French Materialist Disciples of Locke

French Materialist Disciples of Locke JOHN W. YOLTON LOCKE SUGGESTEDWHAT,given the limitation of our knowledge of the nature of material and immaterial substances, there would be no inconsistency in the notion that God could superadd to matter the power of thought. After all, according to the view Locke shared with Robert Boyle, God did add motion to matter, motion not being a natural property of matter. Moreover, Newton had recently shown the importance of gravitation in the behavior of all bodies (especially planetary ones), and gravity, not being natural to body, had to be added by God. When Bishop Stillingfleet drew out Locke on this suggestion, Locke sketched a possible creation scenario where God creates bare substance and adds various qualities and powers to it, e.g., motion, attraction and repulsion, sense, life. God, could, then, Locke suggested, have added the property of thought to biological matter having these other properties . At the same time, Locke makes it clear that he does not think any matter does think, certainly not corpuscular matter which everyone agreed was dumb and inactive. He wanted to defend the intelligibility, not the actuality, of matter of a certain complexity and organization having dual properties, those usually ascribed to body and mind or, in a more traditional language, body and soul. While I do not find the text of Locke at all ambiguous on the question of matter thinking, some of his readers then and now suspect a hidden agenda, where Locke was moving in the direction of a materialism which said some matter does think. The storm of protests, reactions, and support of some few who did try to develop such a view in eighteenth-century Britain has been presented in my recent Thinking Matter.' What needs examining now is ' Thinking Matter: Materialismin Eighteenth-CenturyBritain (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press and London: B. H. Blackwell, 1984). This controversy was much broader than Locke'ssuggestion of thought being added to somekinds of matter. It was a debate that ranged [83] 84 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the migration of Locke's suggestion (and of part of that British controversy) onto the European continent. By means of translations of his various books, reviews and extracts of them in French-language journals, and by Voltaire's letter on Locke (Letter XIII in his Letters concerning the English Nation, 1733; French original, 1734), which highlighted the suggestion of thinking matter and located Locke in the context of such deistical and materialist writers as Collins, Toland, Spinoza, attention was called to Locke's possible materialist tendencies. Bayle cited and discussed the exchange with Stillingfleet over that topic, it appeared in footnotes to Coste's second French edition of the Essay, and, more significantly, it appeared in the body of an important clandestine tract, L'ame materieUe. ~ Condillac has often been cited as an early French follower of Locke, although de G6rando correctly points out that Claude Buffier preceded Condillac in adopting some (though different ones from Condillac) of Locke's doctrines, a The principle often cited as linking Locke to Condillac is 'all ideas come from the senses', or, in its Aristotelian and scholastic form, 'nothing in the intellect which is not first in the senses'. We shall find that the aspect of this dictum which leads Locke's French critics to place him in the materialist camp is not its epistemic implications but the causal theory of perception connected with it. All three of the French critics discussed in this paper follow Malebranche in his occasionalism, i.e., in disconnecting perceptual awareness (though not its physiological accompaniments) from any causal relation with the world. Three accounts of the relation between soul and body (a topic which occupied much attention in the French-language journals ) were distinguished by eighteenth-century writers: (1) the system of physical influences, i.e., any account which says soul can be influenced by the physical world or that the soul can affect the body; (~) the system of preestablished harmony, associated with Leibniz and his follower Wolff; and (3) the system of occasionalism, i.e., Malebranche's account which makes God the only cause of the motion of bodies, including our own. over physics (the...