Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (Ideas in Context)

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L O C K E , L A N G U A G E A N D EA R L Y - M O D E R N PHILOSOPHY

In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in earlymodern philosophy, and presents a groundbreaking analysis of John Locke’s critique of words. By examining a broad sweep of pedagogical and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century, Dr Dawson explains why language caused anxiety in writers such as Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Nicole, Spinoza, Pufendorf, Boyle, Malebranche and Locke. Locke, Language and EarlyModern Philosophy demonstrates that new developments in philosophy, in conjunction with weaknesses in linguistic theory, resulted in serious concerns about the capacity of words to refer to the world, the stability of meaning, and the duplicitous power of words themselves. Dr Dawson shows that language so fixated all manner of early-modern authors because it was seen as an obstacle to knowledge and society. She thereby uncovers a novel story about the problem of language in philosophy, and in the process reshapes our understanding of early-modern beliefs about nature, epistemology, morality and politics. hannah dawson is Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University of Edinburgh.

I D E A S I N CO N T E X T 7 6

Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy

IDEAS IN C ONTE XT

Edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully

The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve. The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation. A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume.

LOCKE, LANGUAGE AND EARLY-MODERN PHILOSOPHY HANNAH DAWSON

University of Edinburgh

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521852715 © Hannah Dawson 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 978-0-511-28894-4 ISBN-10 0-511-28894-8 eBook (EBL) hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-85271-5 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-85271-4

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

for Joy Denyer

Contents

Acknowledgements

page x

Notes on the text

xii

Introduction part i

1

language in the trivium

11

1 Language in logic

13

2 Language in grammar

41

3 Language in rhetoric

64

part ii philosophical developments of the problem of language 4 The relationships between language, mind and word

89 91

5 Semantic instability: a containable threat

129

6 Under cover of sensible and powerful words

154

part iii

locke on language

183

7 Words signify ideas alone

185

8 Semantic instability: an inherent imperfection

210

9 A life of their own

239

10 Locke in the face of language

277

Bibliography Index

305 349 ix

Acknowledgements

A number of friends and institutions have helped me write this book and it is an enormous pleasure to acknowledge them here. In the first place, I am indebted to the British Academy Arts and Humanities Research Board for funding the PhD out of which the book arises, and to Christ’s College, Cambridge, for the sunlit home in which I wrote much of the thesis. I am also indebted to Queens’ College, Cambridge, for the junior research fellowship, the top-floor rooms and the stimulating interdisciplinary culture which facilitated the conversion of thesis to book. I thank the librarians of the British Library, of Cambridge University Library and of Duke Humfrey’s Library, for their good humour and professionalism. In the production of this book, Cambridge University Press has been brilliant. The reports by their anonymous readers were exceptionally useful, and I have done my best to incorporate their suggestions. A˚sa So¨derman has been a wonderful copy-editor, at once sensitive and astute. Jackie Warren has been both tolerant and helpful. And as for Richard Fisher, it has been a pure delight to get to know at first hand his legendary unfailing cheer and consummate efficiency. His patience and compassion have gone beyond the call of duty and I am forever obliged to him. In ways that are too various to enumerate here, but that involve kindness, conversation, criticism, books, bibliographies and laughter, I am hugely grateful to the following scholars: John Allison, Terence Ball, Richard Bourke, Brendan Bradshaw, Leo Cadogan, Daniel Carey, Janet Coleman, David Cram, Emma Gilby, Angus Gowland, Mark Goldie, Lilja Gretarsdottir, Lena Halldenius, James Harris, Ross Harrison, Susan James, Natalie Kaoukji, Sachiko Kusukawa, Cees Leijenhorst, Rhodri Lewis, Ian Maclean, Noel Malcolm, Ian Mcbride, Murray Milgate, Craig Muldrew, Jim Murphy, Eric Nelson, Ian Patterson, William Poole, Richard Rex, John Rogers, Sami Savonius, Richard Scholar, David Sedley, Sandy Stewart and Richard Yeo. x

Acknowledgements

xi

I am especially grateful to Annabel Brett, who introduced me to the rewards of intellectual history, whose perception and support over the years have awed and nourished me, and whose answers to my questions never fail to the hit the mark. I would also like to single out John Dunn, who continues to bring Locke into focus for me. I owe serious debts to those generous citizens who took time to read parts, or even all, of the book, and whose incisive comments enabled me both to clarify my arguments and to avoid some (doubtless not all) embarrassment: Stefan Collini, Sandra Dawson, Vlad Eatwell, Rebecca Langlands, Richard Serjeantson and Tristram Stuart. Michael Moriarty and Jim Tully examined my PhD, and I cannot thank them enough for their scrupulous observations, their transformative enthusiasm and, most of all, the imagination they brought to bear on my work, opening my eyes to its wider implications and setting me on a new path. It is difficult to find words adequate to express my greatest debt. With generosity, readiness and heart-warming optimism, Quentin Skinner has scrutinised every draft of every chapter of this book, attending to both the particular and the general, wielding all the time his erudition and acuity. There is something magical about his power as a teacher: his clarity is infectious, his counsel is liberating, and his confidence brings one closer to being worthy of it. While one of the joys of academic existence is that colleagues are also friends and that the grim line between work and life is at best nonexistent, I want to end by thanking all those comrades from a slightly distinct sphere without whose sociability and tomfoolery I would have struggled to discern the point of anything. I thank in particular Vlad Eatwell, Henry, Sandra, Rebecca and Tom Dawson, and finally my grandma, Joy Denyer, to whom I dedicate this book with all my love. Queens’ College, Cambridge

Notes on the text

references I use the author-date system to refer to both primary and secondary materials. In the case of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, I also give the book, chapter and section references, in that order, to provide a clearer sense of where we are in the work. In facsimile editions of works where the editor’s pagination differs from the original, I cite the original pagination. In the case of Locke’s manuscripts, where his own pagination goes awry and the editors have added consistent numbering, I cite the editors’ pagination first, followed by Locke’s in brackets. transcription While, in the main, I preserve the spelling and punctuation of the texts cited in the bibliographies, I sometimes disrupt it in order to smooth out my prose. For example, I modernise early-modern orthographical traditions, such as the use of the long ‘s’. Very rarely, in order to integrate quotations into my sentences, I make a grammatical alteration to a word, for example ‘defrauded’ becomes ‘defrauds’. I thin out the profusion of capital letters and italics in early-modern works. translation When quoting from texts written in languages other than English, I use the translations cited. Where none are available or appropriate, I make my own. Where I disagree with the translation, or do not think it captures the force of the original, I supply the original words, sometimes suggesting an alternative translation.

xii

Introduction

Language was a problem for early-modern philosophers. Not only were a remarkable number of works devoted to the subject, but it intruded upon texts about nature, morality and politics. At a time when both the portrayal of reality and our access to that reality were being challenged, and when religious and political conflicts proliferated, language came to seem dangerously unhinged. It was supposed to reach out to the world and to mediate between men, but instead it barred the way.1 As perceptions of the natural and cultural worlds mutated and splintered, it was feared that language no longer mapped them. Yet language was not silent. Covering over the cracks in the semantic edifice, it told its own duplicitous story. It seemed to have a power of its own. Unfettered in practice by the forces that ought to have constrained it, it tore at knowledge and at the community. So pressing was the unease about language that when John Locke came to write his great work on human understanding, he felt impelled to include an entire book on words. This inclusion is even more surprising when one considers that the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689) is recognisably a work of logic.2 Logics old and new had, in the main, treated ideas and words simultaneously, and even interchangeably, explaining how these simple units were gradually compounded by the mind in a process that culminated in chains of reasoning. Locke repeats this traditional trajectory from ideas to knowledge, but inserts a distinct treatment of words, therein delivering the most sustained, devastating and acute critique of language that his age produced. The aim of the present study is to show why he came to make this insertion and, more generally,

1

2

Early-modern philosophers generally speak of ‘men’, rather than ‘men and women’. In order to avoid anachronism or exculpation, I tend to maintain this usage. Locke effectively names it as such at its end (Locke 1975, p. 720 (iv.xxi.4)). It becomes clear that it was perceived as a logic by himself and contemporaries in his Correspondence (Locke 1976–89, iv, pp. 479 and 601–2; v, p. 351). See also Buickerood 1985, pp. 157–9, and Schuurman 2004, p. 2.

1

Locke, language and early-modern philosophy

2

why language came to be the object of such general disquiet among earlymodern philosophers. More precisely, this book does four things. First, it analyses the theories of language that were bequeathed to early-modern philosophers in obscure as well as canonical texts. Second, it uncovers the linguistic concerns and ambitions that these theories, in conjunction with certain epistemological and practical developments, provoked in philosophers. Third, with the framework of early-modern philosophy of language in place, it considers Locke’s intervention. It identifies the arguments that he was repudiating and amplifying, as well as those that he simply reiterated. Against the background of everyday assumptions, negative reactions and creative developments, the innovative force of Locke’s polemic is thrown into relief. The book ends with an assessment of the ramifications of Locke’s philosophy of language for his epistemological and political projects. While commentators have produced important work on Locke’s philosophy of language, they have often done so from a contemporary perspective, evaluating his answers to questions that preoccupy philosophers now. The principal debate has revolved around Locke’s fundamental linguistic thesis that words signify ideas.3 His critics retort that meanings cannot consist of private ideas. If they did, people would be able neither to communicate nor to refer to external things. His defenders exculpate him from the crime, variously arguing that he did not make such an obvious mistake. However, Locke could not have seen the original privacy of meaning as a mistake. It was obvious to him that meaning was primarily private. The entire point of words was to publicise ideas that would otherwise be hidden. This was a truism that Locke accepted without question and that made sense as part of a network of beliefs about God, man and the world. An understanding of Locke’s intellectual environment makes it clear that he was not interested in proving that words signify ideas; this was an uncontested fact. Moreover, by establishing what was taken for granted, one can unearth what Locke was saying that was new, and therefore the points he was actually trying to make. It turns out that Locke was in fact concerned to expose the desperate consequences that follow from the commonplace that words signify ideas. Ironically, these consequences touch on precisely the pitfalls of which commentators have declared him naively ignorant. That is to say, he worries that, given that words signify ideas, they are removed 3

For references to this debate see fn. 44, p. 219, chapter 8, below.

Introduction

3

from the world and obstruct communication. Situating Locke’s ideas in their context, therefore, captures his concerns rather than our own. We believe that, given that we communicate, meaning must be publicly accessible, and so we trawl the objective world and linguistic use for this elusive entity. We search for an exit from Locke’s ideational theory of meaning. But reading him in the light of our opinions erases his. We come at meaning from the opposite direction. Whereas we see meaning as working – with ease, it is sometimes said – from the outside in, for Locke it works – with difficulty – from the inside out. More generally, Locke’s linguistic theory has been flaunted and attacked as the exemplar of a representational model of language, whereby words stand in a representative relation to ideas and (perhaps, in some ways) to things. This ‘Lockean’ approach has been contrasted with the various nonrepresentational accounts that have flourished in the twentieth century. However, it turns out that, long before the howls began, Locke himself struggled with and owned up to the failings in the only linguistic paradigm that was avaliable to him. His immanent critique is testament not only to his acuity, but also to his intellectual courage and integrity.4 There are some commentators who have taken a historical approach to Locke’s philosophy of language, and to early-modern philosophy of language as a whole. However, historians tend to present Locke as ushering in a strikingly new way of words rather than developing old ones in a complex performance of debt and denial.5 More generally, scholarly attention has focused on the outstanding contributions to linguistic theory in the period, on the abundance of literature that explicitly and entirely pertained to language.6 In addition to these strange and mighty ships, I explore the waters that kept them afloat and the undercurrents 4 5

6

I am indebted to Jim Tully for making this clear to me. For interpretations of Locke’s novelty, see Cohen 1997, p. xxiv; Formigari 1998, p. 13; Padley 1985 and 1988, i, p. 352. Important exceptions to this discontinuous approach include Hacking (1975b) and Ashworth (1981), both of whom locate Locke in certain linguistic traditions. Ayers (1991) is a masterpiece that straddles philosophical and historical approaches to Locke’s epistemology and, within this, his philosophy of language. Ott (2004, pp. 13–21) brilliantly identifies the Hellenistic semiotic tradition to which Locke is indebted. He also evaluates Locke’s position from a contemporary perspective, and defends it against the attacks of Berkeley, Mill, Frege, Wittgenstein, Quine and Putnam. For my response to this book see Dawson 2004. References to this literature occur throughout the book. Among the significant contributions to the study of early-modern philosophy of language are: Aarsleff 1982; Bono 1995; Cave 1979; Chomsky 1966; Cohen 1977; Coudert 1978 and 1991; Demonet 1992; Elsky 1989; Fish 1971a and 1972; Formigari 1988 and 1993; Foucault 1970; Hacking 1975b; Katz 1981; Kessler and Maclean 2002; Knowlson 1975; Land 1986; Maclean 1992 and 2002; Markley 1993; Padley 1976, 1985 and 1988; Rossi 2000; Salmon 1972, 1988 and 1996; Slaughter 1982; Stillman 1995; Struever 1995; Skinner 1996; Vickers 1985; Waswo 1987.

4


that affected their course. Taking account of the fluid, international republic of letters that connected philosophers across borders through migration and the circulation of correspondence, manuscripts and books, I cover English and European authors, especially French ones. As well as making significant additions to the subject of language, the French turn out to be particularly resonant with Locke. And, in addition to texts from the early-modern period, I study those from antiquity and the intervening years whose traces are so vivid in early-modern writing. Within this frame, I look at two kinds of source that have not received much attention from students of early-modern language movements. To recover quotidian assumptions about language, I turn to the textbooks that taught the three arts of language – grammar, logic and rhetoric. The trivium formed the bedrock of every gentle education. It embodied the received wisdom about the nature of words that philosophers would have learnt at school and university, and that they went on to rehearse, embellish and unpick. In order to uncover these reactions, I then turn to a wide range of books that are primarily occupied with subjects other than language, such as metaphysics, commonwealths and Scripture, but that nevertheless record the irresistible pressure of linguistic concern. I look, for example, at Descartes’ Le monde (written 1629–33; published 1664), Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) and Pufendorf ’s De iure naturae et gentium (1672). In this small sample, the menace of language worms its way into discussions of light, republics and law. I investigate this kind of ubiquitous linguistic interference. Accordingly, when I come to Locke, I look not only at book iii of his Essay – the book that is entitled ‘of words’ and is so well known to historians of linguistics – but also at those parts of the Essay that are apparently not concerned with language, as well as the vast extent of his published and unpublished oeuvre. This use of all manner of philosophical texts delivers a more richly shaded, generally darker, picture of early-modern philosophy of language than that painted by those books which enthusiastically advertise their interest in language. In addition, these comments about language that spilled so plentifully and so anxiously on to the pages of early-modern philosophy tell us something that might otherwise be missed about the intimate relationship that was conceived between language and philosophy. One cannot grasp the full extent of contemporary linguistic concerns when they are abstracted from philosophy. Indeed, it seems to me that earlymodern philosophers were not so much concerned about language per se, except insofar as it obstructed philosophy and the better life that philosophy would bring.

Introduction

5

This brings me to the distinctive thrust of this book: that the earlymodern preoccupation with language originates from deep fears about the corruptible nature of words themselves – about their fragile relation to the concepts and things to which they were supposed to be fixed, and about their extraordinary power to disrupt truth and society. On the whole, commentators have tended to elucidate how language was conceived to work by Locke and his predecessors. We are told, for example, how Jacob Boehme believed that there was a divine natursprache that inherently contains knowledge of nature, or how John Wilkins believed that language can map the world essentially, albeit conventionally, or how Locke believed that words signify ideas. This may all be so, but it fails to register the anxiety that characterises so much early-modern treatment of language, that fuels so many of the reformatory plans with which we are familiar, and that pushes the subject into philosophy at large. By projecting on to early-modern linguistic thought our mission to discover how language works, we are easily blinded to the overriding source of its urgent energy: alarm that language did not work as it should. As established perceptions of man’s relations to the world and to his fellows were questioned, so too were the aptness, the stability and the strength of language. Language was both the agent of provocation and the victim of these unsettled perceptions. It was this complicated interaction of beliefs about the internal constitution of language and of changing philosophical positions that made language come to seem so threatening to natural, moral and political philosophers and to so encroach upon their writing. This book examines this volatile interaction. It tells a story about the problem of language in philosophy. In studying a wide range of texts, I want not only to achieve a fuller image of early-modern philosophy of language, but also to penetrate the early-modern usage which is foreign to us now. By moving back and forth between a wealth of texts, it gradually becomes possible differentially to decode the (unstable) meanings of key terms. From our point of view, the most vexed and important of these involve those entities that words are said to ‘signify’: ‘meaning’, ‘signification’, ‘sense’, ‘thing’ or ‘res’. By enveloping oneself in the cultural lexicon of early-modern speakers, one can begin to see things in their terms. One begins to shake off the modern presumption that meaning is in certain ways a function of the interplay of signs, that language and meaning are somehow made of the same stuff, or draw breath from the same source. One begins to internalise the radical disjunction between sign and signified which is axiomatic for earlymodern thinkers and key to understanding their linguistic solicitude.

6


However, I am not simply concerned to give an impressionistic account of early-modern philosophy of language, one that juxtaposes an array of resemblances and aporias. I am also interested in recovering a history of the debate, in the strings of actions and reactions that constitute a dynamic conversation. Rather than merely unlocking what various writers thought that words meant, I track a narrative of the shifting semantic ground. I probe the responses of philosophers to what they read in the trivium, the quarrels and bequests that related these philosophers and the rejoinder that Locke gave to this debate. In establishing these associations, I note some of the connections that we know existed between authors, particularly in the case of Locke, whose manuscripts and library afford us access to his literary interests. However, the marks that writers leave on each other do not originate simply from the reading of books. In the self-consciously friendly and dialogical community of seventeenth-century philosophers, ideas were shared and developed off the page.7 Indeed, Locke is keen to tell us that the seed of his Essay was produced when ‘five or six friends meeting at my chamber’ were overwhelmed by the difficulties of philosophical inquiry.8 The trade in ideas was particularly active in a culture that positively encouraged gentlemen to copy wise dicta into their notebooks and to pepper their speech with them. The high value set on commonplaces promoted an intense and elusive exchange of identical beliefs. Moreover, just as language is overwhelmingly communal, so too are beliefs. Invented in the interstices between speakers, they are circulated, reinforced and contested. They make up that symbolic web which gives us voice. I take it, then, that one does not need explicit allusions or proven familiarity to justify relating texts to one other. The fact that Locke may well not have read, for example, Thomas Spencer’s Art of Logick, Delivered in the Precepts of Aristotle and Ramus (1628) does not mean that he was not familiar with the ideas represented there. Spencer declared that ‘by institution . . . the signification of words followes the intent of the speaker, and not otherwise’.9 It strikes me as legitimate to say that Locke was ‘repeating’ this view when he wrote: ‘that then which words are the marks of, are the ideas of the speaker: nor can any one apply them, as marks, immediately to any thing else, but the ideas, that he himself hath’.10 This is not to say that individuals are drowned by the discourses in which they move. They can 7 8 10

See Shapin and Shaffer 1985; Shapin 1994; Walmsley 1993. Locke 1975, p. 7 (Epistle to the Reader). 9 Spencer 1970, p. 154. Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.2).

Introduction

7

modify, challenge and invert the conceptual resources they are given. Indeed, it is crucial to my analysis that authors can act, particularly when I come to Locke’s shocking interruption. Treading a path, then, between intertextuality and authority, this book follows the ideas that led philosophers to fear language. Part i examines the mainstream beliefs about language that are imparted in the trivium. It is important to note that early-modrn philosophy of language is fundamentally a philosophy of words. While today we might focus more on sentences, and while concatenations of words were explored by early-modern writers, their primary unit of analysis was words, which were believed to signify something outside themselves. More particularly therefore, early-modern philosophy of language might often be characterised as a philosophy of names, whereby sounds are considered to be applied to, or to name, something extra-linguistic, such as a pelican, an emotion or a mental action such as negation. Drawing on and reinforcing this tradition, all three sister arts depict words as signs that, by convention – or semantic contract, as I shall call it – have one proper meaning. Meanings are thoughts that in turn, if one is talking about the external world, hook on to things. Following Aristotle, the mainspring of early-modern linguistic theory, these three units – words, thoughts and things – are presented as operating in harmonious and univocal synchrony. Indeed, they are so tightly joined that the spaces dividing them seem to disappear. Words are taken so straightforwardly to represent their meanings that they stand confidently alone, what they actually signify remaining concealed or unconsidered. Often, thoughts are subsumed by things, mental mediation eclipsed by a seemingly perfect realism. However, under the gaze of external critical eyes and the pressure of internal dissent, various aspects of the tripartite union threaten to unravel. I identify three concerns that are thus provoked and in part ii I follow the ways in which various philosophers address them. The first is about the relationship between language and the world. The fear is that words might not correspond to things as they really are, but pervert them instead. The new philosophers choke on the Aristotelian linguisticontological paradigm they had been fed by logicians. While some, particularly the Cartesians, replace it with equally ambitious accounts, others stress the unstoppable breach between words and the world. The second concern is about semantic instability, whereby the conventions that connect words to meanings are insecure, and whereby one word might have a plurality of meanings. Logical fallacies and, more dangerously,

8


rhetoric had advertised and warmly embraced the ambiguous possibilities inherent in language. Reflecting on these, philosophers warn of the perils of free-floating words, particularly in the moral sphere. The third concern is that words might usurp the theoretically sovereign place of thoughts and things, and come to dominate the relationship. This danger had been both inadvertently broadcast by grammarians, who focused on the body rather than the soul of words, and shamelessly celebrated by rhetoricians, who taught the sweet and irresistible power of words. As a result of their supremacy, words might in fact stand for nothing at all. Moreover, they might belie the truth and write the natural and moral worlds in their own deceitful, but opaque, image. When Locke urged his readers, then, to consider well ‘the errors and obscurity, the mistakes and confusion, that is spread in the world by an ill use of words’, he was picking up a well-established refrain of earlymodern philosophers.11 Part iii investigates his intervention in their discussion. While keeping in mind the different circumstances and purposes that inform each of his different writings, I pursue the comments about language that run throughout them. Locke deepens each of his predecessors’ concerns, and, generally speaking, where they had often blamed speakers for the imperfection of words, Locke blamed words themselves, as well as their (un)knowing users. Provoked by overambitious and treacherous talk, influenced by critics of linguistic abuse, and thinking through revolutionary scientific and political developments, Locke makes his landmark case against language. In the context of the first concern that I have identified, he declares that we cannot know things in themselves, but only insofar as they affect our senses. Our talk about the external world is therefore bound to signify ideas alone (or rather, ideas and the fruits of our rational labour on them), and these bear no resemblance to the world. While this is basically a repetition of new (rationalist-) empiricist claims, Locke elaborately consolidates it through the filter of his distinctive epistemology. He also extracts the specifically linguistic implications of anti-Aristotelian mechanism from the epistemological ones with which they had generally been run together, and thereby gives them an original prominence and particularity. The second concern, about semantic instability, had not been nearly so developed by Locke’s predecessors. The ambiguous use of words had generally been characterised as a clearly identifiable, preventable misdemeanour. The breach of linguistic conventions had been conceived as avoidable, as caused by 11

Locke 1975, pp. 509–10 (iii.xi.4).

Introduction

9

the deliberate malice of men who wanted to subvert truth, justice and peace. Locke’s reply was that people inevitably, innocently and most of the time, mean different things by the same words, particularly moral ones. They therefore do not communicate about matters of the utmost importance. The application of his theory of ideas to language leads him to conclude that we actively construct the complex meanings of the great majority of our words. They are therefore bound to differ from person to person in accordance with differences of experience and belief. This calls into question the very existence of common use. Locke firms up the third concern by systematically laying out the sensible autonomy of words and their great allure to our sensuous minds. In themselves, words are sounds and squiggles that enter and fix in our minds with far more ease than their ephemeral and complicated meanings. Words therefore dominate in cognition as well as in communication. Their palpable and singular presence conceals the unreal and multiple nature of meaning, with the result that people mistakenly imagine that their words are a mirror both of reality and of other people’s minds. Moreover, people often speak words that they either do not understand or that have no meaning to speak of. Locke fears that the impressive façade of words fills our heads and tells its own tales. While our semantic handiwork is fissile and full of holes, our words instruct us otherwise. His treatment of language is a plea for us to realise the limitations and imperfections of the meanings of our words and their intractable presence in private and interpersonal experience. I conclude by asking how Locke’s critique of language might cause us to re-read the theorist of human understanding and of politics with whom we are perhaps more familiar. The answer is potentially devastating. Locke’s fears about the embodied power of language threaten to dim the light of knowledge. By infecting men with erroneous and empty discourse and by encouraging them to pretend to a greater intelligence than they can ever have, language threatens both the judgement that establishes political legitimacy and the precious policy of toleration. Moreover, Locke’s apprehension about the loose ties that bind words to ideas challenges both the trust and the unity that gives life to civil society. Locke’s pessimistic account of language turns out to subvert, if not obviate, crucial ambitions of his philosophy.

part 1

Language in the trivium

chap te r 1

Language in logic

Of the three arts of language, logic offers the most fundamental analysis of the subject. It deals most directly with meaning, that is, with the concepts and the things that words represent. It is for this reason that, while grammar comes first in the trivium, I begin with the second sister and her revelation of the heart of language. Logic is an instrument for sound reasoning, and is often presented as yielding truth. At the end of the seventeenth century, the discipline is still firmly shaped by the Aristotelian Organon, but it is not a monolith.1 Its scholastic constitution, having been variously contested by humanist authors, is further developed by new philosophers from Bacon to Locke, whose Essay is an important contribution to the field.2 I have called upon 1

2

Aristotle’s Organon includes Categories, De interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics and Sophistici Elenchi. This sketches what became the tripartite journey from terms to propositions to reasoning (demonstrative, probabilistic and fallacious) that shapes early modern logics. The concepts of ‘humanism’ and ‘scholasticism’ are to a great extent confused and modern fabrications, and often cannot be pulled apart, each drawing on identical or interwoven classical sources, and engaging in often indistinguishable practices. Insofar as one can discern a division of interests, these coincided peacefully in a unified curriculum. Having said that, these labels are useful shorthand for particular outlooks. I take ‘humanism’ to champion the studia humanitatis (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy) and to be often concerned with textual criticism, temporality, probabilism, arguments in utramque partem (on both sides of a question) and the citizen orator. ‘Scholasticism’ is perhaps an even more problematic and all-encompassing term, denoting simply the culture of the ‘schools’ or universities. In addition though, I think of scholastics as having a particular preoccupation with logic, and especially with Aristotle and his tradition. Moreover, while early-modern Aristotelianism was plural, porous and vital, it is important to note the polemical, contemporary caricature of the ‘schoolman’ as enslaved to authority, splitting hairs and spinning webs of insignificant words. On humanism and the Renaissance as worthwhile categories see Kristeller 1979a and Skinner 2002b, pp. 1–3. On the close relationship of humanism to scholasticism see Kristeller 1979b; for a more antagonistic characterisation see Grafton and Jardine 1986, pp. xiii–xiv. On early-modern Aristotelianisms see Blackwell and Kusukawa 1999 and Mercer 1993. See Marenbon (1991) and Spade (1998) on late-medieval logic; Ashworth (1974) on logic in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Ashworth (1988) on ‘traditional’ logic in the Renaissance; Jardine (1988) on humanist transformations and logic’s ‘hybridisation’ (p. 174); Ong (1958) on the pedagogically motivated Agricolan–Ramist movement which reified the logical ontology; Rossi (2000) on the Neo-Platonist, especially Lullist, conversion of logic into an

13

14


the disparate voices in this parade to retrieve basic and commonplace assumptions about language and meaning.

words as signs Words are universally characterised as signs. The Manuductio ad logicam (1614) by Philippe du Trieu, a Jesuit scholastic logic that Locke both possessed and recommended to his students at Christ Church, defines speech (oratio) as significant sound (vox significativa).3 A word is said to signify its ‘signification’ or ‘meaning’. These two terms are used interchangeably in early-modern English. For example, in his Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), John Wilkins translates ‘meaning’, or that ‘which is intended by any . . . sound or character’, as ‘sense, signification’.4 I generally use these terms in the same way.5 ‘Signify’ is a rich term that is roughly equivalent to ‘indicate’ or ‘make known’.6 In his Ars logica (1632), John of St. Thomas makes more explicit the integral role that the human mind plays in signification, defining a

3 4

5

6

encyclopaedic key to the world; Malherbe (1990) on Bacon’s critique of logic; Nuchelmans (1998a, 1998b and 1998c) on seventeenth-century logic; Schurmann (2000), Easton (1997) and Buickerood (1985) on ‘new’ developments and Locke’s place within them. Howell, W. (1971, pp. 6–7) asserts that logic was transformed in an ‘intellectual revolution’ whose ‘hero’ was Locke. Du Trieu 1826, p. 89. See Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 252; Ashworth 1981, p. 304. For further examples, see Wilson 1553, fo. 8v: ‘ ‘‘nobles’’ signifie not onely the peers of a realme, but also thei are the good yelowe nobles in a mans purse . . . every one of these woordes have a double meanyng’ (my emphasis); Blount 1969, sig. P1r: ‘Entendment . . . signifies in our common law so much as the true meaning or signification of a word’; Kersey 1969, sig. R2v: ‘To mean’ is interpreted as ‘to purpose, to understand, or to signify’, and ‘signification’ translates as ‘meaning’; the title of John Cowell’s legal dictionary, which Locke both possessed and recommended for a gentleman’s reading (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 117; Locke 1997, p. 379) reads: The Interpreter or Book containing the Signification of Words, wherein is set forth the true meaning of all . . . ; Locke 1975, p. 422 (iii.iv.6): ‘the meaning of any term is then shewed, or the word is defined when by other words, the idea it is made the sign of, and annexed to in the mind of the speaker, is as it were represented, or set before the view of another; and thus its signification ascertained’; cf. p. 480 (iii. ix.9). See Ashworth (1981, pp. 309–11) on the difference between early-modern ‘signification’ and our sense of ‘meaning’; contrast Losonsky (1994, pp. 127–30), who argues for ‘some minimal, pretheoretical conception of meaning’ (p. 130) that, like water (p. 129), existed then as now, and was the object of Locke’s linguistic theory. Ott (2004, p. 28) makes an illuminating contribution to this debate, inviting us to think of ‘to mean’ as we do when we say that ‘puddles mean rain’. This makes sense of the claim that ‘words mean ideas’. It was Grice (1957) who brought attention to this ‘natural’ (as opposed to ‘nonnatural’) kind of meaning. Accordingly, I also use ‘semantic’ to capture this broad, early-modern conception of ‘meaning’ or ‘signification’, which shifts, as we shall see, between concepts, things or both. Occasionally, I import the modern categories of sense and reference to elucidate my argument. See Ott (2004, pp. 13–21) on the ‘indicative’ tradition; Ashworth (1974, pp. 39–41, and 1984, pp. 60–2) on the ‘making known’ tradition.

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sign as ‘that which represents something other than itself to a knowing power’.7 He goes on to explain that there are two types of sign. Formal signs signify immediately and of themselves, and include concepts whose very nature is to represent things. Then there are instrumental signs. These do not intrinsically signify and are themselves distinct objects of sensation.8 Words fall into this category. While different philosophers had proposed different and incommensurable typologies of signs over the years, all agree that verbal signs are quintessentially sensible (audible or visible) and signify something absolutely distinct from themselves. Augustine advertises the sensible aspect of words. He defines a sign, of which a word is a species, as, in a respectful quotation of John of St. Thomas, ‘something which, besides the impression that it conveys to the sense, makes something come into cognition’.9 The Port-Royal’s enormously influential La logique, ou, l’art de penser (1662) by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, owned and applauded by Locke, repeats Augustine’s claim that ‘for an uttered or written sound to signify is nothing other than to prompt an idea connected to this sound in the mind by striking our ears or eyes’.10 Words must be sensible to manifest things that would otherwise be hidden. Thomas Hobbes gives a strong account of the intrinsic sensibility of words. In addition to requiring sensible signs to communicate insensible things, he says that we need them to remember, and even to think. In his Computatio sive logica (1655), better known as De corpore, he distinguishes two functions of language. One is the familiar, communicative one. The other is mnemonic. It involves notae, or ‘sensible things employed by our own decision, so that at the sensation of these things, thoughts can be recalled to the mind, similar to those thoughts for the sake of which they were

7

8 9

10

John of St. Thomas 1985, p. 116. See Murphy (1994) for an account of John of St. Thomas’ semiotics; Murphy (1991) for a criticism of John’s division between natural and habituated signification. Deely (1985) argues that John of St. Thomas is part of a ‘radical . . . semiotic enterprise’ in which Locke is also involved (p. 514). See also MS. Stowe 990, fo. 162r on the distinction between formal and instrumental signs. John of St. Thomas 1985, p. 116. Ott (2004, p. 14) argues for an opposition between the ‘indicative’ Augustinian tradition and the ‘expressing’ or ‘making known’ scholastic tradition that Ashworth describes. However, while these traditions did have rival understandings of non-verbal signs, they broadly agreed on the nature of words. For example, John of St. Thomas (1985, p. 27), a scholastic supposedly at the heart of Ott’s opposing camp, agreed that linguistic signs are instrumental. A similar debate over the essence of a sign is conducted in the Coimbra commentaries on Aristotle, a text which, as E. J. Ashworth shows, was recommended for young scholars by Thomas Barlow, librarian of the Bodleian in 1652–60, in a list which Locke copied into his commonplace book (Collegium Conimbricense 1610, pp. 292–4). Cf. Ashworth 1981, p. 304. Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 75; MS. Locke f. 3, p. 52; Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 66.

16


summoned’.11 In private thought, then, as well as in public speech, the sensibility of words might be crucial. Another definitive characteristic of language is its conventionality. While a few early-modern writers loudly and mysteriously disagree on this point, most concur that the connection between words and meanings is arbitrary, purely contingent on human will, and agreed on by men through a semantic contract.12 In his popular Institutionum logicarum (1626) (top of the list of logics that Richard Holdsworth recommends to Cambridge undergraduates towards the middle of the seventeenth century), Franco Burgersdijk defines speech (interpretatio) as ‘a symbol made from articulate sound, signifying a concept of the mind by institution’.13 Lurking within the logicians’ conventionalist thesis is the possibility of instability and opacity. Reading against the grain of their frequent plea to speak ‘properly’, that is, in accordance with common use, we are alerted to the fact that sign and signified might come apart at will. The PortRoyalists urge that ‘we should accommodate ourselves to usage as much as possible’. They are upset by ‘chemists’ who ‘enjoy changing the names of most of the things they talk about’.14 Unless we speak ‘properly’, declares Burgersdijk, our words cannot be ‘perspicuous’.15 Only convention can make sounds transparent signs. Words are inherently opaque, and just as men join them to meanings, so might they separate them. The Coimbra commentary on Aristotle’s Dialectic (2nd edition 1610) brings out the ineliminable dualism of sign and signified. It distinguishes between the verbs ‘signify’ and ‘represent’. A representative is something that ‘makes the thing present’, whereas a sign causes something other than itself to come to mind.16 The radical division, only bridgeable by breakable convention, between meanings and intrinsically meaningless words was to seem to some a fragile base for communication. I now turn to the question of what words signify. Broadly speaking, logicians give two (sometimes overlapping) answers. The first posits a binary relationship between word and meaning, between sign and signification. The 11 12

13

14 16

Hobbes 1981, p. 12. Many commentators argue that the belief in (the possibility of ) naturally significant words was widespread. See, for example, Cope 1999, p. 57: ‘it must be realized that in Locke’s time, most people believed in natural connections between words and things’. See also Aarsleff 1982, pp. 42–83, and 1999; Bono 1995; Coudert 1978 and 1991; Foucault 1970. In contrast, Demonet (1992) demonstrates convincingly the overwhelming early-modern consensus, following Aristotle, that words are connected to their meanings arbitrarily. Holdsworth 1961, p. 634; Burgersdijk 1634, p. 142: ‘symbolum ex articulata voce factum, animi conceptus ex instituto significans’. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, pp. 64; 65. 15 Burgersdijk 1634, p. 142. Collegium Conimbricense 1610, pp. 295–7.

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terms verba and res are widely used to characterise this bisection.17 Burgersdijk puts an Aristotelian spin on the duality, stating that, if ‘man’ were defined materially it would be ‘one syllable’, if formally, it would be ‘animal’.18 The second answer to the question of what words signify is a triptych. In his hugely influential Systema logicae (1600), Bartholomaeus Keckermann declares that ‘a word is the sign of a thing and a concept’.19 In Samuel Smith’s Aditus ad logicam (1613), a textbook that Locke recommended to his students, a word is defined as ‘a sign of a thing and a concept’.20 In his Institutio logicae (1687), a textbook that Locke possessed, John Wallis writes that ‘speeches or words (either spoken or written) are names of things, and signs (or indications) of thoughts, or concepts of the mind’.21 As I shall show, logicians are generally committed to this tripartite paradigm, believing that words hook on to the mind and the world, and that these three elements somehow parallel each other. However, running uneasily and ubiquitously alongside this considered commitment, are simpler, careless stories. Logicians regularly switch between the two- and three- part accounts of language. Keckermann, for example, whom we saw voicing the linguistic triptych, also saw double, dividing words into two aspects: ‘material’ (sound or image) and ‘formal’ (signification).22 In this way, concept and thing become confused under the umbrella of res, and one of them tends to disappear. Most often, it is the mental component that is forgotten, words seeming to reach directly out to the world. Language seems to melt into reality as even the distinction between verba and res blurs, the one standing confidently for the other. The three elements dissolve into each other on the pages of the logics, as though there were no question of the plenitude of the letter. In the course of this book I shall unpack the unities that are conjured out of these semantic elisions. language reflects the mind I turn first to the conceptual plain of signification. Logicians portray language as the mirror of (ideally rational) thought. Indeed, at times ratio runs together with oratio to the extent that they become 17 19 20 21

22

For example, Clauberg 1658, sig. *4v. 18 Burgersdijk 1634, pp. 159–60. Keckermann 1600, sig. A4v: ‘vox est signum rei & conceptum’. Schuurman 2000, p. 53; Smith, Samuel 1656, p. 4: ‘vox est signum rei et conceptuum’. Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 262; Wallis 1687, p. 1: ‘voces seu verba (sive scripta sive prolata,) sunt Rerum Nomina, Signaque (seu indicia) cogitatuum, sive conceptuum mentis’. Keckermann 1600, sig. A5r.

