some measure of doubt. This temper of mind is obviously connected with religious toleration,
with the success of parliamentary democracy, with laissez-faire, and with the whole system of
liberal maxims. Although he is a deeply religious man, a devout believer in Christianity who
accepts revelation as a source of knowledge, he nevertheless hedges round professed revelations
with rational safeguards. On one occasion he says: "The bare testimony of revelation is the highest
certainty," but on another he says: "Revelation must be judged by reason." Thus in the end reason
remains supreme.
His chapter "Of Enthusiasm" is instructive in this connection. "Enthusiasm" had not then the same
meaning as it has now; it meant the belief in a personal revelation to a religious leader or to his
followers. It was a characteristic of the sects that had been defeated at the Restoration. When there
is a multiplicity of such personal revelations, all inconsistent with each other, truth, or what passes
as such, becomes purely personal, and loses its social character. Love of truth, which Locke
considers essential, is a very different thing from love of some particular doctrine which is
proclaimed as the truth. One unerring mark of love of truth, he says, is "not entertaining any
proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant." Forwardness to
dictate, he says, shows failure of love of truth. "Enthusiasm, laying by reason, would set up
revelation without it; whereby in effect it takes away both reason and revelation, and substitutes in
the room of it the ungrounded fancies of a man's own brain." Men who suffer from melancholy or
conceit are likely to have "persuasions of immediate intercourse with the Deity." Hence odd
actions and opinions acquire Divine sanction, which flatters "men's laziness, ignorance, and
vanity." He concludes the chapter with the maxim already quoted, that "revelation must be judged
of by reason."
What Locke means by "reason" is to be gathered from his whole book. There is, it is true, a
chapter called "Of Reason," but this is mainly concerned to prove that reason does not consist of
syllogistic reasoning, and is summed up in the sentence: "God has not been so sparing to men to
make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational." Reason, as
Locke uses the term, consists of two parts: first, an inquiry as to what things we know with
certainty; second, an investigation of propositions which it is wise to accept in practice, although
they have only probability and not