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152 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:1 JANUARY i988 Peter Alexander. Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles. Locke and Boyle on the External World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp. 336. $44.5 o. Peter Alexander's aim in his Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles is mainly to solve some alleged puzzles in Locke's Essay by articulating Lockean philosophy as a popularization of the seventeenth-century Corpuscular theory of physics. He tries to argue that what he calls the familiar interpretation of Locke is based on a systematic misinterpretation of the Essay ever since its publication in 169o. The so-called familiar interpretation results from several mistaken views which could be summarized as follows: 1. to see Locke's aim as identical with Berkeley's and Hume's; 2. to overlook Locke's affinity with Descartes and Leibniz; 3. to assume that he has totally rejected Aristotelianism; 4. to neglect Boyle's influence on Locke; 5- to try to reduce the History of Philosophy to a compendium of topics currently under discussion; and finally, 6. to rely in studying Locke on abridgements of the Essay. Consequently, the following puzzles seemed to arise from Locke's New Way of Ideas: Is a red ball really red--as red as it is really spherical? How could an idea which is mental resemble a quality of material objects? How could an idea be in an object when Locke has warned us that an idea could not be anywhere but in the mind? Could an intersubjective language denote private ideas of sensation? How could Locke distinguish between ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection? How could part of complex ideas be visible and another part invisible? As we said above, Alexander tries to solve these puzzles by inviting us to place the Essay not in the narrow epistemological tradition which severs philosophy (or rather its history) from the History of Science but in the history of the popularization of Science. This new approach is surely to be welcomed. Alexander presents us with a thinker involved in seventeenth-century controversies about the nature of scientific enquiry, its methods, assumptions, and limits. He is right to draw our attention to the fact that the historical context of Locke's Essay is the Scientific Revolution. So far he is on safe ground. But he goes further and says that an "important feature of this revolution was the growing perception that theology, natural philosophy and metaphysical philosophy could and should be pursued independently of one another" and that consequently "philosophy need no longer be regarded as the handmaid of religion ." This is followed by an even more debatable statement "that philosophical thinking and scientific investigation constituted no threat to religious belief and much theological thinking" (9). During the whole of the eighteenth century what we call Natural Religion began gradually to replace traditional theology, which was closely linked with scholastic philosophy and Aristotelian physics. It is worth noting that theology with its close links with ethics and politics was, until the time of Locke, Toland, Collins, and Tindal, part and parcel of what could be called an "elite culture" which furnished the ruling classes with the required ideology for justifying both political authority and political obliga- BOOK REVIEWS 153 tion. In a sense, the rise of Natural Religion could be seen as the gradual replacement of a crumbling "elite culture" by a new culture. Locke's philosophy in his Essay, his version of Natural Religion in The Reasonableness of Christianity, and his political philosophy in the two Treatiseson Government are indeed separate books but they cannot be understood independently of one another. A reinterpretation of the Bible in the light of the achievements of the new physics was indispensable for enabling Locke and other eighteenth-century thinkers to usher in the new way of thinking. And the popularization of science was needed for the same purpose. Locke applied therefore the new methods of natural philosophy to all three domains of the new culture--to religion, ethics and politics. This is Locke's philosophy. The attempt to save the Essay from repeated accusations of confusion and inconsistencies is thus partially accompanied in Alexander's book by an artificial confinement...

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