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indistinguishable.23 This equivalence has its roots in the Greek word logos which, as well as giving its name to the discipline, balances between ‘reason and speech’, collapsing the two into each other.24 As Hobbes says, ‘the Greeks have but one word . . . for both Speech and Reason’.25 In his Introduction to the Art of Logick (1671), John Newton elaborates on the Greek derivation of the name of the art. Logos ‘signifieth speech, and according to Aristotle, speech is twofold, internal, and external. Internal speech he calleth that which is conceived in the mind: and he calleth external which is expressed by words.’26 Echoing Plato, Pierre Gassendi explains in his Institutio logica (the first part of his Syntagma philosophicum, 1658), that ‘logic . . . takes its name from the Greek word logos which means speech, since thinking is nothing else but an inner conversation which the mind holds with itself ’.27 In his Summa totius logicae Ockham had given a seminal account of the isomorphism between mental, spoken and written language: Language is threefold: written, spoken and conceptual. The last named exists only in the intellect. Correspondingly the term is threefold, viz. the written, the spoken and the conceptual term. A written term is part of a proposition written on some material, and is or can be seen with the bodily eye. A spoken term is part of a proposition uttered with the mouth and able to be heard with the bodily ear. A conceptual term is a mental content or impression which naturally possesses signification or consignification, and which is suited to be part of a mental proposition and to stand for (supponere) that which it signifies.28

The oratio mentalis is simply publicised by an external version of itself. Wallis echoes the parallel relationship between mental and verbal discourse when he characterises them as ‘internal’ and ‘external’ forms of the same thing.29 Thought is therefore discursive, identical in form, though not matter, to language. Robert Sanderson refers not so much to a relation of identity as of manifestation or translation. His Logicae artis compendium (1618) is an exemplar of the seventeenth-century ‘systematic’ movement 23

24 26 27 28

29

Hobbes (1969, p. 23) plays with the rhyme to jibe at insignificant speakers, such as beggars reciting the paternoster, for whom ‘ratio, now, is but oratio’. Although the two words are not etymologically related, early-modern philosophers mine the apparent continuity. 25 Wallis 1687, p. 1: ‘vox & Rationem significat & Orationem’. Hobbes 1996, p. 29. Newton 1671, p. 2. Gassendi 1981, p. 80. Cf. Plato (1928, p. 179): thought is ‘the talk which the soul has with itself ’. Ockham 1990, p. 47. Panaccio (1999b, p. 14) asserts that Ockham accomplished ‘une re´volution theóretique majeure extreˆmement influente, par la mise au point prećise´ment de ce concept d’oratio mentalis’. Wallis 1687, p. 1. On mental language, see Ashworth 1974, p. 42; Ashworth 1982; Ashworth 1984, pp. 58–60; Spade 1980.

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that amalgamates scholasticism and Ramism.30 It was published at least ten times in the course of the century and is described by one commentator as the ‘most influential textbook of the seventeenth century’.31 Locke not only owned a copy but recommended the text to his students, although he would later, when his disdain for the logicians’ pretensions to describe the world had firmly crystallised, attack Sanderson, along with Burgersdijk, as the representatives of that ‘whole tribe of logicians’ who talked emptily.32 According to Sanderson, the ‘objects’ of logic are primarily the human mind (mens humana), and secondarily speech (oratio), which expresses the thoughts of the mind (sensa mentis).33 Burgersdijk sums up the coordination between speech and thought in the Synopsis of his Institutionum. Logic ‘signifies at once reason and speech. For logic directs the rational faculty, or concepts of our mind, and teaches them to translate into apt speech.’34 The mental-linguistic parallelism is developed into a narrative in three parts. Derived from Aristotle, it is represented here by the Coimbra commentary: ‘first it is right to define, what is a name, and a verb, then what is a negation, what an affirmation, what a proposition, and then what is discourse’.35 As Peter Berault’s Logic or the Key of Sciences (1690) puts it more succinctly: ‘the first part makes mention of the terms; the second of the proposition; and the third of the argumentation’. This trinity reflects three ‘actions of our spirit’: ‘to conceive, to judge, and to reason’.36 Speech and thought appear like synchronised swimmers. The basic dance goes as follows. At the first stage, the mind is almost passive and the concepts simple. While philosophers tell various complex stories about how the mind comes to have universal concepts, in the logics they generally appear fully formed, as singular and automatic.37 As Aristotle writes, ‘a noun or a verb by itself much resembles a concept or thought, which is neither combined nor disjoined’.38 Gassendi, the ‘empiricist’, 30

31 32 33 34

35

36 37

38

Howell (1961, p. 299) describes Sanderson as the ‘chief English Systematic’; cf. Nuchelmans 1998a, p. 104. On the systematic movement see Howell 1961, pp. 282–317. Feingold 1997, p. 297. Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 225; Ashworth 1981, p. 304; Locke 1706b, p. 192. Sanderson 1985, pp. 1–2. Burgersdijk 1668, p. 1: ‘tum rationem tum orationem significat. Logica enim dirigit intellectus nostri rationem, sive conceptus, eosque docet apta oratione interpretari’. Collegium Conimbricense 1610, p. 291: ‘Primo definire oportet, quidnam sit nomen, & quid verbum, deinde quid negatio, quid affirmatio, quid Enuntiatio, quid denique oratio sit.’ Berault 1690, p. 6. See Spruit (1994 and 1995) for a compendious survey of the ways in which the mind was thought to obtain the ‘intelligible species’ or essence of a thing from antiquity to the seventeenth century. Aristotle 1938b, p. 117; ‘resembles’ here does not indicate any natural connection between sign and signification. Charles (1994) argues that Aristotle has an account of the meaning of names which is midway between Frege and direct reference theory.

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calls the first cognitive procedure ‘imagination’.39 The Cartesian PortRoyalists call it ‘conception’, producing ideas, not ‘images painted in the fantasy’.40 As late as 1732, an account of ‘dialectica universa’ from Douay, lays down the first operation of the mind as ‘apprehension’ or ‘a simple perception’.41 While logicians traditionally and overwhelmingly deal with language and thought as two sides of the same coin, they sometimes conduct a discussion specifically about terms, often at the end of their first sections.42 It should be noted immediately that Locke’s book iii, which bridges his discussion of ideas in books i and ii and their agreement/ disagreement in book iv, bears the traces of this traditional logical structure, while at the same time challenging it. It should also be noted that while traditional logicians sometimes identify discrepancies between terms and concepts, these are presented as limited and manageable, and, more generally, the specific discussions of terms only elaborate more deeply on the parallelism between terms and concepts which permeates the discipline. Logicians (Locke included) distinguish between, for example, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, ‘connotative’ and ‘absolute’, and univocal and equivocal terms – distinctions that Locke will transform and sometimes collapse almost out of all recognition.43 Perhaps the most important division at this point in the present study is betwen categorematic and syncategorematic terms. The former signify the objects of thought, such as ‘homo, animal’, and the latter the actions that the mind performs on them, such as ‘ut, omnis, nullus’, and most crucially ‘est’ – the copula that relates simple terms to each other in a proposition at the second stage of logic.44 Aristotle characterises the second mental-linguistic action as composition/separation and affirmation/denial. Both these characterisations are taken up by seventeenth-century philosophers. Du Trieu defines a proposition as a judgement, ‘when something is affirmed or denied of something else’.45 Sanderson defines it compositionally.46 Hobbes goes so 39

40 42 43

44 45

46

Gassendi 1981, p. 80. See Osler (2002, p. 84) on Gassendi’s ‘empirical approach to the world’ in his logic. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, pp. 23; 26. 41 MS. Stowe 990, fo. 162r. See, for example, Burgersdijk 1668, pp. 18–20; Du Trieu 1826, pp. 6–20. Du Trieu 1826, p. 8 (De Termino Simplici et Complexo); p. 10 (De Termino Concreto et Abstracto); p. 12 (De Termino Connotativo et Absoluto); p. 16 (De Termino Univoca et Aequivoca). See also Burgersdijk 1668, p. 19; Locke 1975, pp. 420–75 (iii.iv–viii). Du Trieu 1826, pp. 6–7. See Nuchelmans 1998a, pp. 107–8. Du Trieu 1826, p. 2: ‘propositio . . . est alicuius de aliquo affirmativa negative oratio: ut, homo est animal ’. Sanderson 1985, p. 3.

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far as to call his work: Computatio sive logica.47 Gassendi and the Port-Royalists fuse the two accounts.48 In language, this is expressed by the copulative verb ‘is’ and makes propositions.49 The final mental action is an inference, whereby less known propositions are derived from better known ones, most perfectly conducted by the syllogism. Although the syllogism comes under attack from Bacon, Descartes and Locke, it remains remarkably robust as the accepted means of watertight reasoning, drawing the support, in their logics at least, of Gassendi, Hobbes and the Port-Royalists.50 Thomas Wilson’s Rule of Reason (1551) describes it as the ‘perfect argument’.51 Du Trieu actually calls his third tract De syllogismo.52 While the precise movements of these mental acrobatics are disputed, it is agreed that the linguistic procession maps a mental course. There is a compelling body of commentary that argues that in the course of the seventeenth century logic was transformed from a discursive and artificial discipline to one with an epistemological and natural focus, turning from language to psychology. This new logic has been called natural or facultative logic, or the logic of ideas. Based on the informal, native workings of the mind, it was designed both to emulate them and to train them towards truth and clarity.53 While logics had always been divided 47

48

49 50

51

52

53

For Hobbes reason is reckoning, the adding and subtracting of terms. He gives the example of seeing something far off, and thinking body, then observing the thing move and thinking animate, then hearing it speak and thinking rational. These single concepts ‘are composed into one name . . . man’ (Hobbes 1981, pp. 3–4). Gassendi 1981, p. 81; Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 23. The word ‘judgement’ was often used to name a much larger part of the logical enterprise as a result of the Ramist division of logic into two parts: invention and judgement. As Wilson (1553, fo. 2r) explains, inventio finds out the ‘matter’, whereas ‘framying of thinges aptly together, and knittyng woordes for the purpose accordyngly . . . in Latine is called Iudicium’. Aristotle 1938b, p. 121. Bacon (1996b, pp. 221–2) rejects it only for natural philosophy (Locke owned The Advancement of Learning (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 78)), Descartes (1985a, pp. 36–7) and Locke (1975, pp. 670–81 (iv.xvii.4–8)) for all reasoning. Running together formal and mental elements, he calls it ‘an absolute gatheryng, or resonyng, whereby the last sentence whiche we woulde prove, is confirmed by other propositions and sentences more universal, and better nowen then the thing whiche is proved’ (Wilson 1553, fo. 23r). He goes on to explain the three parts of a syllogism in temporal terms, calling them the ‘Antecedens, Consequens, Nova illationis’ (Du Trieu 1826, p. 120). Hobbes uses the same temporal language to describe scientific deduction (Hobbes 1981, p. 12). Early-modern discussions of inferential signs emerge out of antique (especially Epicurean) treatment of the subject, on which see Allen 2001; Jackson 1972, p. 115; Long and Sedley 1987, pp. 90–7; Markus 1996, p. 72. Ott (2004, pp. 7–33) argues that this is the tradition in which we should read Locke’s use of ‘signification’. Schuurman (2004) is the most recent work to make the case for a ‘new logic (of ideas)’, by contrast with ‘the old (Aristotelian)’ (p. 3). Schuurman identifies three elements that define the new logic: ideas, human faculties and method. For a longer engagement with his important book, see Dawson 2005b. Buickerood (1985) traces the rise of ‘facultative’ logic, fully realised in Locke’s Essay which compiled ‘a natural history of the understanding’ (p. 157) whose goal was ‘to formulate the

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according to the operations of the mind, these divisions had arguably played a purely superficial and structural role. For example, while Wallis divides his logic into the three ‘operations of the intellect’, these simply head a traditional division of the three parts of logic: ‘de vocibus’, ‘de propositione’ and ‘de argumentatione’. Wallis never ‘scrutinizes’ the operations themselves, as Locke is to do.54 This refigurative movement can be traced from Bacon’s Novum organum (1620) which, as its title suggests, is a replacement of Aristotelian logic,55 through Gassendi’s ars bene cogitandi and Descartes’ Regulae ad directionem Ingenii (written c. 1628) and his Discours de la me´thode pour bien conduire sa raison (1637), with the latter’s emphasis on clear and distinct ideas and on a natural, non-syllogistic method, to the offerings of Clauberg, Arnauld and Nicole, Spinoza, Malebranche and finally Locke,56 who inveighs against the suffocating artificiality of the syllogism and recommends instead ‘native rustick Reason’.57 Logic attains an increasingly holistic and normative agenda. Logicians expand their domain, now embracing the influence of passion and education on cognition. Logic becomes therapy for the mind, steering it away from error towards intellectual illumination. Gassendi says that logic should be an instrument to stop the mind from straying, ‘just as the carpenter provides himself with a ruler’.58 The Port-Royal Logique has the ambition of ‘educating our judgement and making it as precise as possible’.59 Spinoza and Locke are concerned with the ethics of the understanding, its ‘emendation’ and the correction of its ‘conduct’.60

54 55

56

57 58 60

principles of the habituated regulation of the mind in the apprehension of things, and the acquisition of knowledge and properly grounded opinion’ (p. 176). Cf. Land (1986, p. 7) on the shift from a formal to a psychological pursuit; Gaukroger (1989, p. 3) on the shift from a ‘discursive to a facultative conception of inference’; Michael (1997) on the move to epistemology. Nuchelmans (1998c, pp. 132–3) explains that formal logic was increasingly questioned in the seventeenth century. Passmore (1953) highlights Descartes’ opposition to formal logic. Thomas (1967, p. 534) describes formal logic from the mid-fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth as ‘sterile’. See also Easton 1997, p. i; Schuurman 2000, pp. 62–3. Buickerood 1985, p. 160. Among the nineteen works Locke owned by Bacon, there are two editions of Novum organum (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 78). At the beginning of the Conduct of the Understanding (written 1697), Locke justifies his own revision of the logic whose ‘rules have served the learned world these two or three thousand years’, by appealing to ‘Verulam’s Authority’ who attacked and replaced it in his ‘Novum Organum concerning Logick’ (Locke 1993, p. 4). Schuurman (2000 and 2004) highlights Descartes as the radical innovator and Locke’s Essay as ‘the most outspoken specimen of the new logic’ (2004, p. 2). Michael (1997) stresses the primary importance of Gassendi, and then the Port-Royalists in effecting the revolution in logic. See Palmer (1997) on Descartes’ Regulae as an early-modern logic. Locke 1975, p. 679 (iv.xvii.6); cf., more generally, Locke 1975, pp. 668–88 (iv.xvii). Gassendi 1981, p. 80. 59 Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 5. See Spinoza 1985 (Tractatus de intellectus emendatione (1677)) and Locke 1993 (Of the Conduct of the Understanding) – a chapter intended for but never included in the Essay. Cf. De Dijn (1989) on

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Malebranche’s De la recherche de la ve´rite´ (1674–5) is a manual on error and how to avoid it.61 Indeed, Locke’s book on language, or rather on the impediment of language, aimed at banishing the cognitive faults induced by language, itself grows out, in part, of the increased attention being paid to the identification and purgation of error. In his Logica vetus et nova (1654), the scholastic-Cartesian occasionalist Johann Clauberg captures the new spirit. In Baconian fashion, he writes that ‘the origins and causes of the errors and imperfections of the human mind must be investigated’. Logic is the ‘medicine’ of the mind and will lead it away from such errors.62 However, it would be wrong to over-segregate the old from the new. While the concern was magnified in kind and scope, logicians had always been concerned with error, often devoting a fourth part of their books to a discussion of fallacious reasoning. Moreover, while the desire was doubtless reformulated, logics had always had ethical aspirations. For example, in his Aristotelian–Ramist Art of Logick, Thomas Spencer sees his art as ‘healing the wound we received in our reason by Adams fall’.63 While there was undoubtedly a revision of logic that kept time with the new way of ideas, commentators underplay both the importance of the mental component in traditional logic and the persistent inclusion of language in the new logic. While the Port-Royalists and Gassendi might advertise their contributions as arts of thinking, they still organise them broadly around terms, propositions and discourse, maintaining the old sense of an identity between language and thought. The revolution should not be overstated therefore. The ‘new’ logic did not deal ‘with ‘‘concepts’’ rather than terms’,64 but continued, perhaps with even greater

61

62

63 64

Spinoza’s vision of logic as purifying the intellect and Passmore (1986) on Locke on the ‘ethics of belief ’. Schuurman (2000, pp. 75–7) sees Malebranche’s Recherche as an important contributor to the Cartesian logic of ideas in its focus on mental errors, and as an important influence on Locke, especially his Conduct, a manual for the ‘prevention and cure of errors that are relevant for Locke’s logic of ideas’ (p. 96). Cf. Schuurman 2004, pp. 44–50. Clauberg 1658, p. 1: ‘errorum & imperfectionum humanae mentis in rebus cognoscendis originem & causas investigandas esse’; p. 34. Locke had a copy of this in his library (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 109). On Clauberg’s reconciliation of scholasticism and Cartesianism see Bardout 2002. On Clauberg’s medicinal logic, see Hammacher 1981. Spencer 1970, sig. A3r. Easton 1997, p. i. While Descartes and Spinoza do vociferously banish language from reasoning, and are suspicious of its surreptitious and misleading interventions, as I shall show in chapter 6 (e.g. Descartes 1984a, p. 21, and Descartes 1985e, pp. 220–1; Spinoza 1994, p. 64), they do assume, in the context of their words, the continuity between language and thought which is so characteristic of the ‘old’ logic. While these texts are not squarely in the logical genre, the citations bear on the practice of thinking well.

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unreflectiveness than before, to elide the difference. It is this continuing amalgamation that will provoke Locke so urgently. I end this section by giving an impression of the fusion of language and thought that persists in seventeenth-century logic. In his translation of Peter Du Moulin’s The Elements of Logick (1624), Nathanael De-Lawne announces that the subject of the first book is ‘simple notions’. However, when he comes to define them he does so in linguistic terms, positing with breath-taking confidence a direct correlation between word-units and notion-units. ‘Simple Notions are such, as are expressed by one word onely; As horse, man, whiteness.’65 When he comes to define a proposition he moves seamlessly between the linguistic and the mental. ‘Enunciation is a speech, wherein something is affirmed or denied. Every enunciation consists of two words at the least, which the logicians call termes’.66 While Gassendi is generally careful to talk about ideas rather than terms in the first section of his Institutio logica, he returns to labyrinthine verbal analysis when he addresses propositions and syllogisms. ‘Every proposition is generally affirmative or negative, and affirmation and negation take place through the inclusion of the verb ‘‘is’’ or, with the addition of the negative particle, ‘‘is not’’.’ He then backtracks from his original silence on terms by telling us that ‘what precedes the verb is called the subject, being that which is made the foundation, like ‘Socrates’ and ‘Justice’ . . . and what follows the verb is called the attribute or predicate’.67 One unique, self-reflexive voice of concern about the confusion between language and thought which doubtless rings in Locke’s ears comes from the Port-Royalists.68 However, even they proceed from an initially self-consciously ideas-focused analysis to a linguistic one when they come to propositions and reasoning. They thereby threaten to erase their innovative caesura between mental and ideational discourse, publicising an ambition and a failure of ambition which were to inspire and provoke Locke respectively and in equal measure. language reflects the world All logicians agree that words refer to things in some, albeit highly interpretative, way. They also agree that there must be some mental component to linguistic reference. Moreover, despite the new philosophical inroads, 65 68

Du Moulin 1624, p. 2. 66 Du Moulin 1624, p. 106. 67 Gassendi 1981, p. 102. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, pp. 58–60. For a discussion of their critique see pp. 38–9 below.

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the Aristotelian classification of the world proves remarkably tenacious, continuing to capture the imaginations of logicians of all persuasions. While the balance between inquirer and object had always been disputed, logical language is commonly seen as comprehending the world as well as charting the sound operation of the mind. Ontological considerations appear in tandem with epistemological ones. When the Thomists say that logic deals with entia rationis, they mean things as conceived by the mind.69 Wallis declares that the objects of logic are ‘all things (either real or imagined)’ about which we can talk or reason.70 Sanderson describes logic as ‘an instrumental art, directing our mind in the understanding of all intelligible things’.71 Its end is the knowledge of ‘things (rerum)’.72 Burgersdijk, repeating Keckermann, casts logic as ‘directing the mind to the understanding of things’.73 While res and ‘things’ are ambiguous terms, tottering between the conceptual and the real, this ambiguity only follows from the supposed conformity of the two planes. Logicians certainly have the world in mind. Keckermann makes clear the real scope of logic. While it guides our mind, it does not do so ‘absolutely, but in relation to things’. Language is reflective ‘of things themselves in nature’.74 Language is supposed to deliver the nature of things, or rather, the nature of things as they are conceived, although few logicians advertise or dwell on the difference. The perceived correspondence between language and things is further brought out in the goal of truth, which runs centrally through the twists and turns of the logical tradition. It is the case that as the new philosophies of the seventeenth century dismantled the Aristotelian ontology that had informed logic, the discipline was still heavily Aristotelian and therefore shifted its focus from substance to form, from truth to thinking well.75 69 71

72 73

74

75

Nuchelmans 1998a, p. 106. 70 Wallis 1687, p. 1: ‘Resomnes; (sive Reales, sive Imaginariae)’. Sanderson 1985, p. 1: ‘ars instrumentalis, dirigens mentem nostram in cognitionem omnium intelligibilium’. Sanderson 1985, p. 1. Burgersdijk 1668, p. 1: ‘dirigens intellectum in cognitione rerum’. Cf. Keckermann 1600, sig. A1r: ‘Logica est ars dirigendi mentem in cognitione rerum’. Keckermann 1600, sigs. A1v-2r: ‘non absolute: sed in relatione ad res’; sig. A3v: ‘rerum ipsarum in natura’. See Feingold (1997, pp. 275–305) on the way in which logic had a purely ‘utilitarian’ role in the University of Oxford in the seventeenth century, and Schuurman (2000, pp. 52–3) on how logic came to be regarded less as the path to truth and more as a propadeutic for thinking well. For alternative viewpoints see: Easton (1997, p. ii) on the lack of ‘clear boundary lines separating logic from epistemology or metaphysics in the early modern period’; Rossi (1968, p. 8) on a move, through Ramism, from logic as the art of discussion to logic as the instrument for natural research. On the earlier commitment to truth see, for example, Howell, W. (1961, p. 3) on ‘Renaissance logic’ as concerned primarily ‘to achieve a valid verbalization of reality’, and Ashworth (1974, p. 27) on post-medieval logic as more ‘philosophical’ than ‘formal’.

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However, many of those logics that did absorb the new philosophy remained committed to the goal of truth, albeit in a different guise. More generally, textbooks continued to peddle truth as their aim. The logical emphasis on veracity had also been challenged by humanists, who attended not so much to truth, as to probability, rhetoric and topical reasoning, and preferred the title ‘dialectic’. Wilson, for example, defines ‘logique’ as ‘an arte to reason probably, on both partes’. He analyses non-demonstrative arguments, including ‘enthymema’, ‘induction’, ‘example’ and ‘sorites’. However, humanists did not jettison the goal of truth.76 The very same Wilson also declares that logic ‘settes foorth the trueth’.77 Bacon provides another example of how humanists continue to pursue truth, albeit refracted through a new lens. He extracts induction from the lesser forms of argument, redefines it and puts it on a veridical pedestal in the field of natural philosophy.78 Moreover, scholastic logicians had always discussed dialectical or probable knowledge.79 By the seventeenth century, the two traditions were fused in the mainstream logics. Burgersdijk regards ‘logic’ and ‘dialectic’ as interchangeable and covers ‘imperfect’ forms of argument, in addition to the syllogism.80 While Gassendi and Port-Royal include an analysis of probable reasoning, they also remain devoted to the search for truth. The Port-Royalists explain that logic enables one to ‘discern’ ‘the true and the false’.81 Gassendi says that logic ought to make thought ‘free from error’, and thereby ‘attain the mark at which it aims, that is, truth itself’.82 At the beginning of De interpretatione Aristotle had explained how words bridge on to the world by means of the mind: Words spoken are symbols or signs of affections or impressions of the soul; written words are the signs of words spoken. As writing, so also is speech not the same for 76

77 78

79

80

81

Wilson 1553, fos. 1v; 31r–34v. See Jardine (1988, p. 197) on the humanist introduction of ‘ad hoc and occasional arguments’ to the Organon. Wilson 1553, fos. 1v; 2v. He writes about ‘the induction which the logicians speak of’, and condemns it as ‘utterly vicious and incompetent’, on the grounds that ‘to conclude upon an enumerations of particulars without instance contradictory is no conclusion, but a conjecture’ (Bacon 1996b, p. 221). The final sections of logics usually dealt with topics or ‘the seat[s] of an argument’ (Sanderson 1985, p. 183), which are often divided into three (demonstrative, dialectical and sophistic) from which three types of argument and knowledge (certain, probable and sophistical) are drawn respectively. E.g. Du Trieu (1826, p. 157) discusses ‘demonstrative’ and ‘dialectical’, ‘litigious’ arguments; cf. Burgersdijk 1668, pp. 34–40; Gassendi 1981, pp. 144–55. These sections also often include or precede a discussion of method, the influential offspring of humanist, especially Ramist, reform. Even Descartes, who shuns formal logic, retains the notion of method, and writes his own Discours de la me´thode. Sanderson, Gassendi and the Port-Royalists all include a section on method. Burgersdijk 1634, pp. 2–3; Burgersdijk (1668, p. 33) enumerates inductio, enthymema, exemplum, syllogismus hypotheticus, syllogismus disjuctivus, dilemma and sorites. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 5. 82 Gassendi 1981, p. 80.

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all races of men. But the mental affections themselves, of which these words are primarily signs, are the same for the whole of mankind, as are also the objects of which those affections are representations or likenesses, images, copies.83

This gobbet is the foundation of early-modern philosophy of language, containing three claims that become, in the main, axiomatic. First, Aristotle lays down the rarely contested law that words are conventional. Second, he declares that while words, because they are purely conventional, differ between people, the concepts (like the things) they signify are the same for all men. We will hear these two claims being repeated, if sometimes tested, throughout this book. Now I look at the third maxim that Aristotle dictates: words signify concepts which, in turn, signify and resemble objects.84 While his followers debate heatedly about the matter, they agree that concepts are integral to the signification of things. Moreover, they tend to present these concepts not as obstacles, but as straightforward ways of knowing those things. Ockham asserts that words are imposed on both things and concepts: ‘words are applied to the very same things which are signified by mental concepts’.85 John of St. Thomas asks ‘whether vocal expressions primarily signify concepts or things?’ His answer begins with a statement on which he believes there to be general agreement: ‘we suppose as granted by all that vocal expressions signify formal concepts as much as objective ones, since this is clearly established by the philosopher’. He argues that because words signify both things and concepts ‘by the same imposition’, they signify them ‘by one single signification’.86 The Coimbra commentary provides an extensive gloss on De interpretatione I. It lays out three positions. The first, ‘Scotist’, position holds that ‘words are substituted for concepts . . . but they do not signify them’; when words are used, it is ‘things’ which are ‘revealed’. The second, ‘Boethian’, position maintains that ‘only concepts are signified by words’. The third and favoured position steers a middle course – ‘words signify both concepts and things themselves’.87 However, the discussion is not yet closed. The next question 83

84 85

86 87

Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. Demonet (1992, p. 88) describes these lines of Aristotle as ‘le catećhisme de la theórie du langage a` la Renaissance’. Modrak (2001) argues for the modernity and defensibility of Aristotle’s theory of meaning. Panaccio 1999a, p. 398. Ockham 1990, p. 48: ‘voces imponuntur ad significandum illa eadem, quae per conceptus mentis significatur’. John of St. Thomas 1985, pp. 344; 345. Collegium Conimbricense 1610, p. 305: ‘voces substitui quidem pro conceptibus intellectus, sed eos non significare . . . quia vocibus utimur, ut ostendamus rem, quam mente apprehendimus’; p. 306: ‘vocibus solos conceptus significari’; ‘voces tum conceptus, tum res ipsas significare’.

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is whether words immediately signify concepts or things. Like John of St. Thomas, the commentary decides that both concepts and things are signified immediately. Burgersdijk argues that words signify concepts primarily and things secondarily.88 After much convolution in his disputations on Aristotle’s Organon, the Jesuit Martin Smiglecius, recommended to students by both Holdsworth and Locke, asserts the opposite.89 Hobbes responds to this debate by declaring that they are all talking rubbish. Words can only ever signify concepts: Since, as has been defined, names ordered in speech are signs of conceptions, it is obvious that they are not signs of things themselves; for in what sense can the sound of this spoken word ‘‘stone’’ be understood to be a sign of a stone, other than that whoever might have heard this vocal sound will gather that the speaker has thought of a stone? Therefore the dispute over whether names signify matter, form, or a composite of them and other disputes of this kind are characteristic of erring metaphysicians who do not understand the words about which they are arguing.90

Hobbes is truistically reminding his readers that a speaker can only express the contents of his mind, and he cannot have stones in there.91 He is also probably making a polemical point against Aristotle, who had postulated that when a man thinks of a stone, while ‘the stone does not exist in the soul’, the ‘form of the stone’ does, thereby almost identifying concept and thing.92 As if responding to Hobbes’ rude ejection of stones from speech, John Sergeant, critic of Locke – the next staunch defender of purely ideational signification – declares that when we judge that ‘a stone is hard, we do not intend to affirm that the likeness or idea of a stone is hard, but the very stone itself’. His logic, The Method to Science (1696), attests to the continuing belief that, by means of ‘notions’ or ‘meanings’, we ‘discourse of the very thing it self, and of its very nature’.93 88 89

90

91

92 93

Burgersdijk 1634, p. 141. Holdsworth 1961, p. 635; Ashworth 1981, p. 304; Smiglecius 1618, p. 5. On this debate see Ashworth 1981; 1984, pp. 62–4, and 1987. Pinborg (1984b) explains how this debate intersects with the nominalist/realist debate. Hobbes 1981, p. 15. Martinich’s translation of ‘quo sensu enim intelligi potest sonum hujus vocis lapis esse signum lapidis’ reads ‘for in what sense can the sound of the vocal sound ‘‘stone’’ be understood to be a sign of a stone’. Sorell (1999) argues that Hobbes moved from being antiAristotelian to ‘simply unAristotelian’ (p. 364); cf. Leijenhorst (2002a) on the Aristotelian framework of Hobbes’ mechanical philosophy. However, even Hobbes includes things (loosely) in language to the extent that they cause ideas (e.g. Hobbes 1996, p. 13). Aristotle 1935, p. 181. Sergeant 1696, pp. 2; 3; 2. Locke’s copy of this edition was given to him by the author (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 230). Phemister (1993) asserts a continuity between Locke and Sergeant over experience and demonstration which is severed by Locke’s refusal ‘to countenance demonstration in natural science’ (p. 249).

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Notwithstanding their general commitment to mentalism, there are three ways in which logicians contemplate an unmediated relationship between words and things. First, they refer back to a remark Aristotle had made in his Sophistici Elenchis that contradicted his more vociferous commitment to mentalism. ‘For’, he writes, ‘not being able to point to the things themselves that we reason about, we use names instead of the realities as their symbols.’94 The second intimation of a direct link between language and the world appears in the theory of supposition. Late-medieval Terminists were concerned with what we might now call the reference of a term, and how it might be ‘restricted’ or ‘ampliated’.95 ‘Appellation’ is the most restricted form of reference. Peter of Spain defines it as ‘the acceptance of a term for an existent thing’. Therefore ‘chimera’ has no appellation.96 ‘Supposition’ is the more general word used for thinking about a term’s reference, and is determined by its sentential context. Peter defines supposition as ‘the acceptance of a substantial term for something’.97 Ockham explains that ‘ ‘‘supposition’’ means taking the position, as it were, of something else’.98 Du Trieu’s inclusion of a treatment of supposition in his logic adumbrates the perseverance of the theory in the seventeenth century.99 ‘Supposition’ is a technical term whose sense we have lost, but an awareness of its provenance will illuminate Locke’s critique of language. The theory of supposition indicates that the possibility of reference to things outside the mind is built firmly into early-modern philosophy of language. When a word is ‘supposed’ to be a thing, it literally stands in its place.100 The third incursion into the mentalism that characteristically underscores linguistic theory is more subtle. While it is agreed that words signify concepts as well as things, this dual signification is often hidden, the relation between the two elements unflagged and unexplored, one subsumed by the other, reducing language to a bipartite association between words and ‘things’. While these ‘things’ sporadically appear under the heading of conceptions, they soon loose their mental identity, as men and dogs appear laughing and barking on the pages. It is the nature of these (concept-)things to which I now turn. 94 95 96

97 100

Aristotle 1987, p. 3. See Sedley 1996. For helpful summaries see Marenbon 1991, pp. 43–7, and Ashworth 1974, pp. 77–92. Peter of Spain 1990, p. 175. See Ashworth (1974, p. 92) on appellation as the denotation of some existent object. Peter of Spain 1990, p. 69. 98 Ockham 1990, p. 64. 99 Du Trieu 1826, p. 107. On signification, supposition, sense and reference see De Rijk 1989a; De Rijk 1989b; Henry 1981; Pinborg 1984a; Spade 1998, pp. 412–15.

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What is this world that is grasped by language in logic? We might expect the ontologies embedded in seventeenth-century logic to reflect the contested natural philosophy of the period. Given that some logicians are also principal players in the new philosophy, we might imagine any uniform characterisation of ‘the world according to logical language’ to be entirely redundant. But in fact, with the exceptions of Descartes and Bacon, even the ‘newest’ of logicians subscribe, superficially at least and with perplexing consistency, to a well-worn Aristotelian map of the world. We ought to remember this when we come to the denunciation by Locke and others of the way that people take words for things and, more particularly, logical classifications for reality. Their ferocity seems less strange in the face of an apparently strong, inflexible and unproblematised verbal–real caricature which was imprinted in young minds.101 The map of the world usually consists of natural ‘substances’, such as ‘horse, man, tree’, although some logicians include non-natural entities, or ‘accidents’ as they are sometimes called, such as ‘justice, beauty’.102 As I have already indicated, despite the more complicated accounts given by the philosophers to whom logicians are indebted (or whom they are) about the construction of universals, these concepts–things seem in (and out of) the logics to be almost passively and simply conceived, and therefore common to all people. Aristotle had used ‘man’ as an example of just such a concept that is neither combined nor disjoined and therefore incapable of truth or falsity.103 ‘Man’ appears ubiquitously in logics, as the paradigm ‘simple’.104 Cartesians recast simple concepts in accordance with their epistemology. The Port-Royalists’ are ‘thinking . . . judging, reasoning . . . being, existence, duration, order, and number’. They declare that we have ‘very clear ideas’ of thinking and extended substance.105 While Aristotle, and then Aquinas, explains how we actively abstract from particulars before we cognise the universal, and while Descartes describes how we perceive clear and distinct ideas by scraping away sensible ones, these processes, particularly the Thomist–Aristotelian one, at least as they appear in the logics, seem to be effortless. Or rather, the effort is rarely promulgated, the simple conceptions of essentially simple things 101

102

103 105

Lear (1988, p. 229) explains how Aristotle laid bare the ‘broad structure of reality’: ‘at the apex were essences and the predications which expressed them’. Du Moulin 1624, pp. 3; 4. I include Du Moulin’s examples of moral simplicity because Locke will inveigh against the non-judgemental simplicity of ideas of mixed modes as well as substances (his development of the accident/substance distinction). Aristotle 1938b, p. 117. 104 E.g. Du Trieu 1826, p. 9. Cf. Peter of Spain 1990, p. 69. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 49. See Clarke (1981, pp. 27–8) on Descartes’ substitution of intuitius for the ignorance of the dialectians.

