A Note on Locke and the Knowledge of Material Things

Notes and Discussions A NOTE ON LOCKE AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF ~/~ATERIAL THINGS Professor Anderson, in his article, "Locke on the Knowledge of Material Things," 1 says of Locke: "Like the Greek atemists, he conceives of matter as consisting of particles or corpuscles infinite in number. At least some of these are so minute as to be individually insensible, and probably he intends that all are, although, to my knowledge, he never states that this is so." :No doubt the "never" refers only to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, but it is of interest that Locke's Elements o] Natural Philosophy closes with the assertion that all are insensible7 While I can agree with most of Professor Anderson's conclusions, carefully drawn from Locke's statements about real and nominal essences, I fail to see how Locke's denying essential qualities to individual things implies that "no body can be said to possess its own size, shape, and motion or rest." Locke's own language was that "An accident.., may.., alter my... shape." 8 It is not that a body has no size, but that, since its size is alterable, any one sort of size is not inseparable from a thing, and so not essential. Nor do I find credible Anderson's attack on Locke's assigning probability to statements about material substances. Anderson correctly insists that no material thing has a real essence, nature, or constitution (for every thing is alterable ) and that any discerned property does not represent the thing detached from all other material things. But Locke's saying that bodies' "observable qualities , actions, and powers are owing to something without them" and that things do not "contain within themselves the qualities that appear to us in them" 4 can only mean that what a thing (sensibly) is today, it may not be tomorrow. It does not mean that things are not distinguishable. There are appearances, and they are regular, and they will be organized systematically and stated as the constitutions and properties of bodies--the sort of propositions that get stated in Elements of Natural Philosophy. All this has to do with material things as they appear to us, and, given a concurrence of one's own experience with the general consent of men, we would state such propositions as probabilities. There is even probability with respect to the insensible parts of material things--but only by analogy. It is in no high degree; Locke speaks of it as hypothetical. But he is right, we must hypothesize that the unseen parts act in some way similar to the seen. Or, as Locke would probably say today, we must, in exploring the hitherto insensible, act as if it were propertied in some way analogous to the sensible and known. GEORGE HENRY MOULDS Kent State University Kent, Ohio Journalof the History o] Philosophy, III: 2 (Oct., 1965),205-215. ~John Locke, Elements o] Natural Philosophy, The Works o] John Locke (10th ed.; London: J. Johnsonet al., 1801),III, p. 304. .8Locke,An Essay ConcerningHuman Understanding,in Four Books, III, vi, p. 4. Italics mine. Ibld., IV, vi, p. 11. [325] ...