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SEASFAPE thH FOG: ANALUGE, LEHTAlNTY AND
thlfllfiiAL EXERHHSAHS JN Jtflflfi LOChE’S
AN ESSAY CUNCEHNlNG HUMAN tNDEHSTANUlNG

 

Philip Keith Vogt

A THESlS

Submitted to
Michigan State Univeristy
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of History

1990

ABSTRACT

SEASCAPE WITH FOG: ANALOGY, CERTAINTY AND
CULTURAL EXEMPLARS IN JOHN LOCKE’S
AN ESSAY CONCERNlNG HUMAN UNDERSTANDING

By

Philip Keith Vogt

The common and contradictory suppositions that John
Locke’s epistemology is accurately summarized by the metaphor
of the tabula rasa and that Locke opposed metaphysical
discourse are weighed against a rereading of An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding inspired by the works of Hans
Aarsleff and Dominick LaCapra. Locke’s explicit defense at
Book IV of metaphorical usage in metaphysical discourse is
acknowledged and the logical function of Lockean metaphors is
likened to that of Platonic myths. The role in the Essay of
the tabula rasa is shown to have been relatively
inconsequential and the metaphor of the ship is offered
instead as a truer representation of Locke’s probabilistic
theory of mind.

ii

Copyright by
PHILIP KEITH VOGT

1990

iii

To my sisters, Karen and Becky, and my brother, Sam.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This essay benefitted greatly from my course work and
conversations with Dr. Josef Konvitz, a scholar of remarkable
erudition. The titles he brought to my attention ultimately
accounted for nearly one fourth of the bibliography. As
valuable as were his criticisms, more important still was his
patient receptivity to my ideas and the contribution that that
made to bolstering my confidence in my own originality.

Dr. David LoRomer’s reading of my rough draft was

invaluable. His criticism was the dynamite that broke what,
in the summer of 1990, was looking very much like an
absolutely intractable mental block. His advice that I free

myself from slavish attention to secondary sources and
concentrate on my own insights is deferred to future projects,
but not forgotten.

Finally, I must acknowledge a unique debt to my advisor,
Dr. Peter Vinten-Johansen. I cannot imagine how I might have
completed this project without the emotional support he has
given me since my days as an undergraduate and the
intellectual freedom that he unfailingly allows me. As this
project was repeatedly preempted by more urgent deadlines over
nearly a two—year period, I always found that when I was ready
to return to it, it was still fresh in his mind. He embodies
a great deal of the continuity in my academic career. At a
time when professional demands make true mentorship rare, 1 am
one of the happy few.

No image from John Locke’s philosophical work is as
widely recognized as that of the white paper, the famous

tabula rasa. But calls by Dominick LaCapra and other

 

similarly-minded theorists of history for a rereading of such

"great texts” as An Essay Concerning Human Understanding raise

 

the problem of whether this particular metaphor of mind is a
suitable synecdoche for the complete philosophy of mind that

Locke advances in the Essay.1 The same problem emerges, too,

 

from reappraisals by historians of science of what was
actually entailed in the development of the "empirical method"
by an intellectual circle centered on the Royal Society that
included Locke, and again, from reevaluations by cultural
historians of the link between symbolism within texts and the
symbol systems of the societies in which texts are produced.
On close inspection, the white paper turns out to be a far
less revealing and less integral part of the overall argument
of the Essay than another Lockean metaphor, that of the ship.
The long-standing emphasis on the white paper suits those who
reduce Locke’s epistemology to a simplistic empiricism, while
the more frequently employed ship metaphor confronts us with
the probabilistic theory of mind and perception that, more and
more, Locke is rightly given credit for developing.
Furthermore, by allowing the ship to supplant the white paper,
we not only address the question of what constitutes a

"proper" reading of this particular multifaceted text; we also

 

lDominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History:
Texts, Contexts, Language (Cornell University Press: lthaca
and London. 1983).

 

 

2
find that the ship metaphor carries us further than the white
paper toward explaining how a Scientific Revolution and an
Enlightenment that are each, in their own right, undergoing
reevaluation might have been linked, thereby providing one
answer to the question of what, if any, historical
significance a modern corrective to traditional readings of an
influential text might venture to claim. As Hans Aarsleff has
shown, the traditional readings we correct turn out to be
those first produced long after the fact of the Essay’s
publication by commentators hostile to the very intellectual
milieu that initially received it so enthusiastically.2
Jettison their distortions and Locke’s ship arrives at last
with its manifest full, not blank.

This is not to say that such a manifest would list none
of the empiricism that most have thought was the Essay’s sole
cargo. To say that Locke’s epistemology is probabilistic is to
admit instead that contraband rationalism also lies stowed
below deck. "[Locke’s] empiricism was of a peculiar kind,"
wrote Maurice Cranston in an early (1957) acknowledgement of
the Essay’s multidimensionality, "for he also entertained
several notions which are all characteristic of rationalism --
"rationalism," that is, which is by definition antithetical to
empiricism." Believing that Locke’s analysis was clouded by

his clumsy synthesis of these two supposedly-incompatible

 

2Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the
Study of Language and Intellectual History (University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. 1982).

3
perspectives, Cranston accused Locke of being "guilty of the
very abuses of language against which he writes so
forcefully," that is, of accepting uncritically the crucial
distinction between primary and secondary qualities and of
thereby failing to heed, in his discussion of the adequacy of

language, the skepticism that elsewhere in the Essay runs

 

strong: "By insisting that general words must stand for
abstract ideas, Locke blinds himself to the fact, which
elsewhere he comes very close to seeing, that general words do
not "stand" for anything at all."3 The best that Cranston can
say for Locke is that at least one modern historian, Gilbert
Ryle, credited him with "adumbrating" a "scientific
probability" that might have served as an alternative to
either a dogmatic defense of the reliability of language or
total skepticism. Still, Cranston implies that this was
overly-generous, that Ryle was offering a "twentieth-century

case for the greatness of Locke": "twentieth-century" meaning,

 

3Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (Oxford
University Press: Oxford and New York. 1985), pp. 264-278.
The distinction between primary and secondary qualities
developed from the ancient problem of knowing which
perceptions were accurate and which were deceptive. Primary
qualities of objects were those which actually inhered in the
objects themselves, while secondary qualities were generated
by the human perceptive faculty. Cranston is arguing that
Locke’s extensive critique of the variability of language in
its encounter with the (evident) universe of secondary
phenomena, not to mention the many abuses to which language is
routinely subjected, should have necessitated the admission
that words are, as we might say today, self—referential, a far
more radical conclusion than Aarsleff’s point that Locke, like
Saussure, rejects the "double conformity" of words to objects
and to ideas (Aarsleff, p. 25; see also Essay lI,xxxii,8 and
footnotes 10, 11 and 12, below).