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confidently paraded, and a tight link between concept and thing maintained. The important thing to note, that will leave Locke open-mouthed, is the advertised simplicity of big concepts–things, especially substances like ‘horse’, that, having nothing affirmed or denied of them, are therefore relatively untouched by human intervention and shared by all. In this initial conception there is no combination or judgement, only a direct and (relatively) inactive reception of things. Burgersdijk explains that a ‘simple theme’ is one that is ‘apprehended without complex thought, without affirmation or negation; such as Socrates, disputat, respublica’.106 The possibility of truth and falsity only enters at the second, propositional stage of thinking, when simple things are affirmed or denied of each other. The Coimbra commentary defines a proposition as ‘a speech which signifies truth or falsity’.107 Whatever the more philosophical logicians scruple to tell us about the activity of abstraction which delivers universal concepts, it is only when we do things with these concepts that the mind is presented as taking full control – before this, the objects of thought are given more than made. Logicians therefore make ambitious claims for the scope of their substantial terms whose meanings are simple and indisputable, having been acted upon barely visibily by the mind. Moreover, logicians give the impression that verbal simplicity and universality corresponds with conceptual–ontological simplicity and universality. Single words seem to stand for single concepts–things. Keckermann declares that ‘a simple thing is that which is expressed with one word, like man’.108 For Sanderson, a ‘simple conception’ finds expression in ‘simple terms’.109 Wallis announces that ‘simple terms’ signify ‘simple apprehensions’.110 Logicians are aware that there is not necessarily a numerical correspondence between word and meaning. Hobbes explains ‘that a name is not to be taken in philosophy as it is in grammar’; ‘ ‘‘sentient animate body’’ is one name for philosophers because [it applies] to one thing, to each and every animal, while for grammarians it is three names’.111 But the Hobbesian warning is not much broadcast. Verbal units give the lie to equally unitary meanings. It is the presumption of passively received, simple and universal (concepts of ) substances, particularly as trumpeted by Aristotelians and Cartesians, and fostered by simple words, that Locke will deconstruct. 106

Burgersdijk 1668, p. 1. Cf. Gassendi 1981, p. 80. Collegium Conimbricense 1610, p. 329: ‘enuntiatio est oratio significans verum, vel falsum’. 108 Keckermann 1600, sig. A4r: ‘res simplex est, quae unica voce exprimitur, ut homo’. 109 Sanderson 1985, pp. 2–3. 110 Wallis 1687, p. 22. 111 Hobbes 1981, p. 21. Cf. Burgersdijk 1668, p. 1. See Tachau (1987) on complexe significabile. 107

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These simple elements slot neatly into the grand and comprehensive taxonomy of the world that logicians confidently proffer. They take Aristotle’s ten categories or predicaments (substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, action, passion, posture, state), and the five universals or predicables (genus, species, difference, property, accident) that Porphyry had systematised in his Isagoge (an introduction to Aristotle’s Categories), as crucial for ‘true’ and ‘proper’ reasoning. Wilson writes that ‘a predicament is . . . a rehearsyng what wordes maie be truly ioined together, or els a settyng foorth of the nature of every thing and also shewyng what maie be truly spoken, and what no’.112 The realist (in both senses) appearance of the linguistic taxonomy is unmistakable. Res and verba are enveloped by the title ‘predicable’. According to Burgersdijk, predicables ‘are truly, properly, naturally, and immediately affirmed of many’.113 However, this referential ambition might implode under a critical gaze, as it seems that predicables are constituted intertextually, in reference to each other. The ‘genus’ is ‘that which is predicated of many different species’, and ‘species’ ‘that which is gathered under the genus’.114 Terms like ‘man’ or ‘animal’ do not have fixed places in the anatomy; their status is determined by context. For example, ‘animal’ would be the genus with respect to ‘man’, but the ‘species’ with respect to ‘animate’. The Port-Royal Logique is explicit about this: ‘the same idea can be a genus with respect to the ideas to which it extends, and a species when compared to another, more general idea’.115 Du Trieu inadvertently reveals the pre-determined circularity of the deductive process in two disparate examples of supposedly demonstrative inferences: ‘man is an animal, man is sensitive’ and ‘every man is sensitive, therefore every man is an animal ’.116 Textbook accounts of universals invoke a hermetically sealed map, whose marks only signify differentially, not transcendentally. 112

113

114

115 116

Wilson 1553, fo. 7v (my emphasis). Cf. Nuchelmans (1998a, pp. 111–12) on how it was thought that the categories ought to be an ‘inventory of things in the world’. Jardine (1974, p. 19) argues that sixteenth-century dialectical handbooks saw linguistic structures as mapping ontological ones. See Ong (1958, p. 70) on the impression, inherent in the long-standing logical framework, that words stand for things. Burgersdijk 1668, p. 7: ‘quae de pluribus vere, proprie, naturaliter, atque immediate affimantur’. Cf. Du Trieu 1826, p. 30; Sanderson 1985, p. 4. Burgersdijk 1668, p. 8: ‘genus est, quod de pluribus specie differentibus praedicatur . . . species est, que collocatur sub genere’. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 41. Du Trieu 1826, p. 121: ‘Bona est, cuius consequens legitime infertur ex ante cedente: ut, Homo est animal, homo est sensitivus’; p. 120: ‘argumentatio est oratio, in qua unum ex alio colligitur; ut, Omnis homo est sensitivus, ergo omnis homo est animal ’.

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Even so, embedded in the watertight classificatory map are pretensions to an essentialist ontology which is exacting, real and intelligible.117 Wallis tells us that the first three predicables (genus, species, difference) are ‘essential’ to the subject, whereas the last two (property and accident) are merely ‘accidental’ to it.118 The rigid strength of essentialism reveals itself in elaborations of difference – the quality which essentially distinguishes between things. There are three acceptations of the word ‘difference’, says Sanderson. The first and vulgar one differentiates something from another on the basis of ‘accidental’ and ‘separable’ difference, such as ‘Socrates standing’ from ‘Plato sitting’. The second and more proper means of differentiating things is by some ‘inseparable accident’, such as distinguishing Plato from Socrates on the basis of their different noses. The third and most proper means of differentiation is on the grounds of an ‘essential’ difference, the like of which divides rational Socrates from irrational Bucephalus.119 Arnauld and Nicole write that ‘real definitions’ identify ‘the nature of a thing by its essential attributes, of which the common one is called the genus, and the proper one the difference. Thus a human being is defined as a rational animal, the mind as a substance that thinks, the body as an extended substance.’120 Cartesianism is thus woven into the traditional logical fabric, simultaneously subverting and revitalising the genre. In contrast to essential differences, properties and accidents are inessential. Properties, such as ‘being capable of laughter’ or ‘two-footed’, are ‘necessary’ with respect to ‘man’ but not ‘essential’. Accidents are even further from the heart of substances. Du Trieu defines an accident as ‘that which is present or absent without the corruption of the subject . . . such as white, with respect to a wall’. He goes on to explain that accidents are either ‘separable’, such as ‘sleep, with respect to men’, or ‘inseparable’, such as ‘white’, with respect to swans, thereby depicting sensible qualities as discrete entities in a way that will upset the new philosophers.121 Wallis says that while a property of something is not ‘essential’ to it, it is ‘necessarily conjoined’ to it, as ‘capable of laughter’ is in the case of ‘man’. Some accidents, none of which are ‘necessary’ to the subject, are ‘separable’ from the subject, such as ‘white’ in the case

117 118 121

See Dean 1998 on essentialism and method. Cf. Friedman 1999. Wallis 1687, p. 16. 119 Sanderson 1985, p. 12. 120 Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 126. Du Trieu 1826, p. 48: ‘quod adest atque abest sine subjecti corruptione . . . ut, album, respectu parietis’; p. 49.

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of ‘wool’ and ‘paper’, while some are ‘inseparable’, such as ‘heat’ in the case of ‘fire’ and ‘blackness’ in the case of ‘raven’.122 Real truth and falsity are determined by predicables and categories with stipulative assurance. For example, Burgersdijk explains an essentially true proposition as one in which ‘either the genus is predicated of the species; as, Man is an animal, or the difference is predicated of the species; as, Man is rational.’ A merely necessarily true proposition is formed when ‘the property is predicated of its subject’, as in ‘man is capable of laughter’.123 This reified and precise linguistic web is said to copy the world. There had always been a debate, which intensifies again in the seventeenth century, over whether and to what extent the linguistic taxonomy truly maps the divisions of nature. The old guard had never been oblivious to the interpretative interface between words–concepts and the world, as in the old nominalist/realist controversy. Sophisticated scholastic logicians had always busied themselves with disputations about the nature of their entia rationis, and how they grasped the world. Smiglecius asks whether ‘an entity of reason consists in the impossible conjunction of several things’, ‘whether an entity of reason is a concept or exists outside the mind’, ‘or and in what way an entity of reason is made by the intellect’.124 With the pressure of the scientific revolution and the recrudescence of scepticism there is a general rejection of the intelligible forms and sensible species of Aristotle’s world, and increasing doubt about the mind’s capacity to penetrate the heart of matter. Notwithstanding certain critical discriminations about the real/rational divide and the growing sense that words are out of step with the world, the logic textbooks – a fundamental repository of linguistic–ontological wisdom – move seamlessly between a linguistic and an ontological account. Students would be forgiven for thinking that they were reading a straightforward definition of the world. For example, Du Trieu defines the categories as ‘a series or order of terms’, and then goes on to talk 122

123

124

Wallis 1687, pp. 17; 20. Cf. Ong (1958) on the increasing reification, simplification and dichotomisation of logical classifications as a result of Ramist reform. Burgerskijk 1668, p. 22: ‘In quibus vel genus praedicatur de specie; ut, Homo est animal vel differentia; ut, Homo est rationalis’; ‘In quibus proprietas praedicantur de subjecto suo . . . ut, Homo est risibilis’. Smiglecius 1618: ‘an ens rationis consistat in conjunctione impossibili plurium rerum’ (p. 9); ‘utrum ens rationis sit conceptus aut denominatio extrinseca’ (p. 17); ‘an quomodo ens rationis fiat ab intellectu’ (p. 25). See Marenbon (2000a) on the debates over the linguistic/intellectual/real content of the categories; Marenbon (2000b) on Abelard’s conception of the categories not as a reflection of the ‘order of things, but merely a feature of how language signifies them’ (p. 57); De Rijk (1989c) on Ockham’s emphasis on the manufactured nature of logical conceptual apparatus.

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about their reality.125 Zachary Coke’s Art of Logick (1654) says unambiguously that ‘things themselves are placed in the predicaments . . . conceits and names of things but secondarily, and so far forth as they represent things’.126 The Port-Royalists reject Aristotle’s categories because they ‘are viewed as based on reason and truth, when in fact they are completely arbitrary, having no foundation but the imagination of one man who had no authority to prescribe laws to others’. But their proposed replacement categories (mind, body, measure, position, shape, motion and rest) only prove the point that logical distinctions are considered to map the world. They condemn Aristotle’s categories because they ‘accustom people to be satisfied with words’.127 One might counter that they just substitute one empty linguistic structure for another. cracks in the mirror The new philosophical inroads into scholastic epistemology and ontology that I shall explore in chapter 4 threaten to shatter the logicians’ linguistic mirror of things. Beyond these external assaults there are internal weaknesses that, to a sensitive student of logic, might also pulverise the glass. I identify three possible sites of discontent. The first concerns the practice of logic. In tandem with textbooks, students learnt the art of logic by means of, and with the ultimate aim of, disputation, an activity that, it was complained, elevated victory above truth, thereby robbing speech of veracity. Disputation played a vital part in a student’s education, as Holdsworth makes clear in his detailed advice on the matter. What counts is having readily to hand the most popular lines.128 In his textbook, Sanderson includes an appendix on ‘disputation’, where he explains how the disputant might conquer his opponent.129 The practice is quintessentially adversarial. The title of the discipline indicates this, as Peter of Spain explains, ‘this art is called ‘dialectic’ from ‘dia’, which means ‘two’ and ‘logos’, which means ‘discourse’ . . . suggesting the discoursing . . . of a pair, an opponent and a respondent in disputing’.130 Although it is vociferously maintained that it will thrash out the truth, many philosophers are concerned that victory has more to do with a sharp tongue, and that therefore students are encouraged vainly to cultivate their verbal weapons at the expense of truth, with the effect that its very 125 127 128

Du Trieu 1826, pp. 51–2. 126 Coke 1969, p. 19. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 34. Holdsworth 1961, p. 636. 129 Sanderson 1985, pp. 40–66.

130

Peter of Spain 1990, p. 1.

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existence comes to be doubted.131 Bacon describes the ‘point’ of syllogistic logic as ‘to master an adversary in argument’. He characterises it as a purely ‘verbal’ exercise, sealed off from nature.132 His assertion is commonplace. In his Academiarum examen (1654) John Webster says that at university he learnt nothing except ‘artificially how to chide’.133 John Ley recounts, in his Discourse of Disputations (1658), how the unsuspecting are ‘easily intangled’ in the ‘deceit’ and ‘subtilty’ of skilled disputants.134 Thomas White accuses religious disputations, in his Controversy-Logicke (1659), of being not only ‘needeless, useless’, but also ‘dangerous’ because ‘tongue, and chance, do for the most part beare a great sway, and have a maine stroake, and oftentimes, to breake and disorder the better cause’.135 In his Logica, sive Ars ratiocinandi (1692) (massively indebted to Locke’s Essay), Jean Le Clerc explains that logic originated in the mouths of loquacious ancient fighters, and as a result deals with words, not cogitations, teaching one to dispute on any subject rather than investigate truth.136 Doctors of logic are themselves self-conscious about the tension between truth and victory occasioned by the controversial setting to which the subject is inextricably joined. De Lawne protests too much against the accusation that logic teaches its students ‘to turne white into black, and black into white, to serve their owne purposes, and to make people beleeve what they list’.137 Du Moulin himself admits that in ‘bad hands’ the art is transformed ‘into a faggot of dry thornes, which pricketh on every side’.138 Wilson offers tactical tips for the battle, where the prize is won by striking one’s opponent dumb by blinding them with ‘mocke matier’. The logical treatment of sophistry is supposed to enable upstanding students to evade sophists. However, it also darkly teaches, or at least attests to the existence of, cynical fighters. Wilson draws a colourful portrait of these swashbucklers: It is a wonde to see the subtle brain, of many braggyng bodies with bold countenaunce, beare an outward shadowe of wisdome havyng onely the maskyng 131

132 135 136

137

E.g. Wilson 1553, fo. 60v. See Ong (1971, p. 65) on the ‘omnipresence of the oratorical frame of mind’, which led the learned to take ‘any side, perhaps, but some side certainly’. See also Walmsley 1993. Bacon 1857, iv, p. 411. 133 John Webster 1970, p. 92. 134 Ley 1658, p. 4. White 1659, sig. A5v-A6r. Le Clerc 1692, p. 2. Locke was given this edition by the author (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 111). He notes that he received it in April 1692 (MS. Locke f. 10, p. 133). In a letter to Locke, Molyneux criticises Le Clerc’s Logica, ‘in all which he has little extraordinary but what he borrows from you; and in the alteration he gives them he robbs them of their native beautys’ (Locke 1976–1989, iv, p. 601). Savonius (2002) explains Locke’s and Le Clerc’s closely related logical projects in terms of cultural and political reform. Du Moulin, sig. )( 3. 138 Du Moulin 1624, recto side of the leaf immediately preceding sig. A1.

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37

visage, and lackyng the naturall face. Thei will stande stoutely in maintenaunce of an untruthe, and with countenauce seme to share it: yea, and by their bolde bearying it out, almost perswade the hearers, that they onely have the true part, and the other are altogether deceived.139

In men battling to win the argument, language might well outwit the truth. The second way logic threatens to detach verba from res is in its applause for authority. Words accrue credibility by the external virtue of their speaker rather than their internal sense. Most notoriously, scholastic logicians defer consistently to Aristotle.140 In addition to submitting to the words of particular authorities, students are advised on the high status of authoritative statements more generally. These are drawn from topics or loci and are to be used as proofs for demonstrative as well as probable arguments.141 Logical ‘maxims’ are self-evident propositions which may be used as certain premises. Peter of Spain educes from the topic of ‘definition’ the maxim that ‘anything predicated of a definition is predicated of the thing defined’. This yields the certain argument that ‘a rational, mortal, animal runs, so man runs’.142 As Gassendi says of maxims, ‘it is sufficient only to grasp their meaning in order to give assent to them’. Gassendi’s examples are of both a practical and a speculative nature: ‘the whole is greater than any of its parts’; ‘God and Nature do nothing in vain’; ‘no-one is able to hate the good as good, nor love evil as evil’.143 In a way that would annoy Locke, these linguistic assertions are presented as irresistible, perspicuous and often innate. They and the universals that are their constituent parts are characteristically abstract and general, and are often described as ‘better known’ (notiora) – which sounds counterintuitive to empiricists for whom particulars are better known.144 The final crack in the mirror of language is explicitly promulgated by logicians. Their accounts of sophistry, with which they routinely conclude their books, reveal how univocity – the mainstay of both communication and ratiocination – might shatter. Gassendi explains that fallacious reasoning occurs when ‘there is present some ambiguity of word or expression, and the sense of the word or expression is different in the proposition from what it is in the assumption, so that it is not surprising 139 140

141

142

Wilson 1553, fo. 63r. See, e.g., Descartes (1985c, p. 147) on scholastics being like ivy on Aristotle, the tree. Cf. Marenbon 1991, p. 9. See, e.g., Gassendi 1981, pp. 113–9; Sanderson 1985, pp. 183–211. As a result of the humanist reform which bring rhetoric and logic closer together, ‘human authority’ or ‘testimony’ becomes a locus in logic from where so-called ‘inartificial proofs’, or probable arguments, are drawn (e.g. in Gassendi 1981, p. 119, and Sanderson 1985, p. 208). See Serjeantson 1999. Peter of Spain 1990, p. 52. 143 Gassendi 1981, pp. 113–14. 144 E.g. Peter of Spain 1990, p. 51.

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that when both have been admitted as true an absurd conclusion follows’. Sophists mine the multivocity of words, inducing absurd, but formally sound conclusions. Gassendi takes the classic example of an ambiguous word that can be used as the middle term to reason falsely. ‘A certain star is Sirius; a dog is a barking animal . . . therefore, a certain star is a barking animal.’145 In his Sophistici Elenchi, Aristotle refers to the success of sophistic speech: In reasoning, those who are unacquainted with the power of names are deceived by paralogisms both when they are parties to the controversy and when they form the audience. From this cause . . . there exist proofs and confutations that are apparent but unreal.146

Aristotle’s audience, his critics as well as his supporters, all agree that names have a ‘power’ that outstrips both truth and univocity. As a rule, the logical treatment of ambiguity is firmly contained. It is an avoidable and identifiable misuse of language. Semantic instability does not escape from its demarcated area into language as a whole. Following Aristotle’s piece of common sense, it is taken for granted that men share a universal mental discourse, emanating as it does from one world.147 There are a few exceptions to this rule. At the thoughtful heart of scholastic logic, writers wonder about the implications of the assumption that words signify the speaker’s thoughts.148 Smiglecius asks whether ‘the signification of a word ought to be taken from the concept of the impositor, or from the concept of the hearer’. He concludes that the signification of an utterance must come from impositors alone, however imperfectly they understand the thing. His reason is that ‘words are signs of concepts, and we express by our words, that which we conceive in the mind’.149 It is not, then, at the margins, but at the centre of the scholastic fortress, that it is mooted that the meanings of the same words might be different in different people’s mouths. But these are murmurs drowned out in the noisy, mainstream confidence in semantic uniformity. There is one other lone, but powerful, voice that probes the fact of semantic individualism, with extraordinarily sceptical results. Into the 145 146 147

148 149

Gassendi 1981, pp. 152; 153. Sanderson (1985, p. 215) gives the same example. Aristotle 1987, p. 5. Pinborg 1984a, p. 254: ‘the fundamental dictum of medieval semantics that language (as expression) imitates the conceptual contents which are common to all men’. Ashworth 1974, p. 44. Cf. Ashworth 1981, pp. 317–18. Smiglecius 1618, p. 12: ‘An vocis significatio sumi debeat ex conceptu imponentis, vel ex conceptu audientis’; p. 14: ‘verba sunt signa conceptuum, & id verbis exprimimus, quod in mente concepimus’.

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very first section of their Logique, the one that deals with ideas, the PortRoyalists insert a warning about words. They declare that although we ought to reason solely with the significations of words, habit and necessity force us to ‘pay more attention to the words than to the things’. The problem is, they tell us, that words do not necessarily stand for the same ideas for different people: We should note that while people often have different ideas about the same things, still they use the same words to express them. For example, a pagan philosopher’s idea of virtue differs from a theologian’s idea, and yet each expresses his idea by the same word, ‘virtue’. Moreover, people in different ages have viewed the same things quite differently, and yet they have always collected all these ideas under the same name. This causes us to become easily confused when uttering a word or hearing it uttered, since we take it sometimes for one idea, sometimes for another.

They go on to give the examples of ‘soul’ and ‘life’, crucial words that are multiply (mis)understood.150 Their point is that cultural and temporal relativism mean that different people understand different things by the same word. Words have a history; they amass a cluster of diverse and possibly contradictory meanings under the same nominal umbrella. The Port-Royalists conclude that ‘every language is full of countless similar words that share only the same sound, but are nevertheless signs of completely different ideas’.151 This is the most radical and devastating rejection of the twin traditional beliefs in univocal languages and an eternal community of meaning. This critique is less a central tenet of the Logique than a note of caution that has in its sights scholastic philosophy rather than speakers in general. It does not deter the Port-Royalists from keeping their assertive linguistic-ideational course. However, to pricked ears it is a provocative deconstruction of the cavalier conjunction of res and verba, an indication that language might not be a transparent window on to meaning. While there are chinks in the logicians’ armour, however, the view of language that they defend is robust. While words signify concepts, these concepts are generally seen not to veil the world but to reveal it. So limpid is the vision that concepts afford of things, that they seem to melt into each other, and verba to map res in a perfect symmetry. The world that language reveals is a stiffly classified, basically Aristotelian one: words appear automatically and universally to signify simple essences of 150

Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 58.

151

Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 60.

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substances such as ‘humanity’ in the case of ‘man’.152 As we shall see, this account of language left a deep impression on its philosophical readers. At times they reiterate and reinterpret its referential and essentialist ambitions, while at others they turn against it, drawing on both the revisionary intimations within logic and (often relatedly) on contemporaneous assaults on scholasticism. Some suggest that language might be structured less by the world and more by authority, by pedagogical and social concerns, and, most importantly, by human subjectivity. Locke is the most trenchant and relentless assailant. Indeed, insofar as his Essay is a logic, it is exactly the tradition we have explored in this chapter which the Essay is intended to dismantle. Locke assiduously undermines the impression given in the logics that words stand for things. He also attacks a connected assumption which is so accepted by logicians that it is rarely broadcast: that words stand for the same things for different people. It is a testament to the continuing power of scholastic logic at the end of the seventeenth century that Locke exerts so much energy in indicting it. 152

Aquinas 1998, p. 31.

chapter 2

Language in grammar

If logic discloses the heart of language, then grammar supplies the body. According to Lily’s Grammar, otherwise known as The Royal Grammar and the predominant textbook in England throughout the seventeenth century, the discipline teaches ‘the art of writing and speaking rightly’.1 As the mainstay of early-modern education, it inculcates the quintessentially human skill that distinguishes men from beasts, enabling them to flourish in society. In his influential Minerva, sive De causis Latinae linguae (1587), Franciscus Sanctius explains that grammar, ‘the art of speaking rightly’, is the most basic of the three arts of language.2 Obadiah Walker’s Of Education (1673) reiterates its propaedeutic role. Neither rhetoric nor logic, that teach one, respectively, to speak ‘perspicuously, decently, and persuasively’, and ‘pertinently and rationally’, are to be learned before the linguistic rudiments enshrined in grammar.3 Bacon records the essential, if unglamorous, nature of the discipline; it is ‘the harbinger of other sciences; an office not indeed very noble, yet very necessary’.4 In his Philosophia rationalis (1638) Thomas Campanella calls it ‘an instrumental art’.5 Pupils were expected to have mastered it at grammar school, and its preliminary status is reflected in the fact that the subject did not officially appear in the curricula of the Universities of either Oxford or Cambridge.6 Unofficially, however, undergraduates were encouraged to refresh their memories; Holdsworth urgently declares that ‘grammers must not be 1

2

3 4

The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. B1r [p. 1]; Locke not only owned this edition (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 98) as well as three versions of Lily (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 175), but also represented ‘Lily’s Grammar’ as synonymous with ‘Grammar-Schools’ in his Thoughts concerning Education (Locke 1989, p. 218). In his rendering of Lily, William Walker explains that ‘the Authority of this Nation had upon mature deliberation established this to be the only grammar, that should be learned in all the schools of England’ (Walker 1674, sig. A5r). For further evidence of its preeminence see Lily 1664, sig. A3r. Sanctius 1664, pp. 7–8; 9. Locke owned this edition, in addition to another copy of this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 225). Walker 1970, pp. 107–10. Locke had this edition (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 262). Bacon 1857, iv, p. 440. 5 Campanella 1638, p. 1: ‘ars instrumentalis’. 6 Feingold 1997, p. 243.

41

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forgotten’.7 The art was indispensable in a world where a gentleman’s status was partly measured by his linguistic virtuosity.8 While grammar purports to teach one to speak, however, it could be judged to belie its name. According to early-modern linguistic theory, speech is definitively significative, or else it is just noise. Verbal discourse must be animated by semantic discourse. However, grammar focuses on the semiotic as opposed to the semantic properties of language.9 The art therefore threatens to impoverish its charge. It is this elevation of the form over the content of language that distinguishes the discipline from its sisters in the trivium. While logicians and rhetoricians concentrate on what words signify, grammarians often turn a blind eye to the signified, attending instead to the identification and ordering of the signs themselves. This does not mean that they take the semiotic side of language to be sufficient. Grammar is a preliminary to its sister arts, and they elaborate on meaning. Nevertheless, grammar divulges the radical dualism of res and verba that underpins early-modern philosophy of language, and the possible independence and pre-eminence of words alone. In the course of the century several writers are concerned that students are obsessed with the clothes (the words) rather than the body (the signification) of language, to use a common analogy. Grammar promotes this disjunction between oratio and ratio, and the love affair with the former that so disturbs contemporaries. This concern elicits various attempts by philosophers in general and grammarians in particular to tie verba to res. This chapter investigates how grammar exposes the inherent meaninglessness of words per se and their simultaneously inherent vitality 7 8

9

Holdsworth 1961, p. 641. On the overriding importance of becoming a master of words, and ultimately of rhetoric, see Costello 1958; Grafton and Jardine 1986, p. 211; Kristeller 1979a; Ong 1971, pp. 113–41. By stressing the grammarians’ consistent focus on the semiotic properties of language, I am questioning Padley’s narrative which traces a move from ‘formal’ to ‘semantic’ grammar (Padley 1976, p. 74) in the period 1500–1700, and which constitutes the major contribution of secondary literature on the subject. Padley (1976, p. 57) asserts the replacement of usage with ratio in the humanist tradition. Padley 1985 and 1988, i, describes the ‘semasiological’ as opposed to ‘formal’ (p. 76) development of grammar. Padley 1985 and 1988, ii, which deals with ‘vernacular norms’ (p. 3) and ‘observational’ as opposed to ‘methodical’ grammar (p. 1), says of Lily that it is ‘a good illustration of the general drift away from formal criteria in the direction of semantically based ones’ (p. 233). While there was indeed a movement (which I shall trace) to inject matter into words, this was coincident with a continuing emphasis on the signs themselves. See also Black 2001, who explains that Italian renaissance Latin education was ‘overwhelmingly philological’ rather than philosophical (p. 9). Mitchell (2001) argues that grammar was the site of controversies about standardisation, pedagogy, writing instruction, universal language and social position in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.

Language in grammar

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as pure signs. It then explores the disparate grammatical endeavours to ground both individual words and linguistic structure as a whole in some extra-linguistic, universal and fixed rationale. I end by analysing the view that such projects are doomed to failure given the contingent, fluid and divergent nature of human languages. the concentration on verba not res Grammarians both propagate and reflect the view that words are signs whose whole purpose is to signify something other than themselves. This generates the paradigmatic duality of sign/signified which we met in the previous chapter and which indicates the unreflective and latent fusion of concepts and things on the semantic side of the duality. In the Grammatica speculativa by Thomas of Erfurt, a leading modistic medieval grammar, a word (dictio) is ‘a significative expression (vox significativa)’.10 This description is echoed ubiquitously. In his Latine Grammar (1651), Charles Hoole, described by John Twells as a ‘new’ grammarian, defines a word as ‘a part of speech, which itself doth signifie something’.11 Of a more traditional persuasion is John Stockwood, who declares in Certaine Grammar Questions for the Exercise of Young Schollers in the Learning of the Accidence (1590), that a word is ‘a voyce consisting of one sillable or more, wherein is uttered so much as signifieth somewhat’.12 The persistent duo of sign and signified appears in various nominal guises. In English, the significant other is called ‘signification’, ‘sense’, ‘meaning’ and, most often, ‘thing’.13 The duality is described differently, depending on the particular philosophical persuasions of the grammarian. In his De causis linguae Latinae (1540), Julius Caesar Scaliger exposes his Aristotelian heritage by explaining that a vox has a ‘material’ and a ‘formal’ component, where ‘form’ denotes the essence, or anima, of a thing. ‘‘Felix’’ is one ‘‘vox’’ if you look at it ‘materially’, but three if you look at its ‘form’. That is to say, it has one phonetic existence, the word ‘felix’, and three semantic ones, its three possible genders.14 The PortRoyal Grammaire (1660), on the other hand, reveals its Cartesian roots when it distinguishes between the ‘material part’ of words (their ‘sound’) 10 12 13

14

Thomas of Erfurt 1972, p. 149. 11 Twells 1985, p. 153; Hoole 1969, p. 16. Stockwood 1590, sig. A4v. See, e.g., Stockwood (1590, sig. D2r) on ‘the signification of a word’; The True Method of Learning the Latin Tongue by the English (1696, sig. A3r) differentiates between the ‘word itself ’ and the ‘sense of the word’; Bullokar 1980, p. 54: ‘signification or meaning of words’. Hoole (1969, p. 20) says a noun ‘nameth a thing’. Scaliger 1540, p. 145.

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made by ‘men and parrots’ alike, and the ‘spiritual part’ (their signification of ‘thoughts’), to which parrots are strangers.15 Sometimes grammars fuse the semiotic and semantic qualities of language. The Royal Grammar rattles out the semantic refrain: ‘a noun is the name of a thing’. It adds the formal proviso that a noun substantive ‘needs no other word to shew its signification’.16 The definition of a verb is similarly mixed: ‘a Verb is a part of speech declined with mood and tense, and betokeneth doing . . . or suffering’.17 The English Guide to the Latin Tongue (1675) also displays this seamless movement between semiotics and semantics, this time in the case of nouns: ‘A Noun is the name of a thing . . . A noun substantive may have a, an, or the before it, and cannot have the word thing immediately after it.’18 William Walker’s reformed version of The Royal Grammar (1674) gives the impression that language is constituted by a web of both phonetic and graphic signs, and determined by extra-linguistic reference. He explains that one might know the gender of words ‘by the nature of things’. However, having declared that ‘birds, wild-beasts, and fishes generally are of the Epicene gender’, the first exception to the rule turns out to be that ‘nouns ending in um . . . are generally of the neuter gender’.19 Ben Jonson’s English Grammar (1640) defines a word in general as ‘a part of speech, or note, whereby a thing is knowne, or called: and consisteth of one, or more syllabes’.20 More often, however, this interplay between sign and sense is eclipsed by an overwhelming focus on signs alone. Res melts away, leaving the reader with a baffling maze of empty signifiers. Scaliger is explicit about the strict exclusion of res from grammar. He explains that words can be considered in terms of their ‘figure’, their ‘composition’ and their ‘truth’, and that grammarians deal with the first two elements, while dialecticians are concerned with truth, or words’ fit with the world.21 Sanctius characterises oratio in terms of its phonetic elements rather than its intentional content. It consists of voces that are made up of syllables, which are in turn made up of letters, or individual sounds.22 This depiction of grammar in particular, and language more generally, is reiterated by Hoole: ‘Grammar hath its name from letters, which the Greeks call grammata . . . for this art begins with letters, of which syllables are made; 15 16 17 19 20 21

Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, pp. 21–2. The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. B2r [p. 3]; [p. 4]. Cf. The True Method 1696, p. 5. The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. C8r [p. 31]. 18 The English Guide 1675, p. 3. Walker 1674, pp. 25; 27. Jonson 1640, p. 35. Locke owned Jonson’s Works (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 163). Scaliger 1540, p. 2. 22 Sanctius 1664, p. 8.

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and of syllables, words; and of words, a speech.’23 Language seems to spiral, self-referentially, into itself, rather than reach out to people and their world. A circular and insulated picture of discourse is promoted through the meta-verbal focus on parts of speech, and also through the emphasis on making grammatical as opposed to real or rational sense. The Royal Grammar declares that ‘syntax . . . teacheth how to join words rightly together in sentences’, and defines a conjunction as ‘a part of speech which joineth words and sentences together’.24 The True Method of Learning the Latin Tongue (1696) explains that ‘a verb is a part of speech, which joyns a noun to a noun, or a noun to an adjective’.25 Much grammatical analysis of language therefore occurs at a purely surface level, and makes sparse reference to the semantic components of speech. The view of language as a tissue of insignificant signs, promoted, albeit inadvertently, by the grammarians, is compounded by their emphasis on the sensible aspect of words. At the base of early-modern philosophy of language lies the principle that men cannot communicate their ideas mind to mind and are therefore forced to use sensible entities – sounds and marks – which can signify insensible ideas. Words are a sensible conduit for intelligible matter, as George Dalgarno announces in his Tables of the Universal Character (1657): The soules of men, though of a spirituall and heavenly substance; yet in respect of that neare and strict union betwixt them and their bodies which they are in this state of mortality, are not able to act & exert their intellectuall faculties, without the ministration of the corporeall organs of the inferiour faculties of the senses; the chief servants the body does afford the soule, are the eare and the eye, the one carrying in upon the understanding the species of things by the signes of variously and artificially modulated sounds; the other from the like artificial variation of figures.26

Grammarians devote a large amount of space to the audible and graphic identity of words. Their discipline is divided into four parts, as enumerated in Twells’ Grammatica reformata (1683): ‘orthographia, prosodia, etymologia, syntaxis’. Orthography ‘teaches the nature, affections or accidents of letters’, and prosody, ‘the difference of the syllables’.27 The Royal Grammar explains that ‘a letter is a mark of a simple sound’.28 In his Pamphlet of Grammar (1586) William Bullokar praises the multiplicity of 23 25 26 27

Hoole 1969, p. 2. 24 The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. E8v [p. 64]; sig. E7v [p. 62]. The True Method 1696, p. 30. Dalgarno 2001a, p. 90. Cf. Izzo (1982) on phonology and orthography in the sixteenth century. Twells 1985, p. 158. 28 The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. B1r [p. 1].

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sounds employed by the ‘sencibl’ English tongue.29 The Port-Royal Grammaire initially concentrates not on ‘words, as significative; but only of their nature and property as sounds’.30 Hoole describes a syllable as ‘a taking letters together, and uttering them with one breath’.31 John Wallis actually appends a Grammatico-Physical Treatise on Speech (or on the formation of all speech sounds) to his Grammar of the English Language (1653). In it he explains how to pronounce different letters. This attention to the material, or sensible, aspects of discourse is also apparent in their use of ‘signs’ to identify parts of speech. John Milton’s Accedence (1669) advises that declined, as opposed to primitive, words ‘are those which have diverse endings’.32 In his Short Institution of Grammar (1674), Richard Busby explains that ‘a substantive is declined . . . with one article; as hic pater a father’.33 In his Grammatica Anglo-Romana (1687), Samuel Shaw explains how a noun’s case is unveiled by certain tell-tale signs. ‘The particle of is a sign of a genitive case’, and ‘the particles to or for put acquisitively, before a casual word, are signs of a dative case.’34 Mark Lewis offers the most elaborate version of this teaching method. His grammar is called An Essay to Facilitate the Education of Youth, by Bringing Down the Rudiments of Grammar to the Sense of Seeing (1674).35 He contends that children sense far better than they reason, and proposes using their keen faculty of sight to pick out the grammatical status of words. ‘We may know the parts of speech by sense.’ He begins with the common advice that ‘all English words which have a, the, or an before them, are nouns . . . This is obvious to sense.’ He then unfolds a further plan: ‘the child may know the parts of speech by the character the words are printed in’. By attributing to certain parts of speech certain fonts, capitals, and other visible differentials, the student is enabled to discern and remember which is which. Lewis proudly gives the following example: ‘The Arch, spread over us, is the Heaven’.36 Grammarians abstract language by classifying words themselves with yet more words. While words are always at one remove from what they signify, grammarians hoist the speaker up to a second level, widening the distance between sign and signified. John Brinsley’s Posing of the Parts (1617) reveals 29 32 33

34 35

36

Bullokar 1980, p. 52. 30 Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 5. 31 Hoole 1969, p. 14. Milton 1971, p. 2. Busby 1972, p. 3. Locke owned Graece Grammatices (1647) by Busby (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 98). Shaw 1969, pp. 36; 43. Locke owned a copy of Lewis’ grammar (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 174). See also the full title of another of Lewis’ works, Vestibulum (Lewis 1675c). Lewis 1675b, sig. A1v [p. 2]; sig. A2v [p. 4].

