TIBEVKA

REVIEW OF LOCKE.

From the American Quarterly Review for December 1832.

The life of John Locke, with Extracts from his Correspondence, Journals, and Common-place Books. By LORD KING. New Edition, with considerable additions. In two Volumes. London, 1830.

THE life of a philosopher, properly written should be an intellectual treasury. It should differ from all other biographies in certain and definable particulars, and in the same degree as its subject differs from all other subjects. What are some of these distinctive points of difference? Napoleon was a great and extraordinary man: for twenty years the eyes of half the world were fixed in steadfast astonishment upon his meteor flight. His bold projects, his unrivalled undertakings, and his achievements, which have beggared all others; his energy of mind, and his accommodation to bodily endurance; his rise, the meridian splendour of his exaltation, and his subsequent fall to the very nadir of weakness-to be the pensioned prisoner of the only foe he never conquered, have all struck the sense as they whirled before us like the shifting scenes of a play. What would be the characteristic of his written life, may be easily gathered. It would combine with the moving incidents of his career, a full view of the politics and military improvements of the age. Essentially it would be the history and exhibition of a great mind acting upon the elements of power-a development of physical strength. Byron was an extraordinary genius. There was strung within him a chord which vibrated in delicate unison with the tones of Apollo's lyre; but he was seemingly astraya wandering orb in the vault of heavenly poesy. He speaks of the dark and of the wild. He dwells in a solitude like his own

Manfred's "as an anchorite's, were it but holy;" "he cometh unto you with a tale which holdeth children from their play, and old men from the chimney corner." Every character that has been given of him or of his poetry, seems too tame. He delighted to graze along and there and anon poise upon the rugged points of the human heart. His lines were a transfusion of himself. In every thing he did, we see the workings of genius, and what he did was eccentric and of itself. His biography, then, would trace his own peculiar power as a vein in the body of poetry. It would embody with the aspirations of his muse, the entire character of poetry. In either of these cases-and we have taken opposite and remarkable instances of our own time for apt illustration-the biography is necessarily personal;-whatever is heaped above, the substratum is individuality. We do not, cannot forget the man and the genius; the deed of daring, the reach for fame, accompany the person; and as one courted our superstitions and wonderment, and the other unveiled the darkness of our own bosoms, so we seek to know the secret charm which encircled the warrior and the divinity which swelled the bosom of the bard. But in the life of a philosopher, he, as an individual, rarely comes into view. He is lost in the sublimity and intrinsic worth of his speculations. We forget the agent in the importance of labours which come directly home to our minds. We are solicitous to know the source of his power, but we soon drop him. His acts are the operations of mind upon mind-that modification of being which constitutes its noblest form. The field, therefore, enlarges itself, and the scope for the biographer is extended. He enters upon a new element of history-that of a mind. He examines not persons so much as things; though the life of an individual be the groundwork of his labours. He must analyze and combine the complex and diversified theories which are connected with the views of his subject. He must collate the numerous hypotheses which have gained a foothold among men, in order that he may show the more clearly the merits of him whose history he narrates; just as the heavy tactics of Frederick are necessary to be known, to comprehend the merits of those of the hero of Austerlitz. The biography of a philosopher should, therefore, differ in many particulars of its form from all other biographies.

The life of John Locke, written with a view to reproduce those principles of which he was the stern and uncompromising expounder, fixing them as standard, though not infallible canons by which the philosophical and political doctrines prevalent, both anterior and subsequent to his epocha, might be measured, compared, and adjudged-and by which the partial theories of the extremes of sensualism and idealism in psychology, and of intolerance and ultra-liberalism in politics, might be exposed; his life thus

