questionable, that there is omnipotence and omniscience in God; and though I cannot have a clearer perception of anything, than that I am free-yet I cannot make freedom in man consistent with omnipotence and omniscience in God; though I am as fully persuaded of both as of any truths I most firmly assent to. And therefore I have long since given off the consideration of this question, resolving all into this short conclusion:-that if it be possible for God to make a free agent, then man is free; though I see not the way of it.' This is one way of expressing the mystery of immoral or irrational agency, within the divine or perfect system-moral disorder within the universal order-the moral government, which presupposes freedom, combined with the mechanical government, in which all events, including human actions, are passive examples of natural laws. The theological idea of the universe, as ultimately the orderly manifestation of rational purpose, but in ways that human understanding cannot elaborate in their infinite detail; and the merely physical idea of it, as purposeless causal mechanism-both lead our limited understanding at last into mystery. Reason surely finds the reasonable alternative in that mystery which satisfies the divine spirit in man, without necessarily contradicting the scientific understanding, which limits its judgments to the laws of sense. and real What Locke teaches about the necessary narrowness of Nominal man's knowledge of the attributes and the powers of sub- Essences. stances, or, in his own language, about 'simple ideas' in the 'coexistences' implied in the connotations of their class names, is seen, at another point of view, in the many passages of the Essay, especially in the Third Book, in which it is argued that a human understanding can be concerned only with 'nominal,' not with the 'real,' essences of individual substances1. 'Nominal essences' are those 'abstract' or general ideas of substances that men form for themselves: conformity to such ideas, on the part of real substances, when it is found by experience to exist, gives the conforming substances a right to the name appropriated 1 An edition of the Third Book of the Essay, with useful annotations, was published in 1881 by Mr. Ryland, to the 'abstract idea,' which the name thus connotes. Having that conformity, and having the nominal essence, mean the same thing. To be a man, or of the species man, and to have a right to the name man is the same thing. Since nothing can be a man [in our regard], or have a right [according to our conceptions] to the name man, but what has a conformity to the abstract idea the name man stands for in our mind; nor anything be a man, or have a right to the species man, but what has the essence of that species [i. e. its nominal essence];-it follows that the abstract idea for which the name stands, and the [nominal] essence of the species is one and the same.' It also follows, that the different essences of the different sorts of substances are 'inventions of the human understanding'; and the 'sorts,' created thus by our minds, are applied to actual things, according as the cap prepared by the inventors is found to fit. Take away the abstract idea according to which we sort individual substances, and which we attribute, as nominal essence, to objects in which attributes are found corresponding to our connotation of the name, and 'our thought of anything essential to them instantly vanishes.' We have no idea of their essence, except in an abstract idea that may be applicable to them, or that seems to be exemplified in them. It is impossible that anything deeper than the complex idea connoted by our class name should determine for us the species of substances; and this idea of ours is what Locke calls a 'nominal essence.' 'Why do we say, "This is a horse, and that a mule; this is an animal, and that an herb?" How comes any particular thing to be of this or that sort, but because it has that nominal essence; or, which is all one, agrees to that abstract idea that name is annexed to?' Hence 'our ranking and distinguishing natural substances into species consists in the nominal essences the mind [of man] makes, and not in the real essences to be found in the things themselves. It is evident that we sort and name substances by their nominal, and not by their real, essences. And these nominal essences are made by the mind [of man] and not by nature; for were they nature's workmanship, they could not be so various and different in several men as experience tells us they are Nature, in short, makes particular things, which differ in their molecular or other ultimate constitution-that is, in the real essences that make them be the particular things that they actually are; men connect with names their own abstract ideas, which they 'invent,' and they apply those names to particular substances that seem to correspond to abstract ideas or nominal essences thus formed by themselves, although the ideas must fall short of the deeper reality which belongs to the (by us) undiscoverable real essences. In those comparatively superficial 'inventions' of men consists, Locke would say, the whole business of genus and species-so far as a human understanding can be concerned with it. particular stances, We are ignorant of that molecular constitution of each The real body, which, as containing its real essence, makes each essences of be the individual body that it is; we are ignorant too of subthe ultimate constitution of self-conscious persons, and must bodies or not take for granted, Locke thinks, that consciousness cannot spirits. be among the attributes that coexist in matter, at least