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the triple-tiered structure that is fostered by the grammarians. He says that ‘a hand it self is not a noun: but the word signifying a hand is a noun’.37 Stockwood paints a similarly rarefied picture of language. ‘The thing itself which is called a booke is not a noun, but this woorde booke.’ The questioner in the dialogue asks ‘why doest thou put this difference betwixte the thing and the name of the thing’? The respondent replies ‘for that in grammar which teacheth the true order of speech, wee have to consider nothing but the very woords that be spoken: so that things which bee signified by these words perteyne nothing to grammar’.38 The ‘difference betwixte the thing and the name of the thing’ is further exposed by the way in which the written word is considered a sign of the spoken word. Writing is not one, but two, steps away from the world. This traditional view has its roots in Aristotle’s seminal statement that ‘written words are the signs of words spoken’.39 ‘Aristotle says rightly’, applauds Bacon, that ‘words are the images of thoughts and letters are the images of words’.40 The Port-Royal Grammaire reiterates the commonplace, ‘sounds have been pitched upon by men to signify their thoughts, and . . . they have likewise invented certain figures which should serve as signs of these sounds’.41 Jenkin Philipps explains in his introduction to the grammatical works of James Shirley (1726) that ‘letters and syllables’ are the ‘marks or signs of the several sounds we make use of, to express our notions or Idea’s to one another’.42 Words, which bear no resemblance to what they signify in their pristine audible incarnation, are even more obscure in their written form. The lines and curves on the page recede further from the world. It is this wall of sound that divides (albeit conventional) script from meaning, as well as people from each other, that the universal language theorists want to pull down. Contrary to what is often supposed, they generally reject not arbitrary signs per se, but simply the audible versions. Following Bacon, they turn from ‘words’ to ‘real characters’, which, as Francis Lodwick puts it, are ‘representations of things, and not of sounds’.43 redressing the imbalance The early-modern period resounds with complaints that words are vacuous and that they are loved and used at the expense, and to the exclusion, of things. Some of the loudest cries come from within the 37 40 43

Brinsley 1677, p. 3. 38 Stockwood 1590, sig. B3r. 39 Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. Bacon 1857, iv, p. 439. 41 Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 13. 42 Shirley 1971, p. i. Bacon 1996b, p. 231; Lodwick 1972a, sig. A4r [p. 206]. Cf. Wilkins 1968, p. 21.

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grammatical tradition itself, which is not homogenous, but internally contested and negotiated. Certain reformers are disturbed by the way their discipline encourages insignificant speech. They resist the purely verbal characterisation of language, and urge that it be filled with sense. Mark Lewis’ Apologie for a Grammar inveighs against ‘the greatest Rabby with his millions of words without this knowledge [of ‘things’]’.44 In An Appeale to Truth (1622), a vehement rant against traditional grammar as both useless and obstructive, Joseph Webbe quotes one of the most eloquent and harsh of his critical forbears: Half our age, saith Montaigne, is consumed that way: we are kept foure or five years in learning to understand bare words, and to join them into clauses; then, as long in proportioning a great bodie extended into foure or five parts; and five yeares more at least, ere we can succinctly knowe how to mingle, joyn, and interlace them handsomely into a subtile fashion, and into one coherent orb.45

Montaigne here charges grammarians with religiously constructing a beautiful but self-consuming verbal circle that has no passage to the world. Not only are their words metaphysically vacuous, but also sprung from a dead language, Latin. John Milton’s re-definition of grammar reflects the concern to inject sense into sound: ‘the art of right understanding, speaking, or writing Latine’.46 His insertion of ‘understanding’ into the definition that traditionally includes only ‘speaking’ and ‘writing’ echoes a general plea to adjoin mental to verbal discourse. John Dury, for example, of the Hartlib circle, accuses traditional grammar of introducing students, ludicrously, to ‘the materiall sense of words’ in advance of ‘the formall coherence of things which their construction is to represent’.47 An Examen of the Way of Teaching the Latine Tongue (1669) makes a similar protest, asserting that standard Latin teaching stunts learning because ‘it hath needlessly engag’d us to preferre the knowledg of words to that of things (which is a great Evill)’.48 In his Apologie Lewis urgently indicates the hellish consequences of embracing words and neglecting content. ‘All methods ought to be so contrived to shorten Art in gathering words more timely to relish things, that we may understand ourselves in affairs of our present and everlasting concernment.’ Lewis paints a familiar portrait of grammatical training resulting in an empty-headed fool who speaks without ‘ideas of things in his mind’.49 John Robotham’s letter to the reader that he prefixes to his edition of Comenius’ Janua linguarum reserata . . . The 44 47

Lewis 1675d, p. 36. Dury 1970, p. 162.

45 48

Webbe 1967, p. 18. 46 Milton 1971, p. 1. An Examen 1969, p. 16. 49 Lewis 1675d, pp. 31; 36.

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Gate of Languages Unlocked (1631) likewise bemoans the way in which traditional grammar propagates ‘a meer verbalist’, as opposed to ‘the perfection of a realist’.50 He asserts that grammarians teach their students insignificant words. ‘No marvell if it be so long before wee can reach the pith of matter, when so much time is mis-spent in the bark of words’. He delivers the following ‘generall maxime’ for a student: ‘that he learns no more than hee understands; that the end of his pains is not words, but matter’. The same principle is trumpeted in Comenius’ aptly named textbook Orbis sensualium pictus (1658): ‘I say, and say it again aloud, that this last is the foundation of all the rest: because we can neither act nor speak wisely, unlesse we first rightly understand all things which are to be done, and whereof, we are to speak.’51 The entreaty that one’s speech must not outstretch one’s knowledge is so urgent (and is reiterated by Locke with such force) because it is merely normative, not descriptive. Reformers attempt to remedy the deficit of res by using the vernacular to teach Latin.52 The Royal Grammar had traditionally taught Latin grammar in Latin – a dead and foreign tongue, unintelligible to young English pupils. In his grammar Shaw attacks ‘the multitude of grammars’ that use Latin as the means as well as the end of grammatical training. He therefore writes his in English, ‘so children might learn a language which they know not, by one that they know’.53 In his Vestibulum technicum . . . wherein, the Sense of Janua Linguarum Is Contained, Lewis too inveighs against traditional grammar: ‘it is crime enough that it is in Latin’,54 while Philipps comments on the futility of the work of reformers like Sanctius and Scioppius whom we shall encounter below. Their endeavours are, he claims, ‘of no use to children and beginners, because written in Latin; for to teach Latin by Latin Rules is to explain one obscurity by another, and therefore very ridiculous in it self ’.55 An Examen also complains about using Latin to learn Latin. It suggests that students instead learn the rules in their mother tongue.56 In the same vein, Milton proffers his Accedence as an effective route to Latin grammar, in place of the standard and strange one where pupils learn ‘first the Accedence, then the Grammar in Latin, ere the Language of those Rules be understood’. His conversion of the rules into English entails that ‘the long way is much abbreviated, and the 50

51 52

53

Comenius 1643, sig. c4r. Locke possessed three editions of Comenius’ text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 114). Ianua is the name of the ‘fundamental Italian textbook of elementary education’ in Latin in medieval and renaissance Italy (Black 2001, p. 7). Comenius 1643, sig. c4r; sig. c6r; Comenius 1968, p. 90. See Waswo (1999b) on the rise of the vernacular in the Renaissance; Johnson (1944) on the neologising and latinising of English in the sixteenth century. Shaw 1969, sig. A5r. 54 Lewis 1675c, p. 6. 55 Shirley 1971, p. iii. 56 An Examen 1969, p. 27.

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labour of understanding much more easie’.57 Brinsley is in the vanguard of reformers who convert Lily’s rules into English.58 He is motivated not only to illuminate Latin, but also to enrich the pupils’ understanding of their own tongue. He includes specifically English grammatical advice, such as the tip that one can know a ‘noun adjective’, ‘if I may put this word thing to it’.59 Wallis takes the revolutionary step of writing a specifically English grammar – his Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae of 1653 (albeit written in Latin!). Many grammars are, indeed, written in both Latin and English, to shed light on the unknown through the known. For example, William Clare organises his Compleat System of Grammar English and Latine (1690) in two columns, English on the left and Latin on the right, whereas Hoole’s Latine Grammar is advertised as a reformed version of Lily, and consists of a facing page translation. In his Universal Character (1657), Cave Beck recommends that his character be learned ‘in the nature of Comenius’s Janua set forth with the vulgar language on one side, and the character on the other’.60 In his version of Comenius’ Vestibulum Novissimum Linguae Latinae (1647), J. Brookbank explains the merits of learning Latin through English.61 In addition to the mainstream recourse to the vernacular to make grammar and language more intelligible, there is a marginal, more radical movement that emerges in the second half of the seventeenth century. This movement rejects as too limited the reforms I have outlined because they keep the discipline at the level of inherently unintelligible words. According to these ‘new’ grammarians, words per se are opaque to children. As arbitrary signs they tell us nothing about their meanings. At ‘the Entrance’ to his Janua linguarum, Comenius asks the rhetorical question: ‘do not also the characters and draughts . . . of letters look like the wonderfull strange sights to little children at the first shew’.62 This revolutionary group of educationalists are thorough-going empiricists and believe that children can only learn language though their senses. They take their cue from the Aristotelian dictum that ‘there is nothing in the understanding which was not first in the sense’.63 It is this belief that motivates Lewis’ visual differentiation of the parts of speech. ‘Things not brought down to childrens capacities by sense, are like confused objects . . . Instruction of children ought to be . . . made so plain, that 57 60 62 63

Milton 1971, sig. A2r. 58 Padley 1985 and 1988, 1, p. 153. 59 Brinsley 1677, p. 4. Beck 1657, sig. B1r. 61 Comenius 1647, sigs. A4r–A8r. Comenius 1643, sig. D1r. Comenius 1968, p. 90. On the history of this tag, see Cranefield 1970.

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they may look on words as pictures. We ought to speak to children, as if we painted our words, that they may see us speak.’64 While Lewis restricts his appeal to sense to the level of language, members of the Hartlib circle extend it to meaning, thereby bypassing intrinsically obscure words and making meaning itself intelligible. John Dury proposes ostensive learning because children learn ‘single words with the observation of the things themselves’.65 Comenius’ Orbis sensualium pictus is the great example of this pedagogical endeavour. It appears in English in 1659 as Visible World, or, A Picture and Nomenclature of All the Chief Things that Are in the World, and of Mens Employment therein. Charles Hoole’s titular translation demonstrates the supreme power accorded to sight. The book consists of pictures of everything from the heavens, through nature, to the world of human artifice. Each thing is marked by its name to make a truly ‘lively and vocal alphabet’. As Comenius says, ‘pictures are the most intelligible books, that children can look upon. They come closest to nature.’ As Hezekiah Woodward explains, in his laudatory judgement on Comenius’ work, the aim is to ‘make our words as legible to children as pictures are’. The English introduction recommends that the words be further illuminated by showing children the things themselves, in order to push the meanings into the sensuous and impressionable mind. ‘And let the things named be shewed, not only in the picture, but also in themselves, for example, the parts of the body, clothes, books, the house, utensils, &c.’66 Words appear as alien squiggles to children unless they are encountered in conjunction with what they are instituted to signify.

grounding grammar While grammars are notable for flagging up the semiotic side of language, they also, to varying degrees, indicate what it might signify. Those of a more ‘philosophical’ persuasion, perhaps trying to stem the semiotic flow, devote whole treatises to the mental and real schemes that language maps. As in linguistic theory more generally, grammarians present language as predominantly made up of names – or nouns. According to Shirley, 64 65

66

Lewis 1675b, p. 2. Dury 1970, p. 162. See Webster (1970) on the educational precepts of the Hartlib circle. See also Privratska and Privratska 1994; Strasser 1994. Locke owned four works (on husbandry) by Hartlib (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 151). Comenius 1968, pp. 111; 105; 95.

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they are among ‘the most essential parts of any language’.67 This emphasis intimates two worlds, one of manufactured names and one of extra-linguistic things, one straightforwardly and mimetically laid over the other. Brinsley says that ‘a noun is the name of a thing that may be seen, felt, heard, or understood’.68 In his satirical plays about grammar and rhetoric, Words Made Visible (1679), Samuel Shaw comments on the contemporary enthusiasm for naming; Sir John Oneme, representative of knights, or nouns, replies to the charge that there are, dangerously, too many of his class, with the following rhetorical question: ‘if his Majesty will needs make a noun of every thing, that can be seen, felt, heard, or understood, how should the kingdome choose but be full of knights?’69 The fact that language is riddled with ‘names’ indicates that it is primarily considered as a reflection of something else. It is possible to distinguish two kinds of source from which language is said to stream: things in the world and concepts in the mind. As ever, the two are often neither explicitly nor, perhaps, analytically held apart, but often, bewilderingly, consume each other. Like the logicians, grammarians present language as mirroring the external world and employ the Aristotelian substance/accident dichotomy.70 Their division of nouns into substantives and adjectives is based respectively on the distinction between ‘the thing itself’, and ‘the manner, kind or quality’ of the thing.71 The ontologies that inform grammars vary according to the specific philosophical persuasion of the grammarian. Bassett Jones, in his Herm’aelogium (1659) asserts that there are three word classes. These are noun, verb and adjective, and have their ontological roots in ‘being’, ‘motion’ and ‘quality’.72 Philipps maintains that there are four kinds of words: ‘substantive’, ‘adjective’, ‘verb’ and ‘particle’. This quartet is the mirror of the world: ‘whatever exists in the whole universe, is either a thing or substance, or the manner or quality of a thing; the action of a thing, or the manner or quality of that action’.73 In L’art de parler (1676), Bernard Lamy draws a popular verbal trichotomy of nouns/adjectives/articles which maps the basic real(–mental) logical structure of subject/predicate/copula. Nouns signify ‘the substance’, such as ‘earth’, adjectives its ‘manner’, such as ‘round’, while articles ‘mark the references which things have among themselves’, such as ‘the earth is round’.74 67 70 72 74

Shirley 1971, p. 5. 68 Brinsley 1677, p. 3. 69 Shaw 1972, p. 32. E.g. Campanella 1638, p. 21. 71 The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. B2v. Jones 1970, sig. A7v. 73 Shirley 1971, p. iv. Lane (1969, p. 19) had proposed the same quartet. Lamy 1986, pp. 186; 187. Locke owned this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 169).

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There is a simultaneous and complementary move among grammarians to offer the mind as the source of universal grammatical structure. While grammarians are often far from explicit about mental signification, which hides under the general term ‘thing’, they do reiterate the commonplace that words signify the thoughts of the speaker. For example, John Stockwood explains that ‘speech . . . is a pronouncing of words together, wherein every man and woman speaking to each other, use to utter their myndes’.75 As Lamy puts it in his grammatical section, ‘the idea’s present to our mind . . . are the soul of our words’.76 The True Method introduces its discussion of syntax with the following familiar belief: ‘the words of humane speech are the marks by which we make our thoughts known to others’.77 Beyond this general characterisation of speech as an expression of thought, grammarians, resembling the logicians again, assert that the structure of language is informed by mental operations. One class of words that all grammarians agree signifies a certain kind of mental activity is the interjection. It is, according to Twells, ‘a virtual sentence, where the noun and the verb are contracted into an undigested word, which word betokeneth some motion or affection of the mind’.78 The Royal Grammar defines an interjection as ‘a word expressing some passion of the mind’.79 Bullokar offers the same definition and gives the examples: ‘Sorrow: as, alas: how; Fear: as, oh: O-Lord; Wonder: as, Whough: good-Lord ’.80 Grammar blurs completely with logic when grammarians attest to a conformity between verbal and mental discourse. While we might think this derives from logic, Lane argues in his Key to the Art of Letters (1700), in defence of his use of logical terminology, that he is only returning it to its original place. ‘I am perswaded that Aristotle borrowed them first from Grammar, which was in being long before his Logic, which I think . . . to be nothing else but Grammar . . . the Art of thinking and speaking are not two, but one Art . . . speaking being nothing else but vocal thoughts, and thoughts but silent speaking.’81 The synchronised acrobatics of logic animate grammar. Language appears as made up of subjects and predicates, and the copula which affirms or denies them of each other. The Grammatica speculativa explains that parts of speech are compounded ‘for the purpose of 75 78 81

Stockwood 1590, sig. B2r. 76 Lamy 1986, p. 181. 77 The True Method 1696, p. 57. Twells 1985, p. 160. 79 The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. E8r. 80 Bullokar 1980, p. 51. Lane 1969, p. xvii. See Panaccio (1999a) on grammar and mental language.

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expressing a compound concept of the mind’.82 Campanella claims that a word (vocabula) signifies a simple mental concept, and that discourse (oratio) manifests complex concepts of the soul.83 While we would expect this kind of explanation from these two ‘philosophical’ sources, we also find echoes in Bullokar’s Grammar. He divides conjunctions into ‘copulatives affirmatively, as and: also’, and ‘copulatives negatively, as nor: neither: not yet’.84 According to The True Method, ‘a proposition is a perfect sentence, or speech wherein something is affirmed, or denied of another’. It goes on: a ‘substantive in the nominative case’ that ‘comes before the principal verb’, ‘is called a subject’, and ‘all that follows it is called the predicate’, while ‘the verb is the copula that joyns them together’.85 Grammarians believe that every unit of language ought to symbolise one unit of thought. Like logicians, they note that there may not be a perfect symmetry. They exemplify their point with ellipsis, when a word is omitted but a mental term understood.86 However, they claim that language can always be filled out, or rationalised, to disclose an exactly replicated mental configuration. The aim and the expectation is that each word should signify a single thought – an assumption that Locke will denounce as deeply misleading. The Port-Royal Grammaire, adduced by Chomsky as the Cartesian precursor to his own deep structure theory, is really only developing the old grammatico-logical tradition that sees linguistic discourse as a copy of mental discourse.87 The Grammaire begins by stating that ‘knowledge of what passes in the mind, is necessary to comprehend the foundation of grammar: and on this depends the diversity of words which compose discourse’. It divides words into two basic classes, one signifying ‘the objects’ and the other ‘the manner of our thoughts’. It explains that the essence of a verb is ‘affirmation’. It maintains that there are three mental operations: ‘perception’, ‘judgment’ and ‘reasoning’. These have their 82

83 84 87

Thomas of Erfurt 1972, p. 277. See Pinborg 1984a, p. 254. Cf. Preston (1997) on the modern reception of the idea that there is a language of thought. Campanella 1638, pp. 13; 15. Bullokar 1980, p. 44. 85 The True Method 1696, p. 57. 86 E.g. Sanctius 1664, p. 66. Chomsky 1966, pp. 31–54. See Padley (1976, pp. 1 and 12) on the Chomskianism of the grammatical tradition dating back to Aristotle; Breva-Claramonte (1983) on the origins of PortRoyal Chomskianism in Sanctius and his own roots in modistic grammar. See also Miel (1995) on the Port-Royalists as Augustinian rather than Cartesian with their story about innate ideas and fallen signs and the non-Chomskianism of Descartes who does not differentiate between deep and surface structure, assuming that language is an accurate reflection of thought; Parish (1999, p. 479) on the Port-Royalists’ ‘logical, analytical’ as opposed to ‘usage-based view of grammar which had prevailed’; Panaccio (1999b, p. 13) on the ‘rapport’ between scholastic mental linguistics and present-day cognitive science.

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linguistic correspondents in, respectively, simple terms, propositions and syllogisms.88 As we know, it is precisely this tripartite division that underpins the tripartite organisation of logic. While it might well be the case that logic and grammar became increasingly psychological in the course of the century, on a trajectory where Port-Royal is key and which culminates in some way in Locke, the grammatical tradition as a whole had always been steeped in the logicalmentalist characterisation of language.89 Moreover, it included things squarely in the scope of language. The division between things and concepts is an important early-modern analytical division, but over-emphasising it belies the general agreement that talk about the external world involves three entities – words, concepts and things.90 This premise of early-modern philosophy of language, laid down by De interpretatione, overshadows discussions about the underlying rationale of language. The Grammatica speculativa gives an elaborate description of the interplay between the three modes: of being, understanding and signifying.91 Scaliger explains that words are signs of our ‘intellectual notions’, which are in turn signs of ‘things’.92 The Port-Royal Grammaire, far from denying the role of the external world in language, simply asserts that ‘the objects of our thoughts are either things, as the earth, the sun, water, wood, which are commonly called substances: or the manner of things, as to be round, red, hard, learned, &c. which are called accidents’.93 And Wilkins, a notoriously ‘thing’-obsessed linguist and therefore supposedly on ‘the other side’, chimes in with the mentalist refrain. Language, and ‘names’ in particular, he says, are the ‘external expression’ of ‘mental notions’ or ‘conceits’.94 Like all early-modern philosophers, grammarians maintain that words hook on to both concepts and things, even if they vary in their characterisation of the relationship between the three elements. Having made that point, it is also important to note the way that grammarians, like logicians, elide the difference between concept and 88 89

90

91 94

Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, pp. 21; 24; 97; 22–3; cf. the same claim in Lamy 1986, p. 187. While Padley (1985 and 1988, i, p. 286 and 1976, p. 209) is right to argue against Chomsky that Port-Royal has non-Cartesian antecedents, he misses the over-arching logical influence on grammar, and the increasingly psychological emphasis of logic. Padley (1985 and 1988, i) argues for a strict division of these two, claiming that in England, universal (empirical) grammarians assumed that language was ‘the mirror of things’ (p. 325), whereas on the Continent, especially in France, the rationalists proposed the mind as ‘the mirror of thought’ (p. 271). Thomas of Erfurt 1972, p. 143. 92 Scaliger 1540, p. 115. 93 Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 25. Wilkins 1968, p. 20. See Padley (1985 and 1988, i, p. 369) on Wilkins as the acme of the word–thing empiricist tradition and on the Port-Royalists’ ‘isomorphism of the linguistic structure and the structure of thought’ (p. 296).

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thing, subsuming both under the title res or ‘thing’, and betraying the mentalism to which they are probably committed. The simple refrain that ‘a noun is the name of a thing’ hides the tripartite paradigm, and might lead students to a simplified and perverted view of language’s relationship with the world. In Robotham’s letter to the reader of Comenius’ Janua, we see mentalism being obliterated by the weight of the world: the expressed purpose of the book is to ‘imprint’ in the reader ‘the notion of the thing’.95 But the text itself seems to name things directly. Likewise, Philipps writes that the four word classes ‘are sufficient to express all the ideas of things, and the judgements we make’. However, he also declares that they correspond to ‘whatever exists in the whole universe’.96 An important consequence of the fact that language is taken to have one natural mental–real foundation is that it is considered to be underpinned by a universal semantics. As Aristotle had postulated in De interpretatione,97 the unity of the real and the mental arenas guarantees one semantic bedrock that is unmoved by superficial linguistic variation. Jones echoes the point. ‘As the reason is one’, he argues, ‘so is it observable, that the expression thereof in and by man is in all countries (qua reason) the same.’98 rationalising and regularising grammar There is a major debate among grammarians about whether their subject is a contingent and vagrant product of usage, or whether it is underpinned by some universal and rational order, governed by universal laws. While there are leading figures in both camps, both views sometimes come through the same texts. The second view constitutes a rejection of the irregular and use-based picture of grammar that dominates education in England. Lily, the principal textbook, consists of an extensive plethora of exceptions to rules and so undermines claims of regularity. It is riddled with divisions, accidents and moods, and paints a messy and ungoverned picture of speech.99 The great early-modern systematisers, or ‘philosophical projectours’ as The Royal Grammar calls them, adopt the view of the medieval modistae, that grammar is a science grounded on fixed and rational principles.100 95 97 99

100

Comenius 1643, sig. C5r. 96 Shirley 1971, p. iv. Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. 98 Jones 1970, sigs. A5r-v. For example, one edition of 1664 includes the ‘optative’ mood, which the rationalising Twells rejects as being simply another description of the subjunctive (Lily 1664, sig. C2r; Twells 1985, p. 165). The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. A5r; Thomas of Erfurt 1972, p. 135. See Sirridge 1995.

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Scaliger endeavours to lay out the ‘communis ratio loquendi’.101 Sanctius maintains that his grammar is gathered primarily from ‘reason’, and only secondarily from ‘testimony and use’.102 This opinion finds ample support in the seventeenth century, most notably in the Port-Royal Grammaire generale et raisoneé. It is a ‘work of reasoning’ that identifies the ‘nature’ of language. Rather than descriptions of grammatical precepts it provides explanations – for instance, that cases originate from the need to record relations between things, and that the genitive case signifies ‘the relation of a thing, which in any manner whatsoever belongs to another’.103 The popularity of the view that grammar has an underlying rationale is also indicated in the full title of Jones’ Herm’aelogium, or, An Essay at the Rationality of the Art of Speaking (1659). Explicitly following the second of Bacon’s two injunctions that were to set the universal language movement asail,104 Jones compiles a ‘philosophical grammar’ which sketches an ‘analogie between words and things, or reason’.105 Lane reiterates this belief in a universal grammar that exists ‘according to the unalterable rules of Right Reason, which are the same in all languages how different soever they be’.106 Twells undertakes a sustained attack on the disordered jumble of Lily. He prefaces his work by hallowing his rationalising forbears. He applauds Sanctius’ ‘perfect system of the Latin Grammar’. Of Gaspar Scioppius’ Grammatica Philosophica (1628) he says that it was ‘founded on . . . infallible unerring principles’. He dubs Gerhardus Joannes Vossius ‘this wise architect’, who ‘had finished the beautiful structure’. His own offering is a lean, regular text. For example, he denies that there are irregular or defective nouns ‘in Nominum Natura’.107 Thomas Farnaby writes a significantly entitled Systema grammaticum in 1641. He rationalises grammatical anomalies, and ‘reduces’ the ‘heteroclite [defective] nouns’ into their ‘several declensions’. For example ‘volo, nolo, malo, edo, fero, are regulated to the third conjugation; and the anomala tenses of them set in the margin’.108 He subsumes ‘possum’ under ‘sum’. These 101 103

104

105 107

108

Scaliger 1540, p. 136. 102 Sanctius 1664, p. 5. Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, sig. A3v; sig. A4r; pp. 36; 39. Twells also provides reasons for grammatical structure; e.g. he says of the neuter gender that ‘it was introduced . . . with very good reason, both for variety and better distinction of words’ (Twells 1985, p. 160). Bacon 1857, IV, p. 441; Bacon 1996b, p. 231. The first injunction was to inquire into notae rerum other than words, particularly real characters (Bacon 1857, iv, pp. 439–40; Bacon 1996b, p. 231). Jones 1970, sig. A6r. 106 Lane 1969, p. x. Twells 1985, pp. 155; 157; 162. The full title of this work identifies this reformist, philosophical tradition in grammar. Farnaby 1969, sig. A4r.

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schematisers appropriate the so-called ‘figurative’ or irregular aspects of grammar, such as ellipsis and pleonasm, into their perfect systems. Even outside the hard core of regularising grammarians, the discipline as a whole had traditionally been dominated by the language of the law. Even the irregular Royal Grammar employs this terminology: ‘The Rules for the Verb and Adjective are called Concords, or rules of Agreement. The Rules for the Case of the Substantive are called Rules of Government’.109 The widespread view of grammar as bound by laws underpins Shaw’s play. The cast includes King Syntaxis and his people, who personify the eight parts of speech. The entire plot is motivated by the King’s fury at his subjects’ rebellious activity. While Shaw’s point is that language is not obedient, his choice of the political analogy is instructive of the depth of feeling that it should be. The assumed regularity of language is also manifest in the belief in a natural word order. According to Stockwood, the ‘nominative case’ ‘in the naturall order of speeche commeth before the verbe’.110 In his Grammaticae puerilis Lewis patriotically explains how in English ‘the words stand in a natural order’. That is to say, ‘the substantive is the thing it self, and beginneth the period; only the adjective the manner of the thing is unusually put before it: the verb is the motion of the thing, and follows after it’.111 Lancelot and Arnauld refer to the ‘natural order’ of syntax.112 And Wilkins’ ‘Natural Grammar’ follows ‘the natural sense and order of the words’.113 Here again, it is crucial to note the assumption of universality – in this case grammatical – which underpins language. The assumption also shines through the view that languages map each other and are made up of interchangeable units. The action of translating from the vernacular into Latin, and vice versa, is a fundamental exercise for pupils.114 Jonson makes the following claim for his English Grammar: ‘we shew the copie of it, and matchableness, with other tongues’.115 In his Additional Rules in the Oxford Grammar (1680), Twells interlaces Latin and English versions. For example, ‘vox generalis the general word dat legem imposes a gender positis upon words contained infra se under it’.116 The belief that semantic and grammatical universality forms the groundwork of languages is obviously entrenched in the universal language movement. Wilkins styles his a ‘natural . . . philosophical, 109 111

112 114

The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. F1r. 110 Stockwood 1590, sig. C2r. Lewis 1675a, sig. A1v (counting title page as A1r). Locke owned the 1670 edition of this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 174). Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 150. 113 Wilkins 1968, p. 355. E.g. The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. a4r. 115 Jonson 1640, sig. E1r. 116 Twells 1680, p. 189.

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rational, and universal’ grammar which belongs ‘to the philosophy of letters and speech in general’.117 In his News to the Whole World, of the Discovery of an Universal Character, and a New Rational Language (1658), Dalgarno advertises that the ‘grammatical rules of this art . . . shall be altogether grounded upon nature and reason, without any irregularities or exceptions (which nature and reason abhors)’.118 a contingent circle I now turn to the other extreme of the debate, to those who reject the universality, rationality and naturalness of language and its grammar, and paint instead an irregular, heterogeneous and mutable picture of them. These historically-minded critics reflect, but with greater force, the usebased orientation of the higgledy-piggledy Lily. Their pronouncements also echo the humanist interest, exemplified by Valla, in practice, probabilism and history.119 For these alternative grammarians, language is not a perfect portrait of a fixed and ordered universe, but an evanescent product of diverse and contingent human communication. At best, grammar is an imperfect record of the way language works at a given moment. Born after the event, it describes rather than creates the speech of a particular community. At worst, grammar is an ill-fitting straightjacket into which speech is contorted. In its tightly regular form the so-called art of speaking bears little resemblance to living and idiosyncratic tongues. The grammarians’ subject matter wriggles out of their chains. Language appears not to be underpinned by the universal principles that are required of a science, or even an art. Webbe, one of the loudest proponents of the customary nature of language, adduces Quintilian for the view that grammar was not ‘sent from heaven when men were first formed, to give lawes of speaking; but . . . it was found out after they spake’.120 Even the great rationaliser Sanctius, quoting Seneca, affirms that grammarians ‘are the custodians, not the authors of the Latin tongue’.121 Even Wilkins, writing under the steam of the universal language movement, asserts that ‘grammar, is of much later invention then languages themselves, being adapted to what was already in being, rather 117 119

120 121

Wilkins 1968, p. 297. 118 Dalgarno 2001b, p. 110. Cf. Shapiro (1991) on the continuing influence of humanism in the seventeenth century; Milton (2000a) on the humanist enthronement of custom and authority, by contrast with the new philosophers’ rejection of it. See also Simone (1998) on the tensions between use, reason and nature in early-modern linguistics. Webbe 1967, p. 23. Sanctius 1664, p. 5: ‘grammatici enim, ut inquit Seneca, sermonis Latini custodes sunt, non auctores’.

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then the rule of making it so’.122 This derivative view of grammar does not itself impugn its philosophical pretensions; language itself might be a rational institution, from which a rational grammar might be extrapolated. However, some grammarians propose that language itself is a contingent and fluid fabrication, eluding law and reason.123 The Royal Grammar claims that Sanctius and his disciples are living in a fantasy world, ‘and that [a]n absolute universal alteration’ of the discipline that they ‘dream of, is altogether impracticable’.124 Lewis draws our attention to the accidental and fluctuating nature of his subject. He declares that ‘languages were made, and daily suffer alterations, rather by chance, than any art or contrivance’.125 The Port-Royalists have to admit that ‘custom and reason often differ’. For example, prepositions disobey the rule of marking ‘one relation’ each, the same preposition sometimes marking more than one.126 Philipps is forced to admit that ‘all tongues had their birth among the ignorant people, and use gave the stamp of authority to the most irregular expressions, and therefore ’twas not in the power of any mortal, however learn’d, to reduced them to any rules without innumerable exceptions’.127 On this view, language has a democratic authorship, and is therefore beset by foolish inconsistencies. Shaw provides an amusing illustration of the view that language disobeys the laws that grammarians seek to apply to it. His play vibrates with the anger of King Syntaxis at his subjects’ endemic revolt. One of the judges, Lego, recalls the first proud and devastating mutiny: ‘a general defection of the eight parts of speech from the great King Syntaxis, which is to this day known by the name of Confusion of Languages’. The nouns or knights are on trial for their ‘Heteroclite’ brigade who vary their genders and declensions. The verbs or nobles of the ‘defective’ variety face the charge of self-confessed insubordination. The ‘impersonalls’ are impugned because they ‘refuse to send out men into his majesties service’. The page of Lord Gymnasiarches, Lord Lieutenant of the eight classes of the realm, rudely refers to the King as he who ‘governs that ungovernable thing call’d the tongue of man’.128 As the full title suggests, Webbe’s Appeale to Truth, In the Controversie betweene Art, and Use is devoted to the disjunction between the delightful vagaries of the spoken word and the hopelessly regular art of grammar. He accuses it of being an inherently ‘deceitful’ art because it teaches the opposite of what it purports to do: ‘speaking rightly’. Grammarians do not 122 123 124 126 128

Wilkins 1968, p. 19; cf. Shirley (1971, p. i) for a reiteration of the point. See Izzo (1982, p. 336) on the renaissance inheritance. The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. A5r. 125 Lewis 1675b, sig. A1r. Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, pp. 52; 86. 127 Shirley 1971, p. ii. Shaw 1972, pp. 22; 32; 22; 23; 3.

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live in the real world but speak a peculiar, albeit ‘proper’, language. ‘Wee are bound rather to erre with the multitude, than to follow truth with two or three.’ Grammar is based on ‘custome or authority’, not reason.129 To support this claim, Webbe interlaces his statements with an impressive array of authorities. He quotes Juan Luis Vives on ‘custome’ as ‘the Lady and Mistresse of speaking’. He criticises grammarians for ‘polluting their speech with foule enormities, whil’st they follow Art, which is not capable of use, because use is various or changeable’. He relishes the derision of ‘Halvinus’, who writes that grammar is bound to fail due to the protean nature of its object. To attain perfection it would need be ‘as often renewed as new words are coined, or ould ones newly received’. Grammar would need to keep up with languages’ ‘daily alteration’ if it were to have ‘any certainty or perfection’. Moreoever, it is ‘impossible’ that it could be ‘universal’ or ‘perpetual’.130 Language is so inconstant and diverse that it eludes codification for even a moment, let alone for all tongues at all times. This view has revolutionary pedagogical consequences. If languages are purely the products of popular use, if they are irreducible to fixed rules and classifications, and if they have no rational core to penetrate, then they can be learned only by observation and practice, not by grammar. Hartlib asserts that the learning ‘of learned tongues’ is much hampered by ‘the Grammatical Tyranny of Teaching Tongues’.131 His friend Dury claims that ‘the knowledge of tongues is the proper effect of the memory and not of any reasoning ability, because they depend upon the observation only of that which is the constant custome of people’.132 In his Dissertation on Reading the Classics (1713), Henry Felton recommends that ‘a Youth’ be ‘taught to know Grammar by Books, instead of Books by Grammar’.133 Webbe contends that those who seek to learn a language by ‘learning or following grammar’ ‘labour in vaine’. Language is so riddled with ‘irregularities’ and ‘new-found exceptions’, that we better learn languages, as in other modes of behaviour, ‘by use & exercise, then by art, or precept’. He goes on to say that ‘we beginne not by art, but by nature: and proceed by use, custome, authoritie, and exercise govern’d by the eare’.134 The famous instance of a child who learnt beautiful Latin through experience is Montaigne. He is adduced by An Examen to prove that ‘rules are needless’ for learning a language, and that ‘there is nothing more natural, nor infallible’ than learning by ‘use and conversation’.135 129 132 135

Webbe 1967, pp. 32; 33; 36. 130 Webbe 1967, pp. 22–3; 20–1; 22. 131 Hartlib 1970, p. 194. Dury 1970, p. 156. 133 Felton 1971, p. 53. 134 Webbe 1967, pp. 37; 12–13. An Examen 1969, pp. 8; 7; 4.

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This attitude is partly grounded in an externalist model of personal construction. In his Compleat English Schoolmaster (1674), Elisha Coles explains that, while children have little judgement, they are ‘capable of imitation’.136 A new mind is a tabula rasa, inscribed by the chatter – generally of women – which flutters about them. According to Webbe, the Romans did not have their Lilys, but ‘were taught by use and custome, from the mouthes of nurses and other women which had the keeping of them, from their cradle, and not by Grammar, or Grammarians’.137 Obadiah Walker repeats the commonplace: ‘the nurses forme the speech, the garbe, and much of the sentiments of the child’.138 In A Childes Patrimony (1640) Hezekiah Woodward urgently exhorts parents to ‘looke well with whom the childe doth converse; there is a companion whose words fret like a gangrene, and corrupt like a plague sore, which whom the childe receives an impression quickly, which will not quickly out again . . . the breath of a wicked companion is more contagious then is unholsome ayer’.139 The view that language is the product of experience and use, that it does not originate in reason and the world, but mutates and diverges threatens the efficacy of language as it was conceived in the early-modern period. It implies that languages do not, as we have seen logicians and grammarians assume, reflect one universal mental discourse. Instead, languages appear as deeply, as well as superficially, incommensurable with each other. Somewhat surprisingly, this culturally specific view appears in Bacon’s plan for a ‘philosophical grammar’. By gathering the best words from different peoples and discovering ‘the analogy between words and things, or reason’, one might, in addition to repairing Babel, reveal the particular and divergent ‘dispositions and manners of peoples and nations’ by means of their diverse speech. Bacon takes an example from a cheeky Cicero, who had remarked that ‘the Greeks had no word to express the Latin ineptus; ‘‘because,’’ says he, ‘‘that vice was so familiar among the Greeks that they did not perceive it in themselves’’ ’.140 Webbe reiterates the point with extra force, criticising translators of the ancients for being insensitive to linguistic fragmentation and uniqueness: ‘Every tongue hath proper and peculiar words, which are neither agreeable to other tongues, or lyable to translation.’ It is not only national tongues that diverge, but also ‘sundry regions’, such as ‘Flanders, Brabant, Holland, and Zeland’.141 Commenting on this problem, as posed by Comenius’ Janua, Robotham explains how he got over the 136 139

Coles 1967, p. 103. 137 Webbe 1967, p. 26. 138 Walker 1970, p. 18. Woodward 1640, p. 43. 140 Bacon 1857, iv, pp. 441–2. 141 Webbe 1967, pp. 34; 21.