 

 

4
one supposes, post-Kantian or even relativistic, the point
being that Ryle’s apology was soft on an empiricism that
Cranston felt could only become muddled by contact with
rationalism.4

Peter Nidditch, editor of a recent (1975) edition of the
Essay that by most accounts is the best yet, chooses the
course opposite from Cranston’s and simply defers to the
latter-day consensus in order to sidestep entirely the issue
of whether the epistemology of the Essay is that of the

rationalists or the empiricists: "The Essay presents, for the

 

first time, a systematic, detailed, reasoned, and wide—ranging
philosophy of mind and cognition whose thrust, so far as it is
in line with the future rather than the past, is empiricist
(italics mine)."5 Similarly, Peter Briggs points out the
deliberate linkage between Locke’s theory of language and his
overall epistemology that refutes Cranston’s charge of
clumsiness -- "the fallibilities of language and the failures
of man’s understanding [in the Essay] were related and
reciprocal" -— but ultimately returns to the familiar shelter
to be found in reading the Essay as empiricism’s seminal text:
an empiricism defined, now, as the "sanative contact with the
real world which differentiates Locke’s definition of

knowledge from his definition of madness."6 Also accepting

 

4Cranston, Locke, pp. 277-278.

5Peter H. Nidditch, "Introduction" to John Locke, Ag
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Ed. Peter H. Nidditch.
Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York. 1975), p. viii.
All direct citations from the Essay in this paper are taken
from Nidditch’s edition.

5

the common characterization of the Essay as straightforwardly

 

empiricist in its plan, S.H. Clark discovers therein what he
imagines to be an embarrassing Platonic element, "a potent
residual idealism” that "allows [Locke] . . . vicarious access
to an enhancement that his epistemology rigorously excludes."
This putative "enchancement" consists of a supersensual realm
populated by the "spirits" and "angels" whose appearance in
the Essay (unconceded by Clark) is no less important for being
both figurative and brief, as well as by the beneficent diety
who appears more frequently and about whom Locke is

unquestionably in earnest. It also includes Locke’s "ocular

vocabulary,’ his 'vast number of psychic metaphors" and his
many "archetypes" and analogies, none of which reproduces the
evidence of the senses with the slavish literalism thought
appropriate to an empiricist text. Clark appears to be
offended by the misanthropy, not to mention the intellectual

pusillanimity, of introducing into the analysis images

partially or wholly unsubstantiated by argument, "habitual

 

6Peter M. Briggs, "Locke’s Essay and the Strategies
of Eighteenth-Century English Satire" in Studies in
Eighteenth-Century Culture (v. 10. 1981), pp. 138-139. The
passage cited by Briggs (11,xi,13) in fact deals with
deduction, not perception, explaining the difference between
reasoning from false premises, which is the occupation of "mad
Men," and not reasoning at all, which is the mark of "Idiots."
Given the sarcasm shortly thereafter (Il,xiii,11) against
"some" who "either change the Signification of Words, which I
would not suspect them of, they having so severely condemned
the Philosophy of others [(etc.)]," the passage appears to be
an ironic attack on those of Locke’s philosophical opponents —
— "mad Men," by implication —- who manipulate the ambiguity of
words to justify bogus conclusions (see also footnote 9,
below).

 

6
elisions of terminology," that apologize for the very

epistemological limitations that the Essay is otherwise at

 

pains to detail. Such devious machinations follow, allegedly,

from Locke’s unwillingness to admit the 'infinite regress"
produced by any honest attempt at turning the faculty of
intellectual examination upon itself. The resulting
contradiction is said to be felt in Locke’s combativeness, his

"curious excess of rhetorical energy,’ his "uncouthness,"

while the Essav’s broad success in its day is dismissed as

 

merely a "convenient corroboration and codification of popular
prejudice and expectation."7

Of course, in the eyes of cultural historians, to become
"a convenient corroboration and codification of popular
prejudice and expectation" is no small thing, and we will see
that Locke’s popular success, his use of metaphorical

"enhancements' and his disputatiousness were all linked, but
first things first; Locke cannot be expected to have
demonstrated the courage of simplistic empiricist convictions
he never held, or the false manners. If Hans Aarsleff is
right about the artificiality of the empiricist-rationalist
dichotomy, then the discovery of Platonic elements in the
Essay is no scandal. Indeed, it is Charles Griswold’s recent
(1988) work on the Platonic dialogues that illuminates the

function of both the "enhancements' and the combativeness that

 

7S.H. Clark, "The Philosophical Rhetoric of Locke’s
"Essay"" in The Locke Newsletter (Ed. Roland Hall. Dept. of
Philosophy, University of York. No. 17. Autumn 1986), pp. 96-

99! 102, 109, 112, 115 (see also footnote 18, below).

 

7
are identified by Clark. Drawing upon Hegel, Griswold argues
that disputatiousness follows naturally from a determination
to philosophize in the face of an honest admission of Clark’s
infinite regress. Since the ultimate value of all
metaphilosophy, epistemology included, is unprovable, Griswold
argues that its practitioners can answer their severest
critics only by provoking them into argument, for "to argue
against philosophy is to engage in it."8 While the
disputatiousness in Locke’s Essay may not appear, at first, to
follow the dialogic form used by Plato (and Galileo), on
closer examination, those passages in which Locke directly
addresses his opponents are indeed seen to consist of the
point—by—point pattern of assertion and rebuttal that one
would find in a formal dialogue. Missing are the dramatic
personages who would typically deliver arguments in the form
of speeches, but otherwise the method of succinctly
recapitulating an opponent’s position and the cummulative
alternation of opposing arguments is the same.

Nowhere in the Essay is this more evident than in the
exhaustive attack on innateism in Book I, and, not
coincidentally, it is in Book I and the first chapters of Book
II that Locke’s argument generates its richest array of the

metaphors, the "elisions of terminology," to which Clark so

 

3Charles L. Griswold, Jr., "Plato’s Metaphilosophy:
Why Plato Wrote Dialogues" in Platonic Writings, Platonic
Readings (Ed. Charles L. Griswold, Jr. Routledge: New York.
1988), p. 154. The unanswerable nature of metaphysical
questions is a recurrent theme in the Essay, beginning at
I,i,3.

