Other philosophical work,

Life at Oates was varied by occasional visits to London, particularly in 1696 and the four following years, when, as a Commissioner of the Board of Trade, with an income of £1000 a year, he became again involved in official cares. One relaxation was the society of visitors who were attracted to Oates by its illustrious inmate-Newton, once and again, on his way to or from Cambridge, Molyneux from Dublin, Fowler, the latitudinarian Bishop of Gloucester, and the free-thinking Anthony Collins, then a young Essex squire.

Work in the study was resumed with characteristic industry and method as soon as Locke was settled at Oates, latterly assisted by M. Coste as amanuensis. What he occasioned had published in the two preceding years, especially the

by the

Essay.

Essay, soon involved him in controversies which lasted with intervals to the end of his life. New editions of the Essay, the second in 1694, followed by the third and fourth in 1695 and 1700, with important changes and new chapters in the second and fourth; adverse criticism of the Essay by Norris, Thomas Burnet, Lowde, Sherlock, Sergeant, Leibniz, and Lee; the famous controversy with Stillingfleet; the posthumous tractate on the Conduct of the Understanding, originally meant to form a chapter in the Essay; the Examination of Malebranche, and the Remarks on Norris, both posthumous-formed the philosophical work at Oates, in these fourteen years, along with constant correspondence, especially with Molyneux, Limborch, and latterly Anthony Collins. The correspondence between Locke and Molyneux throws light on many parts of the Essay. It arose incidentally. In December 1692 a book reached Locke at Oates, presented by its author, William Molyneux, an eminent young member of Trinity College, Dublin. It was entitled Dioptrica Nova. In its preface Molyneux wrote, with reference to logic, that 'to none do we owe more for a greater advancement of this part of philosophy than to the incomparable Mr. Locke, who in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, hath rectified more received mistakes, and delivered more profound truths, established on experience and observation, for the direction of man's mind in the prosecution of knowledge, than are to be met with

in all the volumes of all the ancients. He has clearly overthrown all those metaphysical whimsies which infected men's brains with a spice of madness, whereby they feigned a knowledge when they had none, by making a noise with. sounds, without clear and distinct significations.' The arrival of the Dioptrica Nova at Oates was the beginning of an affectionate interchange of thoughts between its author and the author of the Essay, about projected improvements in the successive editions of the Essay, and other common intellectual interests, which was continued till the unexpected death of Molyneux, in October 1698, a few weeks after his visit to Oates. Through him the Essay made way in Dublin, as it had made way at Oxford, with the help of Wynne's Abridgment, published in 1695.

of the

The Essay rapidly attained a wide popularity, unpre- Popularity cedented in the case of an elaborate philosophical treatise, Essay. but explained by a relation of the book to life and action that could be readily appreciated by persons unaccustomed to metaphysical speculation. It was translated under Locke's eye into French by M. Coste, his literary assistant. The French version appeared soon after the fourth English edition of the Essay, and has itself passed through several editions. A Latin version followed in 1701.

versy with

Locke's correspondence with Bishop Stillingfleet takes its Controplace among the memorable controversies of the philoso- Stillingphical world. It arose in this way :-Toland, the Irish Pan- fleet. theist, in his Christianity not Mysterious, had exaggerated some doctrines in the Essay, and then adopted them thus exaggerated as premisses of his own. In the autumn of 1696, Bishop Stillingfleet, a learned ecclesiastic more than a philosophical reasoner, in a l'indication of the Trinity, made some reflections upon Locke's Essay, for not leaving room for the mysteries that are involved in the Christian revelation. Locke replied, early in the next year, in a Letter of 227 pages, defending his ideas of substance and causality, as well as of nominal and real essences. Stillingfleet's rejoinder appeared in May. It was followed by a Reply or Second Letter from Locke, in August, nearly as long as the first, in which he insists on the wide meaning in which the term idea is used in the Essay, and shows how

Other adverse

Critics of

Norris.

'the greatest part of a book treating of the Understanding must be taken up in considering ideas'; denies that he has placed the certainty of knowledge exclusively in ideas that are 'clear and distinct,' inasmuch as we may have knowledge of some relations of ideas that are in all other respects obscure and mysterious; and then returns to our ideas of substances,' of 'natures' or 'essences,' and of essences real and nominal.' The Bishop answered this in 1698. Locke's elaborate Reply was delayed till 1699. In it he pursues, with immense expenditure of vigorous reasoning and irony, the many ramifications of the controversy, wherein, besides other incident matters, what his lordship has said concerning certainty by reason, certainty by ideas, and certainty by faith; the resurrection of the same body; the immateriality of the soul; the inconsistency of Mr. Locke's notions with the articles of the Christian faith, and their tendency to sceptism (sic) is examined.' The death of Stillingfleet in the same year ended this trial of intellectual strength.

