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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Like many of his contemporaries, John Locke was concerned with the problems inherent in both the communication and the recovery of an author's meaning. Language and its proper use was of the utmost significance for him. He was in no doubt that God had granted language to man to act as ‘the great Instrument, and common Tye of Society’, but though God-given, language as man had used it had not proved an unmitigated blessing:
he that shall well consider the Errors and Obscurity, the Mistakes and Confusion, that is spread in the World by an ill use of Words, will find some reason to doubt, whether Language, as it has been employ'd, has contributed more to the improvement or hindrance of Knowledge amongst Mankind.
1 Locke, John, An essay concerning human understanding, Nidditch, Peter H. (ed.) (Oxford, 1975), III, i, 1.Google Scholar
2 Ibid. III, xi, 4.
3 Ibid. III, xi, 11.
4 Any list of recent authors who have contributed significantly to discussions of methodology in the history of ideas must include Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock. Apart from their more theoretical works they have given practical demonstrations of how properly historical understandings may be achieved. See Skinner, Quentin, ‘The principles and practice of opposition: the case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole’, in Historical perspectives - studies in English thought and society, McKendrick, Neil (ed.) (London, 1974), pp. 93–128Google Scholar, and Pocock, J. G. A. (ed.), The political works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977)Google Scholar. For an exemplary study in achieving historical understanding of a text see also Thomas, Keith, ‘The social origins of Hobbes's political thought’, in Brown, K. C. (ed.), Hobbes studies (Harvard, 1965).Google Scholar
5 See, for example, Essay, III, x, 2–6.
6 By ‘imagination’ Bacon meant that faculty of the soul used in the study of poetry, and one of the three ‘fountains of learning’. The advancement of learning (Oxford, 1960)Google Scholar, II, i, I. To Hobbes, , ‘Imagination…is nothing but decaying sense’. Leviathan, Macpherson, C. B. (ed.) (Harmonds-worth, 1968), p. 88Google Scholar. For Winstanley, Gerrard, ‘imagination’ was the effect of the distortion of reason and sense by human selfishness. The works of Gerrard Winstanley, Sabine, G. H. (ed.) (New York, 1965), p. 252Google Scholar. For something of the range of contemporary uses of ‘property’, see Richards, , Mulligan, and Graham, , ‘“Property” and “People” in the political thought of Locke and some contemporaries’, Journal of History of Ideas, XLII (1981).Google Scholar
7 Essay, III, xi, 10.
8 Edmund Waller, for one, thought part of the problem lay in the use of the vernacular. He asked: ‘Of English Verse’, lines 5–6, 13–16.
9 Bacon had written that ‘the high and formal discussions of learned men end oftentimes in disputes about words and names; with which…it would be more prudent to begin’. The New Organon (Indianapolis, 1960), I, lixGoogle Scholar. Hobbes, in mid-century, explained that ‘men register their thoughts wrong, by the inconstancy of the signification of their words’. Leviathan, p. 102. Locke wrote: ‘Words are, in their own nature, so doubtful and obscure, their signification for the most part so uncertain and undetermined, which men ever designedly have in their use of them increased, that if, in our meditations, our thoughts busy themselves about words, and stick at the names of things, it is odds but they are misled or confounded.’ ‘Study during a journey’, in Sir King, Peter, Life and letters of John Locke (Burt Franklin, reprint, N.Y., 1972), p. 105.Google Scholar
10 Birch, Thomas, The history of the Royal Society of London (London, 1756–1757, repr. Johnson Reprint, N.Y., 1978), I, 409.Google Scholar
11 Sprat, Thomas, The history of the Royal Society (repr. St Louis, London, 1959), pp. 40, 113.Google Scholar
12 An abstract of Dr Wilkins’ essay, in The mathematical and philosophical works of the Right Reverend John Wilkins (London, 1802), p. 249Google Scholar. Wilkins, John, Towards a real character and a philosophic language (London, 1668)Google Scholar, was sponsored by and presented to the Royal Society. It aroused great interest among the virtuosi (see Hall, A. R. and Hall, M. B. (eds.), The correspondence of Henry Oldenburg (University of Wisconsin Press, 1966)Google Scholar, IV passim) and was known to Locke, who also knew Sprat's work. Long, P., ‘Summary of the Catalogue of the Lovelace Collection of Papers of John Locke’, Oxf. Bibliog. Soc, New Series, VI (1953), 41.Google Scholar