in certain material substances, such as the human organism. According to the Essay, the real essences of bodies, hidden in the primary qualities of their atomic constitution, outside human experience, cannot be made the principle according to which things are classed by men, or the ground of their scientific inferences. But men can form abstract notions, associate their notions with names, apply the names to things, and evolve logical conclusions in which the significant names are the terms, thus constructing 'sciences' that may be only verbal. Inasmuch as the real essence—that which makes each individual thing be the thing it really is-is hidden from human observation, the nominal essences that we are obliged to make our reasonings about things turn upon, and which connote only superficial qualities of the particular substances to which they are applied, afford no sufficient foundation for the absolute certainty that alone is entitled to be called knowledge. So-called 'science' of nature must thus be for ever, in a human understanding, provisional and hypothetical. It is progressive just so far as the nominal essences made by men approximate to the 1 See Bk. III. ch. vi. Nature is supernatural. real essences that are hid from man's view by inexorable conditions, imposed upon every human inquirer into the ultimate causes of the changes which material substances are always undergoing. The 'essences' with which man can be concerned are all of his own construction, and, as Bacon says, fall far short of the subtlety of nature. In regard to the natural universe of coexistences and changes, human understanding, according to Locke, is confined to judgments of probability, and must operate within what is at best a sphere of faith and hope, not of knowledge or absolute certainty. If Locke had thought out what is implied in his own idea of active power being properly spiritual, he might perhaps have seen that, through the eternal and universal presence of the divine activity in the cosmical system, God and nature are not mutually exclusive; that the contemporaneous and successive 'coexistences' of the changing ideas or phenomena, in which nature presents itself, are all signs and revelations of the supreme Reason and Will that eternally maintains this orderly system; according to laws, and for ends, that are only imperfectly comprehensible, in any knowledge of the realities that, like the human, is necessarily incomplete. Nature would thus be conceived as (so far) an incarnation of God. But Locke's point of view in the Essay always gives prominence to the external conditions under which knowledge and faith arise in a human understanding. It thus overlooks the innate spiritual reason that forms their background, and that is presupposed in the very laws according to which changes are physically regulated; and also in the 'real essences,' or individual 'natures,' with which things are charged, and by which their individualities are so determined as that each is what it is. Knowledge of abstract maxims. VII. HUMAN KNOWLEDGE OF IDEAS IN THEIR So much for Locke's account of the knowableness, by a human understanding, of mental propositions in which the agreement or disagreement of the ideas concerns, either 'real existences,' manifested in their simple ideas, or 'coexistence' of ideas, as qualities or powers of different sorts of substances. See next what the Essay teaches about the other two sorts of 'agreement or disagreement' of ideas -relation proper, and identity with diversity-in which the ideas are abstracted from real substances and their changes, and are viewed without respect to conditions of time and place, or to what happens in an experience of the concrete universe. Although propositions concerned with 'coexistences,' i. e. which present human interpretations of matters of fact, have not got absolute certainty-are tentative, though it may be progressive, hypotheses, that gradually approximate to ultimate truth-Locke finds that the case is different with purely abstract assertions that are independent of the contingencies of time and sense. in abstract ethics. The relations of the ideas that are abstracted from par- Illustrated in pure ticular substances, and liberated from bondage to the changes matheof sense, are, according to the Essay, the only ones in which a matics, and human understanding can reach general propositions that are unconditionally certain. The reason of this is, that a human understanding is the sole creator and preserver of the abstract ideas which enter into such propositions. In this way the assertions which they involve escape interference on the part of the powers, imperfectly calculable by the narrow experience of man, that determine the coexistences and sequences in nature. Those relations of our abstract ideas, as they form the largest field of our knowledge, so it is hard to determine how far it may extend; because the advances that are made in this part of our knowledge, depending on our sagacity in finding intermediate ideas that may show the relations and habitudes of ideas whose coexistence [in nature] is not considered, it is hard matter to tell when we are at an end in such discoveries.' (Bk. IV. ch. iii. § 18.) Accordingly, there is a prospect of indefinite advancement in pure mathematics, Locke's signal example of this sort of knowledge. But abstract ideas of quantity are not his only examples of the absolute certainty of abstract. knowledge. The [abstract] idea of a Supreme Being, infinite in power, goodness and wisdom, whose workmanship we are, and on whom we depend, and the [abstract] idea of ourselves as rational beings, being such as are clear |