 

 

8
strenuously objects. If the human mind is not what the
proponents of innateism have claimed it to be, it instead
resembles an eye (l,i,1; l,ii,1; l,ii,9; l,ii,25), a candle
(I,i,5), an empty cabinet (I,ii,15), a beam of light (l,ii,27;
l,iii,4; l,iii,13; l,iv,9), a white paper (l,iii,22), a siege
battery (l,iv,25), a mirror (II,i,15; II,i,25; Il,viii,16), a
painting, in general (ll,ii,5; II,ix,8; Il,x,5), a landscape,
in particular (II,i,7), a clock (II,i,7), a fountain (II,i,Z),
a tomb (II,x,5), a dark room with windows, suggesting a camera
obscura (II,xi,17), and a ship (II,viii,8; II,xiv,27). The
mind’s attempt to know its own operations is like a shipline
measuring the depths (l,i,6) and its shortfalls are like
blindness (I,iv,19, I,iv,23), while the separation between
what can be known and what cannot is likened to a horizon
(l,i,7). Locke also illustrates his more explicit arguments
with similes that function as unacknowledged metaphors of

mind, as in the case of the chess set invoked to clarify his

(D

position on the doctrine of substance (II,viii,8). Thes

metaphors all serve a purpose in the Essay similar to that

 

performed in the Platonic dialogues by myth, functioning as
substitutes for the proofs that metaphilosophy simply cannot
provide and offering something familiar and seemingly
analogous -— something persuasive in the absence of proof --
instead. As Griswold says, in the absence of anything better,
they "reassure us that there are grounds for the hope that

philosophy” or, in Locke’s case, epistemology, "is a

worthwhile enterprise."9

If some of Locke’s metaphors bear a striking resemblance
to what may or may not actually be Platonic forerunners, as
the dark room and the blindness that would accompany exposure
to sensation beyond normal human capacity (II,xxiii,12) recall
the Republic’s Cave of Er, such parallels for our purposes can
be accepted as merely coincidental. The important point here
is that Locke’s frequent recourse to a style of argument that
transcends the evidence of immediate sensory experience
indicates that his position cannot simply be forced into a
context of rationalist-empiricist polarization and then
summarized as anti-rationalistic (or as bad empiricism, as
Clark would have it), regardless of which specific sources may
or may not have inspired him.

In addition to the evidence to be inferred from
metaphorical usage per se, the same reassurance on the worth
of philosophy spoken of by Griswold is explicitly provided by
Locke himself at Book IV, Chapter xvi of the Essay, "On the
Degrees of Assent:"

Concerning the manner of Operation in most parts of
the Works of Nature: wherein though we see the
sensible effects, yet their causes are unknown,

and we perceive not the ways and manner how they
are produced. . . . For these and the like coming
not within the scrutiny of humane Senses, cannot be
examined by them, or be attested by any body, and
therefore can appear more or less probable, only as
they more or less agree to Truths that are

established in our Minds, and as they hold proportion
to other parts of our Knowledge and Observation.

 

9Griswold, "Plato", p. 159.

10
Analogy in these matters is the only help we have,
and ’tis from that alone we draw all our grounds
of Probability. (lV,xvi,12)

Having said at the outset (l,i,5) that since "the

Comprehension of our Understandings, comes exceedingly short

 

of the vast Extent of Things" we must not "peremptorily, or
intemperately require Demonstration, and demand Certainty,
where Probability only is to be had, and which is sufficient
to govern all our Concernments," Locke now establishes
metaphor, or "analogy," as providing both a means by which
probable arguments are constructed and a criterion by which
they are judged to be more or less persuasive, "only as they
more or less agree to Truths that are established in our
Minds, and as they hold proportion to other parts of our
Knowledge and Observation": only, that is, to the extent to
which they invoke some familiar and seemingly relevant image
as a substitute for the more compelling proofs that cannot be
provided. Such a situation arises, as Griswold said, whenever

the issues involved are metaphysical: "coming,' in Locke’s
words, "not within the scrutiny of humane Senses, [when they]

cannot be examined by them, or be attested by any body," as

9 '

happens with either 'immaterial Beings' or the "material
beings," the "Spirits" and "Angels" that so offended Clark,
"which either for their smallness in themselves, or remoteness
from us, our Senses cannot take notice of" (IV,xvi,12; see

also II,xv,1l).

Metaphysical proofs in the Essay do, therefore, partake

11

of a certain kind of empiricism, but only one in which the
question of the existence of a physical world independent of
human perception has become largely irrelevant, surpassed in
importance by Locke’s recognition of the inescapably
subjective character of the individual human memories to which
analogies speak. Those memories are the residue of both
empirical (in the sense of universally accessible) and
subjective experience: of both the "sensation" and the
"reflection" that are first discussed in Book I (I,iv,18). As
Locke says in Book II, "Men . . . come to be furnished with
fewer or more simple Ideas from without, according as the
Objects, they converse with, afford greater or less variety;
and from the Operation of their Minds within, according as
they more or less reflect on them" (II,i,7). Hence, where
metaphysics are concerned, it is the variable reality of
subjective experience, not of an external world existing
independently of human perception, that is seen to provide the
"sanative contact" spoken of by Briggs, the reality against
which thought is measured and judged to be either sane or mad.

Lockean metaphysics employ metaphor for the same reason
that Platonic metaphysics employ myth, and also in the same
way, namely, as an appeal to reasonableness -- to the
admission that proofs are never more than probable -- and to
the individual reservoir of memory that passes for common

sense. Though the memories to which analogy must make its

appeal, the "Truths that are established in our Minds"

12
(IV,xvi,2-3), vary from person to person, tolerance within
debate, not solipsism, is the consequence for philosophy:
We should do well to commiserate our mutual
Ignorance, and endeavor to remove it in all the
gentle and fair ways of Information; and not
instantly treat others ill, as obstinate and
perverse, because they will not renounce their own,
and receive our Opinions, or at least those we
would force upon them, when ’tis more than probable,
that we are no less obstinate in not embracing some
of theirs. (lV,xvi,4)
As the only form of proof that was entirely independent of the
testimony of "fair Witnesses" (lV,xvi,6), analogy offered an
invincibly subjective alternative to the unreflective and
factious "enthusiasm" (IV,xix,3) that characterized much of
the philosophical discourse of Locke’s day.

Griswold and Locke are thereby seen to agree that a
person who argues philosophy engages in philosophy and in so
doing accepts and partakes of a level of meaningfulness that
transcends what is strictly demonstrable. Implicit in the
recognition of this fact (and Locke’s statement that
analogical thought is also probabilistic is proof that he did
indeed recognize it) is the very suspension of judgment on the
ultimate existence of a physical world beyond human perception
and the concomitant elevation in importance of structures
imposed mentally upon an otherwise undefined external manifold
that together define rationalism. Since this is a view
intrinsic to both Platonic myth and Lockean metaphor, and one

that contrasts with the dogmatic realist position that the

objects of perception actually have existence beyond the mind,

13
the metaphysic of the Essay must be seen to be as much
rationalistic as it is empiricist.

This is not to say that every conception of proof in the
Lockean schema is predominantly metaphysical, though none
escapes a degree of metaphysical uncertainty to become more
than merely probable. Nor is it to deny that the
nonmetaphysical conceptions are more accurately described by
the empiricism traditionally ascribed to the system as a
whole. The four "Degrees of Assent" Locke defines in Book IV

constitute a hierarchy of probability, with what amount to

criteria usually associated with Kant -- (rational) necessity
gag (empirical) universality -- serving to define the
trustworthiness of experience-claims. Besides the least
compelling of the four modes, "Analogy," "Assurance" attaches

to empirical arguments whose "probabilities rise so near to

 

Certainty, that they govern our Thoughts as absolutely, and

 

influence all our Actions as fully, as the most evident

demonstration.' "Confidence" names the degree of probability
warranted by an argument "attested by many and undoubted
Witnesses." A third, unnamed, level of empirical proof is
marked by the testimony of a lesser number of "Historians of
credit" when there is otherwise "nothing for, nor against it"
(IV,xvi,6—9). With its combination of latent empiricism and
active rationalism, analogy alone among Locke’s proofs is both

preeminently metaphysical and entirely independent of

objective verification.