written and pursued in the spirit of truth, of philosophy, and of sound criticism, would be a contribution to the whole world— whose property he has become. We would have the life of Locke the nucleus of these extended folds, the basis of this harmonious structure, because the dogmas of no other writer in modern times have exerted so wide and lasting and powerful an influence, relating, as they do, to many, very many of the practical questions which have since his time engaged the attention of individuals and of states. We would, moreover, have the field thus enlarged, that men might, from so favourable an opportunity, see and know at a glance, and as from a known point, how far and how rapidly they had advanced or retrograded in every direction-that they might determine the place of departure, the rate of progression or of retrogression, and the limits any where arrived at, if it so be, of the human intellect-and that, elevated upon this vantage ground, they might direct their energies with certainty to the same or other inquiries. In a life of this philosopher, thus written, the origin of ideas and the sources of knowledge, and hence the analysis of the elements of reason, the nature of consciousness, the doctrine of the metaphysic, the correlation of the infinite and the finite, which are so many outshoots from the parent trunk of intellectual philosophy, and yet convolved as so many of its branches; the whole theory of government, the origin and nature of political authority, the freedom and toleration in matters religious, the foundations of our holy faith; and the still more practical subjects of the method of education, of religious worship, of the elements of political economy, of the value and nature of money, of coin, of trade-all these topics and others, which it were tiresome to enumerate, but, nevertheless, of vital importance, would be so many centres of intellectual light emitting a noonday radiance on the reader's mind.

We have given the peculiar condition under which we would were written the life of the greatest practical philosopher that the sea-girt isle of our fathers has produced: and we advance it with the full conviction that it should and can be fulfilled. Biography itself is in the course of great development. A companion, rather than a handmaid, of civil history, it admits of almost every latitude of inquiry; like history, too, it has been changing its form as the principles of human nature have been more observed and studied, the process of human action laid more bare, and the facts of physical science collected and arranged. It is, or may be a philosophical collation of individual effort and experience, and of individual opinion. It is not legendary but critical; and it has become such by a natural and gradual evolution. Materials have accumulated; the world has grown old if not wise in experience. All that is past may afford illustrations and prophecies for the present and future; and the life and

opinions of one man, may, by a reciprocal metrology, be admeasured by and be the measure of all others. In respect of Locke, the facilities for such a critical life are numerous; his writings, which, as Bayle has taken occasion to note, "will make his name immortal," have been canvassed, criticised, and expurgated, more, perhaps, than those of any other modern writer; his opinions have afforded texts for the discussion of all the questiones vexata in the science of mind and of polity, as they have also been the starting point of numerous other systems. All that seems wanting, is a mind to collect together, to dispose, and accurately to quadrate these materials, and to take advantage of these means. *

It is not a part of our philosophy to despair of seeing the want of a full and critical life of this distinguished writer supplied. We have no ground of complaint, whatever we may have for regret as to the deficiency; for a certain point in science must be reached, before the life of any philosopher can be so fully given as we have ventured to prescribe. Discoveries of laws and principles are slow, and we should ask too much of the preceding age-vires ultra sortemque, were we to seek from it a complete history of Locke's labours, and of his contributions to our real knowledge. The time, however, is well nigh arrived, when it can and should be done.

But we cannot deem it other than a lamentable circumstance, that there is not a single popular and accessible account of the life of Locke in the English language. The only authentic narrative, is that published in French by his friend, the celebrated Leclerc, in the Bibliothèque Choisie, a short time after his death. Of course, even this could not be complete as to the historical incidents and private labours of Locke. No one, however, can read it without a pleasing and amiable emotion, for it is an offering at the shrine of friendship. It breathes the spirit of deep and manly affection, while from every part gush forth the involuntary effusions of a warm heart, in the contemplation of the virtues of a dear and tried friend. It had its inception in a mood german to that of the poet over Lycidas:

* We know not but that we may venture to say, that there is one individual, at least, to whom we could have intrusted the execution of such a work as we have alluded to above,-one whom principles, experience and mental culture, have elevated to a high place in the estimation of his contemporaries. Pauca quidam ingenii sui pignora dedit, sed egregia, sed admiranda! Need we add that we would have assigned it to the author of the elegant "Discourse on the study of the Law of Nature and of Nations", who has in his strictures on Locke's writings, displayed a judgment and an erudition alike suited to the task.