science should stay apart from religious disputes. The propagandist for the
Royal Society, Glanvill (who was at Oxford in the 1650s with Locke), was a
liberal rationalist Anglican; under Henry More’s influence, he delivered in 1661
a skeptical criticism of causality against the deceptiveness of the senses, de-
fending empiricism on moderate probabilistic grounds. Glanvill’s ingredients,
as well as the upshot of his position, are similar to Locke’s. How did Locke
arrive at a position which is far more famous, which turns the emphasis onto
a critique of innate ideas and principles? It was not a matter of defending
science by a moderate empiricism, since this needed no defense. Locke instead
crafted a position over the years which critiqued the foundations of all the
rival philosophies.
What distinguishes Locke from Glanvill and others of that milieu are his
travels and his resulting wide network contacts. Locke developed his philoso-
phy while in France during 1675–1679, where he encountered the Cartesians
and possibly Malebranche, and again during 1681–1689 when he was in
Holland, in contact with the Portuguese Jewish Spinozaists and with Bayle.^15
The 1670s were the time when the Cartesian system was under intense debate.
The loyalists Rohault and Régis were expanding the array of self-evident
axioms to bolster the deduction of the cogito and its consequences, and Spinoza
(1677) had taken the geometric method to a further extreme. On the other
side, Huet supported religious fideism, using skeptical arguments against the
cogito, and Malebranche (1674) was shifting the emphasis to the perception
of all ideas in God. Empirical scientists backed away from the extreme claims
of Cartesian rationalism. Its axiomatic method of obtaining certainty was
modified by Leibniz into a criterion of plausible rather than absolute arguments
(Brown, 1984).
Locke joined the movement rejecting the Cartesian position, but he did this
in a distinctive way. He turned probabilism and empiricism into a weapon
against all philosophies of substance—materialist, rationalist, and idealist
alike. At a time when metaphysical positions were returning to the field, Locke
staked out an anti-metaphysical position which nevertheless held metaphysical
implications. His empiricism moved ideas into the focus of attention, in oppo-
sition to any substance that lay behind them. Locke opened a path beyond the
disputes between the Platonists and Hobbes, as well as between Cartesians and
fideists or Malebranchian spiritualists. In Locke’s mature position, all that can
be known derives from simple ideas, received passively through the senses, and
their recombination into complex ideas by the mind. This is all there is to
abstractions and generalizations; there are no essences of things but only
names, and these in turn are only ideas bundled together for convenience in
discourse. All the Cartesian traits of the world of extension are reduced to
ideas. There is no certainty from “clear and distinct ideas” in Descartes’s sense
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