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impossibility of a straight translation. He ‘strives not to render the Latin ad verbum . . . but truly to expresse the author’s meaning in such proper words, and current phrases, as an English man will own’.142 The emergence of vernaculars focuses attention on inter-linguistic distinctions. No more the strange Latinate ‘English’ with its genders and suffixes. Jonson champions the independence of his mother tongue; he explains how English has a ninth part of speech – the articles – in addition to the Latin eight.143 The Port-Royalists are forced to admit that not every grammatical element is shared by all languages. They also use the example of articles which French has but Latin lacks.144 While grammarians themselves do not extrapolate them, the view that languages are not intertranslatable has potentially devastating consequences. If languages are not underpinned by a universal organisation, and if linguistic signs are arbitrary, and therefore inherently opaque, then language cannot be guaranteed to convey the thoughts of the speakers, nor to describe the world. It is the commonality of deep semantic structure, divergent superficies notwithstanding, that underpins both communication and external reference. Predominantly pedagogical concerns lead certain grammarians to two connected philosophical conclusions. Frustrated with the ineffectiveness of general rules to teach grammar and language, they turn to observation and practice, and form the view that language is a contingent circle, floating free of any rational or real base, and changing its consistency from moment to moment. The second conclusion emerges out of the desire to render Latin grammar intelligible by means of the vernacular, in addition to wanting to teach the vernacular in its own right. This leads to the realisation that Latin grammar is incommensurable with English, and that particular languages do not mirror each other at a deep level. These two conclusions, in conjunction with the grammarians’ strict division between res and verba, and their focus on the formal and sensible, opposed to the semantic aspect of words, threaten to present words as profoundly and necessarily unintelligible, and as completely unhinged. Language, as it is presented in grammar, juts out in two opposite directions. On the one hand, it appears, as it does in logic, full of sense and a perfect mirror of one mind–world. On the other, it seems an unanchored play of signs, blowing in the wind of contingent usage.

142

Comenius 1643, sig. C7v.

143

Jonson 1640, p. 56.

144

Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 50.

chapter 3

Language in rhetoric

Rhetoric is the final art of language. Having learnt to speak and reason, students discover how to beautify their words and make them persuasive. Only then are they fully equipped to take the stage as gentlemen. Holdsworth explains the indispensability of ‘Oratory’, ‘without wch: all the other learning though never so eminent is in a manner voide & useless, without those you will be bafled in your disputes, disgraced, & vilified in Publicke examinations, laught at in speeches, & Declamations’.1 Succeeding her sister arts, rhetoric is the grand finale, by which one learns how to express what one thinks clearly and convincingly. It is therefore the art that deals most fully and explicitly with the human act of speaking, with the production of impressive, sensible words and with the audience. While rhetorical presentation of language is rooted in standard linguistic assumptions, it probes them and exposes points of vulnerability that cause concern about language in general. For example, tropes expose the fragility of the semantic contract that joins words to meanings; the essence of a trope is that it pulls words apart from their designated meanings, and applies them elsewhere. The deeply rhetorical culture in which early-modern elites are entrenched unmasks language in a way that simultaneously impresses and horrifies them. What is early-modern rhetoric? Despite the proliferation of vernacular treatises on rhetoric in the later sixteenth century and their continued production throughout the seventeenth, it is still the ancients to whom students are officially and enthusiastically guided. In the main, they are 1

Holdsworth 1961, p. 637. I shall use ‘oratory’ and ‘eloquence’ almost interchangeably with ‘rhetoric’, although there are arguably important distinctions, ‘oratory’ emphasising speech (as opposed to writing), and eloquence (especially in the seventeenth century) elocutio. On the continuing centrality of rhetoric in the seventeenth century see Feingold 1997, p. 248; Murphy 1981, p. ix; Murphy 1983; Skinner 1996; Vickers 1994. For summaries of the state of the subject at that time see Abbott 1983; Conley 1990, chapter 6, Kristeller 1983.

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directed to models rather than explanations of eloquence,2 encouraged to acquaint themselves with an eclectic choice of styles, although there is an increasing predilection for the ‘plain style’ towards the end of the century. Locke’s own advice on how to teach ‘the art of speaking well’ is that ‘we are more apt to learn by example, than by direction’.3 He goes on to cite Cicero, Terence, Virgil, Livy and Caesar, specifying the best editions. However, in addition to these exemplars, Locke also recommends some manuals. ‘If anyone hath a mind to consult the masters of speaking, and writing’, Locke advises Cicero’s De oratore and Orator, and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria.4 This pair, in addition to the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, are the ‘three principal authorities’ for (classical) eloquence.5 The other great antique text is Aristotle’s Rhetoric. This differs from the Roman texts in focusing on probable reasoning, rather than persuasion of the audience by stylistic and emotional methods. Aristotle disapproves of arguing by means which are extrinsic to the matter in dispute. His dry enthymemes (probable syllogisms) are neither pugnacious nor seductive. While Roman writers do deal with the discovery of arguments, it is only part of the battery that enables the orator to win the war of words, and becomes even less consequential in seventeenth-century rhetoric.6 Where Aristotle’s text is crucial is in its extensive typology of the passions. It proves so influential that even Locke directs budding gentlemen to it for self-knowledge, and has a copy in his library.7 Intimate understanding of the passions is of the utmost importance for the orator who wants his audience to love his cause. In the main, however, it is the ornate Roman art of persuasion that the humanists recover. But by the end of the seventeenth century, the subject is a conflicted shadow of its former self. It is possible to identify two principal guises. In the first, the five classical parts of rhetoric are whittled down to one: elocutio – the figures and tropes – which works wonderful magic on an audience. This part was already central in the ad Herennium and comes almost entirely to constitute the discipline.8 The main reason 2

3 4 5 6

7 8

Feingold’s treatment of rhetoric in Oxford in the seventeenth century focuses on the exemplarity approach (Feingold 1997, pp. 249; 251). Locke 1997, p. 351. Locke 1997, p. 351. Locke owned De oratore (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 108). Skinner 1996, p. 35. This element (inventio) was inserted into logic in the sixteenth century. See Serjeantson (1999) on the continuing importance of testimony and proof more generally in early-modern England. Locke 1997, p. 354; Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 75. Cf. Green 1994. See Skinner (1996, pp. 55–65) on the specialisation of rhetoric.

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for this near-total eclipse of the remaining four parts of rhetoric is the rhetoricisation of logic by Agricola, Ramus and Talon, whereby inventio (discovery of arguments) and dispositio (judicial arrangement of arguments) were moved from rhetoric into logic.9 Of the remaining elements, memoria and pronuntiatio were sidelined by the printing revolution.10 Spoken oratory continued to be important in the pulpit and the assembly, but is little considered in the textbooks.11 Dudley Fenner’s The Artes of Logike and Retorike (1584), an example of vernacular Ramism, divides ‘Rhetorike’, ‘an arte of speaking finely’, into ‘Garnishing of speech, called Eloquution’, and ‘Garnishing of the manner of utterance, called Pronounciation’.12 The battle for prominence between pronuntiatio and elocutio is dramatized in Shaw’s Words Made Visible, where the two personae fight it out. Ellogus (elocution) wins such an unassailable victory that the children of Eclogus (pronounciation), Voice and Gesture, are too frightened even to take the field in defence. The great bulk of English rhetorics concentrate almost exclusively on elocutio, as indicated by the following titles: The Tropes and Figures of Scripture (Thomas Swynnerton, c. 1537–8), A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (Richard Sherry, 1550), A Declaration of all such Tropes, Figures, or Schemes (Angel Day, 1595), The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d, wherein above 130 the Tropes and Figures Are Severally Derived from the Greek into English (John Smith, 1657), The Treatise of the Figures (John Stockwood, 1674). William Dugard’s Rhetorices elementa (printed nine times between 1640 and 1669), splits rhetoric into ‘elocutio’ and ‘pronunciatio’, and proceeds to discuss only the former.13 The second kind of eloquence that gains ground as the century progresses moves in an opposite direction. It rejects the technicality of elocutio, with which rhetoric as a whole had become identifiable, and redescribes the discipline as a natural, plain – albeit persuasive – art of speaking.14 This simple characterisation had always underpinned the discipline; Quintilian defines it as bene dicendi scientia.15 But while 9 10 11 13

14

15

See Monfasani (1988) on humanist treatment and transformation of rhetoric. Memory was also increasingly regarded as an art in itself (see Skinner 1996, p. 58). See Monfasani 1988, p. 205; Shuger 1993, p. 122. 12 Fenner 1584, sig. D1v. Dugard 1972, p. 1. See Murphy (1981, p. 133) on the republication of this text 1640–69. Two exceptions are Thomas Wilson’s vernacular exemplar of full-bodied classical eloquence in his Arte of Rhetorique (1554), and Obadiah Walker’s Instructions concerning the Art of Oratory that hits the presses as late as 1659. See Jones (1951 and 1971) on anti-rhetorical speech; Patterson (1970, p. xiv) on the importance of stylistic ‘decorum’ in the sixteenth century; Croll (1971) on the fluorescence of ‘attic prose’; Gaukroger (2001, p. 126) on the Royal Society’s distinctive emphasis on plain, natural speech. Quintilian 1920–22, I, p. 301. Locke had two copies of the Institutio (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 217).


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Quintilian had wavered between this innocent characterisation and the darker vis persuadendi, the modern, self-consciously plain-speakers trumpet their departure from enchantment. One member of this movement is Bernard Lamy, whose L’art de parler we have already met as a grammar, so basic are its avowed aims. Like the new natural logicians, Lamy privileges the natural light – the irresistible darling of the new philosophy – over the artificial precepts of the textbooks: ‘as to the ordering of words, and the rules to be observed in ranging a discourse, Natural light directs us so clearly, that no man can be ignorant’.16 ‘Having all of us one and the same nature, (be the language that we speak what it will)’, he writes later, ‘we follow all those rules which we have shown to be natural, and essential to the art of speaking’. The emphasis is on words that effectively communicate reasoned matter rather than on an excessive play of words that elicits certain emotions. Lamy even divides ‘the art of speaking’ from ‘the art of persuasion’, admitting that ‘both are comprehended under the name of Rhetorick by several great Masters’. He distinguishes the two arts on the following grounds: ‘every man who speaks well, has not the secret of working upon the Affections, or working to his side, such as were before of contrary opinion; and this is call’d to perswade’.17 Locke is firmly in Lamy’s camp. For him the ‘art of speaking well, consists chiefly in two things, viz. perspicuity and right reasoning’.18 Joseph Glanvill is an alternative representative of the new rhetoric. In his Essay concerning Preaching (1678) he continues to define the end of rhetoric as ‘to persuade men’.19 However, he says that this is to be achieved by plainspeaking, which he defines in opposition to the flourishes of elocutio, and thereby redescribes eloquence out of all recognition. the core linguistic precepts of rhetoric: significance and communication Rhetoric embodies paradigmatic early-modern philosophy of language: by convention, words signify concepts that in turn might signify things. In his Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1599), John Hoskins explains that ‘the conceits of the mind are pictures of things and the tongue is interpreter of those pictures’.20 However, rhetoricians tend to conflate this triptych into the duplicitous duality we have already seen reverberate

16 19

Lamy 1986, p. 198. Glanvill 1703, p. 23.

17

Lamy 1986, pp. 202; 343. Hoskins 1935, p. 2.

20

18

Locke 1997, p. 350.

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through the first two trivial disciplines.21 Quintilian writes that ‘every speech . . . consists at once of that which is expressed and that which expresses, that is to say of matter and words (rebus et verbis)’.22 In his Arte of Rhetorique (1554) Wilson, who might be expected to steer away from these indeterminate concept–object ‘things’, uses the catch-all semantic term and explains that ‘apt words’ are those ‘that properly agree unto that thyng, which thei signifie’.23 On the spectrum of res, from concepts to things, where logicians, whose eyes are often turned toward nature, appear to subsume concepts under ‘things’, rhetoricians, located firmly in the human sphere, often emphasise the intentional rather than the referential aspect of signification. Lamy declares that ‘discourse is the image of the mind’.24 Rhetoric is accused of manufacturing a redundancy of words, a semantic vacuum, or what Thomas Sprat calls ‘this superfluity of talking’.25 Bacon has the imitative slaves of Ciceronian style in mind when he says that the ‘first distemper of learning’ is ‘when men study words and not matter’.26 Joshua Poole provides a wonderful example of this kind of verbal surfeit in his Practical Rhetoric (1663). Although he claims that he imparts ‘plenty of words and matter’,27 he glosses six sentences in the course of 202 pages, in a cornucopian emulation of Erasmus. The first sentence – ‘love overcometh all things’ – is followed by a flood of synonymous ones, such as ‘all things are overcome by love’, ‘Venus’ Son overcomes all things’, and ‘Good God! How do all things lye crouching at the feet of love!’28 Displays like this elicit the cutting scorn of Shaw, who has Pronunciation say of Invention: ‘thou canst speak non-sense so ingeniously’. Later on, Trope describes ‘those babbling things call’d words’, adding that ‘we have made a wide difference between words and things’.29 Aware of the charge of vacant words, and echoing a perennial concern about language more generally, rhetoricians stress that res must fill verba. 21

22 25 26

27

See Howell, A. C. (1971) on the humanist understanding of res as ‘subject matter’ rather than ‘things’, as, he shows, the new scientists begin to understand it. Vickers 2002 brilliantly identifies two ways of representing language in the Renaissance. He names as ‘rhetorical’ the duality of verba and res (meaning or subject matter) and ‘linguistic’ the ultimately Aristotelian triad of word, concept and thing. He argues, contra certain secondary commentators, that these two were quite compatible and ran concurrently ‘for over two thousand years’ (p. 286). Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 397. 23 Wilson 1560, fo. 84v. 24 Lamy 1986, p. 305. Sprat 1959, p. 111. Locke owned this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 238). Bacon 1996b, p. 139. See Vickers (2000) on how Bacon’s ‘first distemper’ is not directed against humanism in general, but is an intervention ‘in a debate over imitatio carried out within humanism’ (p. 141). Cf. Vickers (1968) on Bacon’s literary strategies; Vickers (1996) on Bacon’s complex treatment of rhetoric; Briggs (1989) on Bacon’s conception of a rhetorical science which persuades the truth out of nature; Steadman (1971) on Bacon’s self-heroising rhetorical strategies. Poole 1972, sig. A6r. 28 Poole 1972, pp. 1; 2; 6. 29 Shaw 1972, pp. 105; 109.


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Cicero declares that ‘a knowledge of very many matters must be grasped, without which oratory is but an empty and ridiculous swirl of verbiage’.30 ‘I would have the orator’, says Quintilian, ‘while careful in his choice of words, be even more concerned about his subject matter’.31 Renaissance rhetoricians also adopt this somewhat defensive stance. Erasmus has Bulephorus say: ‘let our first concern be for ideas, our second for words; and let us fit words to things, and not the other way round . . . A speech will really come alive if it is born in our hearts, not if it floats on our lips.’32 Erasmus is employing a standard trope that characterises res as the soul of speech, without which it dies. He echoes Augustine’s demand for the verbum cordis, the internal word that animates, or gives meaning to the sounds we utter. When Sherry urges that words be ‘apt’, he explains that this is less a quality of words themselves than ‘the strength and power of the signification: & must be considered not by hearyng, but understandyng’.33 The claim that res are essential to verba is matched by an equally firm insistence that without verba, res are imprisoned and useless.34 Speech is the escape from our solitary confinement. Through words and gesture we open our minds and hearts to others.35 As Agricola says, ‘if speech is a sign of the things which are contained in the mind of him who speaks, then it follows that its proper task is to show and bestow these contents of speech’.36 The proposition that language publicises the private contents of the mind and that twentieth-century philosophy of language associates with Locke, had been established for centuries. Indeed, in his Garden of Eloquence (1577) Henry Peacham presages Locke when he inserts divine teleology into language: the sine qua non of society. ‘The Lord God hath ioyned to the mind of man speech, which he hath made the instrument of our understanding, & key of conceptions, whereby we open the secreates of our hartes, & declare our thoughts to other.’37 In De eloquentia sacra et humana (1619), Nicholas Caussin explains that eloquent speech – ‘the seed of heaven’ – implements mutual nurturing while the ‘mute herds’ 30 33 34

35

36

37

Cicero 1942, i, p. 13. 31 Quintilian 1920–22, iii, p. 189. 32 Erasmus 2000, p. 73. Sherry 1961, p. 20. See Tuck (1998, p. 17) on the humanists’ view that ‘philosophy could not be understood nor taught in isolation from rhetoric’; Menn (1998, p. 43) on the (Ciceronian) importance of yoking wisdom to eloquence. For example, Cicero (1942, ii, p. 177) singles out the eyes as having as many significationes as there are emotions; Wilson 1560, fos. 112v–13r. Agricola 1538, pp. 10–11: ‘Quod si est signum rerum, quas is qui dicit animo complectitur, oratio, liquet hoc esse propriu opus ipsius, ut ostendat it atque orationis indulserit munus?’ See Rebhorn (2000, p. 42) on the remarkable number of editions of this text that were published in the sixteenth century (over 40 between 1515 and 1579). Peacham 1971, sig. Aiir. Cf. Locke 1975, p. 402 (iii. i. 1–2).

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remain atomised.38 Language enables individuals to enrich one another’s lives in ways unavailable to beasts.39 Caussin is alluding to Cicero’s story in his De inventione which describes the genesis of the peaceful civitas as wrought by reason armed with rhetoric, transforming people ‘from wild savages into kind and gentle folk’. Cicero’s influential point is that ‘a mute and voiceless wisdom’ is powerless.40 This assessment of language as indispensable in communication and transfigurative in effect reverberates down the centuries. Eloquence is described as language at its best, as making res perfectly evident. The speaker’s words ought to be ‘plain’, to lead the audience directly to the ideas of the speaker. Quintilian says that the ‘prime virtue’ of speech is ‘clearness (perspicuitas)’.41 The etymology of Quintilian’s goal is instructive; one ought to perceive the matter through the words with a quasivisual clarity. Aristotle had already laid down the law on the importance of lucidity. A ‘chief merit’ of ‘style’ is ‘perspicuity’. ‘If [speech] does not make the meaning clear, it will not perform its proper function.’42 According to Cicero, the orator must speak ‘lucidly (plane)’.43 The ad Herennium insists that topics must be expressed ‘with purity and perspicuity (pure et aperte)’.44 Here, the Latin suggests that language ought to open to reveal its intentional contents. The early-modern rhetoricians vociferously encourage the pursuit of plainness. This drive motivates John Bulwer’s Chironomia. or, The Art of Manuall Rhetoricke (1644), which appeals to naturally expressive gesture. Wilson instructs the orator to use ‘plain wordes’.45 Sherry says ‘the proper use of speech is to utter the meaning of our mynde with as playne wordes as may be.’46 In his Instructions concerning the Art of Oratory (1659) Walker asserts that no matter what style you choose, ‘perspicuity’ or ‘to be understood’ ought to be the orator’s top priority.47 There are two things that – contradictorily – make rhetorical speech perfectly plain: common use and elocutio. Esteem for common use had always been a hallmark of humanism, and rhetoricians advertise their strict adherence to it.48 It is, after all, the only thing that makes words 38

39 40

41

42 45 48

Caussin 1630, p. 3: ‘semen coeli’; p. 4: ‘totum nostrum est; in huius laudis societatem non mutae pecudes sese offerunt’. Holdsworth (1961, p. 644) says of this text that ‘no piece of scholarship is more usefull, & necessarie’ to the study of oratory. Cicero 1942, i, p. 25; Cf. Quintilian 1920–22, i, pp. 323–5. Cicero 1976, p. 7. Cf. Wilson (1560, fos. Aviiv-viiiv) and Bacon (1858, pp. 721–2) for early-modern repeats of the tale. Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 131. See Vickers (1999, p. 41) on clarity as the prime virtue of language in the Renaissance. Aristotle 1926, p. 351. 43 Cicero 1942, ii, p. 31. 44 Rhetorica ad Herrenium 1954, p. 269. Wilson 1560, fo. Aiv. 46 Sherry 1961, p. 13. 47 Walker 1682, p. 98. See Monfasani (1999) on ‘consuetudo’ as the sole norm of language in the renaissance (p. 403).


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publicly meaningful in the first place: words are connected to their meanings by human ‘consent’, as Puttenham puts it in The Arte of English Poesie (1589).49 Lamy declares that ‘custom is the master and soveraign arbiter of all languages’.50 Sounds are meaningless unless their speakers and hearers understand what they have been instituted to signify. By religiously following the vagrant contracts of speech communities, rhetoricians ensure that their words illuminate things as straightforwardly and immediately as possible. The ad Herennium explains that language achieves ‘clarity (explanatio)’ if it uses ‘current terms (usitatis verbis)’, which ‘are such as are habitually used in everyday speech’.51 Hobbes, the author (?) of the Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique (1637), explains that a word obtains ‘perspicuity’ if it is ‘proper’.52 Wilson is proud that ‘wee never affecte any straunge inkehorne termes, but so speake as is commonly received’.53 Rhetoricians contrast themselves with the unintelligible and sophistic dialecticians. They are men of the world, citizens who speak properly. Using a common analogy between money and language, Quintilian maintains that ‘usage . . . is the surest pilot in speaking, and we should treat language as currency minted with the public stamp’.54 Words should be rigidly fixed to their meanings, just as coins must live up to their (face) values. Congruent with the submission to propriety is anxiety about vulgarity. ‘Speech’, says Puttenham, ‘is fully fashioned to the common understanding’.55 The opinionated and ignorant majority literally make sense of words. Language reflects the poor minds of its instigators. Quintilian raises the alarm; if usage, he writes, ‘be defined merely as the practice of the majority, we shall have a very dangerous rule affecting not merely style but life as well’. ‘In speech we must not accept as a rule of language words and phrases that have become a vicious habit with a number of persons.’ He concludes by strictly defining usage ‘as the agreed practice of educated men’.56 Early-modern rhetoricians inherit both Quintilian’s unease and his solution. Lamy is troubled by the conflict between progressive wisdom and popular usage but he worms around the obligation to propriety. He denies that raising ‘custom to the throne . . . of all languages’ entails putting ‘the sceptre into the hands of the populace’ and ‘bad custom’. Instead, sovereign custom is that of ‘good speakers’.57 Elite 49 50 52

53 56

Puttenham 1589, p. 120. See Vickers (1988) on the continuity between rhetoric and poetry. Lamy 1986, p. 203. 51 Rhetorica ad Herennium 1954, p. 271. Cf. Cicero 1942, i, p. 11. Hobbes 1986, p. 108. While the Latin paraphrase of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is substantially Hobbes’ work, Karl Schuhmann has showed that the English translation is probably not. See Skinner 2002c, p. 4. Wilson 1560, fo. 82v. 54 Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 113. 55 Puttenham 1589, p. 120. Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 133 (my emphasis). 57 Lamy 1986, p. 204.

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jargon has to be coined to denominate or communicate something precisely, and it is this that we must follow.58 Linguistic ‘propriety’ is therefore learned, not rude. However, this confident appeal to the consensus bonorum could be perceived as an attempt to square the circle, shirking the consequences of a fundamental principle of language – that words only come to mean anything by common use, and individuals are therefore powerless against the tide of popular linguistic legislation. Lamy realises this, despondently ending his discussion of the forces that create language with an admission (that in some ways Locke will repeat) that the masses have us by the nose. We must ‘submit to the tyranny of custom’.59 This is an acute reflection on the invincibly democratic nature of language. The second element that endows rhetorical speech with peculiar clarity is elocutio. This would seem to contradict everything I have just said about the importance of common use: tropes explicitly break the contracts that create meaning. In his Institutiones rhetoricae (1523) Melanchthon explains that a trope is the ‘mutation’ of a word from its ‘proper to another signification’.60 Running roughshod over propriety, rhetoricians professionally block the only gateway to communication, maintaining that well-considered impropriety paradoxically makes the matter more plain than ever. Lamy is aware of the contradiction. Hyperbolic statements such as ‘swifter than the wind’ are ‘in strictness . . . lyes, but they are innocent lyes, and deceive no body: for no one but understands what we mean’.61 Sherry repeats the counterintuitive thought that ‘to set out the matter more plainly we be compelled to speake otherwise then after common facion’.62 Tropes make the speaker’s intention clearer than if he had used the more conventional word. Metaphors exemplify this. Aristotle declares that they ‘above all things’ give ‘perspicuity’.63 Cicero says they ‘better convey the whole meaning of the matter’.64 For Quintilian, they add ‘to the copiousness of language’ because they augment the number of res.65 This conviction is picked up later. Smith, for example, says that a metaphor ‘enriches our knowledge with two things at

58 59 60

61 64

E.g. Lamy 1986, pp. 203–4; Puttenham 1589, p. 121; Digby 1645, p. 7. Lamy 1986, p. 207. Melanchthon 1521, sig. Ciiir: ‘est autem tropus, verbi, seu sermonis in aliam significationem, a propria muatio’. Vickers (1989, p. 283) explains how elocutio was regarded not as merely ornamental, but as the means of perfect mental expression. Lamy 1986, p. 218. 62 Sherry 1961, p. 13. 63 Aristotle 1926, p. 355. Cicero 1942, ii, p. 125. 65 Quintilian 1920–22, iii, p. 303.


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once, with the truth and a similitude’.66 The multiplying images feed off each other in a productive symbiosis. It is interesting to note here a related rhetorical reason to depart from common use, because, despite Locke’s spitting rage at rhetoric, it is an explanation he copies. Locke suggests that many thoughts are named metaphorically, that is, by giving them existing names whose meanings relate to the as yet unnamed thought.67 This is a view that Peacham espouses (whom we have also seen presage Locke’s ascription of sociable speech to God’s design). Peacham argues that tropical speech is sometimes a matter of ‘necessity’. The multiplicity of experience outstretches language, so it has to double up, as it were, to communicate these anonymous items. The first speakers are taken to have ‘borrowed’ names from things that resemble the undenominated things, ‘that by translation they might utter their minds largely, and set forth any matters with great perspecuity and pleasauntnesse’.68 Sherry repeats that a speaker might, out of ‘necessitie’, have to disobey propriety.69 The orator’s claim to extraordinary perspicuity, due, paradoxically, to both common use and tropicality, attracts vehement repudiation. Just as orators are attacked for verbosity, so are they accused of obscurity. This is partly because everybody wants to appropriate the core values of significance and perspicuity, and to attribute their binary opposites to enemies, all of which they do, often, ironically, by means of eloquent virtuosity.70 However, the argument against elocutio also has some intrinsic merit. Far from being an honest means to semantic illumination, it could instead be impugned for breaching the customary norms of language and thereby jeopardising communication per se, let alone extraordinary elucidation. It flies in the self-consciously open and frank face of the new philosophers who tell it like it is. Boyle articulates this opposition between perspicuity and elocutio. He explains that ‘where our design is only to inform readers, not to delight or persuade them, perspicuity’ should qualify our style rather than rhetorical ornaments, which ‘darken . . . the subject’.71 In his Ecclesiastes (1675), Wilkins’ injunctions for preaching reflect the new plainness. He says that a phrase ‘must be plain and natural, not being darkened with the

66 69 71

68 Smith, John 1656, p. 10. 67 Locke 1975, pp. 403–4 (iii. i. 5). Peacham 1971, sig. Biv. Sherry 1961, p. 13. 70 Vickers 1985, p. 42 and Vickers 1987, p. 13. Boyle 1661, p. 195. Locke had this edition of The Sceptical Chymist (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 92).

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affectation of scholastical harshness, or rhetorical flourishes’.72 Joseph Glanvill epitomises the latest paradigm, advocating, in contrast to ‘affected Rhetorications’, ‘plain words’ and proclaiming (by means of the quintessentially elocutionary practice of redescription) that ‘plainness is for ever the best eloquence, and ’tis the most forcible’. He confides, somewhat disingenuously, in his audience that ‘there is a bastard kind of eloquence that is crept into the pulpit, which consists in affectations of wit and finery, flourishing, metaphors, and cadencies’.73 sensible words Rhetoricians make exceptionally conspicuous the view that words have to be sensible to represent their absent contents. Their prime objective being to transfer the speaker’s intention to the audience, they attend assiduously to the interface between word and hearer. Theirs is the art of persuasion, which penetrates the auditor’s mind and brings it round to sympathy with the speaker’s cause. They seek the most successful ways of affecting the auditor, and they light on sensation as a pre-eminent means. As Puttenham remarks, the mind is ‘not available unlesse it be by sensible approaches, whereof the audible is of greatest force for instruction or discipline’.74 We have already met the Aristotelian dictum, reinvented by the new empiricists, that the path towards understanding begins in sense perception. In addition to explaining why words work at all, this insight informs the rhetoricians’ more intense exploitation of the sensibility of words. They orchestrate sounds and silences like a musical score, moving the auditor where they will. Rhetoricians make the most of, and thereby advertise, the palpable nature of words. In his Traite´ du sublime (1674), Boileau’s rendition of Longinus, we are exhorted to attend to the sound of our words. ‘For tho’ these sounds of themselves signifie nothing. Yet by the variations of the tones, mutually striking against each other; and by the mixture of their concords they often, as we experience, cause a wonderful transport and rapture of the soul.’75 The ancients had emphasised the importance of selecting the word that ‘sounds best’, as Quintilian puts it.76 The 72

73 75

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Wilkins (1675), p. 199. Cf. Jones (1951) on the attack on pulpit eloquence; contrast (Vickers 1985, p. 45) on the rhetorical tactics of the church (and the Royal Society (p. 63)) against nonconformists (and occultists) and the myth of plainness the church created for itself. Glanvill 1703, pp. 12; 25; 23. 74 Puttenham 1589, p. 164. Boileau 1712, p. 78. In 1703 Locke recommends Boileau’s Du sublime for a gentleman’s study (Locke 1997, p. 351). Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 81.


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ad Herennium dwells long on the most fitting tone of voice. This interest in sound is recorded in onomatopoeia. In his Garden of Eloquence (1577) Peacham defines this trope as ‘when we invent, devise, fayne, and make a name, immitating the sound of that it signifyeth, as hurliburly’.77 It fuses sound and sense into Edenic transparency. There are also figura dictionis, described by Fenner as ‘speache . . . garnished by the pleasant and sweet sound of words joyned together’.78 He focuses on the delightful sonority that warms the auditor to what is said. Walker advocates a pleasurable aural experience. ‘Words smooth and sweeter-sounded . . . are to be used rather then rough and harsh’. He warns against ‘causing an ungratefull sound’, depicting the auditor’s mind as something that needs ingratiating, that might bar or admit.79 Puttenham discusses ‘auricular’ figures that ‘serve th’eare onely’, and can ‘ravish’ it; an example is ‘Aposiopesis’, or ‘the figure of silence’, where the speaker breaks off, communicating either shame, fear, threat or ‘a moderation of anger’.80 Perhaps most desirable are ‘sententious’ figures, which ‘ravish’ the ear as well as the mind. In a virtuoso piece of word-play, Hobbes indicates the sensuous raptures that poetry should induce. Bemoaning tired and hackneyed ‘metaphors and similitudes’, he explains that: the Phrases of Poesy, as the ayres of musique with often hearing become insipide, the reader having no more sense of their force, then our flesh is sensible of the bones that susteine it. As the sense we have of bodies, consisteth in change and variety of impression, so also does the sense of language in the variety and changeable use of words.81

Exploiting the ambiguity of ‘sense’ which, in a verbal context, indicates both meaning and sound, Hobbes insists that words, as well as meanings, should be physically sensible. The importance of a full sensory rhetorical experience is revealed by the comparisons of oratory with tasty food, sweet smells, colours, flowers, spectacles, as well as rousing music. Cicero says that a speech should be dressed or ornamented with ‘colour and flavour’ and must neither satiate nor disgust.82 Lamy claims that we are more keenly moved by sense perception than intellectual conception. In his discussion of proper word order, he explains that the ‘ears do instruct us so sensibly what rules are to be observed’. They pick up faults in sentential structure that our mind

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Peacham 1971, sig. Ciiiir. 78 Fenner 1584, sig. D3r. 79 Walker 1682, pp. 25; 24. Puttenham 1589, pp. 133; 139; 164. 81 Hobbes 1971b, p. 53. 82 Cicero 1942, ii, pp. 77–9.

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misses. This is because ‘we are more disturbed at a thing ungrateful to our sense, than to our reason’.83 Glanvill’s scorn and suspicion about aural experience provides an important coda to this section. He rejects the sonorous barrage that language can muster, accusing it of concealing ignorance. He describes the captivated congregation who, on hearing ‘phantastical phrases’, ‘are pleased with their sound’ but, like the preacher, have no idea what the words mean.84 Rhetoricians expose both the sensibility of words and the importance of sense perception in cognition, and thereby cause philosophers to worry about the palpable and seductive nature of words in their own meaningless right. sensible ideas The premium on sensation, in conjunction with the rhetoricians’ desire for perfect communication, exposes broader contemporary anxieties about the elusiveness and insensibility of meaning. Rhetoric demonstrates the gulf that separates words and their absent meanings, as well as the bridge over it. While sensible words transfix the auditor, alone they are but sounds, signifying nothing. The orator must make the concepts that are carried on the backs of words compelling. Ordinarily they are a light cargo. They need weight in order to gain them long and deep admittance to the auditor’s mind. The orator therefore turns again to the senses. The great influence accorded to sense perception is mobilised to give life and affect to concepts themselves, and thereby enhance communication. Commentators on biblical rhetoric stress the necessity of making verbal content sensible, if it is to win minds. In The Interest of Reason in Religion, with the Import & Use of Scripture-Metaphors (1675), the Independent Robert Ferguson explains how ‘the clearest and most convincing Reasons’ are powerless without linguistic ‘attire & apparel’ which will bring them ‘as neer as may be to [the hearers’] sense’ and ‘impress and strike their imagination’.85 Lamy explains that Scripture abounds with ‘metaphors taken from sensible things’ because the weak, fallen mind struggles to understand insensible abstractions, whereas it welcomes ‘easie’, ‘sensible and pleasant’ comparisons.86 83 85

86

Lamy 1986, p. 209. 84 Glanvill 1703, p. 27. Ferguson 1675, p. 361. Although Locke did not own this text, he possessed six pieces by the author (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 134). Lamy 1986, p. 222.


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A passage to meaning is erected via the theory of representation, whereby an absent thing is made present. According to Quintilian, this can be done by picturing the thing with linguistic imagery, as well as portraiture and sculpture. The technical term for the quality that makes res present is "” fi "¶fi, which Quintilian translates as evidentia. He says that it should be wielded ‘when a truth requires not merely to be told, but to some extent obtruded’.87 ‘Enargeia, evidence or perspicuitie’, says Sherry, ‘is when a thynge is so described that it semeth to the reader or hearer that he beholdeth it as it were in doyng’.88 The orator is urged to personify abstract concepts, to pour blood into the veins of his characters. Homer was the master of making inanimate things animate, and provided a model for early-modern writers.89 Walker explains how ‘grief’ can be made plain by talking instead about ‘tears’.90 Peacham celebrates the fact that by the use of figures, the orator ‘may set forth any matter with a goodly perspicuitie, and paynt out any person, deede, or thing, so cunninglye with these couloures, that it shall seeme rather a lyvely image paynted in tables, then a reporte expressed with a tongue’.91 The preferred way of bringing the matter to life is by appealing to the queen of the senses: sight. Cicero declares that while all metaphors that appeal directly to the senses are effective, the best appeal to sight – the ‘keenest’ sense.92 According to Aristotle, the most perspicuous speech ‘sets things before the eyes’.93 Horace reiterates the desire to make meaning visible, summing it up with the tag ‘ut pictura poesis’ which guides subsequent writers.94 The aim is to turn remote auditors into captivated spectators.95 The ad Herennium states that a metaphor ‘is used for the sake of creating a vivid mental picture (rei ante oculos)’.96 One truly communicates by placing, as Melanchthon puts it, ‘the sentiment of [one’s] mind in front of the others’ eyes’.97 The Art of Rhetorick, as to Elocutio explains that metaphors ‘are to be so perspicuous, that the similitude may appear as plain as the sun’.98 Walker repeats the point. ‘Metaphors . . . are similitudes contracted to a word; whereby we endeavour, not so much to render our conceits intelligible to the auditors reason, as to paint them visible to his sense. For things of sense onely illustrate; and amongst them, those of sight, most.’99 Boileau defines the 87 88 91 94 96 98

Quintilian 1920–22, iii, p. 245; ii, p. 85. See Rigolot 1999. Sherry 1961, p. 66. 89 Aristotle 1926, p. 407. 90 Walker 1682, p. 25. Peacham 1971, sig. Aiiir. 92 Cicero 1942, ii, p. 127. 93 Aristotle 1926, p. 405. Braider 1999. 95 See Skinner (1996, pp. 182–8) on turning auditors into spectators. Rhetorica ad Herennium 1954, p. 343. 97 Melanchthon 1999, p. 63. The Art of Rhetorick 1706, p. 2. 99 Walker 1682, p. 55.

