Abstract
The immediate occasion for Locke’s greatest work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), was a discussion amongst a small circle of friends over questions of morality and religion, those parts of knowledge, he tells the reader, ‘that Men are most concern’d to be clear in’. Before the group could proceed to investigate theological and moral questions, however, it was thought necessary to step back and see what our abilities were and how far they extended. Locke undertook to provide the requisite preliminaries, doubtless unaware that the overall task would engage him for the next 18 years. These early meetings probably took place sometime in 1670 or 1671 at Anthony Ashley Cooper’s London home, for by the close of 1671 Locke had completed two drafts of what would eventually emerge as the Essay. There are additional comments sprinkled throughout the published work which seem to indicate that Locke wished to address concerns about normative conduct and theology broadly defined, and it is worth keeping in mind that his inquiries began after he had broken with the Church of England’s position on the evil of toleration — and after the failed effort by the latitudinarians to achieve a comprehension in 1668. However short our knowledge may prove to be, all humans ‘have Light enough to lead them to a Knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own Duties’ was how he phrased it at the opening of Book 1, while in the fourth Book he reminded his audience ‘that our proper Imployment lies in those Enquiries, and in that sort of Knowledge, which is most suited to our natural Capacities, and carries in it our greatest interest, i.e. the Condition of our eternal Estate’.
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Notes
The early drafts have been most recently edited by P.H. Nidditch and G.A.J. Rogers, Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and other philosophical writings (Oxford, 1990).
See, most recently, J.A.I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (Cambridge, 1992)
John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, CT, 1993). Also Clark, English Society, 1688–1832.
Locke’s manuscript notes on Edward Stillingfleet’s Unreasonableness of Separation (1680) quoted in Marshall, John Locke, p. 98.
Quoted in Richard Aaron and Jocelyn Gibb (eds), An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay, Together with Excerpts from His Journals (Oxford, 1936), p. 88.
John Dunn, Locke (Oxford, 1984), p. 62.
For a discussion see Peter Walmsley, ‘Dispute and Conversation: Probability and the Rhetoric of Natural Philosophy in Locke’s Essay’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 54 (1993), 381–94.
John Yolton, John Locke: An Introduction (Oxford, 1985), p. 119.
John Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford, 1956), p. 31.
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 61 vols (London, 1963–76), la qu 93 art. 9.
James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, 1993), ch. 6.
Burnet, Remarks Upon an Essay Concerning Human Understanding in a Letter Addressed to the Author (London, 1697), p. 5.
Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse on the Light of Nature (Toronto, 1971 ), p. 54.
See also Ralph Cudworth, Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (London, 1739)
and Henry Lee, Anti-Skepticism (London, 1702).
For a discussion see Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ, 1983)
and H.G. van Leeuen, The Pursuit of Certainty in English Thought (The Hague, 1963).
Margaret J. Osler, ‘John Locke and the Changing Ideal of Scientific Knowledge’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (1970), 3.
See also G.A.J. Rogers, ‘Boyle, Locke and Reason’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 27 (1966), 205–16.
John Coiman, John Locke’s Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1983), p. 216.
Cf. John Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 145–6.
Vere Chappell, ‘Locke on the Intellectual Basis of Sin’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 32 (1994), 197–207, sees intellectualist strains in the second edition of the Essay, although he acknowledges that Locke makes an important shift between 1689 and 1694.
Tillotson quoted in W.M. Spellman, ‘Archbishop John Tillotson and the Meaning of Moralism’, Anglican and Episcopal History, 56 (1987), 411–12.
For a discussion, see David Wootton, ‘John Locke: Socinian or Natural Law Theorist?’, in James E. Crimmins (ed.), Religion, Secularization and Political Thought: Thomas Hobbes to J.S. Mill (London, 1989), pp. 42–3.
‘Of Ethick in General’ printed in Peter King, The Life and Letters of John Locke (London, 1884; reprinted London, 1984), pp. 308–9.
John Yolton, A Locke Dictionary (Oxford, 1993), p. 77.
Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms, ed. Samuel Salter (London, 1753), no.771.
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Spellman, W.M. (1997). Knowledge, Duty, and Salvation. In: John Locke. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25392-0_3
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