John Locke: Problems and Perspectives. A Collection of New Essays (review)

104 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY would do much to define emerging or re-emerging questions of belief by showing them in the perspective of their historical development. KARL C. SANDemtO Macalexter College John Locke: Problems and Perspectives. A Collection o/New Essays. Edited by John W. Yolton. (New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp. vii+278. $9.50) Contemporary philosophical fashion has made much of Descartes, Berkeley and Hume at Locke's expense. In consequence one thinks of Locke as the author of a straw man distinction between primary and secondary qualities knocked down by Berkeley, and of occult doctrines of substance and power destroyed by Hume, or as a polemicist for a new way of ideas already announced by Descartes. One sees little contemporary recognition of the richness and complexity of his thought. This volume of papers, stemming from a conference on the Thought of John Locke held at York University, Toronto, in 1966, goes some way toward redressing the contemporary picture of Locke. Unfortunately, only three of the papers deal with the epistemological and metaphysical thought of the Essay. John Yolton argues convincingly that for "substratum" we should read "atomic particles," a thesis which sets Locke in his intellectual (i.e., Newtonian) context; Richard Ashcraft sets the Essay as a whole in a religious context in which we see a resolution of religious conflict in favor of the rationality of Christian faith as its main objective and also as integral to Locke's concept/on of reason; and W. yon Leyden draws attention to ambiguities surrounding (and connecting) Locke's doctrines of nominal essence in his theory of names, and his theory of substance. The bulk of the essays in this volume are concerned with Locke's political views. Raymond Polin uses Locke, justifiably, to argue the thesis that freedom is inseparable from law, and further, that this political doctrine is tied to the metaphysical view that human freedom is dependent upon a conception of a moral order which men can. and do achieve. M. Seliger traces the connections of Locke's and perhaps any form of liberalism with nationalism. Hans Aarsleff rebuts the criticism that Locke's tabula rasa psychology and his account of man in a state of nature are at odds. Locke's rejection of the innateness of knowledge is in effect the view that truth cannot be private (p. 134), and therefore depends upon the existence and operation of civil society, the origin of which is to be traced to the emergence of reason in men of "precminency ," those special talents who create the conditions of civil society and thus ensure the possibility that other men may attain a rational state. This is a subtle study of a number of themes in Locke's philosophy and repays close reading. The remainder of these essays are historical or iiterary. John Dunn argues that it was not Locke's treatises on government that provided the intellectual justification for the American Revolution and other political currents, though his works were the most sophisticated versions of a popular line of thought It was, however, the cruder forms of liberalism that had political effects. Gordon Schocbet places the treatises fLrrnly in the context of the controversy with Filmer, seeing the argument's main force as disfinguishing the question of the origin of government (familial) from its justification (trust and contract). Peter Laslett contributes a piece on Locke's activities with the Board of Trade on which he sat in its earliest period, showing the importance to Locke's conception of the philosopher of his practical role in human affairs. James AxteU shows how Newton's views prospered by means of Locke's quasi-amateur dissemination of them--the Isaac Asimov of his day, perhaps. Rosalie Colic deals, not BOOK REVIEWS 105 terribly effectively, I think, with Locke's style; the question---how anyone who wrote like Locke could be so popular?--remains. Finally, Aarsleff contributes "Some observations on recent Locke scholarship." He blames a great deal of misinterpretation on Locke's lack of precision and the faulty editing of his manuscripts. Still, one can't help drawing the conclusion from Aarsleff's own observations that the real difficulty is in the...