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use of ‘images’, ‘pictures or fictions’, as ‘to paint things, and give the reader a clear view of them’.100 Hobbes simply says that ‘a poet is a painter’.101 The Art of Rhetorick describes the figure of hypotyposis ‘whereby we express a matter so particularly, that it seems to be represented to the very eye . . . where the whole image . . . is as it were painted out in words’.102 The author calls this figure ‘the very consummation of all rhetorick’. Evoking the full-bodied sensuous emotional experience that the orator should effect, Sherry says of a good metaphor that ‘none perswadeth more effecteouslye, none sheweth the thyng before oure eyes more evidently, none moveth more mightily the affeccions, none maketh the oracion more goodlye, pleasaunt, nor copious’.103 elocutio – breaking the contract While the devices of elocutio are intended to clarify and beguile, they also, as I have already begun to explain, publicise the ease with which the semantic contract – those conventions that attach words to meanings and the only proper source of verbal meaning – can be broken. Tropes are, according to Smith, ‘words . . . used for elegancy in a changed signification; or when a word is drawn from its proper and genuine signification to another’.104 Peacham’s definition highlights the impropriety of tropes: ‘an alteration of a worde or sentence, from the proper and natural signification, to another not proper, but yet nye and likely’.105 Puttenham throws into relief the inherent deviousness of tropical speech, calling ‘Metonimia’, ‘the Misnamer’, and ‘Onomatopeia’, the ‘New namer’.106 Metaphor is queen of the tropes. Its specific definition is almost interchangeable with that of its genus. Wilson describes it as ‘an alteration of a worde, from the proper and naturalle meaning, to that whiche is not proper, and yet agreeth there unto, by some lykenes that appeareth to be in it’.107 As Ferguson puts it, ‘in metaphors one thing is put for another’.108 And as Hobbes says, metaphors ‘openly professe deceipt’.109 The duplicitous potential in language is grossly magnified in another trope, catachresis – usually translated as ‘abuse’. Puttenham describes it as a ‘plaine abuse’.110 Hoskins says that this trope ‘is somewhat more 100 103 104

105 108

Boileau 1712, p. 40. 101 Hobbes 1844, p. vi. 102 The Art of Rhetorick 1706, pp. 51–2; 52. Sherry 1961, p. 40. Smith, John 1656, p. 2. Kinney (1986, p. 18) argues that sixteenth-century English humanists presented language as ‘manipulable . . . relative, the act of formulating it creative’. Peacham 1971, sig. Biv. 106 Puttenham 1589, pp. 150; 151. 107 Wilson 1560, fo. 88r. Ferguson 1675, p. 305. 109 Hobbes 1996, p. 52. 110 Puttenham 1589, p. 150.


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desperate than a metaphor. It is the expressing of one matter by the name of another which is incompatible with it, and sometimes clean contrary’.111 In his Arts of Rhetorick (1634) John Barton writes of this ‘abuse’ that it is ‘very farre fetcht’, ‘an unusuall, strange, and streined metaphor, not obvious and congruous’.112 Melanchthon’s example is calling someone who has killed his friend a ‘patricide’.113 Yet another trope that wears its hypocrisy on its sleeve is irony, that is, ‘when your words differ from your thoughts’.114 Smith says that the use of this trope is ‘to dissemble in speaking . . . as if we should say black is white. It is called the mocking trope, whereby in derision we speak contrary to what we think or mean’.115 The Art of Rhetorick calls it ‘a dissembling trope’.116 Rhetoricians are not only unembarrassed by, but positively applaud, these manifestations of linguistic impropriety – an approach which seems to some to be, by definition, indecorous. Shaw provides a burlesque account of Trope’s enthusiasm for his own misdemeanours.117 Puttenham happily outlines the ‘the darknesse and duplicitie of his [synechdoche’s] sence’. He evokes the unselfconscious delight with which the rhetorical tradition wallows in its linguistic transgressions. Figures are ‘in a sorte abuses or rather trepasses in speech, because they passe the ordinary limits of common utterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceive the eare and also the minde, drawing it from plainnesse and simplicitie to a certaine doubleness, whereby our talke is the more guileful & abusing’.118 If words are only connected to meanings by the semantic contract, breaking that contract renders language strictly unintelligible. As Lamy explains, while we might ‘call a Horse a Dog’, we cannot ‘take the one for the other, without an intire confusion to the conversation of mankind’.119 The fragility of the semantic contract leads not only to the bounded problem of improper speech, but also to unbounded semantic proliferation and readerly authority. Rather than obediently switching between fixed meanings, a dislocated word is autonomous. It can flit anywhere. Or rather, once it leaves the speaker’s mouth, it becomes the property of hearers. Relying on them for its application, its meaning can multiply accordingly.120 The auditor’s freedom is exposed in discussions of tropical speech. Hoskins explains how the mind naturally roams Hoskins 1935, p. 11. 112 Barton 1634, sig. C1r [p. 19]; sig. C2r [p. 21]. Melanchthon 1521, sig. Civr. 114 Cicero 1942, I, p. 403. 115 Smith, John 1656, p. 45. 116 The Art of Rhetorick 1706, p. 9. 117 Shaw 1972, p. 114. 118 Puttenham 1589, pp. 163; 128. 119 Lamy 1986, p. 203. 120 Cf. Cave (1979) on the worry about linguistic proliferation in the Renaissance. 111

113

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beyond its intended object, ‘like the eye, that cannot choose but view the whole knot when it beholds but one flower in a garden of purpose’.121 In his Academy of Eloquence (1654) Blount paints a rich picture of auditory action when he elucidates the figure of ‘Intimation’. It ‘leaves the collection of greatness to our understanding, but expressing some mark of it. It exceeds speech in silence, and makes our meaning more intelligible by a touch, then by direct treating . . . it doth not directly aggravate, but by consequence or proportion, intimate more to your minde, then to your ears’.122 Walker says that metaphors are most ‘significant’ when they originate from familiar things which the hearer immediately understands ‘and applies them farther than the speaker’.123 The view that the hearer might roam mentally beyond the knowledge and intention of the speaker vexes the conditions of communication.124 Elocutionary biblical exegesis exemplifies the reader’s monopoly of meaning. Swynnerton mocks the way in which exegetes decide to read the text literally or not, simply as it suits them. ‘When it lyketh them, the lettre kylleth, the Scripture is figurate . . . When it lyketh them, then the lettre kylleth not, then the Scripture is not figurate.’125 He promises to settle matters by ruling ‘when the lettre kylleth’, which he does in a way that bears the mark of the Protestant reformation. Much later, when the government of England was thoroughly converted, Robert Ferguson defends the non-conformists’ tropical reading of Scripture against Anglican attack. He takes it as his duty to decode the word of God for ‘the defence and vindication of the doctrines of the Gospel; many of which are undermined under the pretence of renouncing luscious and fulsome metaphors’.126 ‘The Bible’, he claims, ‘is replenished and adorned with all sort of figurative expressions’ that he intends to resolve.127 He lays down the ‘rule’ that ‘we impose not a proper sense where the words ought to be taken in a Tropical’.128 He decides the divine ‘intention’.129 Meaning is delivered into the hands of a self-appointed ‘Judicious Interpreter’.130 Needless to say, interpreters abound and with wildly divergent results. Barton, Caussin, 121 122

123 124

125 128

Hoskins 1935, p. 8. Blount 1971, pp. 20–1. Locke owned and extensively annotated Blount’s Censura Celebriorum Authorum (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 88). Walker 1682, p. 55 (my emphasis). See Vickers (1999, pp. 10 and 53) on the integral inclusion of the reader/hearer in the rhetorician’s sights. Kahn (1985) argues that rhetoric was definitively concerned with reader response (p. 19) and explores how various renaissance authors harnessed the ‘active conception of reading’ to educate the reader. Cf. Davidson (1965) on the centrality of the audience in seventeenth-century French literature. Swynnerton 1999, p. 99. 126 Ferguson 1675, p. 279. 127 Ferguson 1675, p. 281. Ferguson 1675, p. 328. 129 Ferguson 1675, p. 331. 130 Ferguson 1675, p. 345.


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Fenner, Ferguson, Smith and Wilkins, to name but a few, are some such self-made hermeneuts. Wilkins sets himself up as a ‘rational’ expositor, thereby authenticating himself, in a nice piece of self-description.131 Maintaining that ‘private interpretation’ must not be admitted to the interpretative enterprise, he proceeds, all the same, to divide Scripture into ‘manifest, or cryptical’ parts that need identification and exposition.132 Smith explains that ‘the holy Scripture is not barren of, but abounds with tropes and figures of all sorts’, and needs ‘the Spirit of the Lord’, as well as the rules of rhetoric, for its true disclosure.133 He exemplifies his point with a little sentence which had lacerated the Christian church. ‘This is my body’ is to be understood ‘spiritually’, as opposed to ‘literally’, of course. speak in g tru th, or winning belief u nder the cover of words The intrinsic duplicity of the tropes might be considered characteristic of rhetoric as a whole, and, in turn, of language in general. According to Montaigne, rhetoricians practice the ‘art of lying and deception’. They ‘pride themselves on deceiving not our eyes but our judgement, bastardising and corrupting things in their very essence’.134 Rhetoricians, for their part, protest too much in denying the charge. The grand, sometimes desperate claim is that the true orator is necessarily a wise and good citizen. Quintilian is the most convinced exponent of this view: ‘No man can speak well who is not good himself .’135 Cicero asserts that ‘it is from knowledge that oratory must derive its beauty and fullness’.136 Eloquence must be wise to deserve the name. However, they are led to admit that it is in fact an art that can be used to good or evil, true or false, ends. And so rhetoric begins its long slide from its bright beginning. Quintilian says that like all great things – the medical profession, a sword, the sun – oratory can harm, but this does not impugn its virtuous status.137 In De elegantiae linguae Latinae (1471) Valla says that it is in the nature of arts 131

132 135

136 137

Wilkins 1675, sig. A5r. Cf. Hoopes (1962) and Mulligan (1984) on ‘right reason’ in religion; Smith (1989) on the special access that radical English sects claimed they had to the spirit of the word; Mandelbrote ((1994)) on biblical criticism at the end of the century; Young (1998, p. 1) on the pathway to ‘reasoning to excess’ at the end of the eighteenth century and Locke’s central place in the incarnation of this ‘knowing age’. 133 Wilkins 1675, p. 15. Smith, John 1656, sig. A5r; sig. A5v. 134 Montaigne 1991, p. 341. Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 315. See Struever (1993) on the healing, curative characterisation of rhetoric. Cicero 1942, i, p. 17. Cf. Gray (1963) on the ideal harmony between wisdom and style. Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 321.

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that ‘you can use them for good or evil’, and that it would be ridiculous to condemn them on this ground.138 However, the inevitable consequence of this concession is that rhetoric’s essence cannot lie in its commitment to truth or goodness, but in its capacity to persuade. Quintilian’s faltering claim that rhetoric ‘is realised in action, not in the result obtained’ seems to be thrown out of court.139 It is in its winning guise that we meet rhetoric in the early-modern period. Students learn it by arguing in utramque partem, that is, on both sides of the question.140 Aristotle, intimating a form of discursive ethics, is a great proponent of the view that a dialectical struggle is the best way of getting at the truth: The orator should be able to prove opposites, as in logical arguments; not that we should do both (for one ought not to persuade people to do what is wrong), but that the real state of the case may not escape us, and that we ourselves may be able to counteract false arguments, if another makes an unfair use of them . . . that which is true and better is naturally always easier to prove and more likely to persuade.141

Lamy echoes Aristotle’s optimism, arguing that the initial ‘love’ inspired by ‘a deceitful Orator’ soon turns to ‘hatred’ as the audience realises the cheat.142 However, the anti-Aristotelian claim that it is not the fact of the matter, but the virtuosity of the speaker that persuades, proves more compelling in the literature. At the beginning of Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates proposes that rhetoric is concerned with the amoral manufacture of opinion as opposed to knowledge. ‘Rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong.’143 In his Index rhetoricus (1625) Farnaby defines the end of rhetoric as ‘to persuade’.144 Hobbes (?) polemically mistranslates Aristotle’s original definition of rhetoric as ‘that Faculty, by which wee understand what will serve our turne, concerning any subject, to winne beliefe in the hearer’.145 We are reminded of that crack in the linguistic mirror occasioned by the practice of dialectical disputation. A culture that 138

139

140

141

142 145

Valla 1522, p. 313: ‘Quibus et bene uti posis et male’. Locke owned this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 256). Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 337. Cf. Monfasani (1992) on the anti-Quintilian claim that the orator is not necessarily a vir bonus. See Coote (1665) for an example of a debate. Cf. Ong (1971) on the ‘ritual male combat centred on disputation’ (p. 17), and on the ‘tyranny’ of oration (p. 53). Aristotle 1926, pp. 11–13. Cf. Grassi (1980) on the supposed tension between rhetoric and philosophy; Vickers (1982b) on this territorial dispute; Vickers (1983) on the power of the orator; Trinkaus (1983) on humanism and truth. Lamy 1986, p. 366. 143 Plato 1925, p. 287. 144 Farnaby 1970, p. 1 (working back from p. 9). Hobbes 1986, p. 40.


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positively encourages arguing pro and con and that values victory above all else, not only dissolves faith in goodness and truth, but also exposes how language can be detached from goodness and truth, and still win the day. A good orator is irresistible. This is because he plays with his words on his audience’s passions. And, as Aristotle admits, it is passion that moves the mind. ‘The emotions are all those affections which cause men to change their opinion in regard to their judgements, and are accompanied by pleasure and pain.’146 Early-modern philosophers fervently and increasingly agree that passion informs cognition,147 and it is this agreement that turns Aristotle’s Rhetoric – a manual on the emotions and therefore the key to an audience’s favour – into such an important book for rhetoricians and philosophers alike. Caussin declares that eloquence ‘can effectively seize and bind people’s spirits’. In his De inventione dialectica (1515) Agricola writes of the power by which ‘we either make faith in one who believes in us and lead him to follow us as if freely, or we completely conquer one who does not believe and drag him fighting against us’.148 Boileau also refers to the rhetorician’s power of bending people’s wills. The ‘sublime’ is ‘something extraordinary and marvellous that strikes us in a Discourse and makes it elevate, ravish and transport us’.149 It has an ‘invincible force’. Resistance is futile. Wilson makes the point that eloquence can change our hearts and minds. ‘Soche force hathe the tongue and soche is the power of eloquence and reason, that most men are forced even to yelde in that, whiche most standeth againste their will.’150 This characterisation is generally represented through metaphors of arms and battle. When Sarcasm, or barbed irony, enters the stage in Shaw’s Words Made Visible, Pronounciation says to him, ‘you are an arm’d Figure, which is a thing strange to see. I thought my brothers [Elocution] captains had conquer’d only by words.’ Sarcasm replies, ‘So do I, Sir, but they are very sharp ones.’151 Rhetoric is of such unconquerable but indifferent strength that to teach it to vicious men would be, as Cicero says, to ‘put weapons into the hands of madmen’.152 The classic example of such a disaster is Catiline, the 146 147

148

149 152

Aristotle 1926, p. 173. On the different ways in which this is thought to be the case and on the overarching move away from a conflictual to a determinist model of desire, see James 1997. Caussin 1630, p. 5: ‘efficax capiendis illigandisque animis’. Agricola 1538, p. 12: ‘Fidem facimus, vel credeti, et velut spote sequetem ducimus: vel pervincimus non credentem, atque repugnantem trahimus’. See Vickers (1982a) on the practicalities of rhetoric and the increasing importance of moving the passions. Boileau 1712, p. 7. 150 Wilson 1560, fo. Aviir. 151 Shaw 1972, p. 172. Cicero 1942, i, p. 45.

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eloquent revolutionary. Thomas Blount recalls that ‘Pericles (the orator) was no less a tyrant in Athens then Pysistratus’, and that Cyneas’ metaphorical arms proved more effective than the literal ‘sword of Pyrrhus’.153 In his De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum (1531), Agrippa rails against the pernicious power of rhetoric that is so often employed in the service of sedition. ‘For nothing is more dangerous to civic offices than this art, from which descend prevaricators, dodgers, perverters of law, sycophants’, who ‘usurp a certain kind of tyranny over the innocent’.154 Many rhetoricians defend the invincible quality of eloquence on the grounds that it alone can lead the foolish and passionate herd to righteousness. Its crippling yoke is justified by a means–ends argument.155 Even Aristotle, who would rather ‘fight the case with facts alone’, sadly admits that enchanting style and delivery have to be employed sometimes ‘owing to the corruption of the hearer’.156 Quintilian reiterates the claim that the power of rhetoric is needed to persuade corrupt ears. ‘If, as is the case, our hearers are fickle of mind, and truth is exposed to a host of perils, we must call in art to aid us in the fight and employ such means as will help our cause.’ Unenlightened judges ‘have to be tricked to prevent them falling into error’. If they were philosophers, ‘there [would] be very little scope for eloquence whose value will lie almost entirely in its power to charm’.157 Although Ramus is disparaging about his refigured rhetoric, he admits its instrumental role with an unsympathetic audience. ‘All the tropes and figures of style and all the graces of delivery, which constitute the entirety of true rhetoric . . . serve no other purpose than to lead the troublesome and stubborn auditor’.158 Caussin defines the art as establishing ‘a kind tyranny in the hearts of men’.159 It is by language that the orator exerts such a bewitching sovereignty over his audience. Rhetoric reveals two terrific virtues of language: it is possible to say anything, and saying it makes it so. As Invention says of Pronunciation in Shaw’s play, ‘It’s dangerous disputing with a person that can call a man out of his name, and yet make that to be his name whatsoever he calls him.’160 It is in the nature of language – which relies on sensible words to express insensible ideas – that the auditor cannot 153 154

155 156 159 160

Blount 1971, sig. A3v. Agrippa 1568, p. 45: ‘Nam hoc artificio nihil periculosius civilis officiis, ab hoc praevaricatores, tergiversatores, calumniatores, sycophante . . . ac in innocentes tyrannidem quanda sibi usurpant’. Locke had this edition (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 69). Howell (1961, p. 3) stresses the rhetoricians’ popular audience. Aristotle 1926, p. 347. 157 Quintilian 1920–22, i, pp. 339; 337. 158 Ramus 2000, p. 159. Caussin 1630, p. 459: ‘mitem . . . tyrannidem in pectoris hominum constituit’. Shaw 1972, p. 105.


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penetrate the linguistic front. He is completely at the mercy of the way the orator chooses to represent things. Language’s extraordinary power lies in its conjunction of seeming enlightenment and real opacity. The orator’s tool seems to be like a window, but it is really a picture. The audience thinks they are looking through the words to the truth, but in fact they are viewing what the speaker has painted with his words, and are impotent to do anything else.161 Rhetoric exposes the especially creative potency of opaque language in the context of the moral world. It offers a number of techniques that (mis) describe this worryingly pliable sphere, threatening to efface any intrinsic qualities it might have. Shaw dramatises the constitutive consequences of naming at pleasure. Trope’s son Metonymy rejoices in his own fixed name: ‘when all the rest of the world have no name, but what I please to give them, is (as the imposition of names has always been accounted) no small argument of my authority. I am the great Nomenclator of the world’.162 One very potent device is amplification, which ‘increases’ or ‘decreases’ matters through redescription. Paradiastole is a species of amplification. It transforms the moral complexion of something or someone in accordance with the orator’s design, usually turning vice into virtue. This is based on Aristotle’s location of virtue on the golden mean between two vices.163 He advises speakers to use paradiastole in the genus demonstrativum, that form of oratory that praises or blames. ‘In each case we must adopt a term from qualities closely connected, always in the more favorable sense; for instance . . . the recklessly extravagant as liberal’.164 Quintilian exhorts the 161

162 163

164

See Blount (1971, sigs. A2v–A3v) on the indispensability and visibility of speech; Hoskins (1935, p. 2) on the mutual dependence of res and verba. Cf. Cicero (1942, ii, p. 113) on the redundancy of wisdom without eloquence. See also Cave (1979) on devious language; Krajewski (1992) on Hermes’ tainted reputation. There seems to be a tension between the claims that a deceiver can communicate unproblematically, and the view that in order to communicate the speaker has to have thoughts corresponding to those he articulates. See, for example, Lamy 1986, p. 305: ‘A Good Imagination contributes particularly to the clearness and facility of Discourse . . . A Man whose Imagination is easy, represents to himself whatever he is to say: He sees clearly before the eyes of his mind; so that expressing by his words, the things as present to him, his Discourse is clear, and the things do range and take their places of themselves in his Discourse’; Felton 1971, p. 106: ‘if a man hath not a clear perception of the matters he undertaketh to treat of be his style never so plain as to the words he useth, it never can be clear’. An answer to this conundrum might lie in the fact either that the orator must be persuaded of what he is saying or that while vivid thought is necessary for exceptionally expressive speech, this is not the case for ordinary communication. Shaw 1972, p. 114. Aristotle 1980, p. 39. Locke owned the Ethicorum nicomachiorum (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 75). See Skinner (1994) on moral ambiguity in Renaissance eloquence; Skinner (1996, pp. 133– 80) on rhetorical redescription and its dangers. See also Struever (1983) on the humanists’ contextualist constitution of virtue and vice. Aristotle 1926, p. 98.

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orator to use the same strategy of linguistic metamorphosis. He explains that ‘if the question turns on the nature of the act’, then ‘we must restate’ that act ‘in a different way, alleging other motives and another purpose and putting a different complexion on the case’. We must resort to the constitutive power of language, whereby a thing becomes what it is named. ‘Some imputations we must mitigate by the use of other words, luxury will be softened down into generosity, avarice into economy, carelessness into simplicity.’165 Cicero chimes in: ‘on a charge of corrupt practices, lavish generosity, can seldom be distinguished from profuse bribery’.166 This device is embraced by early-modern rhetoricians. Peacham explains that it enables us to ‘excuse our own vices, or other mens whom we doe defend, by calling them vertues, as when we call him that is craftye, wyse’.167 The Art of Rhetorick says that paradiastole ‘proves a thing by its way of interpretation, or shewing the contrary’.168 Puttenham writes that by its means ‘we make the best of a bad thing’.169 Hoskins asks with breath-taking candour, ‘how can you commend a thing more acceptably to our attention than by telling us it is extraordinary’?170 The opposite is meiosis, by its which ‘you diminish and abbase a thing’.171 With a shamelessness that verges on the comic, Sherry explains that ‘increasyng or diminishing’ is achieved ‘by chaungynge the worde of the thynge, when in encreasynge we use a more cruell worde, and a softer in diminishynge, as when we call an evyll man a thiefe, and saye he hath kylled us, when he hath beaten us’.172 Language emerges as a creative as opposed to a servile instrument. It forges the moral world, not the other way round. Its force is further amplified because its hearers are often under the illusion that it describes things as they are, not as its user wants them to be. The uncertainty of definitions is another resource that rhetoricians mine in order to bend the truth to their will. This is a locus communis visited by rhetoricians for their artificial proofs ‘when the name by which an act should be called is in controversy’.173 Quintilian explains that ‘though there may be no doubt as to a term, there is a question as to what it includes’. He gives the following cases: ‘to use bad language to one’s wife does not amount to cruelty’; ‘whether a man caught in a brothel with another man’s wife is adultery’.174 By exploiting the fluidity of verbal meaning, the orator softens or hardens his blows. Again, then, semantic indeterminacy is flagged suggestively by rhetoricians. 165 167 170 173

Quintilian 1920–1922, ii, pp. 91; 91–2. 166 Cicero 1942, i, p. 275. Peacham 1971, sig. Niiiiv. 168 The Art of Rhetorick 1706, p. 44. 169 Puttenham 1589, p. 154. Hoskins 1935, p. 17. 171 Puttenham 1589, p. 154. 172 Sherry 1961, p. 70. Rhetorica ad Herennium 1954, p. 39. 174 Quintilian 1920–22, iii, pp. 85; 87.


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Rhetoric broadcasts the free-floating nature of language, the way in which it can be applied as the speaker wills, not as the object dictates. Although Bacon pleads that rhetoric only adorns goodness, evil being immune to fine colours, at another point he admits that it ‘paint[s] and disguise[s] the true appearance of things’. Indeed, he composes an entire work, Of the Colours of Good and Evil, where he prescribes linguistic devices which have the ‘power to alter the nature of the subject in appearance’.175 Rhetoric also demonstrates the invisibility and invincibility of linguistic perfidy, occasioned by the irrevocably opaque façade of language. It enables things, in Pufendorf’s words, to be ‘painted with a quite different face from what they truly bear’.176 And sometimes, pushes Hobbes, the speakers themselves are taken in. ‘Eloquence’, he writes, ‘seemeth wisedome, both to themselves and others’.177 We learn the ‘truth’ about things according to the denominations given them. We are subject to the sovereignty of this ‘beautiful deceit’, as Sprat calls rhetoric – ‘a thing fatal to peace and good manners’.178 175 177

Bacon 1996b, pp. 238; 218; 1996a, p. 97. 176 Pufendorf 1703, vii, p. 143. Hobbes 1996, p. 72. 178 Sprat 1959, pp. 112; 111.

part i1

Philosophical developments of the problem of language

chapter 4

The relationships between language, mind and word

The mirror that language held up to the world, which we met in logic, was in some ways shattered during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the regiments of the ‘scientific revolution’1 laid siege to the forms and species of Aristotelian ontology, the old words and classifications no longer fitted the new world that was being discovered. Moreover, with the reinvention of ancient scepticism and with epistemological transformations more broadly, human experience, which had seemed to deliver the world to men, came to be doubted as a reliable conduit. As the unity of subject and object was threatened, so too was the derivative unity between word and object. Appearance divided from reality and took language with it. However, this did not necessarily mean that a veil of ideas was draped before us or that language fell away from reality.2 Resounding warnings 1

2

Shapin (1996) begins his book on the subject with a sentence that brilliantly captures the problems but also the viability of the phrase: ‘there was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it’ (p. 1). Dear (1988, p. 1) defends the use of this phrase and the changes it describes. While Sorell (1993a) argues for a revision of the old story that modern science superseded Aristotelian science (p. 1), he maintains that one ought to favour ‘a Schmittian tolerance’ of it. See Schmitt (1973) on the continuity and diversity of Aristotelianism. Rogers (2000) defends a characterisation of both ‘new’ science and epistemology. Tuck (1998, p. 19) emphasises that to study philosophy in the European universities for most of the seventeenth century was to study to the works of Aristotle. See also Dear 2001, Hunter 1989 and, for the relation of the new science to society, Hunter 1981. See Ayers 1998b. For alternative and opposing views, see Rorty (1980, p. 139) on the ‘veil-of-ideas’, Yolton (1984 and 1987) on direct realism, and Yolton (1990) for his attack on Rorty. See also Rogers (2000), who traces a story from realist science to the way of ideas with its ‘epistemic gap between the knower and the known’ (p. 58) which threatens realism; Schmaltz (2002), who argues that the cogito does not begin a path to Kant; McRae (1965) on ‘ideas’. For a balanced and cautionary word about the extent to which ‘modern epistemology’ was ‘conceived in a crise Pyrrhonienne’, see Ayers 1998a, p. 1008. On the rediscovery of and responses to ancient scepticism see Burke 2002, pp. 197–212; Floridi 2002; Larmore 1998; Levi 2000; Popkin 1979 and Popkin 1993; Schmitt 1983; Spolsky 2001; Tuck 1993. On the relationship between language and scepticism see Marcondes 1998; and Southgate 1995 (in Blackloist thought).

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were raised about the dangers of error and dogma, and many philosophers, particularly those who set great store by the senses, did see a large fraction of our thoughts and words reflect more on the human subject than on the objective world. But they were not idealists. The vast majority made tentative – or not so tentative – claims about how the mind, and therefore language, could capture the world. And far from being preoccupied with Pyrrhonian incredulity, many, if they engaged with it at all, used it as a foil, and confidently set about describing the world. Sometimes in relation to these issues, several commentators who have specifically addressed language in the early-modern period assert that there were two rival and incompatible theories: a nomenclature of things versus an expression of thought. Some commentators pit the two contemporaneously against each other in a battle between ‘empiricists’ and ‘rationalists’.3 Others see a dominant language of things, championed by the new scientists and ultimately usurped by the language of thought under the decisive captaincy of Locke.4 This chapter seeks to demonstrate the pervasive inclusion of both thoughts and things in early-modern theories of language, whilst exploring the differences, developments and doubts therein. the ancient marriage between word and essence Let us remind ourselves of the foundation of early-modern philosophy of language: the triad of word–concept–thing laid down by Aristotle. Words are symbols of ‘mental affections’, which are themselves ‘representations, or likenesses, images, copies’ of ‘objects’.5 In his Philosophical Essay for the Reunion of Languages (1675), Pierre Besnier writes uncontroversially that words are ‘the expressions of our thoughts, and our thoughts the 3

4

5

Padley (1985 and 1988, I) schematically pits an empiricist conception of language against a rationalist one. Cf. Lennon (1993b), who argues that seventeenth-century philosophy was dominated by a battle between the Cartesian, idealist, gods and Gassendist, materialist, giants, and that Locke should be read primarily as a contributor to the latter cause. In a quite different way, Ayers (1997, p. 4) locates Locke on the side of the empiricist giants. See Atherton (1999) on ‘the empiricists’ (Locke, Berkeley, Hume). See also Ayers (1998a, pp. 1003–8 and pp. 1028–30, and Ayers (1998c, p. 24) for a restrained and persuasive defence of the rationalist/empiricist distinction. Formigari 1993, p. 13: ‘the way of ideas thus severs the univocal correspondence between language and realia . . . language is no more conceived as a repertory of real definitions, a nomenclature of created objects . . . it is seen as a body of historical and cultural choices in which empirical and contingent factors play a decisive role’. Cohen (1977) traces a shift from language as a reflection of nature to a reflection of the mind, in which Locke ‘reidentified’ words as ideas not things (p. xxiv). Cf. Padley (1985 and 1988, i, p. 352) on Locke’s novel enclosure of language in its own autonomous arena. Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. Cf. Ebbesen 1981, pp. 141–3.


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representations of objects’.6 However, just like the logicians, who carelessly confuse concept and thing, slipping one underneath the other, effecting an invisible move between language and the world, Besnier settles into the binary division. Using a common image of the duality, he explains that the ‘signification’ is ‘the soul of the word, as the sound is its body’.7 In his dictionary, the New World of English Words (1658), Edward Phillips voices the dualist mentalite´: ‘all learning in general, is chiefly reducible into those two grand heads, Words and Things’.8 In addition to these sleights of hand is the suggestion, implanted by the Terminists, that words might stand directly for things. Fostered by a thorough logical training, then, this twosome blooms (in)advertently in philosophy more generally, albeit interspersed with circumspect observations about interpretative, mental mediation. Aristotle himself is far from cavalier about the developmental role of the mind in linguistic reference. In Posterior Analytics he points out the gulf between nature, which is essentially constituted by universals, and our initial sense-perception of particulars. That which is ‘more knowable’ to us is less known to nature.9 However, in the process of ‘experience’, or many persisting sense-perceptions, the soul can bridge the gulf and thereby ‘establish’ ‘the universal’, such as ‘man’, as opposed to Callias, Plato or Socrates. The mind cognises ‘the One that corresponds to the Many, the unity that is present in them all’.10 It is of these universals, whose apprehension is necessary to reasoning, that the philosopher speaks. Aristotle’s is an ambitious account of the mind’s capacity to know (and name) the essences of things – or ‘substances’, as they are more properly (and later, provocatively) called. Substances are totalities of matter and ‘form’ (the essence of a substance, such as rational animal in the case of man). According to Aristotle, the mind becomes identical with these forms, so that ‘in a sense’, he announces, ‘the soul is all the existing universe’.11 He compares sensation – ‘the reception of the form of sensible objects without the matter’ – to the way that ‘wax receives the impression of the signet-ring without the iron or the gold’.12 Language can gorge on 6 9 11

12

Besnier 1971, p. 51. 7 Besnier 1971, p. 50. 8 Phillips 1969, sig. b3r. Aristotle 1960, pp. 31–3. 10 Aristotle 1960, p. 259. Aristotle 1935, pp. 179–81. Cf. Lear (1988, p. 229) on Aristotle: ‘the order of reality and the order of one’s knowledge of reality would be one and the same’; and pp. 116–35 for a wonderful account of the identity of subject and object in Aristotle. See Park (1988) for an appraisal of Aristotelian souls and their relationship with nature. See also Park and Kessler (1988) on humanist modifications of psychology. Aristotle 1935, p. 137.

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this intimate union between mind and world, and build an uninterrupted passage from words to things. Essentialist verbal reference seems secure throughout Aristotle’s Organon, where the reified and precise linguistic taxonomies of species and genera, accidents and essences that we saw peddled by logicians map things in the world.13 He slides between the linguistic and epistemological– ontological planes with unbroken and unselfconscious ease. For example, he asserts that ‘things are univocally named, when not only they bear the same name but the name means the same in each case – has the same definition corresponding. Thus a man and an ox are called ‘‘animals’’. The name is the same in both cases; so also the statement of essence.’14 Aristotle reiterates his commitment to linguistic–real continuity when he states that ‘the truth of propositions consists in corresponding with the facts’.15 Before we turn from this mighty source to its streams we ought to remind ourselves of the non-judgemental simplicity of the concepts which words signify – a presumption the logicians repeat unflinchingly. For Aristotle, concepts of substances are, like the words which signify them, single units. We remember his statement that nouns are like concepts, ‘neither combined nor disjoined’.16 ‘Man’, like ‘white’, has a singular denotation; nothing is affirmed or denied of it and it is therefore neither true nor false.17 Aristotle’s realism,18 along with his unitary representation of concepts– things and their numerical fit with words dispatches a view of language that penetrates almost effortlessly, directly, and without the possibility of error, to the heart of things. His scholastic successors hotly debate the extent to which the linguistic– epistemological framework matches the world, although it is generally agreed that a mental operation of abstraction derives the universal from the particular. Towards one extreme are the ‘moderate realists’, or Thomists.19 Aquinas had maintained that ‘something becomes actually intelligible insofar as it is in some way abstracted from matter’.20 But while concept and thing are thus distinct, the ‘essences’ or ‘natures’ of 13

14 16 18

19

20

E.g. Aristotle 1938b, pp. 153–5. Cf. Lear 1988, p. 267: ‘the reason that a linguistic predication, like man is [a] rational animal is true is that a certain predication exists in reality’. Aristotle 1938a, p. 13. 15 Aristotle 1938b, p. 139. Aristotle 1938b, p. 117. 17 Aristotle 1938b, p. 117. I use ‘realism’ quite generally, to indicate a linguistic–real correspondence, in addition and in relation to the context of the nominalist/realist debate about universals. I take this account of the debate from Bolton 1998a, pp. 178–9. Utz (1995) argues for the importance of nominalism in late medieval texts, against Huizinga’s downplaying of it. Aquinas 1998, p. 439.


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things ‘exist in two ways . . . in one way in singular and in another way in the soul’, that is in things and in the intellect, and can be signified by words.21 By contrast, the ‘nominalists’ or Ockhamists deny any universality in things, restricting it to concepts and names. General concepts or names hook on to things by virtue of their similarity to (rather than identity with) them. Francisco Sua´rez, the Counter-Reformation scholastic writing at the turn of the sixteenth century, delivers a rich, robust synthesis of the medieval positions. Denying ‘that the nature is universal in reality’, he argues that a particular individual is ‘placed under the species according to mental comparison or logical consideration’.22 However, the basis for conceptual universality is real similarity between the forms of individuals. Forms do exist in things, but they are particular to individuals.23 ‘A man consists of a body as matter and of a rational soul as form. Therefore, this soul is the substantial form.’24 When we think generally about things we compare similar individuals and abstract from them. While individual substances might not share the same substantial form, they each have one, and these can be known and named. Moreover, they can be compared on the basis of real similarity and considered as one species with one essence that has been abstracted from reality. There may not be an idyllic identity between reality and perception but there is a beam that girds them together and it is based on essential resemblance. Language can look through to the world. If we look to the end of the seventeenth century we find an Aristotelianism – filtered by a corpuscularian Blackloism – in Sergeant’s Method.25 ‘The impressions from objects that affect the senses, and by them the soul, do carry the very nature of those objects along with them, and imprint them in the soul.’26 The essences of things, ideas in God before their creation, exist both corporeally and intellectually. The ‘verity’ 21 22

23

24 25

26

Aquinas 1998, p. 463. Sua´rez 1982, p. 33 (cf. ibid: ‘Every thing, insofar as it exists in reality, be singular and individual’); p. 30. Sua´rez 1982, p. 107: ‘the specific notion is said to be taken absolutely from form. [This is so] because it [i.e. form] confers the last complement, and presupposes only matter as something potential and indifferent’; p. 109: ‘form is more than anything else the principle of individuation’. Sua´rez 1982, p. 182. Phemister (1993, p. 249) presents Aristotle as Sergeant’s ‘master-builder’. Southgate (2000) depicts Sergeant as following in the vehemently anti-sceptical, pro-demonstration footsteps of Thomas White. Sergeant 1696, p. 2. Southgate (2000, pp. 296–8) explains that according to Sergeant’s empiricism, atomic ‘effluvia’ from objects are present in the brain; N.B. also pp. 300–2, White’s and Sergeant’s concerns about language and the trustworthiness of common use which embodies the common sense of the community.

