3 Detailed evidence is lacking, but I suspect (and I believe that more patient study of the Edwards manuscripts than I have yet had leisure for would confirm) that Edwards' immediate and incisive reaction to his first reading of Locke came from the fact that he, being as he was preternaturally sensitive to the full implications of a concept, was more aware than most of his contemporaries, certainly more than any in New England, that Puritanism, and Protestantism in general, had from the beginning suffered from an ambivalent attitude on the question of innate ideas. The Harvard theses of the seveteenth century exhibit a ludicrous alternation of positions that probably reflects a fluctuation of opinion among the authorities. The ultimate reasons for this confusion are not far to seek. The body of the liberal arts in Puritan education included the Physics, which in turn included the doctrine of the nature and faculties of man, and was carried down intact from the medieval curriculum; its fundamental assertion was that nothing could be in the mind that was not first in the senses. On the other hand, the theological doctrine was derived from Calvin and ultimately from Augustine; though not always aware of the ultimate source, Puritan theology and homiletics, apart from Puritan Physics, always showed a tendency to assume that sensations merely aroused or occasioned ideas already latent in the mind and that learning was a species of recollection. There was so much of Augustine in even the rudest of Puritan parsons, who may have read no Augustine at first hand, that they were constantly telling their congregations in effect: “To give them as much credit as possible, words possess only sufficient efficacy to remind us in order that we may seek things, but not to exhibit things so that we may know them,” or “Referring, now to all things which we understand, we consult, not the speaker who utters words, but the guardian truth within the mind itself, because we have perhaps been reminded by words to do so” (De Magistro, Pars. 36, 38, trans. George G. Leckie, New York 1938). New England sermons, before Edwards, abound with ad hominem passages that tacitly assume even in fallen men the persistence of a guardian truth within that needed not so much instruction as awakening.
However, though seventeenth-century Puritanism was sadly muddled on the issue, the problem was not important, for the existential problems of conversion and the practical problems of polity and politics absorbed all attention. Whether innate ideas did or did not exist was an academic topic, fit for discussion at Harvard commencements but not in pulpits. But when Edwards went to Yale, he was sufficiently aware that his father and his father's colleagues were lamenting the inexplicable decay of New England piety; when he read Locke, in 1717, and realized that the peripatetic psychology still being taught in Yale and Harvard was hopelessly out of date, and that the new psychology made it indisputable that all ideas originate in sensation, he appears to have been the first in New England to realize that the old indecision was intolerable, that the superstructure of theology would forever rest on shaky foundations if it could not be whole-heartedly committed to the Lockean philosophy. Consequently he dedicated himself with a resolution that otherwise remains incomprehensible to exorcising from New England not only the Aristotelian psychology but also the last vestiges of the Augustinian notion that words serve only to excite an “interior light of truth by virtue of which he himself who is called the interior man is illumined” (Ibid., Par. 40). By demonstrating that words, “being voluntary signs, they cannot be voluntary signs imposed by him on things he knows not,” Locke prevented Edwards from continuing in the naïve belief of the Puritan founders that words alone could convey to hearers the actual ideas of which they were the signs; but by founding the existence of an idea in the mind upon the shock of sensation, Locke enlisted Edwards against the Augustinian tradition that the sign has meaning because “it finds me knowing the things of which it is the sign” (Ibid., Par. 33). Edwards' problem then became to make words capable not of evoking the idea itself, but of inciting a full awareness of the idea previously given through experience. Without awareness there could be no regeneration.