13 Essay, III, x, 8.
14 Ibid. III, x, 9.
15 Ibid. III, x, 3.
16 Ibid. III, x, 15.
17 Ibid. III, x, 14.
18 Ibid. III, x, 6.
19 Ibid. III, v, 16.
20 Ibid. II, xiii, 18–19.
21 Ibid. II, xxiii, 2–3.
22 Ibid. II, xiii, 20.
23 Ibid. II, xxiii, 2.
24 Ayers, M. R., ‘The ideas of power and substance in Locke's philosophy’, in Locke on human understanding, Tipton, I. C. (ed.) (Oxford, 1977), p. 94.Google Scholar
25 Locke, Essay, II, xxiii, 2.
26 Ibid. II, xxiii, 6.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid. II, xxiii, 7.
29 Ibid. II, xxiii, 1.
30 Bennett, Jonathan, Locke, Berkeley and Hume (Oxford, 1971), pp. 59–77.Google Scholar
31 Locke, Essay, II, viii, 9.
32 Ibid. II, viii, esp. 9–24; II, xxiii, 12–16; III, iii, 17 and IV, iii, 14–16; see also Barger, Bill, Locke on substance (Sheffield Press, California, 1976), p. 111.Google Scholar
33 Locke studied with Boyle at Oxford in the late 1650s and early 1660s, together they attended Peter Stael's lectures and in 1665 they corresponded about a wide range of scientific observations. Beer, S. de (ed.), The correspondence of John Locke (Oxford, 1976), 1, 275, 279.Google Scholar
34 Hall, Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, III, 61, 67.
35 Birch, T. (ed.), The works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (London, 1772), 1, 118–19; III. 3–30; IV, 68–78.Google Scholar
36 Locke, Essay, IV, i—iii.
37 Ibid. II, xxiii, 11–12.
38 Ibid. II, xxiii, 12.
39 Ibid. II, xxiii, 13.
40 Ibid. III, x, 8.
41 Ibid. III, iii, 15.
42 Ibid. III, iii, 17.
43 Ibid. III, iii, 13.
44 Ibid. III, iii, 17.
45 Ibid. III, iii, 18.
46 Ibid. III, iii, 15.
47 Ibid. III, iii, 17.
48 Mackie, J. L., Problems from Locke (Oxford, 1976), pp. 86–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
49 Ibid. p. 75.
50 Locke, Essay, III, x, 2.
51 Ibid. III, viii, 2.
52 Ayers, ‘The ideas of power and substance…’, p. 80.
53 Locke, Essay, II, xiii, 19.
54 Ibid. II, xiii, 18.
55 Ibid. III, iii, 17.
56 Wotton, William, Reflections upon ancient and modern learning (1694, reissued George Olms, Hildesheim, 1968), p. 158.Google Scholar
57 For a general discussion of the seventeenth-century scholastic curriculum see Costello, William T., The scholastic curriculum at early seventeenth-century Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass., 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Thomas, I., ‘Medieval aftermath: Oxford logic and logicians of the seventeenth century’, Oxford studies presented to Daniel Callus (Oxford Historical Association, new series, XVI, Oxford, 1959–1960), pp. 297–311.Google Scholar
58 Kenney, W. Henry, S.J., ‘John Locke and the Oxford training in logic and metaphysics’, Ph.D. thesis, St Louis University, St Louis (1959).Google Scholar
59 Locke, Essay, II, xiii, 19.
60 Manuductio ad logicam (Oxford, 1622)Google Scholar cited in Kenney, , ‘John Locke’, p. 220. Logicae artis compendium, p. 239.Google Scholar
61 John Combach, Metaphysicorum libri duo, p. 228; Christoph Scheibler, Epitome Logica, p. 240.
62 Good, Thomas, A brief English tract of logick (London, 1677), p. 6Google Scholar. Among the substances one might see Good listed not only a man, but also an Angel.
63 Gott, Samuel, The divine history of the genesis of the world (1670), pp. 36–7.Google Scholar
64 Kenney, ‘John Locke’, pp. 229–45.
65 Ibid. p. 224.
66 ‘[Substance is characterised by] man who is the fundament for whiteness… and other accidents…because he is supported by nothing else.’ Ibid. p. 245.
67 Ibid. p. 235.
68 Ibid. pp. 232–3.
69 Ibid. p. 267. Kenney concludes his investigation of Locke's sources with a claim that they ‘had already been dealing with substance in very nearly the same way [as Locke]’. But as this article has argued, this is to miss what Locke was attempting to do with his own usages.