14

So even though he, too, otherwise recognizes the crucial
role played in the Essay by the discussion of analogy in Book
IV, Peter Alexander is misled by his adherence to the by—now
familiar dichotomy of rationalism and empiricism into
conflating Locke’s discussion of metaphysical and
nonmetaphysical proofs. As a result, the empirical experience
against which Lockean analogies are measured appears no
different from the empirical experience that was then emerging
in the Royal Society as the basis for the experimental method
in science. Alexander begins by answering unnamed historians

who argue that Locke invented, in Book II of the Essay, the

 

very distinction between primary and secondary qualities that
Cranston says he uncritically adopted from others. On this
matter of intellectual debts, Alexander is of a mind with
Cranston and constructs, from prima facie evidence, an
argument that the inspiration for the relevant portions of
Book II came from Locke’s colleague at the Royal Society,
Robert Boyle. Thereafter, Alexander parts company with
Cranston to suggest that Locke’s use of the primary-secondary
distinction, far from being uncritical, was a conscious
attempt at transplanting Boyle’s experimental mode from

science to epistemology.1° This supposedly entailed nothing

 

l°Peter Alexander, "Boyle and Locke on Primary and
Secondary Qualities" in Locke on Human Understanding: Selected
Essays (Ed. I.C. Tipton. Oxford University Press: Oxford and
New York. 1977), pp. 62—66. It might be added that we need no
more accept Cranston’s charge of carelessness in regards to
Locke’s understanding of language than Alexander accepts it in
regards to Locke’s grasp of the primary-secondary distinction.

On this point, Briggs was right: Lockean metaphysics

15
less than the discovery, for philosophy, of analogical
reasoning itself, based on the example of speculation within
the Royal Society into "primary," microscopic qualities from
observations of "secondary," macroscopic phenomena.
Alexander’s conclusion is that Lockean analogies were part—
and-parcel of a Royal Society empiricism that, in its
axiomatic acceptance of an independently existing physical
world and the radical contingency of human perception,
reflects what is inevitably read into the Essay by traditional

Lockean scholarship.ll

 

inevitably spill over into a probabilistic theory of language,
since word meaning must either be the same for everyone —- a
position unlikely to be taken by someone who holds that
analogies evoke different images from different people —- or
else must vary according to the different sets of memories
that it makes its various appeals to. So it is that the Essay
asks in its first pages, not only that we settle for
probability in place of the certainty that is unattainable,
but also that we apply the same logical rigor to both our
ideas and our speech, "The greatest part of the Questions and
Controversies that perplex Mankind depending on the doubtful
and uncertain use of Words, or (which is the same)
indetermined IdeasL which they are made to stand for. Locke
concedes that the compelling doubts that can be cast upon the
reliability of language are answered adequately, if not
definitively, by its practical usefulness. Despite the
subjectivity of the perceptions that it describes and the
subjectivity of the minds that it addresses, language works,
and works well, if attended to with care. Locke’s definitive,
explicitly metaphysical answer to the critique of language
would seem to be that all words are analogies (or
"Archetypes," as he says at II,xxxii,25—26, III,v,3,
III,ix,13, III,xi,17 and IV,iv,5—6,11-12), not just the
flamboyant metaphors among them, and though they function well
enough for ordinary purposes, they still produce intellectual
resonances that are subjective to a philosophically troubling
degree (Locke, "The Epistle to the Reader," p. 13. See also
II,xxxi,7,13-14; II,xxxii,25-26; III,v,11; III,ix,5-6;
III,xi,13-14).

11Alexander, "Boyle and Locke", pp. 66, 68: "Locke, in
putting forward an empiricist basis for knowledge, was
codifying the principles of the experimental natural

 

H

16

Contradicting Alexander is the point made at least as
early as the 1950’s by E.J. Dijksterhuis that the distinction
between primary and secondary qualities long antedated the
writing of the Essay, together with what would seem to be that
point’s corollary, that the history of the primary—secondary
distinction carries it into the Royal Society on a current
broader than would make plausible its transmission by any
single individual, even a Boyle, to a man of Locke’s
connections and intellectual stature.12 Given this long and
syncretic history, Boyle probably has to be made the agent of
transmission if the Essay is to be found to partake
exclusively of what Alexander calls the intrinsic realism and
empiricism of the corpuscularian tradition on which the

primary-secondary distinction is predicated.13 Otherwise, the

 

philosophy which Boyle was championing against speculative
natural philosophy." On a separate matter, Alexander blames
Locke’s lack of clarity of expression for an alleged
inconsistency at Il,viii,21, where Locke is thought to be
saying that primary qualities could never produce the
illusions that secondary qualities sometimes do, which would
contradict his argument that (primary) qualities are in
objects; if primary qualities never produce illusions, then
Alexander seems to be saying that they might just as well be
said to be in us as an invariable part of the perceptive
faculty. Alexander’s solution is that Locke probably meant to
say that heat and cold, the examples he chooses, are "merely
ideas in us." Since the ideational context is explicit at
this point in the Essay, Alexander seems to be arguing a non-
issue.

12E.J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World
Picture (Trans., C. Dikshoorn. Oxford University Press: Oxford
and New York. 1960. IV:227), p. 423. This ancient distinction
(see footnote 3, above) had gained new and widespread
importance earlier in the century in the work of Galileo.

13Boyle’s central role in the Royal Society, like
Locke’s, is reduced in traditional histories of science to
that of a protagonist for the most narrowly-defined

empiricism, as, for example, in the work of Steven Shapin and

 

17
borrowing might be unpredictable and the results not
unequivocally those of empiricism, just as, in fact, a close
reading of Book IV of the Essay shows that analogical
reasoning for Locke was, to say the least, no more empiricist
than it was rationalistic: largely subjective and unique,
among the four "Degrees of Assent," in its freedom from the

validation of "fair Witnesses."14

 

