Life and Works of John Locke

John Locke (1632-1704) was born near Bristol into a merchant family; he was sixteen years old at the time of the Revolution; his father enlisted in the Parliamentarian army. A student at Oxford from 1652 to 1658, he pursued the studies that would normally have led him to the clergy; but, in 1658, he turned in a completely different direction, towards medicine, which he studied without ever obtaining a doctorate. In 1666, he attached himself to Lord Ashley, later Earl of Shaftesbury, who led a very turbulent political life, the repercussions of which Locke felt; he made two trips to France, one in 1672, the other from 1675 to 1679, where he spent a year in Montpellier to recover his very delicate health; but this second stay was prolonged until the end of the Earl of Shaftesbury’s disgrace. In 1684, he was again forced to leave England; Earl, having failed in his attempt to provoke a revolution, had been forced to take refuge in Holland where he soon died; Locke, under suspicion in power, deemed it prudent to go to Holland in turn; he was to remain there until the Revolution of 1688. Returning to England in 1689, he refused, primarily because of his health, the post of ambassador to the Elector of Brandenburg, which the new king offered him, and he accepted the position of Commissioner of Appeals. Occupied mainly with political and religious questions, and also with economic ones (he was then writing his Considerations on the Consequences of the Diminution of Interest and the Increase in the Value of Money), he also had to respond to numerous controversies. He then retired to Oates, not far from his friends Lord and Lady Masham (the daughter of the philosopher Cudwood), and he remained there until his death.

In 1670, at the age of thirty-eight, Locke had been, since 1667, physician to the Earl of Sheftesbury, and nothing yet foreshadowed his philosophical vocation; associated with the physician Sydenham, with whom he collaborated, and a member of the Royal Society in 1668, he had written short medical treatises, Anatomica (1668) and De Arte medica (1669), in which he declared: “There is no knowledge truly worthy of the name except that which leads to some new and useful invention. All other speculation is an occupation for idlers.” General theories are harmful because they halt and fix science; only specific hypotheses are useful, for grasping proximate causes. He had also reflected on the political and religious questions that were agitating his country, and he had written Sacerdos and Reflections on the Roman Republic, in which he protested against the encroachment of the clergy on civil power, Infaillïbilis scripturae interpres non necessarius, whose principle is that the Bible is sufficient for salvation, and Essay on Tolerance (1666), on the tolerance due to nonconformists, to Puritans, who had not accepted the Act of Uniformity of Charles II.

In the winter of 1670-1671, following discussions among friends, including the lawyer James Tyrrell, who would later contribute to the revolution that overthrew James II and brought William of Orange to power, and the physician David Thomas, his thoughts took an unexpected turn. He realized, according to Tyrrell’s testimony, that the “principles of morality and revealed religion” could not be firmly established before “examining our own capacity and seeing what objects are within our grasp or beyond our understanding.” Thus, the idea for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding was born, which, in fact, concludes with considerations on the certainty of moral truths (IV, 4, 7) and on the relationship between faith and reason (IV, 18). The Essay, moreover, did not appear until 1690. But, as early as 1671, Locke had written De intellectu humano, where the reduction of all our ideas to simple ideas is presented as in the Essay; the Essay itself is the work of the rare leisure time that a rather eventful career allowed him during nineteen years. As early as 1688, his ideas became known thanks to the abridgment of the Essay published by Le Clerc in the Bibliothèque universelle. The second edition (1694) contains many additions (II, 27; II, 9, 8; Et, 33; IV, 19) or changes (II, -21; II, 28); Coste’s French translation (1740), revised by Locke, also contains several additions or corrections.