mutual ignorance, and endeavour to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information, and
not instantly treat others ill as obstinate and perverse because they will not renounce their own
and receive our opinions, or at least those we would force upon them, when it is more than
probable that we are no less obstinate in not embracing some of theirs. For where is the man
that has uncontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he
condemns; or can say, that he has examined to the bottom all his own or other men's opinions?
The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay, often upon very slight grounds, in this
fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform
ourselves than to restrain others.... There is reason to think, that if men were better instructed
themselves, they would be less imposing on others." *
I have dealt hitherto only with the latest chapters of the Essay, where Locke is drawing the
moral from his earlier theoretical investigation of the nature and limitations of human
knowledge. It is time now to examine what he has to say on this more purely philosophical
subject.
Locke is, as a rule, contemptuous of metaphysics. A propos of some speculation of Leibniz's, he
writes to a friend: "You and I have had enough of this kind of fiddling." The conception of
substance, which was dominant in the metaphysics of his time, he considers vague and not
useful, but he does not venture to reject it wholly. He allows the validity of metaphysical
arguments for the existence of God, but he does not dwell on them, and seems somewhat
uncomfortable about them. Whenever he is expressing new ideas, and not merely repeating
what is traditional, he thinks in terms of concrete detail rather than of large abstractions. His
philosophy is piecemeal, like scientific work, not statuesque and all of a piece, like the great
Continental systems of the seventeenth century.
Locke may be regarded as the founder of empiricism, which is the doctrine that all our
knowledge (with the possible exception of logic and mathematics) is derived from experience.
Accordingly the first book of the Essay is concerned in arguing, as against Plato, Descartes, and
the scholastics, that there are no innate ideas or principles. In the
* Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, Ch. XVI, Sec. 4.