Simon Schaffer (see below). But as with Locke’s Essay, an
unbiased reading of Boyle’s "Proemial Discourse" confounds the

traditional interpretation. Whereas Boyle supposedly called
for cultivating members of the gentry who might serve as
reputable witnesses to Royal Society experiments and whose
testimony might prove useful in establishing unanimity on
questions whose solutions would supposedly have had to rest on
convention, the only comment in the "Discourse" to address the
gentry sardonically contrasts their attraction to experiments
for "their novelty or prettiness" with their ignorance of "the
rudiments or fundamental notions of that philosophy whose
pleasing or amazing productions have enamoured them of it."
As for Shapin and Schaffer’s claim that Boyle categorically
ruled out thought experiments because they were private and
unverifiable, Boyle instead speaks somewhat murkily of
reconstructing experiments out of "notes and memory" or out of
repeated trials when he doubts the "sufficiency" of his
mnemonic devices: "sufficiency" sounding very much here like
the "probability" that attends Locke’s discussion of (memory—
dependent) metaphor. Finally, while Shapin and Schaffer claim
that Boyle forbade ad hominem argumentation in the interest of
communal accord, "The Proemial Discourse" instead includes
virulent attacks on the same Aristoteleanism against which
Locke directed his own sharpest invective: "to vouchsafe it a
solicitous confutation might question a writer’s judgement
with intelligent readers . . ." Disputatiousness is a
prominent weapon in both mens’ arsenals, though, like recourse
to thought experiments or to metaphysics, it must be denied by
those who would make an entire agenda for the Royal Society
out of empirical observation. Robert Boyle, "The Proemial
Discourse to the Reader" from The Ogigin of Forms and
Qualities According to the Corpuscular Philosophy in Selected
Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle (Manchester University
Press: Manchester and Oxford. 1979), pp. 2, 4, 8—9. Steven
Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes,
BoerL_and the Experimental Life (Princeton University Press:
Princeton, 1985), pp. 55, 73.

l‘Alexander’s argument nonwithstanding, the measure of

 

 

 

 

18

A rereading of the Essay obviously becomes pertinent at

 

this point to a long-standing debate within the history of
science in which the common supposition that Lockean
metaphysics are adequately described as empiricist is called
into question by disagreement on the relative importance of
hypothesis and observation to the so—called experimental
method emerging in Locke’s day within the Royal Society. The
work of two of the most recent (1985) participants in that
debate, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, would seem to imply
that the atmosphere within the Royal Society would have been
unlikely to account for an analysis of metaphor like that
found in the Essay’s Book IV, judging by what they find that

the "fair Witnesses' gathered there really were up to. While
it has long been claimed that the experimental method
developed at the Royal Society was inimical to argumentation
from hypotheses, Shapin and Schaffer have refined that
somewhat embattled commonplace to argue that metaphysical
discourse was excluded from the Society’s proceedings in the
name of a communal unity then emerging among English
scientists, taking with it both the metaphors and the

disputatiousness that an unbiased reading nevertheless shows

to have played an integral role in the Essay’s treatment of

 

how handily Locke was able to imbibe corpuscular thought while
remaining free of the empiricist metaphysic that might
reasonably (if ahistorically) be thought its reduction of all
physical phenomena to the motions of invisible particles would
necessarily have entailed is found at II,ii,2, where the
division and recombination of ideas in the process of
reflection -- an entirely mental and "insubstantial" (my term)

phenomenon -— is described in unmistakably mechanistic terms.

19
knowledge and proof. This means that either Shapin and
Schaffer, too, are wrong or the Essay can no longer be taken
for granted as a product of the Royal Society’s intellectual
milieu, at least not as long as that milieu is understood to
be, as these historians rather predictably put it, "empiricist
and inductivist." Retaining Locke as a central participant in
a Royal Society so defined will put historians of science in
the dubious position of having to divorce him from his chief
philosophical work. Certainly some sort of amputation has to
be performed on the Lockean corpus if it is to conform to the
conception of probability that Shapin and Schaffer say
predominated in the Royal Society, whereby the veracity of any
scientific account was considered to be directly proportional
to the number of witnesses attesting to it: a conception that
can cover only the non-analogical definitions of probability

given by Locke in the Essav’s Book IV.15

 

Shapin and Schaffer’s analysis is undoubtedly best taken,
not as the final statement on what was actually promoted and
what might also have been permissible within the Royal

Society, but as a new and provocative contribution in what

 

15Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, pp.
36, 56. In his discussion of "wrong measures of probability"
at IV,xx,17, Locke also explicitly disavows the exclusivity
and the artificial creation of consensus which Shapin and
Schaffer say were the hallmarks of the Royal Society’s

 

 

organization. Condemned is the common practice of "giving up
our Assent to the common received Opinions, either of our
Friends, or Party". For, "If we could but see the secret

motives, that influenced the Men of Name and Learning in the
World, and the Leaders of Parties, we should not always find,
that it was the embracing of Truth for its own sake, that made

them espouse the Doctrines, they owned and maintained."

20
will be an ongoing debate. If future installments in that
debate continue to count Locke’s Essay as one of the most
important works to come out of the intellectual circle
gathered at the Royal Society and yet insist on denying the
metaphysical and rationalist character of Locke’s discussion
of proof in general, or of analogy in particular, then either
they will continue to falter when they reach the heavily
metaphorical argumentation in Book I and the theoretical
statements on metaphor in Book IV or they will follow what we
see is ample precedent and simply ignore the embarrassing
portions of the Essay altogether. Such, unfortunately, is the
approach adopted by Barbara Shapiro, who sets out to reconcile

the Essay with a by-now familiar picture of the Royal Society

 

and, indeed, of the overall English intellectual temper in the
late seventeenth century as inimical to metaphysical
discourse. Shapiro is on safe ground in arguing that a
scientific consensus toward a "probabilistic empiricism" was
emerging in Locke’s day from the complex crosscurrents of
English intellectual life, and perhaps again, based on what we
have seen of the Essay’s sophisticated treatment of
probabilistic argumentation, in claiming that Locke

'represents the culmination of a generation’s attempt to

 

devise a new theory of knowledge appropriate to the
experimental science of the era." But because such a theory
was, as she conceives of it, one from which (after Francis

Bacon) "ambiguity and especially metaphor" must have been

21
"utterly excluded," she adopts what an unbiased reading of the

Essay shows to be an absurd position joining Locke -- for whom

 

she is, of course, unable to cite a single disavowal of
metaphor -- with Thomas Sprat, John Wilkins, Samuel Parker,
Joseph Glanville, William Petty and Boyle (all the rest for
whom she is able to produce, if not explicit statements
condemning metaphorical discourse, at least approximations
thereof) as an opponent of metaphorical usage in scientific
disourse.16

Is the standard picture of late seventeenth century
English intellectual life as dominated by empiricism and
inimical to rationalism to be retained, then, minus its
"culminating" figure, or will historians of science continue
to force Locke into a mold that a careful reading of his major
text reveals to be patently distorting? Of course, neither is
acceptable; the Essay is far too important to be read
inaccurately or out of context, and a new reading of the text
may well be the beginning of a reappraisal of context (just as
interpretations of context must be tested against texts
themselves). After all, one premise of cultural history must
be that analogical discourse retains a broader meaningfulness
than that required merely to rescue it from solipsism.

Metaphors within such influential texts as the Essay can

 

16Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in
Seventeenth—Century England: A Study of the Relationship
Between Natural ScienceL ReligionL History, Law and Literature
(Princeton University Press: Princeton. 1983), pp. 12, 32,
232-245.

