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38 10 Review of Fraser’s Locke 25 September 1890 The Nation Locke. By Alexander Campbell Fraser. [Philosophical Classics for English Readers.] Edinburgh: Wm. Blackwood & Sons; Philadelphia : J. B. Lippincott Co. 1890. Mr. Galton’s researches have set us to asking of every distinguished personality, what were the traits of his family; although in respect, not to Mr. Galton’s eminent persons, but to the truly great—those men who, in their various directions of action, thought, and feeling, make such an impression of power that we cannot name from all history more than three hundred such—in respect to these men it has not been shown that talented families are more likely than dull families to produce them. The gifts of fortune, however, are of importance even to these. It is not true that they rise above other men as a man above a race of intelligent dogs. In the judgment of Palissy the potter (and what better witness could be asked?), the majority of geniuses are crushed under adverse circumstances. John Locke, whose biography by Berkeleyan Professor Fraser is at our hand, came of a family of small gentry, his mother being a tradesman’s daughter. The family had shown good, but no distinguished ability, and no remarkable vitality. The philosopher, John, the eldest child of his parents, was born (1632) two years after their marriage; there was one other child five years later. John Locke himself never contemplated marriage. He resembled not in the least a genius of the regulation pattern—a great beast, incapable of self-control, self-indulgent, not paying his debts, subject to hallucinations, half-mad, absent-minded. He did not even, like the popular hero, attribute all that distinguished him to his mother’s influence. He called her “pious and affectionate,” but rarely mentioned her. On the other hand, he often spoke of his father with strong love, with respect for his character, and with admiration for his “parts.” That father gave him all his instruction up to the age of fourteen 10. Fraser’s Locke, 1890 39 years; and since he alone of Locke’s teachers escaped the bitter maledictions of his later life for their pedantry and “verbal learning,” the father it doubtless was who first taught our philosopher to think for himself. “I no sooner perceived myself in the world,” says Locke, “but I found myself in a storm.” When he was ten years old, the Civil War broke out, and the house was near Bristol, one of the centres of operations . His father at first joined the Parliamentary army, but returned within two years. Such events made food for reflection and doubtless suggested toleration. At fourteen he was put to Westminster school, under stern Dr. Busby, whose pedantry he detested; at twenty sent to peripatetic Oxford, and was still thoroughly discontented. He had not been a precocious boy, and was quite unconscious of superior power. At first he only read romances, and probably never studied very hard. He was awakened by the books of Descartes, whose system he did not embrace, but whose lucidity encouraged him to believe himself not a fool. “This same John Locke,” says Anthony à Wood, “was a man of turbulent spirit, clamorous and discontented; while the rest of our club took notes deferentially from the mouth of the master, the said Locke scorned to do so, but was ever prating and troublesome.” But this is the distortion of hatred, such as that which later prompted the lie that caused Charles II to order Locke’s expulsion from his studentship. The envious tribe said to infest colleges must take everlasting comfort in the reflection that efforts like theirs expelled John Locke from Oxford, and almost sti- fled the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Two years before the Restoration, he took his master’s degree, and was afterwards appointed to that life studentship, to lectureships in Greek and rhetoric, and to a censorship in moral philosophy. At a later date, he took the degree of Bachelor in Medicine. His father and brother died in 1661, leaving him about half enough to live upon. In 1666, being thirty-four years old, he made the acquaintance of Lord Ashley, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury, grandfather of the author of the Characteristics . This nobleman took up Locke and formed him into a man of business, a man of the world, and a politician, fit to become, as he did become, the philosophical champion of the Glorious Revolution. Locke falsifies...

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