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Locke: A Biography by Roger Woolhouse
(Cambridge: Cambridge University - Press, 2007). 528 pp.
CHRISTOPHER O. BLUM is Professor of Humanities
at Thomas More College in New Hampshire.
The early Fellows of the Royal Society of
London felt themselves to have embarked
upon a high adventure. Their motto,
Nullius in verba, would prove to be an easy
target for the satirist, but in the 1660s, it
signified all the boldness of youthful enterprise.
Let the benighted Scholastics across the
Channel take heed: the authority of Aristotle’s
terminology no longer had any hold upon
these intrepid explorers. From thralldom to
substance and quiddity, Bacon, “like Moses,
led us forth at last,” wrote Abraham Cowley,
the Royal Society’s first laureate, in an ode of
1667. These new students of Nature were
armed not with words, but with instruments:
new tools like the barometer, the vacuum
pump, and the microscope. Their hope, as
Robert Hooke expressed it in his 1665 manifesto
Micrographia, was that “by rectifying the
operations of the Senses,” these instruments
would put knowledge on a new and more
certain foundation.
John Locke was made Fellow of the Royal
Society in 1668 and was certainly not the least
of its luminaries. His Essay Concerning Human
Understanding [1690] might well be understood
as the completion of Bacon’s most
cherished project: to refashion the art of
reasoning in order firmly to anchor our knowledge
in the perception of the senses. To put
Locke himself under the microscope, as Professor
Woolhouse has done, is thus to peer into
the wellsprings and sources of the modern
mind. Yet the microscope, as an instrument,
raises its own difficulties. For as Hooke testified,
a razor to our eyes seems “neat,” while
under a microscope “we may observe its very
Edge to be of all kinds of shapes, except what
it should be.” And as with the razor’s edge, so
also with the sharp tool that was John Locke’s
mind. A careful inspection under magnification
reveals unexpected details, but risks the
loss of our grasp upon the whole.
Woolhouse’s micrography does reveal a
new Locke. The painstaking examination of
his correspondence, manuscript notes, and
journals sheds ample light on the character of
the man whom his last biographer, Maurice
Cranston, called “elusive” and “extremely
secretive.” Locke sometimes wrote in a shorthand
that approximated a code, employed a
sufficiently Jesuitical rhetoric as to be judged
“disingenuous” more than once by his admiring
biographer, and is known to have
experimented with invisible ink. His prominent
role in the Whig opposition to Charles
II and then James II is well-known; it earned
him more than one brush with the Crown
and an enduring habit of reserve. Piercing this
veil, Professor Woolhouse has revealed a
more human Locke, a man who knew what
it was to admire and to be admired, to take the
risk of offering his friendship, and to suffer
from such poor health for so long that one
would be inclined to call him frail had he not
achieved so much. It is the private Locke that
we see here: playfully writing under the name
“Atticus” to his Oxford valentine Elinor
Parry; later earnestly dreaming with his Parisian
friend Toinard of escaping the “wickedness
of our Europeans” by moving to “Carolina,
where there is a very fine island which
they have done me the honour to name after
me”; and, towards the close of his life, rhapsodizing
to the youthful radical Anthony
Collins “I thought myself pretty loose from
the world, but I feel you begin to fasten me to
it again. For you make my life, since I have
had your friendship, much more valuable to
me than it was before.”
Is it a warm and feeling John Locke that
Professor Woolhouse’s close inspection of his
papers has revealed? Perhaps that would be to
go too far. Yet it is true that the reticent
bachelor begins to melt away, to be replaced
by the awkward lover, the doting uncle, the
genial fireside companion, the lover of nature
who delighted in the annual return of the
swallows, and, especially, the elderly gentleman
concerned with the vagaries of his health.
And Professor Woolhouse conveys all of this
detail deftly. His Locke is a carefully crafted
narrative in the old style. There is neither
pleading here, nor any censoriousness. We
are expected to bring an interest in the
volume’s subject, and patiently to listen as the
author shares with us the product of his own.