 

22
reasonably be read as cultural exemplars, or "archetypal

analogies,’ in the words of M.H. Abrams, whose point that
"metaphysical systems . . . are intrinsically metaphorical
systems" anticipated Griswold by twenty-five years. But
according to Abrams, certain perennially-important metaphors
do more than fill the inevitable lacuna in metaphilosophy. He
argues that they actually generate the arguments that we
normally think of them as merely summarizing after the
creative fact. Images of mirrors and of lamps are
particularly important, says Abrams, in shaping theories of
the mind as either a passive recorder of impressions
originating from without or as an active agent in the
interpretation of those impressions.17

If not the newest version of the dichotomizing tendency
that strictly segregates rationalistic thought from
empiricism, this nevertheless counts as one of the most
sophisticated, in that it acknowledges, indeed, is predicated

upon, the heavy reliance on metaphor in the Essay which others

 

who deny the rationalistic element therein choose (or are
forced) to ignore. According to Abrams, the image of the

tabula rasa not only provides a fair (if highly abbreviated)

 

synopsis in our own time of Lockean epistemology; it, or a
metaphor very much like it -- the metaphor of the mirror,

perhaps, or the camera obscura, at any rate, an image

 

 

l7M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic
Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford University Press:

Oxford. 1953). pp. 30-31.

23
suggesting intellectual passivity before nature -- embodied in
Locke’s day what was a then still-dominant empiricist
tradition and provided the inspiration for Locke’s own
supposedly straightforward empiricist theory of mind.18 What
Abrams’ argument itself ignores, however, is the array of what
would seem to be unequivocally active metaphors of mind in the
Essay’s Book I and Book 11. These include such versions of
the lamp metaphor as the candle at 1,1,5 "that is set up in
us, [and] shines bright enough for all our Purposes," the
"light" at I,iii,4 that makes certain undeniable propositions
seem self—evident and the "light of Nature" at I,iii,13 by
which we overcome ignorance and which is nothing less than the
"use and due application of our natural Faculties." This same
metaphor is as useful to Locke in exposing what innateist
conceptions of mind lack as it is in illustrating those powers
which, in his own conception, the mind actively displays. At
I,ii,27, Locke says that if we possessed innate ideas, they
would shine out like "native beams of light," and again, at
I,iii,1, that innate moral principles, if there were any,

would manifest themselves "by their own light."19 The

 

lSAbrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 57—58. Abrams
does not use the term "empiricism," though his description of
Locke’s epistemology as "his view of the mind in perception as
a passive receiver for images presented ready-formed from
without" makes it clear that empiricism is what he means.

19Lamps are by no means the only metaphors in the
Essay to suggest an aggressive epistemology. The very first
metaphor that Locke introduces (what Clark calls his "ocular
vocabulary") is the "Eye" of the Understanding ("The Epistle
to the Reader") which, if it were unable to perceive innate
knowledge, "Characters, which Nature it self has taken care to

stamp within," "would be, to make Nature take Pains to no

 

21

evidence of metaphorical usage in the Essay therefore suggests

 

that if Abrams is correct in saying that the metaphor of the
lamp lends itself to dynamic theories of mind, he is
nevertheless badly mistaken in assuming that Locke, or,
therefore, seventeenth century Englishmen in general, lacked
access to it or formulated conceptions of epistemology that
escaped its influence.

What, then, of the passive metaphors, the mirrors that
Abrams says should have determined Locke’s theory of mind
toward that of a "receiver for images presented ready—formed
from without"?20 Explicit references to mirrors occur twice

in the Essav’s Book II, first in the immediate aftermath of

 

the attack on innateism, at 11.1.25, where the metaphor does,
in fact, function as an illustration of the mind’s passive

receptivity to the "simple ideas' that Locke regards as the
essential rudiments (but only the rudiments) of all
intellectual activity.21 Yet in seizing upon this imagery as
proof of the essentially empirical quality of Lockean
epistemology, Abrams forgets that Locke always couples the

'sensation" by which simple ideas are acquired with

 

Purpose" (I,ii,25). By the same logic, intellectual passivity
is disparagingly suggested by the metaphor of the eye’s
absence, by the "blindness" of those who uncritically embrace
the opinions of others (I,iv,23).

2°Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 57-58.

21"These simple Ideas, when offered to the mind, the
Understanding can no more refuse to have, nor alter, when they
are imprinted, nor blot them out, and make new ones in it
self, than a mirror can refuse, alter, or obliterate the
Images or Ideas, which, the Objects set before it, do therein
produce."

 

 

 

 

25

"reflection,' or the capacity for original and independent
thought. The "primary" qualities that we perceive through
sensation and that inher in objects themselves are immediately
and inevitably accompanied by perceptions of "secondary"
phenomena that cannot be separated from the perceptive
faculty. For all the philosopher knows, these may be the
product of sensation or reflection, though in either case
their reliability is uncertain. So it is that the second
occurrence of the mirror metaphor, at II,viii,16, invokes
intellectual passivity as a reproach to those who
indiscriminately attribute qualities to objects alone instead
of to the mind.22 Mirrors suggest intellectual passivity in
the Essay only to the extent that they are used on one
occasion to illustrate what is meant by simple ideas; beyond
that, they reflect on intellectual passivity in an

intentionally derisive way that is a reversal of the meaning

Abrams attributes to them.23

 

22"Which Qualities are commonly thought to be the same
in those Bodies, that those Ideas are in us, the one the
perfect resemblance of the other, as they are in a Mirror; and
it would by most Men be judged very extravagant, if one should
say otherwise. And yet he, that will consider, that the same
Fire, that at one distance produces in us the Sensation of
Warmth, does at a nearer approach, produce in us the far
different Sensation of Pain, ought to bethink himself, what
Reason he has to say, That his Idea of Warmth, which was
produced in him by the Fire, is actually in the Fire; and his
Idea of Pain, which the same Fire produced in him the same
way, is app in the Fire."

23A slightly different version of the mirror metaphor
occurs at 11,1,15, where Locke says that a mind that retained
none of its thoughts would be like a "Looking-glass," and
again the image serves as a disparagement of intellectual
passivity, certainly not as a final epistemological model:
"the Looking-glass is never the better for such Ideas, nor the

26

As for the camera obscura, no specific mention is ever

 

made of it in the Essay, though at II,xi,17 a "dark room" is

 

described whose windows represent both sensation and

reflection, suggesting, in its layout, the camera obscura but

 

depicting Lockean epistemology in its entirety, and not just
in the passive aspects (the realm of sensation) that interest
Abrams. As for that other image of intellectual inertia, the
much-touted metaphor of the white paper, Locke has direct

recourse to it exactly twice in the Essay and makes indirect

 

reference to it exactly twice more. First mention of the
white paper is made at 1,iii,22, in what may well be Locke’s
most scathing attack on the same passivity that the metaphor
of the mirror was employed against at 11,viii,16 but that

traditional Lockean scholarship would have the tabula rasa

 

enshrine. The topic is prejudice and the reluctance of most
adults to critically examine their own beliefs, which makes

them no better than gullible children who hold to "Doctrines,

 

that have been derived from no better original, than the
Superstition of a Nurse, or the Authority of an old Woman.

