The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (27 page)

Then Locke offers his own deceptively simple answer to the mind’s source of knowledge. “Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from EXPERIENCE; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself.” This antidote to absolutes offered everyone a personal arena of independence.

Though experience was the source of knowledge, according to Locke, the
objects
of thought were always ideas. And so, paradoxically, Locke’s way of seeking was both the Way of Experience and the Way of Ideas. Locke saw no contradiction here because his two sources of ideas were both forms of experience. One was
sensation,
or external experience, those “sensible qualities” that external objects convey into the mind. And the other was
reflection,
or internal experience—“the perception of the operations of our own minds within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got, which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas which could not be had from things without.”

Locke significantly concludes his
Essay—
Book IV: Of Knowledge and Opinion—with miscellaneous observations on the degrees of knowledge and on a resounding cautionary note. Rounding out his Way of Ideas, he describes Knowledge as the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas. The perception of this agreement or disagreement he calls
intuitive knowledge.
“We can have knowledge no farther than we have ideas,” so he warns against unfounded universal propositions, the facile wisdom of maxims, and the extravagant uses of “self-evidences.” Not surprisingly, in one of his least original and least persuasive chapters he piously asserts, “We are capable of knowing certainly that there is a God.” But beware of “
enthusiasm,
which laying by reason, would set up revelation without it. Whereby in effect it takes away both reason and revelation, and substitutes in the room of it the ungrounded fancies of a man’s own brain.”

* * *

It was as an amateur—not as a professional philosopher—that Locke had come to philosophy. While Locke called his work on philosophy a mere “Essay,” on government he wrote “two Treatises.” Both are concerned with limits—the
Essay
on the limits of human knowledge, the
Treatises
on the proper limits of government. The
Two Treatises,
as Peter Laslett has shown, were not written after the fact to “justify” the Revolution of 1688. They originated as early as 1679, and were, in fact, a demand for a revolution still to happen, not a rationalization of revolution that had already happened.

The
Treatises,
like the
Essay,
begin with a negative. Just as “innate ideas” provide a foil against which to outline the true sources and limits of our understanding, so now in the first
Treatise,
“The False Principles and Foundation,” the Divine Right of Kings (in the writings of Sir Robert Filmer and his followers), provides Locke’s point of departure. The Second
Treatise
then is “An Essay concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil-Government.” It is surprising that a work so ill proportioned and labored, in a style so awkward, flat, and uninspired could itself have become an inspiration and justification of great Western political revolutions in succeeding centuries. It is the persuasive simplicity of the ideas that explains the enduring power of the work.

The power and originality of the Second
Treatise—
a gospel for Jefferson and the makers of the American Revolution of 1776—was its novel emphasis on
limits.
Just as the
Essay
was an antidote to absolutes in thought—against “enthusiasts” and champions of innate ideas—so the
Treatises
were an antidote to absolutes in government. Earlier political philosophers had enchanted with their visions of political perfection—Plato’s
Republic,
More’s
Utopia,
and Hobbes’s
Leviathan.
They all had the appeal of a constructive poetic imagination. Locke’s
Treatise
on
limits—
the proper and necessary limits of civil government—lacked the poetry of the grand vision. But it offered a commonsense prosaic frame for the Seeker, a plan for community where all could make their personal sallies.

Locke’s argument, though not beautifully logical or systematic, was appealing. Few of Locke’s ideas were original, but the form that he gave to mostly familiar ideas was simple and intelligible enough to encourage revolutions, to justify revolutions, and to help reshape institutions after revolutions. These cataclysmic possibilities may not have been entirely unimagined by Locke. He not only refused publicly to avow his authorship when the
Two Treatises
was published. He actually acted irritated when good friends “accused” him of authorship and demanded his confirmation.

In his
Two Treatises
Locke did not appeal especially to the facts of English history. But he did appeal to all human history, what he called the universal experience of mankind. He based his theory of government on a parable describing how government first came into being. He argued that it was not fair to object to his account of the origins of government just because there were no examples in recorded history of its happening in the way he suggested.

And if we may not suppose Men ever to have been in a State of Nature, because we hear not much of them in such a State, we may as well suppose the Armies of Salmanasser or Xerxes were never Children, because we hear little of them, till they were Men, and imbodied in Armies. Government is everywhere antecedent to Records, and Letters seldom come in amongst a People, till a long continuation of Civil Society has, by other more necessary Arts provided for their Safety, Ease, and Plenty. And then they begin to look after the History of their Founders, and search into their original, when they have out-lived the memory of it.

In that early preliterate era before government, men everywhere lived in a State of Nature. And, as Josoph Acosta’s history of the Indies had recently shown, the people of Peru had once actually lived with “no Government at all.” Men were then free to live as they pleased, “but by consent were all equal, till by the same consent they set Rulers over themselves. So that their Politick Societies all began from a voluntary Union, and the mutual agreement of Men freely acting in the choice of their Governours, and forms of Government.” All depended on the original “State of Nature.”

If Locke’s history (or prehistory!) was speculative, it nevertheless purported to be history. And his explanation was a momentous departure from earlier ways of justifying government. Like Filmer’s Divine Right, those accounts generally had traced the origins of political power to God’s delegation of authority to sacred persons. Such authority could be revoked only by its donor, who was God. But Locke’s civil government was wholly a matter of this world, founded in human convenience, in the people’s need and desire to preserve their lives, liberty, and property. These agents of the people, creatures of the people’s consent, then held their authority within the strict limits under which it had been given. So, if a government ceased to satisfy its earthly creators, its authority was dissolved. Experience, the foundation of Locke’s knowledge, was equally the basis of his civil government. To that earliest experience he traced majority rule.

