these are so far from being innate moral principles, that if they were left to their full swing they would carry men to the overturning of all morality." 40 The consciences. of different men urge diametrically opposed actions; for the dictates of their consciences are only too often the voices of unrestrained passion. The only reliable kind of a conscience is the untrammeled voice of reason, judging according to the real connections between the objects with which it deals. Thus in place of an authority which would change from person to person according as their emotions varied, Locke set up as judge that rational faculty which alone can reach conclusions of an eternal and immutable validity. 36 Burnet: First Remarks, p. 5. 37 Noah Porter: Op. cit., pp. 35-41. 38 Idem, p. 38. 89 King: Life of Locke, p. 103. Cf. Patten: The Development of English Thought, p. 164. متر CHAPTER III THE CONTENT OF LOCKE'S RATIONALISTIC ETHICS 1. The last chapter having been devoted to discussing Locke's treatment of reason as the ethical faculty, an attempt will now be made to outline the system of ethics to which his rationalism led. For since reason was not for Locke a set of infallible principles, but only a faculty whereby the agreements and disagreements of ideas can be perceived, his system of ethics could be built up only by furnishing reason with some empirical material to work upon. The inconsistency previously noticed in Locke's use of the term idea here looms up again, and two quite different moral theories result. According to the first of these theories, the one which corresponds to his treatment of ideas as "whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks," 1 and the one which predominates throughout the Essay whenever the possibility of knowing moral truth is being considered, morality is concerned with "mixed modes." Mixed modes, as was shown above,2 are those ideas which the mind of man can construct by compounding simple ideas of several kinds into one complex whole. That is, the ideas out of which moral truths are made are "voluntary collections of * ideas," arbitrarily brought together without reference to any objective standard. They are not only often framed prior to any experiences akin to them, but also are not even attempts to copy external objects. “In framing these ideas the mind searches not its patterns in nature, nor refers the ideas it makes to the real existences of things, but puts such together as may best serve its own purposes, without tying itself to a precise imitation of anything that really exists."4 Moral ideas are "the creatures of the understanding rather than the works of nature.” Yet they are not, therefore, to be supposed to be fantastic. Rather *they are "real essences"; for though in the case of substances the nominal and real essences are quite different, yet in the case of mixed modes which are known as they are in their real being, the nominal and real essences coincide and are the same. Hence moral ideas, being real essences, have attached to them class names or universal terms; and 6 under them many of the ideas we are continually receiving from our senses may be grouped and ordered. Moral propositions or rules are obtained by perceiving the agreement or disagreement of the moral ideas to each other. Hence moral rules are timeless, for the mixed modes out of which they are constructed are "ingenerable and incorruptible," and have no temporal connection with the "mutations of particular substances."7 Also they are eternal and immutable; for the modes, once fabricated, have a definitely fixed character, and so bear forever the same relations to each other. Of course, the meaning of the terms attached to the modes may change from person to person and from time to time, and thus the propositions made therefrom will be different; but such changes are purely verbal, indicating that one moral truth has been superseded in men's attention by another, not that what was once true has become false. Once a moral term is defined, many truths necessarily follow from its relations to other such terms. Hence, moral truth is the "speaking of things according to the persuasion of our own minds, though the proposition we speak agree not to the reality of things." 8 It is just because of this independence of moral ideas and propositions from any necessary conformity to objects that ethics can be demonstrated. If ethics like physics involved reference to external things, it could only result in probability. But since like mathematics it deals only with mixed modes, it can be a science. The propositions of ethics are true provided that they conform to the requirements of inner consistency. "Upon this ground it is that I am bold to think that morality is capable of demonstration, as well as mathematics; since the precise real essence of the things moral words stand for may be perfectly known, and so the congruity or incongruity of the things themselves be certainly discovered, in which consists perfect knowledge." Therefore it is our own fault if we do not obtain knowledge of morality. We have only to construct our own complex ideas and to note their connections. Whoever fails to think clearly on moral matters is guilty of "a great negligence and perverseness": 10 uncertainty or obscurity is evidence of laziness. Because of the nature of the mixed modes, a whole system of morality can be constructed by careful attention to the ideas present to the mind, without any reference to realities beyond. Locke granted, however, that even in ethics some confusion of thought is likely to result. This confusion is due largely to the difficulties of language. In the first place, moral ideas cannot be represented, as mathematical ones can, by "sensible marks" or figures. One cannot draw a diagram of justice. The only means of distinguishing 7 Idem, III, 3, 19. 8 Idem, IV, 5, 11. Cf. also III, II, 17. 9 Idem, III, II, 16. 10 Essay, III, II, 15, Cf. IV, 4, 7, 12, 8. Also Works, Vol. IV, pp. 405-406. mixed modes in an objective fashion is to give names to them. But names are not understood in the same way by different men, or by the same man at different times. There is no archetype or standard in nature whereby men can keep their terms definitely attached to the same ideas. In the second place, moral ideas are so complex that the precise group of simple ideas involved in their structure is difficult to determine. Some persons may omit as trivial an element which others regard as most important. A complex idea may not be altered much by the omission or inclusion of a certain simple idea; and thus moral terms may never be defined exactly but may be used for several similar groups of ideas. The memory is not capable of retaining the precise combination of parts for which the many moral terms and phrases stand. The more frequently an instance of a complex idea is met with in nature, the more exact it and its designation become. But nature does not furnish us with regular and permanent examples of all our moral ideas. Consequently, even the science of ethics will only approximate perfect formulation.11 Locke did not give many illustrations of the concrete moral ideas and truths which could be known according to his theory of ethics. But the few specific cases he did mention are most interesting. The manufacture of the separate moral ideas is the simplest part of the task. Sacrilege and adultery, justice and gratitude are ideas which can be formed and defined without reference to any acts committed. The idea of murder is obtained by compounding the idea of man and the idea of killing; and if to this combination is also added the idea of a father, there results the idea of parricide. Similarly, the ideas of adultery and of father and daughter or of mother and son unite to form the idea of incest; and the ideas of killing and of a particular part of a weapon produce the idea of stabbing.12 These ideas, however, are only the rudiments for a knowledge of morality. They serve as terms. for propositions which reason can build up by perceiving the agreements and disagreements between them. Complete moral propositions. framed from mixed modes Locke did not often adduce. But two pieces of moral truth he discussed in a passage so significant that it should be quoted in full. "'Where there is no property there is no injustice' is a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid: for the idea of property being a right to anything, and the idea to which the name 'injustice' is given being the invasion or violation of that right, it is evident that these ideas, being thus established, and these names annexed to them, I can as certainly know this proposition to be true, as that a triangle has three angles equal to two right ones. Again: 'No government allows absolute liberty'. The idea of government being 11 Idem, III, 9, 6-9, 10, 1; IV, 3, 19, 4, o. 12 Idem, III, 5, 5-6, 12, 9, 7. |