"White paper receives any characters,’ Locke offers as an
excuse for such children, speaking not about the origin of
knowledge, but about moral credulity, and driving home the
reproach at 1,iii,21 of "Men even of Good Understanding in

other matters, [who] will sooner part with their Lives, and

whatever is dearest to them, than suffer themselves to doubt,

 

Soul for such Thoughts."

27
or others to question, the truth of [their unexamined
propositions]." For our purposes, the important point is that
the metaphor illustrates here an absence of rationality that
is willful, rather than intrinsic.

In the second and last explicit occurrence of the white
paper metaphor, at 11,i,2, the image does indeed suggest
intellectual passivity, but only as the hypothetical
precondition for speculation into the origin of knowledge, and
not as a final epistemological model: "Let us then suppose the
Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters,
without any Ideas; How comes it to be furnished?" The answer
once again incorporates both sensation, or the experience of

"external, sensible Objects," which in isolation might be

 

compatible with an empiricist reading of the text, and
reflection, or the experience "about the internal Operations
of our Minds, perceived and reflected on by our selves" that
represents the element of intellectual self-sufficiency in
Lockean epistemology, of independence from external sensation,
and with which the narrowly-empiricist reading is obviously
incompatible. After that, imagery of white paper is invoked
twice in Book IV in purely incidental illustrations of
comparatively minor points. The immediacy of intuitive
knowledge is compared, at IV,ii,5, to the eye’s instantaneous
apprehension of "Whether this Ink, and this Paper be all of a
Colour" and our acceptance of such knowledge without a solid

understanding of its origins is likened at 1V,xi,2 to the

28
unexamined, commonsensical connection between the paper before
us and the descriptor "white."
80 it is that the metaphor of the white paper -- the

famous image of the tabula rasa —- functions very differently

 

in Locke’s Essay from what either intellectual historians or
historians of science have traditionally asserted. Its
specific role in Lockean epistemology, if minor, is
nevertheless integral, not aberrant; the collective
contribution made by such metaphors to the elaboration of the
argument’s metaphysic is technically indispensible, as Locke
acknowledges in Book IV in his treatment of their theoretical
status. If the mere existence of such metaphors calls into
question the standard picture in the history of science of
what the Scientific Revolution entailed for English thought in
general, or for the Royal Society in particular, a start
toward addressing the discrepancy was been made within
cultural history, whereby metaphors are acknowledged to be, if
not the theoretical mainstays of Lockean epistemology, at
least factors in shaping both popular and philosophical
perceptions of epistemological issues in seventeenth century
England.

The flaw in this approach lies more in its circumspection
than in its misreading of the role in the Essay of any single
metaphor. Otto Mayr’s point that metaphors possess an "inner

logic' and exert a "suggestive power" over the arguments that

they illustrate is reminiscent of Abrams’ thesis that the

29
intellectual function of metaphors is generative. Unlike
Abrams, whose "archetypal" metaphors impose meaning on thought
and discourse, Mayr seems to concede the point made by Locke
in Books 11 and IV that the resonance produced by any
particular metaphor is entirely subjective. The same clock
that suggested governmental or technological intrusiveness to
the seventeenth century Englishman in the street embodied a
rational and apprehensible cosmos to the member of the Royal
Society. This is not to deny that metaphors were just as
promiscuous within the Society as without, and here at last
Robert Boyle becomes more than just a two-dimensional
caricature of empiricism. According to Mayr, Boyle’s
perception of the clock as a metaphor of nature was not fixed.

Instead, it underwent a "cautious transition' from the
determinism consistent with a narrowly-empirical scientific
method to a voluntarism that opened up much wider conceptual
possibilities. But if no use of metaphor whatsoever would
have been consistent with what Thomas Sprat said were the
Society’s goals, then Mayr is discriminating enough to know
that Sprat was not the whole Society, and Boyle’s statements
in defense of metaphor, self-conscious and apologetic though
they may have been, are duly noted. An understanding of the

Royal Society modified even to this modest degree can

accomodate the Locke of the Essay’s Book 1 and Book 11, the

 

polemicist unselfconsciously peppering his arguments with

potent analogies, but nowhere does Mayr credit Locke with the

3 U
explicit theoretical appreciation of metaphor that is
developed in Book IV. Instead, Mayr’s Locke shares in Boyle’s
embarrassment: "Boyle, who loved metaphors, frequently

apologized for this aberration, and John Locke expressed

H U

himself against figurative speech" and "ornaments' in
philosophy."24
Hence, no history of the seventeenth century does justice
to Locke’s approving and richly metaphysical treatment of
metaphor. Even the boldest revisions in the often iconoclastic
field of cultural history fall short. The explanation for
this timidity can only lie in the authoriative weight of a
tradition in Lockean scholarship that has succeeded, as Hans
Aarsleff says, since the middle of the nineteenth century in
reducing the Essay to its component empiricism, initially as a
reaction against the supposedly—materialistic Enlightenment
that Locke (among others) inspired. If, like so many recent
commentators on the Essay (Cranston, Briggs, Clark, Alexander,
Shapiro and Abrams) we suscribe to what Aarsleff calls "the

pedagogically convenient and ideologically loaded separate—box

distinction between rationalism and empiricism" that this same

 

2“Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic
Machinery in Early Modern Europe (The Johns Hopkins University
Press: Baltimore and London. 1986), pp. 30, 61, 82, 94, 217.
Though it is presently impossible for me to check the context
from which Mayr extracted Locke’s statements against
figurative speech due to his use of an 1824 editon of the
Essay that apparently divides chapters with a different
notation from that used by Nidditch, the Essay is rich in such
statements. They are inevitably directed against either the
proponents of Innateism or the Scholastics and are not
intended as a renunciation of metaphor correctly used.

 

31

tradition has bequeathed to us, and as indeed we are taught to
do by the most common historical periodizations and the most
entrenched philosophical categories, then we arrive at the
conclusion that Locke’s epistemology is empiricist, not by
critical examination of the text, but by predisposition.25
Given Locke’s flamboyant use of metaphor in Book 1 and his
meticulous justification of metaphorical usage in Book IV, it

seems probable that the tabula rasa has long been extracted

 

from Locke’s Essay as representing the essence of his.
epistemology, not because it actually functions in the text in
the way imagined, but instead because the passivity it
suggests to readers who have yet to read the book conforms to
what they are made to expect to find therein. Before their
first encounter in the Essay at 1,iii,22, the reader with a
basic knowledge of history and philosophy and the metaphor of
the white paper are already acquainted.