Voltaire’s Summons to Civilization

When we talk of the history of “civilization,” we are speaking in a thoroughly modern vocabulary. For “Civilization” is our legacy from the French Enlightenment—the Age of Voltaire. It is our inheritance from the way Voltaire (1694-1778) and other French
philosophes
saw human achievements (and weaknesses) in their time.

At 9:30 A.M. on November 1, 1755, an earthquake shook Lisbon, a commercial center of the continent, killing some fifteen thousand people and leaving the city in ruins. In that catastrophe the wise men of Portugal and Europe saw the wrath of God—His Providence in punishing a profligate people’s sins. They even saw meaning in the few sacred images that had been spared. And they saw strangely confirmed the devout dogma of Alexander Pope’s recent (1732-34)
Essay on Man:

All Nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear: Whatever IS, is RIGHT.

Voltaire the Seeker promptly refuted that pious optimism in his long poem
The Lisbon Earthquake: An inquiry into the Maxim, “Whatever is, is right.”
A few years later, Voltaire’s classic tale depicted his mock-hero Candide with his companion Pangloss, the world’s greatest philosopher, in Lisbon on that disastrous morning.

Pangloss seized the opportunity to console the dying inhabitants “by assuring them that things could not be otherwise. ‘For,’ said he, ‘all this is for the best; for, if there is a volcano at Lisbon, it cannot be anywhere else; for it is impossible that things should not be where they are; for all is well.’ ” Then, as Voltaire reports in
Candide,
the wise men of Lisbon, in an earnest effort to prevent another earthquake, “could discover no more efficacious way . . . than by giving the people a splendid
auto da fé.
It was decided by the University of Coimbra that the sight of several persons being slowly burned in great ceremony is an infallible secret for preventing earthquakes.” As part of this entertaining ceremony the irrepressible Pangloss was hanged and Candide was flogged to the rhythm of lovely plainsong music. In his Preface to his poem on the earthquake, Voltaire maintained “that ancient and sad truth that there is evil upon earth.” “If the various evils by which man is overwhelmed end in general good, all civilized nations have been wrong in endeavoring to trace out the origin of moral and physical evil.”

Voltaire is most widely quoted for a tragic view of history—“that history in general is a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes, among which we now and then meet with a few virtues, and some happy times; as we sometimes see a few scattered huts in a barren desert.” But in retrospect, this pessimism is not what Voltaire the Seeker has added to our mosaic of belief. Though a passionate skeptic and enemy of religious dogma and fanaticism, Voltaire should be remembered as a long-term optimist. A hallmark of this optimism is Voltaire’s notion of “civilization.” Surprisingly, civilization in its modern sense does not enter our historical thought until Voltaire’s day, and is in large part due to what he and his fellow
philosophes
saw and wrote about in their time.

On March 23, 1772, James Boswell reports, he tried to persuade Dr. Johnson to admit the noun “civilization” in our modern sense into his landmark
Dictionary of the English Language.
Still Dr. Johnson would admit the word only in the technical legal sense of “A law, act of justice, or judgment, which renders a criminal process civil.”

He would not admit
civilization,
but only
civility.
With great deference to him, I thought
civilization,
from
to civilize,
better in the sense opposed to barbarity, than civility.

In the lexicon of Voltaire’s French Enlightenment, civilization was coming to be a name for the enlightened state of which all mankind was capable. In his own lifetime, Voltaire was witnessing in France a climax of civilization and in Russia he was seeing the process by which civilization came to other countries.

The ancient Greeks, too, had distinguished themselves from the Barbarians. But for them the Barbarians (
Barbaros
) were people who spoke any language other than Greek. Only after the Persian wars did “Barbarism” denote the condition of all vulgar and uncultivated people. This was the Greek way of expressing the superiority of Greeks to all other nations. Originally they included the Romans, with other non-Hellenic people, among the Barbarians. But after the Roman conquest of Greece, the Romans eventually took a leaf from Greek chauvinism and used “barbarian” to describe nations outside the orbit of Greco-Roman language and culture. Cicero (106-43 B.C.) used “barbarians” to describe all savage, rude, or uncultivated peoples.

For Voltaire, then, barbarism was no chauvinistic term of contempt. Instead it simply described the failure of any people to fulfill the possibilities of all humankind—“that reason and human industry will continue to make further progress.” He was a bold young man of twenty-one at Louis XIV’s death. Voltaire’s brilliant
Age of Louis XIV,
on which he spent some twenty years and which he called his lifework, was seen by some as a work of sheer French patriotism. But for Voltaire it described a climax of the human spirit (
l’esprit humain
). The Age of Louis XIV was the latest and greatest of the “four happy ages when the arts were brought to perfection and which, marking an era of the greatness of the human mind, are an example to posterity.”

Civilization, then, according to Voltaire, was no monopoly of France, nor of any one people or language. The first of the three earlier happy ages was classical Greece in the time of “Philip and Alexander, or rather of Pericles, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Plato, Apelles, Phidias, Praxiteles . . . the rest of the known world being in a barbarous state.” The second was the era of Caesar and Augustus, “distinguished by the names of Lucretius, Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Varro and Vitruvius.” The third was the Renaissance, “the hour of Italy’s glory.” “The arts, for ever transplanted from Greece to Italy, fell on favourable ground, where they flourished immediately. France, England, Germany, and Spain, in their turn, desired the possession of these fruits.” “The fourth age is that which we call the age of Louis XIV; and it is perhaps of the four the one which most nearly approaches perfection.” Enriched by the earlier discoveries, it accomplished more than the other three together. “All the arts, it is true, did not progress further than they had under the Medici, under Augustus or under Alexander; but human reason in general was brought to perfection.” Finally “rational philosophy” came to light and spread its beneficent influence to England, Germany, Russia, and a revived Italy.