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of our mental-linguistic judgements is based in their literal ‘conformity’ with things.27 Sergeant reveals the persistence of the view that concepts are isomorphic with things, and that therefore words, which signify concepts, import the world. While concepts resemble things in the Aristotelian story, words do not resemble their cargo, as the multiplicity of tongues proves. As Aristotle elaborates in De interpretatione, ‘a noun is a sound having meaning established by convention alone’.28 However, the arbitrary relationship between res and verba did not go uncontested. The recovery of Plato’s Cratylus, together with various Adamite, Hermetic, Cabalistic, Hieroglyphic, Neoplatonic and Chinese traditions, advertised the possibility of a natural link between word and thing.29 Hermogenes explains Cratylus’ position. ‘Every thing has a right name of its own, which comes by nature, and . . . a name is not whatever people call a thing by agreement . . . but . . . there is a kind of inherent correctness in names, which is the same for all men, both Greeks and barbarians’.30 Each thing has an ‘ideal name’ that manifests its ‘essence’ or ‘class’.31 As with Aristotle, an essentialist classificatory framework underpins Plato’s theory of language. But, unlike Aristotle’s forms, Plato’s ideas exist eternally, prior to and separate from the particular ephemera of the material world. His dramatis personae spend the long central section of the dialogue probing various etymologies, whose component parts sum up the nature of the things named.32 Having come to the obstacle that these component parts must themselves have conventional roots, Cratylus goes on to explore the sounds of syllables themselves. He muses on their onomatopoeic potential, for example on the ‘smoothness, softness’ of the lambda and the ‘speed’ of ‘rho’. ‘Representing by likeness’ makes words perfectly transparent. They become inherently instructive; ‘he who knows the names knows also the things named’.33 Knowledge of this ideal language is equivalent to philosophical knowledge. To know the words is to know the things. 27 29

30 32

33

Sergeant 1696, pp. 4; 3; 118. 28 Aristotle 1938b, pp. 115; 117. Coudert (1978) explores early-modern natural language theories. Katz (1981) traces the search for Adam’s language, particularly its connection with Hebrew (pp. 141–5). Vickers (1984, pp. 97–115) discerns a difference between the new science and magic on the basis of their subscription to conventional/natural languages respectively. Bianchi (2002) explores the Natursprache in Bo¨hme and Paracelsus. See also Mercer (2000) on humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany. Plato 1939, p. 7. 31 Plato 1939, pp. 27; 41; 45. See Williams (1994) on the dialogue’s powerfully anti-mimetic conclusions; Sedley (1998) on the contemporary seriousness of the mimetic proposal; Borchardt (1995) on its place in the renaissance. Plato 1939, pp. 171; 169; 175.


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I end this section by pulling out two spanners that Socrates throws in to the works of Cratylus’ Eden. The first questions the rigid reality of the verbal scheme with an example that was to resonate down the centuries: the ‘unnatural birth’ which suggests that language might not map the world. Socrates asks ‘if any offspring that is not human should be born from a human being, should that offspring be called a human being’?34 The second criticism ends the dialogue. Incredulous at Cratylus’ proposal, Socrates posits the ultimate alterity and opacity of words. Having indulged in the fantasy of etymological investigation, he raises the problem of infinite regress. The elements that make up the etymologies are themselves opaque signs. Onomatopoeia is no real refuge, limited in its referential scope and itself dependent on convention.35 The Aristotelian–Platonic traditions do not transmit an immaculately realist conception of language. In various ways the mind intervenes and modifies the world, generalising from the particular. The world may not be exactly the ordered place we describe. But notwithstanding these destabilising factors, language is fastened tightly to the essences of things, albeit arbitrarily – although the mirage of a natural link shimmers seductively and tenaciously. realist, essentialist hangovers: bacon, universal language and the recovery of eden The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the transformation of the multi-faceted but broadly Aristotelian world-view that had captivated European philosophers. This process was as evolutionary as it was revolutionary and it took many forms – which divided the ‘revolutionaries’ from each other as much as they were divided from their common enemy. But, very generally speaking, the new philosophers rejected intentional species and substantial forms as chimerical and replaced them with matter and motion. The paradigm shift from animism to mechanism had radical consequences not only for the linguistic classifications that supposedly mapped the world, but also for language’s capacity to reach out to it and grasp its core.36 However, as testament to the continuing mentalite´, 34 36

Plato 1939, pp. 41; 39. 35 Plato 1939, pp. 131; 173–5. On the relationship between science and language see: Jones (1965 and 1971) for the traditional view of seventeenth-century antipathy towards language and its perceived incompatibility with science; Waswo (1999a) on the ‘deontologizing’ of language in the renaissance (p. 28) and its ‘reontologizing’ (p. 33) in the seventeenth century; Waswo (1987) puts a similar point another way,

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many philosophers maintained an essentialist and realist portrait of language.37 Bacon occupies a pivotal position in this story not only because he balances between Aristotelianism and atomism but also because he, seminally, moves language to the centre of the philosophical stage. For him it is both a renovative tool for, and an intractable obstacle to knowledge. I turn first to his optimistic characterisation. With Aristotle and Adam ringing in his ears, Bacon envisages a marriage between mind and world. The latter is not to be shrunk to the poor confines of the former, but ‘the understanding is rather to be expanded and widened to receive the image of the universe as it is found to be’.38 In his poetic crescendo to The Great Instauration, Bacon mines more visual metaphors to demonstrate his plan: All depends on keeping the mind’s eye fixed on things themselves, so that their images are received exactly as they are. For God forbid that we should give out a dream of our imagination for a pattern of the world; but may He rather grant of His grace that we may write a revelation or true vision of the footsteps and imprint of the Creator upon created things.39

37

38

39

noting a shift from ‘relational’ to ‘referential’ semantics; Foucault (1970) traces a move from a ‘resemblance’ (chapter 2) to a ‘representational’ (chapter 3) episteme, whereby words come out of the world and transparently map it; Fish (1972, p. 381) on the triumph of the plain style; Vickers (1984) on the distinctive attitude of the new scientists towards language; Monfasani (1988, p. 211) on the new scientists’ ‘challenge’ to classical rhetoric; Salmon (1972) ascribes the seventeenthcentury’s ‘profound dissatisfaction with language’ (p. v) to scientific transformations, in addition to persecution-driven migration and the explosion of trade (p. 3); Croll (1966) on the ‘plain’ effects of science on style. A.C. Howell (1971) argues that with the development of the new science, ‘res’ changed its meaning from ‘subject matter’ to ‘things’ in the seventeenth century; while this verdict overlooks the unstinting mentalism of the period (and the referential ambitions of the years preceding) there was definitely an explicit turn towards the (metaphorical!) book of nature, as opposed to the books of the ancients. For a wide variety of revisionist accounts, see Blair 1999; Davies 1987; Dear 1985; Golinski 1990a; Kroll 1991; Kroll 1992, pp. 16–24; Rutherford 1995; Steadman 1984; Stillman 1995; Vickers 1985; Vickers 1987. See Dear (1988, pp. 170–200) on the new, essentialist linguistic systems of the seventeenth century which ‘proposed that essential natures could be known behind appearances and that individuals could be grouped into species accordingly’ (p. 188); Bolton (1998a) on the replacement of Aristotelian essentialism with alternative forms. Bacon 1994c, p. 304. Cf. Bacon (1994a, p. 13) on the near passive reception of the rays of things by the mirror of the mind: ‘I, on the other hand, have not taken my attention off them longer than was needed for their image and rays to meet (as happens in the case of vision) with the result that very little is left for the power and superiority of intelligence.’ See Briggs (1989 (e.g. p. viii)) on Bacon’s restorative project; Rossi (1986, p. 9) on Bacon’s ‘cult of nature’ which would ‘reestablish contact between man and reality’. Snider (1994) argues that Bacon legitimated his project by appropriating the power of the origo. Bacon 1994a, p. 30.


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Bacon’s new logic prepares ‘the bridal chamber of the mind and the universe’, whose progeny will be ‘help for mankind’. Echoing the Aristotelian ambition to get closer to what is ‘more knowable to nature’, his axioms will be ‘such as Nature would really recognize as better known to herself, and which lie at the very marrow of things’. The aim is nothing less than a restoration of the understanding to its ‘original condition, or at least to improve that commerce between Mind and Things’.40 Since it was the ‘greed’ for moral, not natural, knowledge that caused Adam’s Fall, we can and may recover that ‘pure and spotless natural knowledge’ if we labour at it, thanks to God’s curse/dispensation that ‘in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread’.41 The remembering of primordial knowledge includes the restitution of a language that perfectly reflects things, that gives ‘names to all things according to their kind’.42 Drawing on the powerful figurative reserves of vision, sexual intercourse and the garden of Eden, Bacon paints a beguiling portrait of the possible union between the mind (and language) and the world.43 Ideally, words should simply transcribe things, adding no interpretation of their own.44 Bacon’s ambition to make experience ‘literate’ evokes an unmediated intimacy between language and experience.45 When he advises on appropriate style, he instructs us to ‘avoid’ the ‘treasury of eloquence’, and instead ‘set forth’ everything ‘briefly and concisely’. Here words are submissive and loyal representatives of things; they are logically interchangeable. Natural philosophers are ‘faithful secretaries, who only

40 41

42 43

44

45

Bacon 1994a, pp. 24–5; 21; 3. Bacon 1994a, p. 15; 1994b, p. 292. See Sessions (1996) on the centrality of discontinuity (temporal, representational and epistemological) since the Fall and for the ‘syncopated therapy’ (p. 47) of Bacon’s work. On the relation of God and Adam to language, see Readings (1985). See Markley (1993) on the rupture between the ineffable and absolute word of God and fallen language, and contemporary attempts to accommodate the two; Bono (1995) on the divergence between the Word of God and the languages of man. See also Aarsleff 1999. On the importance of Adam and his Fall for the seventeenth century more generally see Almond 1999. Harrison 2002 and Poole 2005. See Smith (1989, p. 341) on the sectarian attempt in the mid-seventeenth century to make human language ‘embody the divine’. See, by contrast, De Grazia (1995) on the secularisation of language in the seventeenth century; Hunter (2000) on the desacralisation of philosophy; Rudavsky (2001) on Galileo’s and Spinoza’s secularisation of theology. Bacon 1994a, p. 15. See Bennett and Mandelbrote (1998) on biblical metaphorical resources; Le Doeuff (1990) on Baconian science as gardening; Merchant (1980) on extinguishing and raping nature. He says that natural history must be ‘free of anything philological’, by which he refers to the philologus, the hermeneut (1994a, p. 6). Bacon 1994b, p. 109. According to McCanles (1990), Bacon submits to the impracticable desire for Derridean presence.

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take hold of and write down the laws of Nature themselves and nothing else’.46 What are these things that language is meant devotedly to reflect? If Interpretatio naturae goes according to plan, they are ‘forms’, or ‘true specific differences’.47 These are not Aristotle’s fictional and teleological substantial forms, but the ‘laws’ by which qualities or ‘simple natures’, ‘such as heat, light, weight,’ are produced.48 Forms do not really exist as such, ‘for nothing truly exists in Nature except separate bodies performing separate pure actions, in conformity with a law’. These laws or forms exist ‘in philosophy’. They are the true genera of Nature, ‘better known (notior naturae)’ to her.49 While Bacon has exiled souls from the world, it is still organised essentially (though Bacon’s essences refer to qualities such as yellowness, rather than substances such as ‘gold’). And these natural essences and the laws that govern them can be perfectly known and named. Bacon’s belief that qualities are constitutive of substances is an experiential way of describing the world which we shall see running through to Locke. Instead of having one substantial essence, substances are: a troop or collection of simple natures; thus in gold the following occur together: that which is yellow; that which is heavy, up to a certain weight; that which is malleable or ductile, to a certain extent; that which is not volatile, and is not consumed by fire; that which becomes fluid, to a certain degree; that which can be separated and dissolved by certain means; and so on, through all the natures that are united in gold. An axiom of this kind therefore derives the thing from the forms of simple natures.50

Substances are ‘compound forms’, or ‘conjunctions of simple natures occurring in the ordinary course of the world’.51 Knowledge of ‘the forms of yellowness, weight, ductility, fixity, fluidity, solutions, and so on, and the means of superinducing them’ would enable alchemy52. Moreover, substances or ‘species’ can be named unproblematically because we have clear(ish) notions of them53. While Bacon’s specific ambitions for substantial knowledge are subsequently discarded, his description of substances as collections of simple qualities or appearances impacts forcefully on subsequent philosophers. 46 47

48 50 53

Bacon 1994c, pp. 303; 312. Cf. Vickers (1991 and 2000) on Bacon’s accommodation with language. Bacon 1994b, p. 133. See Jardine (1990) and Malherbe (1996) on Baconian method; Rossi (1996, p. 29) on Bacon’s ‘via media inter experimentiam et dogmata’. Bacon 1994b, p. 170. 49 Bacon 1994b, pp. 170; 135; 137. Bacon 1994b, p. 137. 51 Bacon 1994b, p. 169. 52 Bacon 1994b, pp. 137–8. Bacon 1994b, pp. 46–7; 65.


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The depth of Bacon’s belief in the intimacy of language and the world also appears in his representation of the world as linguistic. As letters are ‘the elements of all discourse’, forms are, like ‘letters of the alphabet’, the elements of nature.54 Writing in the grip of what Foucault has suggestively, if problematically, characterised as the Renaissance episteme, which sees nature rife with signs and resemblances, Bacon urges us to read what Descartes calls ‘the great book of the world’.55 When the natural historian writes out the world, he is copying ‘the volume of the works of God, and . . . another book of holy scripture’. He should therefore attend to the task ‘with a most religious care’. When we interpret nature we are reading ‘the ideas of the divine mind . . . the genuine signatures and marks impressed on created things, as they are found to be’.56 Bacon therefore balances between penetrative–essentialist and superficial–experiential accounts of knowledge and language, between a language of nature and a mirage of dynamic experience. In addition to transforming the building blocks of language from substances, qualities and experience, Bacon stimulates a plethora of linguistic projects.57 When he comes to the ‘organ of tradition’ of ‘rational knowledge’ in his navigation through learning, he finds that it is ‘not enquired, but deficient’. While the most familiar and fruitful organ is ‘speech or writing’, words are not the only means of communicating thoughts. Before we look at the alternatives, let us note the square inclusion of thoughts in Bacon’s linguistic theory. ‘Words are the images of cogitations’, he declares, expressly quoting Aristotle.58 However, while Bacon takes mentalism for granted, he does not keep it to the fore. He entitles the section ‘De notis rerum ’, begins it ‘These Notes of Cogitations’, and concludes it with a discussion of ‘notes of things’. This brings out the familiar ambiguity of the Latin res and its English translation – ‘thing’. These terms waver between external objects and 54

55

56

57 58

Bacon 1994a, p. 26. Cf. 1994b, p. 122 for another comparison of forms to ‘the letters of the alphabet’. Descartes 1985c, p. 115. Foucault 1970, chapter 2 (although at pp. 51–2 he locates Bacon in the ‘representational’ episteme of the seventeenth century). See Maclean (1998) for a stunning engagement with Foucault; Reiss (1973) for a version of Foucault’s argument; Roseman (1999) for a Foucaultian reading of scholasticism. See Geneva (1995) on the continuing ‘symbolic universe’ (p. 264) in the seventeenth century; Drake (1973) on Galileo’s attempt to move language closer to nature; Maclean (1984 and 2002) on natural and bodily signs respectively; Westerhoff (2001) on Baroque pansemioticism. Bacon 1994c, p. 311; 1994b, p. 49; cf. 1994b, p. 126: ‘the Creator’s true stamp upon created things, printed and defined on matter by true and precise lines’. See Eco (1995) for an overview of the two thousand year old quest for the perfect language. Bacon 1996b, pp. 231; 230.

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internal thoughts and are often used to refer to both. This confusion signals a general forgetfulness – or repression – by early-modern philosophers, of the tripartite linguistic paradigm to which they subscribe. There are two forms of notae rerum. One is ‘ex congruo’ and has ‘some similitude or congruity with the notion’.59 While Bacon himself rejects ‘Plato’s’ proposals, these recall Cratylic, as well as Adamic, names.60 Bacon’s congruent names include ‘Hieroglyphs’, or Egyptian ideograms. ‘Gestures’ or ‘transitory Hieroglyphs’ are also ranked in the category of natural signs. He exemplifies them with the story of Periander who communicated his intention to restrain rebellious nobles by cutting off the tops of the tallest flowers in his garden. The second form of notes are established ‘ad placitum, having force only by contract or acceptation’.61 As well as words, these include ‘Real Characters’ which bypass (spoken) words and represent ‘things and notions’ directly62. There must be as many characters as there are ‘radical words’63. Chinese is Bacon’s example of this kind of arbitrary script, unmediated by sound, which ‘can be read off by each nation in their own language’ and which captures the fecund imaginations of his successors.64 In 1669 John Webb, for example, writes An Historical Essay Endeavouring a Probability that the Language of the empire of China is the Primitive Language. Bacon’s brief exhortations are the seeds of the universal or philosophical language projects that flourish between his death and about 1680. In addition to facilitating international communication, these projects aim to bring language closer to things.65 In addition to Babel, Adam towers over seventeenth-century writers. As Milton ventriloquises for the first philosophical speaker: I nam’d them, as they pass’d, and understood Their nature, with such knowledge God endu’d My sudden apprehension66

Early-modern philosophers, and the philosophical language theorists in particular, yearn to recover this language that contained the nature of things. 59 60 61

62 64 65

66

Bacon 1857, iv, p. 440; 1996b, p. 231. See Aarsleff 1982, pp. 278–92, and Vickers 1984. Bacon 1857, iv, p. 441. Bacon 1996b, p. 231. See Ashworth (1990) on the relationship between emblems (natural signs) and natural history; Bono (1999) on the eclipse of the emblematic world view; Russell (1999) on the emblematic genre in the Renaissance. Bacon 1857, iv, p. 439. 63 Bacon 1996b, p. 230. Bacon 1857, iv, p. 439. See Mungello (1998) on European philosophical responses to China. Bacon himself follows his discussion of notae rerum with a proposal for a ‘philosophical grammar’ that might provide ‘an antidote against the curse of the confusion of tongues’ (1957, iv, pp. 440–1), a juxtaposition of themes that subsequent writers would fuse. Milton 1989, pp. 184–5. Locke owned Paradise Lost (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 189).


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Some take the high road of natural signs. In his China illustrata (1677) Athanasius Kircher explains how, following the Egyptians, Chinese writing is based ‘on pictures drawn from natural things’, such as ‘animals, birds, reptiles, herbs’. ‘There are as many characters as there are concepts which the mind wishes to express’.67 This comment reminds us that despite all the talk about things in this movement, we are still firmly in a mentalist frame. Kircher’s own Ars magna sciendi sive combinatoria (1669) is a massive ‘key’ to all things, reminiscent of the Lullist, encyclopaedic tradition.68 Its basic ‘elements’, out of which everything can be expressed by means of their ‘combination’, are supposedly self-explanatory pictures, such as õ and.69 Another remarkable exemplar of this tradition is John Bulwer’s Chirologia, or, The Natural Language of the Hand, Composed of the Speaking Motions, and Discoursing Gestures thereof (1644). This applauds gesture which, being ‘purely naturall, not positive’ speaks louder than words. This non-verbal form of communication is universally and immediately intelligible. ‘Our pregnant minde’ is not nearly so well delivered by the vocal ‘midwife’. Bulwer locates his project within the twin religious contexts of Adam and Babel – whose falling self and tumbling walls missed ‘this naturall language of the hand’.70 While the idyll of the divine tongue lies behind most reformatory language schemes of the period, for some enthusiastic contemporaries it is much more than a dream. Jacob Boehme was lucky enough to be blessed with divine sight, ‘to see through the poisonful heart of the basilisk, and see the day of restitution of all whatever Adam lost’71. His Signatura rerum (1635) discloses ‘the language of nature’, the ‘essences and forms’ of things72. His Clavis (1642) explains that those whom God has inspired can read this ‘living outflowing word of God’.73 John Webster, an admirer of the ‘divinely-inspired Teutonick’, echoes the desire for ‘the true original tongue’. Nature is ‘so many significant and lively characters, or hieroglyphicks of his invisible power, providence and divine wisdom’. Webster’s is an essentialist world which we know via the senses.74 Feeling 67

68 70 71 73

74

Kircher 1987, pp. 217; 214; 214–15. Locke owned this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 166). See Elsky 1989 and Singer 1995. Cornelius (1965) investigates the relationship between the imaginary languages that are reported from imaginary voyages, and the scientific interest in rediscovering or making a perfect or artificial language that represents reality. See Rossi (2000) on this tradition. 69 Kircher 1669, sig. V2r [p. 155]; sig. Ss4v [p. 328]. Bulwer 1644, sig. B2r [p. 3]; sig. B2v [p. 4]; sig. B4r [p. 7]. Boehme 1912, p. 64. 72 Boehme 1912, p. 12. Boehme 1647, p. 20. See Coudert (1991) on the search for the divine language in the century; Thune (1948) for a study of the Behemenists and Philadelphians in England. J. Webster 1970, pp. 90; 101; 103; 108.

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keenly ‘the general blindness, and curse upon the sons of Adam’, he vacillates between wanting a universal language of arbitrary symbols which would ‘repair the ruines of Babell’, and ‘the paradisical language of the out-flown word which Adam understood while he was unfaln in Eden’.75 Many of Bacon’s successors take his injunction to investigate notae rerum as an order to make language mirror the corresponding orders of thoughts and things. In doing so, they are like Janus, looking back to Adam and forward to their new philosophical invention. They want to wipe clean the old, erroneous slate, and forge a language that fits the new – or not so new – world they are discovering in the scientific ferment of the period. Comenius expresses frustration with unrealistic language in his Via lucis (1668). ‘Words are attached to things without regard to the nature of the things themselves.’76 In his Janua he declares, ‘without boasting’, that ‘I shew thee the whole world, and all the latin tongue’. In the thick of this compendious volume, in the section on the body, the entry on the ‘eye’ is instructive of the sense-based realism of the author. It is ‘a looking glasse, receiving into it selfe the resemblances of things set before it’.77 The mind is not an obstacle, or even a modifier of the world, but serves as a clear channel to language, or, as he puts it in Via lucis, ‘a funnel through which wisdom would flow’. The ‘course’ of the ‘universal language’ ought to be ‘parallel with the course of things’. There ought to be as many names as there are things, and the words should be joined ‘with the utmost precision as things are joined to each other’. Comenius even toys with the ‘harmonious’ potential of this language; by ‘its very sounds it would express the essential qualities and characteristics of things’.78 Cynical about the restoration of a naturally significant language of nature, but sympathetic to the universalist and encyclopaedic cause, a flurry of gentlemen build their own linguistic arks.79 While Seth Ward lampoons Webster for his ‘hieroglypticall’ pretensions, he does not stint from carving out a role for a ‘universall character’ in his riposte (Vindiciae academiarum, 1654).80 Having thought he could devise symbols ‘for every thing and notion’, but finding them too many, he alighted on the idea of making symbols stand for ‘simple notions’ which could then be 75 77 79

80

J. Webster 1970, pp. 77; 106; 107; 109. 76 Comenius 1938, p. 185. Comenius 1643, sig. D1v; sig. F3v. 78 Comenius 1938, pp. 186; 183; 186. On the universal language movement, see Cram 1985; Clauss 1995; DeMott 1958; Knowlson 1975 and 1995; Stillman 1995. See Salmon (1972) on the movement in general and on Lodwick in particular; Slaughter (1982) on the continuing essentialist taxonomic Aristotelianism of the projects. Formigari (1988, p. 133) notes the continuity between mystical and universal language theorists, both concerned for language to mirror reality. Ward 1970, p. 214. On his debate with Webster see Debus 1968 and Debus 1970.


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‘compounded’ and thereby ‘represent to the very eye all the elements of their composition, & so deliver the natures of things’. This would be ‘reall learning’. Indeed, preens Ward, it ‘might not unjustly be termed a naturall language’ because the word would reflect the composite nature of the thing. Revealing the way in which the mind was considered little obstruction to the world, as well as an integral part of language, Ward rebuts Webster’s accusations of unreal academic speech with the following rhetorical questions. ‘Was there ever, or can there be a disputation about anything else but notions? Would he have them bring forth bread and cheese and dispute de gustibus?’81 Lodwick enters the field energetically. The language described in Of an Universall Reall Caracter (c. 1663) will, if underpinned by philosophical insight, ‘much assist to the true knowledge of things’.82 In his GroundWork, or Foundation Laid, (or so intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language (1652), it looks as though it is the old hylomorphic world that is the basis for his language: he explains how proper names ought to be gathered under their ‘species or individuums’, such as ‘man’ or ‘horse’. He also reminds us that mentalism is compatible with realism. Speech, he tells us, is the ‘expression of the minde or thoughts’.83 George Dalgarno, a particularly sophisticated member of the movement, is predominantly concerned that his universal language serve the cause of universal communication more than the truth of things.84 However, an unmistakably philosophical motivation still seeps into his plans. When he announces them in his News to the Whole World, he declares that his language ‘shall be more accommodated for an emphatick delivery of real truths’.85 In his Ars signorum, vulgo character universalis et lingua philosophica (1661), Dalgarno explains that in order to know what ‘signs’ are needed, it is first necessary to examine ‘the nature of things themselves’, metaphysics and logic paralleling grammar just as signs parallel signified.86 Again, although language is being brought closer to nature thereby, the mind does not disappear from the equation. It is the sounds that are eradicated, not the ‘affections of the mind’.87 At about the same time (c. 1661) Isaac Newton drafted Of an Universall Language. His was intended to be ‘deduced . . . from ye natures of things themselves’.88 It begins with ‘an alphabeticall table 81 83 85 87

88

Ward 1970, pp. 215; 216; 235. 82 Lodwick 1972b, fo. 34v [p. 225]. Lodwick 1972a, sig. B2v [p. 211]; sig. A3r [p. 204]. 84 Cram and Maat 2001, pp. 22; 29. Dalgarno 2001b, p. 110. 86 Dalgarno 2001c, p. 177. Dalgarno 2001a, p. 90. See Cram and Maat (2001) for an incisive analysis of Dalgarno’s projects, and particularly for his pragmatic (as opposed to realistic) approach to logico-linguistic schemes. Newton 1957, p. 7. See Elliott 1957, pp. 1–7.

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of all substances (as of Angell, House, Man, I, thou, hee,) or affections (as glorious thing, beautiful thing, loving thing . . . )’. These ‘bare names of things’, symbolically represented, are then related to each other in the same way that the things themselves are related.89 John Wilkins’ Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) is the most extravagant English contribution to the movement. He emphasises the interdependence of language and true knowledge. ‘The theory it self, upon which such a design were to be founded, should be exactly suited to the nature of things.’ He lays out the ‘universal philosophy’, or ‘a just enumeration of all such things and notions, to which names are to be assigned’. His ‘real character’ is the ‘shortest and plainest way for the attainment of real knowledge’.90 In a way that is reminiscent of Porphyry’s tree, of mnemonic–encyclopaedic arts, of Ramus’ dichotomous charts and Bacon’s tables of experience, he carves the universe into its constituent parts. Dalgarno claimed that Wilkins follows ‘that which is called new philosophy’, rejecting essentialist definitions because ‘the formes of things, if there were any such, were unknown to us’.91 Certainly, the tables themselves stray far beyond nature, classifying things as diverse and manufactured as ‘pickling’, ‘contract’ and ‘calumny’.92 The descriptions of substances in the tables consist of superficial and practical details, such as ‘flint’, which Wilkins elucidates as ‘more knobbed and unequal; used for the striking of fire’.93 However, in the preparatory material, he sounds far more committed to the essentialised, knowable world of Aristotelian logicians. He has drawn up, he tells us, ‘tables of substance, or the species of natural bodies, reduced under their several heads’. Recalling the simple, almost passively received concepts of the scholastics which are incapable of truth or falsity, he explains that he has reduced ‘all simple things and notions’ into his tables.94 Resurrecting those unitary apprehensions of substances that one might expect him to leave for dead, he refers to ‘that conceit which men have in their minds concerning a horse or tree’ which is ‘the notion or mental image of that beast, or natural thing’.95 (Note, again, the Aristotelian mentalism that is not an object but a passage to reality.) When he 89 90

91 93

Newton 1957, pp. 7; 8. Wilkins 1968, pp. 21; 20; sig. b1v. For an archival archaeology of the movement that produced Wilkins’ Essay and of the work itself, see Lewis 2003. For various interpretations of Wilkins’ project see Aarsleff (1982, pp. 239–77) on its Adamic/conventional nature; Davies (1987) on Wilkins’ purely figural map of things; Subbiondo (1992) for an appraisal of the context and content of Wilkins’ Essay and his aim for an isomorphism between language and reality. Dalgarno 2001d, pp. 367–8. 92 Wilkins 1968, pp. 261; 263; 273. Wilkins 1968, p. 61. 94 Wilkins 1968, sig. b2v. 95 Wilkins 1968, p. 20.


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comes to ‘natural grammar’, he declares that some of the radical words, or ‘integrals’, ‘signifie some entire thing or notion: whether the ens or thing itself, or the essence: of a thing’.96 Regardless of the contradictory currents that run through Wilkins’ Essay, pulling it now to reality and the scholastic textbooks of his youth, now to appearance and the mechanised vision of his peers, its ambition is clear and familiar: to map the world as we know it.97 His characters are compounded in such a way that ‘we should, by learning the character, and the names of things, be instructed likewise in their natures’.98 All these writers are engaged in bringing language into congruence with things. Sprat echoes this desire in his History of the Royal-Society (1667). He wants a return to the time ‘when men deliver’d so many things, in almost an equal number of words’.99 While this pervasive and polemical dualism must not blind us either to the simultaneous mentalism of these most ‘thing’-focused of language theorists,100 or to the wide scope of the word ‘thing’, neither should we be deaf to the hushed elision of the difference between concepts and things that gives the impression of an unmediated language of things.101 The mind does not obviously distort the world for any of these theorists, even if they differ about what kind of world it represents. In the logics we saw a realist, essentialist view of language. We see this duplicated by seventeenth-century philosophers of language who also blithely propose a language that names things essentially. realist, essentialist hangovers: rationalist penetration One might think that the Cartesians, distrusting the senses, would proffer a severely curtailed account of referential language. However, their words remain stringently connected to the world in two ways. First, in a move central to the new philosophy, Descartes’ rejection of the Aristotelian isomorphism between experience and reality is softened by his claim that our sensations are caused by things even though they do not resemble 96 97

98 101

Wilkins 1968, p. 298. See Cram and Maat (2001, pp. 26–9) on Wilkins’ complex approach to his Aristotelian heritage and on his agreements and disputes with Dalgarno; Aarsleff (1982, pp. 262–4) on the failure of Wilkins’ predetermined inventory to capture the variety of things, as evidenced by John Ray’s complaints about the unnatural constraints of the botanical tables; DeMott (1957) on the antipathy between natural science and the rigid universal language projects. Wilkins 1968, p. 21. 99 Sprat 1959, p. 113. 100 E.g. Wilkins 1968, p. 20. In a moment of reflection on the issue that is rare in early-modern texts, Hobbes (1981, p. 16) tells us that a ‘thing’ or res is any ‘nominatum’, whether existent or purely thought.

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them.102 Second, and with a confidence which rivals the Aristotelians, Descartes, by substituting the eye of the mind for the real eye, makes up for the poor representational content of our sensations and arrives at real description. By overturning Aristotle’s dictum that all natural knowledge must be derived from the senses, Descartes meets the sceptic head-on.103 He puts the sceptic in checkmate by moving in the queenly intellect, a faculty completely independent of the weak and fictionalising senses: ‘even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone’.104 Descartes’ confidence in the power of the intellect should not lead us to ignore the obstructions that he feels the sensations, images and passions of the body pose to that power.105 One of the most treacherous of all sensible things is language. In his second meditation, in trying to discover what this ‘I’ is that necessarily exists, he gets tangled in the infinite regresses of scholastic definitions, and moves deeper into the gloom, from ‘man’, to ‘rational’, to ‘animal’. Only after wrenching himself out of this verbal hole and proceeding to probe his extended ‘self’ does he come to what he truly is: res cogitans.106 However, for the most part, the tug of the body is suppressed – or repressed? – by the might of the intellect. Descartes emerges as a striking realist. Objects that ‘formally’ exist in the world exist ‘objectively’ in the mind: ‘although the reality which I am considering in my ideas is merely objective reality, I must not on that account suppose that the same reality need not exist formally in the causes of my ideas, but that it is enough for it to be present in them objectively’.107 102 103

104 105

106 107

Descartes 1984a, p. 55. Descartes 1985c, p. 129. Descartes adds to the ancient sceptical challenge the possibility (which he rejects) that there might not be a world outside at all and that it might all be a dream (1984a, p. 15). Descartes 1984a, p. 22. See Moriarty (2003) for a brilliant and complex account of how early-modern French thinkers – Descartes, Pascal and Malebranche in particular – are suspicious of experience, with regard not only to nature, but to morality and theology too. He gives the important caveat that while Descartes does dismiss experience in some ways, he also reinstates our ‘ordinary, embodied way of experiencing, coloured, however with a new understanding of its significance for us’ (p. 249). Descartes 1984a, pp. 16–17. Descartes 1984a, p. 29. Yolton (2000) argues that Descartes is a realist for whom objects become known with ‘no ontic switch’ (p. 585). See Behan (2000) for a modified, historicised view which locates Descartes in the context of scholastic formal signs; Ayers (1998b, p. 1066) on Descartes’ view that objects such as the sun have ‘objective’ existence in the mind and ‘formal’ existence in the world. Hausman and Hausman (1997) attribute to Descartes ‘intentional ideas’ (p. xiv), which thereby (p. 26) escape the problem of representation. McCracken (1998) argues that while for Descartes, sensation tells us nothing qualitative about body, it plays ‘an indispensable roˆle in the proof that bodies exist’ (p. 628). Schmaltz (1997) proposes that Descartes has a nativist account of sensation which, motivated by his rejection of scholastic theory, is not as strange as it first appears.


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Descartes gets the courage of his convictions from his belief that ‘everything that we clearly and distinctly understand is true’, a belief he derives from the argument that God (who so exceeds Descartes that Descartes could not have invented him) cannot deceive because this would be to attribute to him an impossible imperfection.108 The irresistibility of clear and distinct cognition is invoked to fill the gaps and silence the questions in his demonstrations. In a somewhat circular move, he even uses it to prove God’s existence.109 The ‘mental gaze’ delivers essences that are ‘immutable and eternal, and not invented by me or dependent on my mind’.110 We have clear and distinct ideas of the two substances that exist (corporeal and intelligent) and of their essences. ‘Extension in length, breadth and depth constitutes the nature of corporeal substance; and thought constitutes the nature of thinking substance.’ Mind and body are divided from each other by a ‘real distinction’.111 Meditating towards the truth, Descartes leads us from his room, with its hot fire that melts the wax, into his mind. Purely intellectually, albeit struggling through sense and language, it grasps the ‘extension of the wax’, while the misleading, subjective images fall away. His inconstant sense perceptions (the faint, sweet ‘taste of honey’, or the fading ‘scent of the flowers from which it is gathered’, or ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ before and after heating) are not inherent to wax. Instead, its properties are ‘extended, flexible and changeable’. The mind strips away sensation to reveal true ideas. With steely precision, even violation, the infallible ‘I’ ‘distinguish[es] the wax from its outward forms – take[s] the clothes off, as it were, and consider[s] it naked’.112 Descartes submits that there are certain ‘eternal truths’ or ‘common notions’, such as: ‘it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time; what is done cannot be undone; he who thinks cannot but exist while he thinks’.113 These are ‘speculative truths which are known solely by means of the natural light’.114 These maxims (the like of which Locke will drown in scorn) enable us to reason to deep truths about the world. For example: we can . . . easily come to know a substance by one of its attributes, in virtue of the common notion that nothingness possesses no attributes, that is to say, no properties or qualities. Thus, if we perceive the presence of some attribute, we

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109 112 114

Descartes 1984a, pp. 9; 43. See Larmore (1998, pp. 1171–3) on Descartes’ inference from certainty to realist truth. Descartes 1984a, p. 47. 110 Descartes 1984a, pp. 44–5. 111 Descartes 1985e, pp. 210; 213. Descartes 1984a, pp. 21; 20–1; 22. 113 Descartes 1985e, p. 209. Descartes 1984a, p. 11.