That is why LaCapra’s call for an unconventional reading
of "great texts" is so significant. 1f traditional
interpretations of important books are to be reconsidered
(which is the same thing as asking if they are to be read
afresh or communicated to new audiences via secondary
synopses), then the relationships between specific texts and
specific contexts must be approached sceptically and perhaps

ultimately redefined. But a reading that resists familiar

 

25Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, pp. 9, 139.

 

32
periodizations is one that has at least temporarily cut its
moorings and risks drifting into ahistoricity. LaCapra’s call
for a new and uncanonical approach to a canon of great books
and Griswold’s defense of dialectical philosophy are both
consciously indebted to Heidegger’s inconveniently ahistorical
notion of the dialogical relationship between reader and
text.26 Rereading Locke’s Essay and discovering that the
metaphors therein function like myths in Platonic dialogues
may pose a very interesting challenge to the commonly accepted
relationship between this particular text and a context
supposedly dominated by a newly ascendant empiricism, but
whether or not the revision can provide an alternative
interpretation in anything approaching similar detail,
coherence or even historical accuracy is uncertain, to say the
least. Put another way, if we defy the weight of tradition
and say that Locke developed a metaphysic of metaphor, should

we not also, like the upholders of the tabula rasa whom we

 

would supplant, be able to say that there is a correct
metaphor for Lockean metaphysics, a metaphor that is
inextricably linked to Locke’s particular day and place, even
if its influence over the Essay is something less than
archetypal?

Locke himself answers the question. The metaphor that

appears most frequently in the Essay is also the one used to

 

 

26LaCapra, p. 29; Griswold is careful to reject
Heidegger’s most sweeping attacks on philosophy while
accepting that dogmatic metaphilosophical constructs are
indefensible: pp. 144, 166.

33
illustrate the widest range of arguments. And though the
subjectivity of metaphors makes their reception unpredictable,
this particular metaphor is also the one whose immediate
resonances most reliably convey the probabilism at the center
of Locke’s theory of mind. The imagery of the ship is used
throughout the Essay in a complex of explicit and submerged
metaphors that invoke the practicality, the ingenuity and the
hazards of seventeenth century seamanship in order to depict
the human intellect operating intrepidly within clearly
defined, and widely understood, limitations. Early in Book I,
the ship expresses the value of raising epistemological issues
even if our weaknesses are thereby exposed: "’Tis of great
use to the Sailor to know the length of his Line, though he
cannot with it fathom all the depths of the Ocean" (I,i,6).
"But what still remains beyond this [knowledge]," Locke adds
in Book 11, "we have no more a positive distinct notion of,
than a Mariner has of the depth of the Sea, where having let
down a large portion of his Sounding—line, he reaches no
bottom" (II,xvii,15).

Later, Locke sails the metaphorical ship into the thick
of battle to demonstrate the futility of wishing that our
intellects were keener: "If our Sense of Hearing were but 1000
times quicker than it is . . . we should in the quietest
Retirement, be less able to sleep or meditate, than in the
midst of a Sea-fight" (11,xxiii,12). In Book IV, the ship is

invoked in an indictment of careless word use, but also more

34
subtly as an encouragement to our confident use of our
admittedly imperfect intellectual instrument, and perhaps also
as a reminder that knowledge is only probabilistic, and never
certain: "Had Men, in the discoveries of the material, done,
as they have in those of the intellectual World, . . . Ships
built, and Fleets set out, would never have taught us the way
beyond the Line" (IV,iii,30). We each command, Locke seems to
say, a cumbersome and unruly vessel over which we must
decisively take charge: "’Till a Man doth this in the primary
and original Notions of Things, he builds upon floating and
uncertain Principles, and will often find himself at a loss"
(II,xiv,27).

Less pivotal arguments are also illustrated with the ship
metaphor. To show that the perception of space is relational,
Locke describes chessmen moving across a board, sets the board
down stationary within his ship, and then moves the ship along

an imaginary coast: "and so both Chess-men, and Board, and

Ship, have every one changed Place in respect of remoter

 

Bodies, which have kept the same distance one with another"
(II,xiii,8). Locke has only to stop the ship to demonstrate
the closely related point that our notion of succession
derives from the linearity of perception: "a Man becalmed at
Sea, out of sight of Land, in a fair Day, may look on the Sun,
or Sea, or Ship, a whole hour together, and perceive no Motion
at all in either; though it be certain, that two, and perhaps

all of them, have moved, during that time, a great way'

35
(II,xiv,6). Finally, to show that this same relativity of
perception accounts in part for the ambiguity of words, Locke

climbs down into the hold:

 

The Ship has necessary Stores. Necessary,

and Stores, are both relative Words: one

having a relation to the accomplishing the

Voyage intended, and the other to future us

(II,xxvi,6).
As we began by saying, the stores carried in that hold are
both rational and empirical, and equally necessary to the
probabilistic epistemology that this metaphor represents.

The ship that one sights from time to time in Locke’s
Essay would seem to convey a theory of the mind as adequate to
the journey at hand. Such a reading is consistent with what
is generally recognized to be the growing confidence of
English philosophy in that day. While Frank and Fritzie
Manuel found that an opening shipwreck frequently was part of

the "stock formula' of sixteenth century utopias, ships
sailing the philosophical literature one hundred years later
had apparently become more seaworthy and were successfully
attaining more mundane ports of call.27 If they managed this
by sailing cautiously, by hugging empiricism’s shore and by
regularly consulting the shiplines of rationalism, they
thereby contributed to a new candor in both the rhetoric and

the methods of philosophy. As the English expressed this

candor through their writings, their Dutch counterparts

 

27Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian
Thought in the Western World (Harvard University Press:

Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1979), p. 2.

 

36
expressed it through literal renderings of nature in
landscapes, or so says Svetlana Alpers.28 Metaphors, though,
are pictures of a sort, and the Essay paints a seascape in the
meticulous detail of empiricism but with a light wash, a
suggestion of fog, reminding us of the irreducible uncertainty

acknowledged by a probabilistic epistemology.

 

28Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in
the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

1983), p. 11.

37
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aarsleff, Hans. From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Studygof

 

Language and intellectual History. Minneapolis:
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Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theoryiand the
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Alexander, Peter. "Boyle and Locke on Primary and Secondary
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Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the
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Boyle, Robert. Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle.
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Briggs, Peter M. "Locke’s Essay and the Strategies of
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Clark, S.H. "The Philosophical Rhetoric of Locke’s Essav" in
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Cranston, Maurice. John Locke: A Biography. Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

 

Dijksterhuis, E.J. The Mechanization of the World Picture.
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Griswold, Charles L., Jr. "Plato’s Metaphilosophy: Why Plato
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LaCapra, Dominick. Rethinking Intellectual History: TextsL
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Locke, John. An Essay_Concerning Human Understanding.
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Manuel, Frank E. and Fritzie P. Utopian Thought in the Western
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38
BIBLIOGRAPHY (Continued)
Mayr, Otto. Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in

Early Modern Europe. Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1986.

 

 

Shapin, Steven and Schaffer, Simon. Leviathan and the Air
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Shapiro, Barbara J. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth

 

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