70 Hale, Matthew, The primitive organization of mankind (London, 1677), p. 9.Google Scholar
71 Ibid. p. 22.
72 The philosophical writings of Henry More, McKinnon, Flora Isabel (ed.) (New York, 1925, reprinted 1969), pp. 62–3, 261, 281Google Scholar; Cudworth, Ralph, The true intellectual system of the universe (1678, reprinted Fromann Verlag, 1964), pp. 18–20Google Scholar. See also Charleton, Walter, The darkness of atheism dispelled (1652), p. 22Google Scholar; ‘[substance] is a thing, wherein either Formally, or Eminently…something which we perceive…hath its necessary existence’, emphasising the Aristotelian formal causal qualities of substance.
73 Burthogge, Richard, Organum vetus et novum (1678), in The philosophical writings of Richard Burthogge, Landes, Margaret W. (ed.) (London, 1921), pp. 5–50.Google Scholar
74 Ibid.An essay upon reason, p. 79.
75 Ibid. pp. 79–86, 93–5, 97–107.
76 Arnauld, Antoine, The art of thinking, Dickoff, James (ed.) (Indianapolis, 1964).Google Scholar
77 Keynes, J. M., A treatise on probability (London, 1948), p. 80.Google Scholar
78 Cranston, Maurice, John Locke, a biography (London, 1957), p. 99.Google Scholar
79 Arnauld, The art of thinking, p. 39.
80 Ibid. p. 40. Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae (1662), III, 306–406 discussed spiritual substance in Cartesian terms as clearly perceived.
81 Gassendi addressed Descartes as ‘O, Soul’, to which Descartes later responded with ‘O, Flesh’. The philosophical works of Descartes, Haldane, Elizabeth and Ross, G. R. T. (eds.) (Cambridge, 1934). PP. 147–208.Google Scholar
82 Barger, Locke on substance, p. 111 and passim.
83 There is a salutary caution for all historians of ideas somewhere in the case of Jacob Boehme, who declared that without the Holy Spirit which had moved him to write, even he could not understand what he had previously written. ‘When he parteth from me, I know nothing but the elementary and earthly things of this world.’ The Aurora, transl. Sparrow, John (London, 1914), viii, 19.Google Scholar
84 This recurrent preference in the seventeeth century for redefinition rather than abandonment of unsatisfactory terms lends force to J. G. A. Pocock's advice that, for the historian of ideas, the first task is ‘to identify the “language” or “vocabulary” with and within which the author operated’. What this paper, however, leaves with more uncertain status is his ensuing and apparently prescriptive observation that the historian should then ‘show how it functioned paradigmatically to prescribe what he might say and how he might say it’. Pocock, J. G. A., Politics, language and time (London, 1973), p. 25.Google Scholar
86 Stillingfleet, Edward, A discourse in vindication of the doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1690), pp. 1–8Google Scholar; Bayle, Pierre, Réponse aux questions d’un provincial (Rotterdam, 1704–1707), IV, 219Google Scholar; Sherlock, William, A Defense of Dr. Sherlock's Notion of a Trinity in Unity (London, 1694), p. 4Google Scholar. For a discussion of An essay's reception, see Yolton, John, John Locke and the way of ideas (Oxford, 1956), pp. 126–48.Google Scholar
86 The definition of ‘meaning’ which underpins the discussion of this paper owes a great deal to that H. P. Grice once offered: ‘For A to mean something by x…A must intend to induce by x a belief in an audience and he must also intend his utterance to be recognized as so intended.’ ‘Meaning’, Philosophical Review, LXVI (1957), 3. Grice has gone on to argue that such an ‘occasion meaning’ is the basic notion, capable of being elucidated from the statement itself without further reference to possibly more conventional meanings within the language. ‘Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning and Word Meaning’, Foundations of Language, IV (1968), 225–42Google Scholar. Grice's work is mentioned here because his criteria for ‘occasion meaning’ are apposite for the point being made about Locke's writing on ‘substance’ and ‘essence’. What has been demonstrated is the way in which Locke's intended meanings for substance are recoverable from the text, and only from the text.
87 The works of John Locke (London, 1812), VIII, v.Google Scholar
88 Ibid. p. x.
89 Ibid. pp. xiv-xvii.
90 Ibid. p. xiv.
91 Ibid. p. xv.
92 Quentin Skinner has been particularly influential in promoting the concept of the role of prevailing linguistic conventions in determining the meaning of a historical text. It should be noted, however, that more recently Skinner has modified his position on the prescriptive role of contextualism, and suggests that texts should rather be located within a scale ranging from ‘strongly heteronomous’ to ‘strongly autonomous’. The former would rely more, the latter less, upon prevailing conventions. See ‘Hermeneutics and the role of history’, New Literary History, VII (1977), 209–32Google Scholar. The import of this paper is strongly to endorse his recognition of the scope for autonomous statements, and that not only within the literary genres which Skinner specifically discussed in that article, but also in other historical texts.
