The Library of John Locke (review)

176 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY and his successors at Padua might somehow be closely connected with the increasingly empirical aspect which Aristotelianism took on in Italian universities in the course of the sixteenth century. I have recently shown ("Giulio Castellani [1528--1586]: A SixteenthCentury Opponent of Scepticism," this Journal, V:I [January, 1967], 15-39) the direct influence of Falloppio's public anatomical demonstrations at Padua on one such philosopher. Other examples could easily be cited. It remains, however, for someone to systematically trace the direct influence of sixteenth-century anatomical progress on the psychology being taught in the universities. Far from being as static and as old-fashioned as it is often characterized , in fact, the university teaching of philosophy--and particularly sensory psychology-gives every indication of absorbing and utilizing new medical currents nearly as fast as they appeared. This imperfectly investigated and poorly understood aspect of the sixteenthcentury "anatomical revolution" must be studied more carefully before we can come to any sort of definite realization of the actual impact of the work of u and his followers on the intellectual community of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in general. After all, it may turn out that Vesalius is lurking in the background of Bacon, Gassendi, Locke, and early modern empiricism as a whole. Cm~s B. SCHMITT Fordham University The Library oJ John Locke. By John Harrison and Peter Laslett. (Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, New Series, XIII; Oxford University Press, 1965. Pp. xi -t- 292. $9.00.) As a social historian, Mr. Peter Laslett has recently shown his skill in reconstructing the past from records of births, marriages, and deaths (see his The World We Have Lost, 1965). In his long introductory essay to the book under review here, Laslett reveals a similar ability to illuminate the mind and person of Locke from data about his book collecting and cataloguing. The style of writing in both books is admirably suited to the tasks of the historian . But for its being highly selective, Laslett's introduction is the best biographical essay on Locke we have. Laslett understands the seventeenth century from within; he has caught the attitudes of its individual men and women, those of John Locke, Gent., as well as the ordinary citizen. It would have been valuable enough for Laslett to recover and record the remains of Locke's library; he has added to that an important essay on Locke. The story of the recovery of that part of Locke's personal library which he willed to Peter King is as exciting as the story of the dispersal of the other half that was willed to Damaris Masliam is depressing. The King half of the library, descended through the Lovelace family to the present, now resides in the country estate of Mr. Paul Mellon in Upperville, Virginia, the books standing "in the same order as they once did amongst all the others at Ores in Essex," the home of Lady Masham where Locke spent his last years (p. 37). They will in time be given to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where the Lovelace collection of Locke manuscript materials now resides. In making this catalogue of Locke's library (a catalogue which covers all the known books in Locke's library, not just those which have survived) Laslett and Harrison have used the Bodleian Library's list, drawn up in 1674 by Thomas Hyde, the list that Locke had interleaved for the recording of his own collection (p. 30). They have not made a "systematic search for items surviving from" Locke's library, nor have they studied Locke's manuscripts for "references to buying, binding, reading, borrowing, and lending of books" (p. vi). There is no attempt at an exhaustive list. The authors confidently assert: "There must be large numbers of other volumes, which Locke possessed, scattered amongst libraries, public and private, throughout the world. Amongst them are, we believe, many things which scholars would rejoice to see again, things like the copy of the French translation of his Essay which Locke seems to have corrected and presented to Damaris Masham, and which was lost to view in 1883" (pp. vi-vii). For the present...