Locke's Essay and the Strategies of Eighteenth-Century English Satire

L o c k e 's ihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Essay a n d th e S tr a te g ie s o f E ig h te e n th -C e n tu r y E n g lis h S a tir e PETER M. BRIGGSfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA —Attitudes are nothing, madam,—'tis the transition from one attitude toyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJI another—like the preparation and resolution of the discord into harmony, which is all in all. —Tristram Shandy The examination of human error is the satirist's vocation, and con­ temporary satirists were well aware of Locke's new views on error relatively soon after the publication of A n E s s a y C o n c e r n in g H u m a n U n d e r s ta n d in g in 1690. More than a generation ago Kenneth Maclean demonstrated that nearly all eighteenth-century men of letters read the E s s a y , Addison and others sought to popularize some of its ten­ ets, and satirists from Swift to Blake toyed or wrestled with Locke's ideas about sensation, mental habits, the nature of imagination, the potentialities of education, and other matters.1 My purpose here is not to survey the breadth of Locke's influence, however, but to ex­ plore some of its particular complexities: specifically, to ask what dif­ ference the currency of Lockean ideas made in satire, both in its down-to-earth technical and strategic aspects and, somewhat more broadly, in its moral ethos. Locke's clear-eyed and quite systematic examination of man's cognitive abilities and limitations had a signifi­ cant impact upon contemporary discussions of human error and con­ sequently upon the literary practices of satirists. Locke was primarily interested in urging that man possesses no innate ideas and in showing that all of his thoughts are ultimately 135 136 / BRIGGS traceable to sensations received from the external world. Man re­ ceives sensory data from the world and the mind organizes and eval­ uates those data; the individual understanding works by finding pat­ terns in its sensations, by comparing new data and its previous formulations of experience, by inferring connections among particu­ lar instances and general rules from them, by reflecting upon the design of its own experiences. Through such processes, Locke ar­ gued, man can eventually arrive at true though limited knowledge of his world; man cannot know everything, but he can know enough to manage his life in a reasonable way. Several ideas derived from Locke's system attracted both immedi­ ate and sustained attention in the literary world. The most important of these, at least from the point of view of moralists and satirists, was the fact that Locke consistently treated human error in terms of spe­ cific, identifiable mental failures—that is, perceptual, cognitive, or linguistic failures—rather than in terms of moral failure, a weakness of character or will. A reasonable man would do the right thing un­ less his reason was deluded (hence the enormous importance of ed­ ucation in Locke's view). Second, Locke's model drew particular at­ tention to understanding as a RQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA p r o c e s s , not a fixed product; the mind engages in a continuing dialogue, not only with the external world reported by the senses, but also with its own habits and its own past formulations of experience. Third, Locke's critical attention to lan­ guage as an aspect of understanding treated in a systematic way a problem which had bothered both philosophers and literary writers for some time previously: words, with all their imperfections, were an inevitable intermediary between man and man, between man and the external world, even between man and his own inner reflections; the fallibilities of language and the failures of man's understanding were related and reciprocal. Two important qualifications are necessary here. Strictly speaking, Locke was not the originator of any of these ideas, though he contrib­ uted much to their refinement; he was indebted to a long tradition of skeptical philosophers—Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and others—and a large part of Locke's contribution was the critical systemization of possibilities...