As befits a study of a philosopher written by
one, there is much careful dissection of texts,
including the various drafts of the Two Treatises
and Essay. And though one reviewer has
found the work cumbersome to use and has
pointed out a number of minor factual errors
in its lengthy course, one ought surely to be
grateful that it is still possible to write a book
that discusses the ideas and the life of a serious
man with the gravity they deserve.1
There is, however, a certain stoniness to
Professor Woolhouse’s Locke. The volume
ends where it artfully begins, at Locke’s grave
in the small village church in High Laver,
Essex. Locke himself tells us there on the
epitaph he wrote for himself that he was “bred
a scholar” and was “contented with his modest
lot.” His biographer conveys, by way of emphasis,
the provision of Locke’s will that he be
buried “in a plain wooden coffin not covered
with cloth or any otherwise adorned.” And the
portrait that is framed by this image of the
disinterested philosopher’s tomb is similarly
drab. The brush strokes are very fine; the
vision is, indeed, microscopic. What is missing,
however, is the high drama of the life of
a gifted, principled, and active man who lived
through some of the most tumultuous decades
of English and European history.
Where ought one to locate John Locke
amidst the political affairs and intellectual
currents of his age? Surely, as Jonathan Israel
has argued, one sight-line ought to be fixed
upon the “radical Enlightenment” coming
out of the Dutch Republic.2 Another, doubtless,
should be the Catholic counter-offensive
against Protestantism, especially as represented
by the France of Louis XIV, which it
was the merit of Richard Ashcraft’s study of
Locke to have placed in the foreground.3 And
yet, Professor Woolhouse’s biography contains
not a single reference to either Spinoza
or Bossuet, who respectively enjoyed European
reputations as the leading representatives
of the new atheism and the resurgent
tradition that Locke himself so doggedly opposed.
Can this be an adequate account of a
man whose library at his death contained
some 4,000 volumes and who pined for the
conversations of London and for news from
the “commonwealth of letters”? Who was
offered rich preferment by England’s new
king just weeks after the Dutch invasion of
1688, when as yet he had published nothing
of significance and was known only as the
one-time secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury?
Who was soon and lastingly regarded as the
light of liberalism and one of the chief founders
of modern thought? There was surely more
to this Locke than the microscope reveals.
It may be readily acknowledged that the
great problem for both John Locke and his
age was the question of religious polity.
Whether that question be expressed in terms
of the problem of toleration or of the reunion
of the Protestant churches, it is all one. Bossuet,
Leibniz, Spinoza, and Locke all agreed: a
Europe divided by confessional warfare had
proven to be unstable, and a solution more fit
than short-lived truces and mutual persecution
needed to be found. From their opposing
solutions to the problem come the principal
political essays of the past three centuries.
Bossuet and Leibniz are the ancestors of
the varying monarchical, corporatist, and
(ironically) Christian Democratic regimes that
have laid down as a first principle that men are
best ruled when human laws are founded
upon divine ones. Spinoza, of course, is the
font of the myriad revolutionary regimes that
have begun with one form or another of the
premise that humanity is a law unto itself.
And what of Locke and of liberalism?
A biography, even a good one, cannot be
expected to offer the last word on the interpretation
of the thought of a man as complex
as Locke. Yet the middle course that Locke
attempted to steer deserves to be teased out in
its full context, a context that includes the
dragonnades of Poitou and the execution of
Oliver Plunkett, the anti-Trinitarian writings
of Isaac Newton and the poetry of John
Dryden, the polemics of Pierre Jurieu and the
correspondence on Christian unity between
Leibniz and Bossuet. Such a study would
offer a sharper sense of Locke’s religious and
political convictions and would show that the
cautious personal life chronicled by Professor
Woolhouse coexisted with a boldness of vision
and a willingness to innovate that made
Locke a true son of Luther and Bacon and by
no means the most timid of the Fellows of the
Royal Society.
NOTES
- See the review by John Milton, in Notre Dame Philosophical
Reviews, at www.ndpr.nd.edu. - See J. I. Israel, Radical
Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity,
1650-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),
especially chapter 24. - See Ashcraft’s Revolutionary Politics
and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986).