The Essay had encountered criticism almost as soon as it appeared. Its collision with received maxims, in the the Essay. form of an assault on 'innate ideas and principles,' shocked those who had been accustomed to defer to authority, and to feed their minds on abstractions. In 1690 John Norris, afterwards a successor of George Herbert as Rector of Bemerton, an English mystic, the friend of Henry More and of Lady Masham, and a disciple of Malebranche, published Cursory Reflections upon a Book called an Essay concerning Human Understanding. He blames Locke, in this tract, for setting himself to prove that there are no innate or natural principles,' and for then 'inconsistently' granting that there are self-evident propositions to which we give ready assent' as soon as they are understood, while he still denies that the assent is 'universal,' on the ground that it is not consciously given in many cases; 'it being a contradiction to assert,' so Locke argued, 'that there can be any truths imprinted on the soul of which the soul is unconscious.' This brochure of Norris is interesting for a recognition thus early, by an English writer, of the implication of latent or unconscious reason in human experience,

analogous to the 'unperceived perception' of Leibniz, so important in the part it plays in modern thought. Sherlock, Sherlock. afterwards Bishop of London, was another adversary. He uttered a caveat against any book that rejects connate ideas or inbred notions.' On this Locke expressed himself with unusual asperity, in a letter to Molyneux (February 22, 1697):-' A man of no small name, as you know Dr. Sherlock is, has been pleased to declare against my doctrine of no innate ideas, from the pulpit in the Temple; and as I have been told charged it with little less than atheism. Though the doctor be a great man, yet that would not much fright me, because I am told that he is not always obstinate against opinions which he has condemned, more publicly than in an harangue to a Sunday's auditory; but that it is possible he may be firm here, because it is also said, he never quits his aversion to any tenet he has once declared against, till change of times, bringing change of interest, and fashionable opinions, open his eyes and his heart, and then he kindly embraces what before deserved his aversion and censure.' Sherlock's objections to the Essay may be found in the 'Digression concerning Connate Ideas and Inbred Knowledge,' which forms the second chapter of his Discourse concerning the Happiness of good men, and punishment of the wicked in the next world (1704). Some of the current objections to theological and philo- Thomas sophical postulates in the Essay found expression in two Burnet. tracts, in 1697, by Thomas Burnet, the eccentric author of the Sacred Theory of the Earth. To the doubts and difficulties of Burnet, in the first of these, Locke curtly replied, in an appendix to his Second Letter to Stillingfleet. Burnet's rejoinder to this was left unnoticed by Locke, whose contemptuous silence drew forth an angry Third Letter in 1699 from Burnet, in which he complained that he had not yet received 'the favour of an answer.' 'You ruffled over the first in a domineering answer,' he says, 'without giving any satisfaction to its contents, but the second being more full and explicit, I was in hopes you would have been more concerned to answer, to answer them calmly and like a philosopher.' Locke still treated his antagonist as unworthy of public notice, but was so far

moved that in the solitude of his study at Oates he filled the liberal margins of Burnet's pamphlet with counter criticisms in his own handwriting. The annotated tract fell into the hands of the late eminent Dr. Noah Porter, some years ago, when part of the contents of Locke's library was dispersed, and he has given an account of this interesting memorial of the past, 'holographic from Locke's own hand,' in Marginalia Lockeana, contributed to the New Englander and Yale Review for July 1887. The marginal criticisms are there presented—'pointed and spirited, expressing his own positions in brief statements that are often corrections of, or antagonistic to, those of his critic. Now and then they are more clear and explicit than the corresponding statements of the Essay. Conscience, innate ideas and principles, the possibility of cogitation in matter, and free will, are the topics on which Locke here explains his meaning, removes objections, and introduces distinctions. Thus where Burnet asks whether the author of the Essay 'allows any powers to be innate to mankind,' Locke notes on the margin :-'I think noe body but this author who ever read my book could doubt that I spoke only of innate ideas; for my subject was the understanding, and not of innate powers. Of ideas there must be a conscious understanding, that is to say, so that innate Sergeant. potentiality was irrelevant to his design. Some curious

animadversions upon the Essay also appeared in 1697, in a volume of 460 pages, entitled Solid Philosophy asserted against the Fancies of the Ideists. The author was John Sergeant (alias Smith), who had deserted the Church of England for the Church of Rome, and had published in 1665 Rational Discourses on the Rule of Faith, answered by Tillotson. Those who have in their minds only similitudes or ideas, and only discourse of them,' says Sergeant, which ideas are not the things themselves, do build their discoveries upon nothing. They have no solid knowledge.' 'Mr. Sergeant, a Popish priest,' Locke writes to Molyneux, 'whom you must needs have heard of, has bestowed a thick octavo upon my Essay, and Mr. Norris I hear is (again) writing hard against it.' (This of Norris appeared in Part II of his Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible