The Moral Role of Government

According to Locke, political power is the natural power of each man collectively given up into the

hands of a designated body. The setting up of government is much less important, Locke thinks,

than this original social–political “compact.” A community surrenders some degree of its natural

rights in favor of government, which is better able to protect those rights than any man could alone.

Because government exists solely for the well-being of the community, any government that breaks

the compact can and should be replaced. The community has a moral obligation to revolt against or

otherwise replace any government that forgets that it exists only for the people’s benefit. Locke felt it

was important to closely examine public institutions and be clear about what functions were

legitimate and what areas of life were inappropriate for those institutions to participate in or exert

influence over. He also believed that determining the proper role of government would allow humans

to flourish as individuals and as societies, both materially and spiritually. Because God gave man the

ability to reason, the freedom that a properly executed government provides for humans amounts to

the fulfillment of the divine purpose for humanity. For Locke, the moral order of natural law is

permanent and self-perpetuating. Governments are only factors contributing to that moral order.

An Empirical Theory of Knowledge

For Locke, all knowledge comes exclusively through experience. He argues that at birth the mind is

a tabula rasa, or blank slate, that humans fill with ideas as they experience the world through the five

senses. Locke defines knowledge as the connection and agreement, or disagreement and

repugnancy, of the ideas humans form. From this definition it follows that our knowledge does not

extend beyond the scope of human ideas. In fact, it would mean that our knowledge is even

narrower than this description implies, because the connection between most simple human ideas is

unknown. Because ideas are limited by experience, and we cannot possibly experience everything

that exists in the world, our knowledge is further compromised. However, Locke asserts that though

our knowledge is necessarily limited in these ways, we can still be certain of some things. For

example, we have an intuitive and immediate knowledge of our own existence, even if we are

ignorant of the metaphysical essence of our souls. We also have a demonstrative knowledge of

God’s existence, though our understanding cannot fully comprehend who or what he is. We know

other things through sensation. We know that our ideas correspond to external realities because the

mind cannot invent such things without experience. A blind man, for example, would not be able to

form a concept of color. Therefore, those of us who have sight can reason that since we do perceive

colors, they must exist.

A Natural Foundation of Reason

Locke argues that God gave us our capacity for reason to aid us in the search for truth. As God’s

creations, we know that we must preserve ourselves. To help us, God created in us a natural

aversion to misery and a desire for happiness, so we avoid things that cause us pain and seek out

pleasure instead. We can reason that since we are all equally God’s children, God must want

everyone to be happy. If one person makes another unhappy by causing him pain, that person has

rejected God’s will. Therefore, each person has a duty to preserve other people as well as himself.

Recognizing the responsibility to preserve the rights of all humankind naturally leads to tolerance,

the notion that forms the basis for Locke’s belief in the separation of church and state. If we all must

come to discover the truth through reason, then no one man is naturally better able to discover truth

than any other man. For this reason, political leaders do not have the right to impose beliefs on the

people. Because everything we understand comes through experience and is translated by reason,

no outside force can make us understand something in conflict with our own ideas. Locke insists that

if men were to follow the government blindly, they would be surrendering their own reason and thus

violating God’s law, or natural law.

The Right to Private Property

The right to private property is the cornerstone of Locke’s political theory, encapsulating how each

man relates to God and to other men. Locke explains that man originally exists in a state of nature in

which he need answer only to the laws of nature. In this state of nature, men are free to do as they

please, so long as they preserve peace and preserve mankind in general. Because they have a right

to self-preservation, it follows that they have the right to those things that will help them to survive

and be happy. God has provided us with all the materials we need to pursue those ends, but these

natural resources are useless until men apply their efforts to them. For example, a field is useless

until it produces food, and no field will produce food until someone farms it.

Locke proposes that because all men own their bodies completely, any product of their physical

labor also belongs to them. Thus, when a man works on some good or material, he becomes the

owner of that good or material. The man who farms the land and has produced food owns the land

and the food that his labor created. The only restriction to private property is that, because God

wants all his children to be happy, no man can take possession of something if he harms another in

doing so. He cannot take possession of more than he can use, for example, because he would then

be wasting materials that might otherwise be used by another person. Unfortunately, the world is

afflicted by immoral men who violate these natural laws. By coming together in the social–political

compact of a community that can create and enforce laws, men are guaranteed better protection of

their property and other freedoms.

Analysis

Locke effectively shifted the focus of seventeenth-century philosophy from metaphysics to the more

basic problems of epistemology, or how people are able to acquire knowledge and understanding.

Locke rigorously addresses many different aspects of human understanding and of the mind’s

functions. His most striking innovation in this regard is his rejection of the theory that human beings

are born possessing innate knowledge, which philosophers such as Plato and Descartes had sought

to prove.

Locke replaces the theory of innate knowledge with his own signature concept, the tabula rasa, or

blank slate. Locke tries to demonstrate that we are born with no knowledge whatsoever—we are all

blank slates at birth—and that we can only know that things exist if we first experience them.

Locke builds a strong case against the existence of innate knowledge, but the model of knowledge

he proposes in its place is not without flaws. By emphasizing the necessity of experience as a

prerequisite for knowledge, Locke downplays the role of the mind and neglects to adequately

address how knowledge exists and is retained in the mind—in other words, how we remember

knowledge and what happens to our knowledge when we aren’t thinking about it and it is temporarily

out of our consciousness. While Locke is thorough in his discussion of what objects of experience

can be known, he leaves us with little idea of how the mind works to translate experiences into

knowledge and to combine certain experiences with other bits of knowledge to categorize and

interpret future information.

Locke presents “simple” ideas as a basic unit of human understanding, claiming that we can break

all of our experiences down into these simple, fundamental parts that cannot be broken down any

further. For example, the idea of a plain wooden chair can be broken down into simpler units that are

received by our minds through one sense, through multiple senses, through reflection, or through a

combination of sensation and reflection. “Chair” is thus perceived and understood by us in several

ways: as brown, as hard, as according to its function (to be sat upon), and as a certain shape that is

unique to the object “chair.” These simple ideas allow us to understand what “chair” is and to

recognize it when we come in contact with it.

Locke’s theory of primary and secondary qualities is based on the Corpuscular Hypothesis of Robert

Boyle, Locke’s friend and contemporary. According to the Corpuscular Hypothesis, which Locke

considered the best scientific picture of the world in his day, all matter is composed of tiny particles,

or corpuscles, which are too small to see individually and which are colorless, tasteless, soundless,

and odorless. The arrangement of these invisible particles of matter gives an object of perception

both its primary and secondary qualities. An object’s primary qualities include its size, shape, and

movement. They are primary in the sense that these qualities exist regardless of whether anyone

perceives them. Secondary qualities include color, odor, and taste, and they are secondary in the

sense that they may be perceived by observers of the object, but they are not inherent in the object.

For example, a rose’s shape and the way it grows are primary because they exist regardless of

whether they are observed, but the rose’s redness only exists for an observer under the right

conditions of lighting and if the observer’s eyesight is functioning normally. Locke suggests that

because we can explain everything using the existence only of corpuscles and primary qualities, we

have no reason to think that secondary qualities have any real basis in the world.

According to Locke, every idea is an object of some action of perception and thinking. An idea is an

immediate object of our thoughts, something we perceive and to which we are actively paying

attention. We also perceive some things without ever thinking about them, and these things do not

continue to exist in our minds because we have no reason to think about them or remember them.

The latter are nonimmediate objects. When we perceive an object’s secondary qualities, we are

actually perceiving something that does not exist outside of our minds. In each of these cases,

Locke would maintain that the act of perception always has an internal object—the thing that is

perceived exists in our mind. Moreover, the object of perception sometimes exists only in our minds.

One of the more confusing aspects of Locke’s discussion is the fact that perception and thinking are

sometimes, but not always, the same action. To add to the confusion, Locke claims in Book II that an

action of perception may have a nonimmediate object, not that it must have one. This makes it

difficult to pin down a rule for what perception is and isn’t, and how perception works.

We may find Locke’s discussion of essence, or substance, confusing because Locke himself doesn’t

seem convinced of its existence. Locke may have chosen to retain this concept for several possible

reasons. First, he seems to think that the idea of essence is necessary to make sense of our

language. Second, the concept of essence solves the problem of persistence through change: that

is, if a tree is just a bundle of ideas such as “tall,” “green,” “leaves,” and so on, what happens when a

tree is short and leafless? Does this new collection of qualities change the essence from “tree” to

something new? In Locke’s view, the essence persists through any change, remaining the same

despite changes in the object’s properties. A third reason Locke seem to be compelled to accept the

notion of essence is to explain what unifies ideas that occur at the same time, making them into a

single thing, distinct from any other thing. Essence helps clarify this unity, though Locke is not very

specific about how this works. For Locke, essence is what qualities are dependent on and exist in.

Locke’s view that our knowledge is much more limited than was previously supposed was shared by

other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers such as Descartes and Hume—even though

Locke differs sharply from Descartes about why that knowledge is limited. For Locke, however, the

fact that our knowledge is limited is a philosophical rather than practical matter. Locke points out that

the very fact that we do not take such skeptical doubts about the existence of the external world

seriously is a sign of how overwhelmingly probable we feel the existence of the world to be. The

overwhelming clarity of the idea of an external world, and the fact that it is confirmed by everybody

except madmen, is important to Locke in and of itself. Even so, Locke holds that we can never have

real knowledge when it comes to natural science. Rather than encouraging us to stop bothering with

science, Locke seems to say instead that we should be aware of its limitations.