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can infer that there must also be present an existing thing or substance to which it may be attributed.115

Descartes’ scepticism, his promulgated tentativeness, is a brash contrivance for a comprehensive account of the mechanistic truth about things. He threatens to cut the world loose from our mind when he repudiates the Aristotelian view that our perceptions somehow resemble the things that cause them.116 But while this novel disjunction will proceed to make less self-assured philosophers question the referential capacity of their words, it is no obstacle to Descartes. Freed from the sceptic’s shackles, Descartes’ descendants devise similarly essentialist and holistic dualist accounts of things. In De la recherche de la verite´ (1674–5), the book which was to provoke from Locke an excoriating review, Malebranche’s universals are eternal, immutable entities, existing independently of human minds. They are in God, who is ‘the intelligible world, or the place of the spirits, as the material world is the place of bodies’. We can understand these ideas by virtue of our soul’s union with God.117 For Spinoza in his Ethics (1677), there is one substance with infinite attributes of which we know two – the material and intellectual. They run in parallel with each other, as two aspects of the same thing.118 This foray into Cartesian philosophy serves two functions in my argument. The first is to counter the widespread assumption in the secondary literature that Cartesians considered language solely as the expression of thought, and that this constituted a rival theory of language.119 They did indeed, as we saw in the Grammaire and the Logique of 115 116

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Descartes 1985e, p. 210. For another example see p. 288. Descartes 1985b, p. 81. Della Rocca (2002) emphasises Descartes’ double commitment to certainty and doubt. Romanowski (1973) gives a distinctive account of the tension between science and discourse in Descartes. Jolley (1992, p. 417) describes Descartes’ pioneering and influential role in demolishing Aristotelianism and replacing it with the mechanical worldview. Garber (2001) emphasises the importance of Descartes’ physics in his wider project. Malebranche 1694, i.iii, pp. 124; 121. Locke had this translation (Harrison and Laslett 1965, pp. 182–3). See Larmore (1998, pp. 1174–5) on Malebranche’s concession to the sceptic that we cannot demonstrate the existence of material objects (which does not deter his otherwise grand and dogmatic claims for the truths of reason). On his fight with Arnauld over whether ideas are objects or acts of perception see Yolton 1987, pp. 319–23. Kremer (1997) characterises Arnauld as a representationalist, an interpretation for which he admits ‘there is little direct textual evidence’ (p. 77). Cf. Nadler (2000, pp. 4–5) on the anti-sceptical nature of Malebranche’s doctrine of ‘vision in God’. Spinoza 1994, pp. 9; 33. See Aquila (1978) on the identity of thought and object in Spinoza. Locke owned the Ethics in Spinoza’s Opera posthuma (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 238). On its rival status see Cohen 1977, p. xxi, and Padley 1985 and 1988, i. Chomsky (1966) singles out the Cartesians as presaging his own innatist, ‘deep structure’ linguistic theories. See Salmon (1972 pp. 12 and 34) on the Chomskianism of the universal language projects; Aarsleff (1982, pp. 101–19)


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Port-Royal, give an elaborate account of the mental discourse that informs the verbal. However, in so doing they were continuing an immemorial logical tradition. Moreover, these manuals keep the world in their sights, as we saw. The Cartesians do tend to collapse ‘things’ into ‘ideas’, rather than ‘ideas’ into ‘things’ (although they often subsume them under the traditional and confused ‘choses’).120 Descartes explains that we ‘use words, or put together other signs . . . in order to declare our thoughts to others’.121 In his Philosophical Discourse concerning Speech, conformable to Cartesian Principles (1668) Louis Ge´rauld de Cordemoy declares that ‘to speak is in general nothing else, but to give signes of our thoughts’.122 But to leave us in no doubt about Descartes’ simultaneous commitment to linguistic reference and to give us a taste of things to come – when the world really does fall away from language – let us look at a testy interchange between him and Hobbes over the ‘truth’ delivered by language. Hobbes objects that ‘the inferences in our reasoning tell us nothing at all about the nature of things, but merely tell us about the labels applied to them’.123 Descartes replies with uncontained derision that: when we reason, this is not a linking of names but of the things that are signified by the names, and I am surprised that the opposite view should occur to anyone . . . And surely on his account, when he concludes that the mind is a motion he might just as well conclude that the earth is sky, or anything else he likes.124

The Cartesians, in conjunction with their exceptionally explicit account of mentalism, had no qualms about the realist scope of their words – which brings me to my second point. Their language is ambitious, embracing the whole world and piercing its essence.

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for a criticism of Chomsky; Bracken (1984, pp. 113–23) and Hacking (1988) for ripostes to Aarsleff’s anti-Chomskianism. See Maclean (1999) for a comparison of Aristotelian and Cartesian mental language; Hacking (1975b, p. 33) on mental discourse as the language that mattered generally to philosophy in ‘the heyday of ideas’; Sorabji (1982) on the predominance of discursive thought in ancient theories of cognition. On the priority of thought over language and its connection to Cartesian dualism see Buroker 1997. Cottingham (1997) argues that ‘Descartes unequivocally advanced the claim that there is no thought without language’ (p. 30), which thereby undermines the notion of ‘Cartesian privacy’ (p. 32). Descartes 1964–74, xi , p. 4: ‘vous sçavez bien que les paroles, n’ayant aucune ressemblance avec les choses qu’elles signifient’. Descartes 1985c, p. 140. Cordemoy 1668, sig. A7v (following the second A4; verso side of British Library pagination p. 7). Locke had a version of this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 116); cf. MS. Locke c. 25, fo. 26r where Cordemoy’s name appears in Locke’s journal index for 1677. Descartes 1984b, p. 125. Descartes 1984b, pp. 125; 126. For a reading of Hobbes’ and Descartes’ contrasting views on the relationship between language and consciousness see Ross 1988.

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Locke, language and early-modern philosophy the human intervention

The dominant view that language represents the world that we have seen promulgated by pedagogues and philosophers alike was undercut by a radically different story which had also been passed down the centuries, to be reinvented in the seventeenth century. According to this story, the meaning of words is determined less by external reference than by human, communal invention. There are two connected elements in this alternative approach to language. The first identifies linguistic origins in mutable and unscientific common usage. The second is rooted in a broadly defined scepticism and stresses the interpretative, subjective content of our referential words. The first differs from the realist programme in emphasis, rather than being theoretically incompatible with it, whereas the second threatens to jettison the world altogether from the language–mind–world equation. We have already met the first element in the conflict between grammarians. The battle lines were drawn between use and the world as the source of linguistic structure. The use-based proposal spills out of, as it doubtless spills into, a more general belief in the cultural contingency of language, loudly championed by renaissance humanists. In his attack on the ‘pseudodialecticians’ (1519), Vives argues that it is wrong ‘to use a selfinvented speech instead of that which other men use’. In his sights are the unintelligible liberties of the scholastics. ‘The people’ are the authors of language to whom grammar, dialectic and rhetoric should pay lip service.125 We remember Lamy bemoaning the irrevocably democratic ‘tyranny of custom’.126 Another facet of this theme is the stress on the deep arbitrariness of the relation between words and things. Conventionalism is by no means inconsistent with a realist view of language. Indeed, most realists sign up to this position. However, they tend not to dwell on it, whereas those writers who focus more on the human than the natural sphere highlight the sovereign role of human will in the creation of meaning. In A Discourse of the Knowledg of Beasts (1657), Marin Cureau de la Chambre explains that ‘speech is not a natural sign, but a sign of institution, which hath no signification but that which is imposed on it by the agreement and consent made amongst those which use it’. If speech is only the arbitrary association of certain words with certain things, then we can teach language to animals, as when we cojoin the sound ‘bread’ to the 125

Vives 1979, p. 55.

126

Lamy 1986, p. 207.


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thing we give to a hungry parrot.127 Hobbes voices the controversial opinion that language always was arbitrary; even Adam’s language did not naturally denote things. Ambivalent on the matter in Leviathan, Hobbes initially declares that ‘the first author of speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sight’. However, he goes on to say that ‘the Scripture goeth no further in this matter’ and muses that God’s initial and limited authorisation ‘was sufficient to direct him to adde more names, as the experience and use of the creatures should give him occasion’.128 In De homine Hobbes wages an allout assault on the theory of Edenic speech. Even ‘the first man, by his own will imposed names on just a few animals’. ‘Speech could not have had a natural origin except by the will of man himself.’ Having reminded his readers of ‘the confusion of languages at Babel’, he ridicules as ‘childish’ those who say that ‘names have been imposed on single things according to the nature of those things. For who could have it so when the nature of things is everywhere the same while languages are diverse? And what relationship hath a call (that is, a sound) with an animal (that is, a body)?’129 Pufendorf repeats Hobbes’ cynicism about Adamic speech. Although one might find significant etymological roots in Adam’s words, those ‘primitives . . . signify merely at pleasure’. Pufendorf gives the following example: ‘though Adam gave this reason for the name Eve, Because she was the mother of all living; yet [that] the word Hava should import to live, is absolutely owing to imposition’.130 This repudiation of the possibility of natural language evokes an original and unbridgeable gap between language and the world. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Felton reiterates the Ovidian prospect of unstoppable linguistic mutation. ‘Languages, like our Bodies, are in a perpetual flux, and stand in need of recruits to supply the place of those words that are continually falling off thro’ disuse.’131 While linguistic conventionalism does not necessarily entail unrealistic language, it could intimate it. Sextus Empiricus goes so far as to make the link explicit in his influential Hypotyposes (translated into Latin by Henri Etienne in 1562).132 By contrast with cultural concepts, natural science is supposed to be ‘a thing that is firm and invariable’, being dependent on external existences and independent of our wills. However, because ‘the significance of names is based on convention and not on nature’, Sextus 127

128 131

Cureau de la Chambre 1657, pp. 266; 264–5. See Serjeantson (2001) on the signification of the passions in animal speech in early-modern philosophy. Hobbes 1996, p. 24. 129 Hobbes 1993, pp. 38; 39. 130 Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 276. Felton 1971, p. 101. 132 Larmore 1998, p. 1145.

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asks rhetorically, ‘how would it be possible for a science capable of dividing a name into its significations to exist’? Logic cannot be ‘as some imagine, a ‘‘science of things which signify and are signified’’ ’.133 Sextus extends arbitrariness beyond the words and into their meanings. The content of words about the world is a matter of convention, not external reference. Sextus exemplifies language’s fluid foundation with Anaxagoras’ provocative proof that ‘snow is white’: ‘snow is frozen water, and water is black; therefore snow also is black’.134 According to this way of thinking about language, words seem cut adrift from any real foundation, yoked instead to the ephemeral (mis) understandings of human communities. It has been suggested that the humanists’ elevation of use indicates the ‘deontologisation’ of language, whereby meaning is determined by the relation of signs to each other, rather than by reference out of the system of signs, to the signified. But this is an anachronistic, Saussurean interpretation.135 In itself, the emphasis on use as the maker of meaning does not jeopardise the capacity of words to refer to the world, which, as we have seen in Aristotle and beyond, they can do perfectly arbitrarily. However, while there is no fundamental incongruity between usage and reference, the focus on the former at the expense of the latter is an alternative focus. And it paints an alternative portrait of language – one grounded more in its speakers than in the things it is supposed to represent. This is a picture that comes into sharp focus in the context of scepticism. This second element in the alternative view of language is not unconnected to the first, but is also bound up with the questioning, pro and con, rhetorical humanistic culture. By ‘scepticism’ I refer not only to the ripples of ancient theories that reached the sixteenth century, Academic as well as Pyrrhonian, but also (and often relatedly) to doubts about the fit between conventional (often Aristotelian) concepts–words and the world, and, more generally, to fears about human weakness and fallibility. It is crucial to note that this conglomeration of uncertainties nestles cheek by jowl with the self-assurance of new philosophical developments. As we have already begun to see, many of the new philosophers who raise questions about the imagination of man and about the correspondence between 133 135

Sextus 1976, p. 291. 134 Sextus 1976, p. 23. Waswo (1987) argues for a ‘relational’ semantics (p. 3) in the renaissance, a view he develops in Waswo 1999a, where he maintains that the meaning of a word was constituted by use (p. 29). See Monfasani (1989) for a critique of Waswo and an assertion of Valla’s (Waswo’s main example) ‘referential’ theory of meaning (p. 317); Maclean (1992, pp. 1–8) for balanced assessment of the issues.


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language and the world propose realist schemes of their own with as much conviction as they pull down the old ones. While ancient scepticism is certainly not the central and exclusive motor of philosophical change, new philosophers instead being concerned to discover and re-describe the world, these assertive re-descriptions are not incompatible with a spectrum of suspicions about the erring thinker/speaker. Indeed, they are bound tightly together. I turn first to the extreme end of the spectrum – to the barrier that sensation puts between language and the world. Sextus explains that the Pyrrhonist draws no connection between appearance and reality. He ‘announces his own impression in an undogmatic way, without making any positive assertion regarding the external realities’.136 The inconsistency of sense-impressions leads him to conclude that they cannot tell anything of what they represent. A jaundiced patient sees the world in yellow.137 If one presses one’s eyeball (apparently), things seem ‘oblong and narrow’.138 While the Pyrrhonist grants the fact of the appearance, he doubts its verisimilitude.139 He remains firmly at the phenomenal level, the visceral presence of which is beyond doubt, being the effect of ‘involuntary affections’.140 He shares the relativism of Protagoras, who had affirmed that ‘man is the measure of all things.’141 The question which haunts new philosophers and which Sextus answers negatively is whether the qualities we perceive in objects subsist in those objects. Divergent experience of things forces one to reject the claim that ‘nature made the senses commensurate with the objects of sense’.142 When the congruity between subject and object is shattered, so too is the congruity between language and things. While Sextus focuses on the epistemological problem rather than its linguistic consequences, he does, in addition to the concerns about linguistic conventionality, meditate on the opacity of logical definitions. Even ‘so familiar an object’ as a man can only be understood by direct experience, not by words. ‘If we propose to define absolutely all things, we shall define nothing, because of the regress ad infinitum.’143 Of themselves, words lead us no further than their sounds. Only experience can fill sounds with sense and this is forever separated from reality. Words about things can refer neither truly nor essentially to those things but merely record our 136

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Sextus 1976, p. 11. See Bailey (2002) on how the Pyrrhonist can live with his denial of any rationally justified belief. Sextus 1976, p. 29. 138 Sextus 1976, p. 19. 139 Sextus 1976, p. 15. 140 Sextus 1976, p. 17. Sextus 1976, p. 131. But the Pyrrhonist does not, like the Protagorean, assert dogmatically that ‘matter is in flux’ (Sextus 1976, p. 131). Sextus 1976, p. 59. 143 Sextus 1976, pp. 289; 285.

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unreliable and phenomenal perceptions of them. Moreover, the infinite particularity of things slips out of the grasp of abstract language. Far from mapping the world, our linguistic classification system, like our moral system, is the victim of contingent and changeable convention and experience. ‘There is a plague on man: his opinion that he knows something.’144 Montaigne reads Sextus with relish, declaring that, despite our claims to quintessential knowledge,145 we know no more than our treacherous senses tell us. They are ‘the beginning and the end of human knowledge’, but they ‘change and corrupt’, rather than represent, external objects.146 Their fluctuating information makes them unreliable sources. Montaigne repeats that what is seen by an eye now squeezed, now free, is different. What seemed like a straight oar seems crooked in the water.147 In the face of such permutation, sensations – our only guide to the world outside – cannot be trusted to resemble their origins. We are estranged from the world. ‘Nature is intended to exercise our ingenuity, like a painting veiled in mists and obscured by an infinite variety of wrong lights.’148 Montaigne depicts himself flailing in a sensuous maze from which he cannot escape. ‘We are going round in circles . . . We retreat into infinity. Our mental faculty of perception is never directly in touch with outside objects – which are perceived via the senses, and the senses do not embrace an outside object but only their own impressions of it.’149 We cannot directly perceive things. Our perception is active, interpretative. We cannot ‘receive anything without changing it’.150 ‘Things do not lodge in us with their forms and essence; they do not come in by the force of their own authority’, as is proved by our divergent reactions to things.151 We are in a sense the authors of things. Montaigne develops and innovates on the subject of language. Echoing the scepticism about linguistic–real classification and drawing on the old example of the monstrous birth that we met in Plato and that hounds subsequent philosophers, Montaigne asserts that ‘what we call monsters are not so’, but only genera ‘unknown to Man’.152 Our classifications of things elude their divine organisation. Like Sextus, Montaigne lampoons the

144 147 150 152

Montaigne 1991, p. 543. 145 Montaigne 1991, p. 588. 146 Montaigne 1991, pp. 663; 667. Montaigne 1991, pp. 675; 660. 148 Montaigne 1991, p. 602. 149 Montaigne 1991, p. 679. Montaigne 1991, p. 634. 151 Montaigne 1991, p. 633. Montaigne 1991, p. 808. See Cressy (2000, pp. 9–50) on early-modern responses to monstrous births. See Thomas (1983) on the changing perceptions of the natural world in the early-modern period that narrowed the perceived gap between men and animals.


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supposed real definitions of the dialecticians. He rejects as purely verbal and circular the ‘true’ propositions spun out of logical classifications: ‘A stone is a body.’ – But if you argue more closely: ‘And what is a body?’ – ‘Substance.’ – ‘And what is a substance?’ And so on; you will eventually corner your opponent on the last page of his lexicon. We change one word for another, often for one less known. I know what ‘man’ is better than I know what is animal, mortal or reasonable. In order to satisfy one doubt they give me three; it is a Hydra’s head.153

The rejection of the logicians’ world is not a marginal attack on a marginal language. It was in the logics that gentlemen learned the truth of things. In pulling the ground from logical language, critics pulled the ground from learned language about the world. For Montaigne, words are doomed to miss the mark of the world, but in disingenuous mouths they veer off more sharply, as in Anaxagoras’ proof that snow is black.154 Montaigne targets disputatious cunning for removing language an unnecessary distance from things. The fruit of arguing pro and contra ‘is the destruction and annihilation of the truth’.155 However, he is ambivalent about verbal juggling because he is also sympathetic to its exposure of the insecure foundations of our knowledge and speech. Although snow seems white, it may not be ‘truly so in essence’.156 While he disdains the aggressive and falsifying verbosity that moulds a gentleman, he also fears language and the world will be forever divorced. Pascal, Montaigne’s horrified but avid reader, draws on scepticism to strip reason of its authority. Alluding to the gulf between perception and reality, he says that ‘everything that cannot be understood does nevertheless not cease to exist’.157 His Port-Royal associate, Nicole, is also conscious of our myopia in his Essais de morale. In the words of Locke, his engrossed translator, he declares that ‘the sight of our minds and of our bodies are much alike: both superficial, both bounded. Our eyes pierce not into the inside of things: they stick at the surface.’ Moreover, ‘though our knowledge be very little, our certainty is yet less’.158 The epistemological scepticism of these two Frenchmen feeds off their Augustinian

153 156 157

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Montaigne 1991, p. 1213. 154 Sextus 1976, p. 23. 155 Montaigne 1991, p. 1048. Montaigne 1991, p. 676; cf. p. 561 on the merits of arguing on both sides about snow being black. Pascal 1995a, p. 79 (Pascal 1963, p. 530: ‘tout ce qui est incompre´hensible ne laisse pas d’eˆtre’). Locke owned two editions of the Penseés (Nouvelle e´d. 1678 and Lyon 1675) (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 204). Nicole 1828, pp. 60; 61.

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desperation about the tight hold of original sin, and plunges us into the dancing, dappled shade of a platonic cave.159 There are two further French philosophers whose engagement with scepticism fuels and is fuelled by a sceptical attitude toward language. The first is Pierre Gassendi. A ‘mitigated sceptic’, he steers a middle course between scepticism and dogmatism in a way that proved popular in England, notably with Locke.160 Gassendi finds his particular footing, laid out in his Syntagma (1658), with Epicureanism. It leads him beyond ‘public knowledge’, or sensation, to ‘things hidden naturally or temporarily’, but not to ‘totally hidden things since our ignorance of them is invincible’.161 He takes sense perception as his certain starting point, those ‘appearances’ or ta phainomena that even Pyrrhonists accept, and takes them as signs from which inferences can be drawn about the truth that lies beneath them.162 In an empirico-rationalist narrative that echoes Aristotle and prefigures Locke, Gassendi explains how we can reason from sense experience.163 Words are essential in this tentative, intellectual bridge between appearance and reality. They signify the je ne sais quoi.164 They serve as ‘substitutes’ for those things that ‘cannot be brought into our presence or cannot appear before our eyes’.165 Words reach out to things beyond our sensory ken, enriching and furthering our understanding of things at the same time that they mark our experiential limits. Gassendi’s mitigated scepticism limits the scope of language, or rather, it causes him severely to curtail the excesses of his (Aristotelian) linguistic inheritance. He embarks on this demolition exercise in his earliest work, Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624), a ground-clearing 159

160

161 162

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Parish (1999, p. 484) comments on the Jansenist characterisation of language as fallen discourse. Marshall (1994, p. xx) argues on the basis of Locke’s translation that he had not yet relinquished his belief in original sin. See Larmore (1998, p. 1158) on Gassendi’s engagement with scepticism more as a way of attacking Aristotelianism than as a response to the ‘ ‘‘sceptical crisis’’ at the beginning of the seventeenth century’, and on the Royal Society’s embracing of the hypothetical middle way. See James (1987) on the mitigated scepticism of Mersenne and Gassendi. Lennon (1993b) argues that Locke’s whole project should be seen as a contribution, under the overwhelming impact of Gassendi, towards the materialist giants in their battle against the idealist gods (Cartesians). Ayers (1997, p. 4) puts Locke in the empiricist tradition, particularly as articulated by Gassendi. Milton (2000c) argues for Gassendi’s small influence on Locke. Gassendi 1972b, pp. 326; 290. Gassendi 1972b, p. 329; cf. p. 333. These signs are divided into ‘empirical’, where the signified is ‘hidden temporarily’, such as smoke in the case of fire, and ‘indicative’, where the signified is always hidden but must exist for the sign to occur, such as sweat in the case of pores (p. 332). Gassendi 1972b, p. 333: ‘all knowledge which we have in the mind has its beginning in the senses’. See Osler (2000) on the tenacity of Aristotelian final causes in Gassendi’s natural philosophy. For a dazzling exploration of the je ne sais quoi in early-modern writing, see Scholar 2005. Gassendi 1972b, p. 329.


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piece for the erection of a viable epistemological (and linguistic) project. Caught up in youthful excitement about akatalepsia, he marvels at ‘how great a gulf divides the Spirit of Nature from the human mind’,166 and denies ‘that one can penetrate to the inner nature of things’.167 We cannot know ‘anything in Aristotelian fashion’.168 Gassendi asks rhetorically how Aristotle thinks the understanding can ‘peer into something’, when he himself admits that ‘there is nothing in the understanding that has not first been in the senses’.169 Our knowledge (and therefore our words) cannot extend beyond the information we derive from our senses. Gassendi despairs at the supposition of ‘souls’ in the world. ‘There are even some who think that stones and metals are alive.’ He digresses at painfully amusing length on what on earth the ‘form’ of a flea might mean.170 Having asked belligerently what is ‘the nature of a horse’s soul’, he seems to soften when he lands on ‘man’ whose ‘difference’, ‘at least’, we know: ‘rationality’. But there follows a torrent of abuse. Having laid bare our ignorance of the ‘differences’ of things, he rounds on the concept of ‘rationality’, drowning it in a sea of questions about what it means, all of which are unanswerable.171 The word ‘rational’ is perfectly obscure; its explication would take so long ‘that a full day will not be enough . . . and the light will fail you’. Definitions are not ‘clear and comprehensible’. He gives the example of ‘motion’, which scholastics helpfully elucidate as ‘the act of a being in potentiality insofar as it is in potentiality’. ‘Great god!’, snorts Gassendi, ‘is there any stomach strong enough to digest that?’ The words in the definition are all themselves in need of definition, ‘from which will follow the need for giving more definitions ad infinitum’.172 The verbal pillars of Aristotelianism crumble into powder, their essentialist scope an insignificant fantasy. The gap between words and things affects not only Aristotle’s dispensable ‘technical terms’ but also indispensable, everyday words. These fall into two types. The first are the qualities of things. Using the sceptical argument about divergent sense perception, Gassendi makes the standard new philosophical claim that qualities are not in things, but in us.173 166 168 169 171 173

Gassendi 1972a, p. 19. 167 Gassendi 1972a, p. 105. Gassendi 1972a, p. 104. Gassendi 1972a, p. 70. 170 Gassendi 1972a, pp. 41; 97–9. Gassendi 1972a, pp. 71; 72–3. 172 Gassendi 1972a, pp. 73; 74. Gassendi 1972a, pp. 91–3. He probes the supposedly private, mental nature of meaning by asserting that it is the public object which determines meaning, rather than the private sensation of that object (p. 92): ‘For even if snow appears red to me, I will still call it white since all men are in general agreement that the color of snow is to be called white; and although the rose may seem white to me, I will still call it red since this rosy color is generally called red . . . it is necessary that

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They are relative, not referential, images. The second type of problematic ordinary words are universals.174 These are not misleading if understood for what they are (purely conceptual or linguistic classifications) but they are shot through with the scholastic misconception that they pick out real categories of things. Gassendi declares that ‘these great universals are nothing more than what the grammarians call common nouns, or ones that can be applied to more than one object, for example ‘‘man’’ or ‘‘horse’’ ’.175 Every thing in the world is ‘unique’, only thoughts and names are universal.176 Conceptual and linguistic unity is derived from ‘similarity’ between particulars.177 For example, the mind forms the ‘universal concept of a man from having seen Plato, Socrates, and others, and has named them both with the same universal noun because of the properties they share’.178 The mind generalises from particulars ‘either by joining or by separating’.179 Although his own Logica appears to accept our convenient classes of things, in his Exercitationes Gassendi tears up the map of the world which allots things to their specific squares. He uses the familiar example of ‘monster’ to expose the unnaturalness of the lines. His is ‘that little one-legged girl whom we saw not so long ago in our Provence’ and who makes a mockery of universal statements like ‘every man is a biped’.180 These supposedly eternal ‘first truths’, the bedrock of true ratiocination, are really contingent and liable to dissolve with contradictory instances. Gassendi depicts nature as slipping out of any inflexible classifications, the most rigid ones of which are the ten categories. ‘You must realize, my good man, that things themselves are not contained by the categories, but only the concepts and names of things.’181 Gassendi pans out from the particularly absurd and ragged straitjacket of the categories to linguistic–conceptual taxonomies in general, and announces their inevitable disjunction from things. Gassendi is keen to qualify his nominalism with the assurance that universal words do, albeit in an abstracted sense, refer to particular things. His nominalist break between concepts–words and things does not entail ‘no reality beneath concepts or words’.182 Linguistic reference is

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175 178 181

the term by which a certain thing is designated in a society be absolutely fixed even if it is possible that various appearances are represented by the single term’. Locke repeats this claim at Locke 1975, p. 389 (ii.xxxii.15). For a discussion of this apparent contradiction in Locke’s linguistic theory see footnote 55, p. 221, chapter 8 below. See Milton (2000b) on the continuing centrality of the nominalist/realist divide in seventeenthcentury philosophy. Gassendi 1972a, pp. 42–3. 176 Gassendi 1972b, p. 43. 177 Gassendi 1972b, p. 44. Gassendi 1972b, p. 46. 179 Gassendi 1981, p. 86. 180 Gassendi 1972a, p. 78. Gassendi 1972a, p. 57. 182 Gassendi 1972a, p. 46.


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underpinned by a causal link between images and things themselves. An image is ‘true’ when ‘the idea of the thing which we imagine conforms to the thing itself ’. This might be the case with a four-footed, running horse, but not with a winged, flying one.183 In his Logica he even goes so far as to preserve conceptual simplicity for substantives, such as ‘man’. In line with an unbroken logical tradition, ‘ ‘‘man’’ is simply conceived without affirmation or denial’.184 While this commonplace may not be representative of his more authentic views, Gassendi certainly has some optimism about verbal reference – an optimism that reverberates in his assertion that the world is made of atoms at the same time that he denies substantial forms. Words may map the superficies of things (and even scratch the surface through reason) in an interpretative rather than an absolute sense, but they hold them truly and wholly, albeit loosely, all the same. Malebranche, the second French philosopher whose encounter with scepticism and the new philosophy causes him to reflect cynically on language, is of a more rationalist ilk. He too uses the sceptical grounds of multifarious sense perception to dispute the Aristotelian inherence of sensible qualities in things. ‘Salt that is savoury to the tongue is pricking and smarting to a wound.’ Names of qualities are ‘equivocal’ because they ‘confound the modes of existence peculiar to bodies, with the modifications of the soul’. For example, ‘when they say that fire is hot, grass green, sugar sweet, they understand . . . that fire contains in it what they feel when they warm themselves; that grass has painted upon it the colours they see; that sugar is endued with that sweetness they taste when they eat it’. This linguistic misunderstanding is embedded in the speech of ‘children, and the vulgar of men’.185 It is an intuitive error that is propagated rather than purged by language – language that does not tell it like it is, but only compounds, and even creates, our delusions about the world. In English philosophy too, epistemological and linguistic scepticism run together, generating and inflaming each other. While Bacon believes in the possibility of the primordial threesome of words, notions and things, he is haunted by the idols that menace the marriage. The most ingrained of these, the ‘idols of the tribe’, concern the perceptual relationship between the mind and the world at a level where one might imagine that nothing could go awry. But in fact, perceptions ‘are 183 184 185

Gassendi 1981, p. 84. Gassendi 1981, p. 83. See Kraye (1999) on the stylistic effects of Epicureanism. Malebranche 1694, ii.vi, p. 55.

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reflections of man, not of the universe’. We project our desires and visions on to things, instead of receiving them straight. ‘The human understanding is like an uneven mirror that cannot reflect truly the rays from objects, but distorts and corrupts the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.’186 The ‘enchanted glass’ of the mind does not duplicate things, but infuses them with its own self-gratificatory fantasies.187 This subjectivist, interpretative, creative account of the human understanding is further infected by the ‘idols of the marketplace’ – words that do not reflect things, but paint an unreal picture. Bacon is obsessed by the way that language, particularly syllogistic language, affords ‘no passage to Nature’.188 Born in the commerce of the common man, words are ‘wrongly’ and ‘inappropriately’ applied. They therefore ‘do violence to the understanding and throw everything into confusion’.189 There are two types of idolatrous word. The first are ‘names of things that do not exist’ or ‘names without [corresponding] things’, like ‘prime mover’, ‘planetary orbs’, ‘the element of fire’. While these can simply be rejected, the second type is ‘obscure and deep-seated’ because it concerns everyday and indispensable words whose foundations we do not question. They are names of qualities like ‘moist’ – ‘which do exist but are muddled and vague, and hastily and unjustly derived from things’.190 These misleading words are ‘inseparable from our nature and condition of life’.191 They cannot be eradicated, only watched and circumnavigated, which suggests the profound intractability of the problem. The meaning of words is determined by incorrect notions. At the same time, the misleading words force themselves upon our minds, a problem Bacon grapples with in his explanation of how syllogistic logic allows ‘nature to slip from its grasp’.192 The syllogism consists of propositions, propositions of words, and words are tokens and symbols of notions. If therefore the very notions of the mind (which are, as it were, the soul of words, and the basis of the whole system and structure) are badly and carelessly derived from things, and vague, inadequately defined and circumscribed, in short, if they are defective in many ways, then everything collapses.193 186

187 188

189 192 193

Bacon 1994b, p. 54; Solomon (1991) gives an unusual interpretation of the way in which Baconian scientists are readers of nature. Wood (1991) argues that Locke was greatly influenced by Bacon. Bacon 1996b, p. 227. Bacon 1994a, pp. 19; 20. Cf. Bacon 1994b, p. 69: ‘in Aristotle’s Physics, you hear little but the words of dialectic; and in his Metaphysics too, under a more imposing name’. Bacon 1994b, p. 55. 190 Bacon 1994b, pp. 64–5. 191 Bacon 1996b, p. 228. Bacon 1994a, p. 19. Bacon 1994a, p. 20; cf. Bacon 1994b, p. 46: ‘the syllogism consists of propositions, propositions of words, and words are tokens of notions. Therefore – and this is the heart of the matter – if the


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Given the dependence of language on its epistemological base, words are only as true as the thoughts they represent. Although it is obvious that thoughts mean everything to language, philosophers rarely refer to the inextricability of thoughts and words, tending to think of them as easily separable. Bacon’s deep insertion of language into epistemology and vice versa is a key moment. We have to wait for Locke to unravel the devastating consequences of this interdependence. But it would be wrong to leave Bacon in such a cynical mood. His promulgation of the epistemological–linguistic problem is part of its exorcism, even if he indicates that it can never be entirely obliterated. He resolutely repudiates the sceptic who throws up his hands in doubt and indifference and preaches ‘Acatalepsy’. He stresses ‘again and again, that the human senses and understanding, for all their weaknesses, must not have their authority disparaged, but should rather be supported’.194 And as we have seen, he thinks it is possible to write out experience in such a way that the gap between words and things is snapped shut. The new mechanists have come a long way from Bacon, opening up that gap between words and things, with thoughts which bear little relation to those things. Kenelm Digby typifies the transformation that the way of ideas causes in linguistic theory. Having warned us in his Two Treatises (1644) that it is ‘most dangerous’ when people ‘confound the true and reall natures of things, with the conceptions they frame of them in their own mind’, he lays out the implications for language in a way that confirms his Aristotelian heritage while treading a road to Locke: It is true words serve to express things; but if you observe the matter well, you will perceive they do so, onely according to the pictures we make of them in our own thoughts, and not according as the things are in their proper natures. Which is very reasonable it should be so, since the soul, that giveth the names, hath nothing of the things in her but these notions; and therefore cannot give other names but such as must signifie the things by mediation of these notions.195

Digby’s account of the ineliminable and unrealistic mediation of notions is superseded, however, by his ambitious account of knowledge. ‘Thus we see knowledge hath no limits; nothing escaping the toyles of science; all that ever was, that is, or can ever be, is by them circled in . . . in what an immense ocean one may securely saile, by that never varying compasse’.196 While words might immediately and necessarily signify only

194

notions themselves are muddled and carelessly derived from things, the whole superstructure is shaky’. Bacon 1994b, pp. 76; 77. 195 Digby 1645, p. 2. 196 Digby 1645, p. 31.

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notions, Digby does not approach Locke’s ‘vast ocean of being’ where one ‘can find no sure footing’.197 Robert Boyle goes a lot further in probing the interpretative, creative character of the mind’s understanding of things, in a way that will deeply impress Locke. However, he gives a confident, probable ‘hypothesis’ of what the world is at base, or in essentia.198 It is made of catholic matter or, to use his coinage, ‘insensible corpuscles’ organised by motion and their interaction.199 He lays out this world-view in The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666), an expropriation of the Aristotelian world-view. ‘Forms’ are redescribed as ‘essential modifications’ of matter, that is, size, shape, motion and ‘texture’ (the spatial arrangement of the corpuscles).200 These ‘primary qualities’ are in a sense the ‘real essences’ of things. We cannot know them through our senses, but we can name them ex hypothesi. However, while Boyle gives an essentialist, albeit probable, account of our knowledge (and naming) of the imperceptible world, he gives a sceptical one of our knowledge (and naming) of the perceptible world. First, he dismisses beliefs that gain credence merely because they have words to represent them. They are ‘grounded on such technical terms or forms of speaking that suppose the truth of such opinions’. But phrases such as ‘four elements’ or ‘substantial forms’ have no grounding ‘in rerum natura’.201 Aristotelian definitions seem to be an emblem of the void at the heart of the philosophical system out of which they are spun. ‘Quality is that by which a thing is said to be qualis.’ This definition consumes itself, unable to escape the verbal circle. The problem of definitional tautology is not restricted to Aristotelian nonsense but affects language in general. Words such as ‘saltness, sourness, green, blue’ cannot be understood through a definition, but only by experience.202 It is not just that language does not, but that it cannot, take us to the world. Boyle reveals a rift between language–perception and the world. Familiarly, he focuses on sensible qualities as the locus of this disjunction. Like Locke’s other friend and mentor, the observational doctor Sydenham, Boyle explains that the senses tell us nearly everything we know about bodies but that, unfortunately, their missives are more imaginative than

197 198 199 200

201

Locke 1975, p. 47 (i.i.7). See McMullin (1990) on Boyle’s and others’ reconceptualisations of the quality of knowledge. Boyle 1979a, p. 69. Boyle 1979a, pp. 69; 71. Locke owned The Origins of Forms and Qualities According to the Corpuscular Philosophy (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 91). See Golinski 1990b. Boyle 1979a, pp. 5; 6. 202 Boyle 1979a, pp. 29; 30.


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real.203 We perceive and name ‘qualities’ as though they subsisted in the things themselves, whereas in fact they are produced by our sense organs. Ideas of things are caused by the ‘relation that happens to be betwixt those primary accidents of the sensible object and the peculiar texture of the organ it affects’.204 Primary qualities in the bodies themselves effect radically different secondary qualities in us. The world is therefore fundamentally not as we see and name it. The problem is that we suppose the contrary. ‘We have been from our infancy apt to imagine that these sensible qualities are real beings in the objects they denominate.’ But there is nothing ‘real’ in the bodies except their corpuscular arrangement.205 The Aristotelians speak as though there were ‘real qualities’, such as ‘whiteness’ (the ‘simple natures’ that Bacon pursues).206 Boyle exemplifies the subjective status of qualities with a pin that causes us pain when it pricks. ‘There is no distinct quality in the pin answerable to what I am apt to fancy pain to be.’ If there were no eyes, there would be no colours.207 Another vivid example is of the sun, whose powers ‘harden clay, and soften wax, and melt butter, and thaw ice . . . ’ yet are none of them present in the sun, which consists only of ‘the brisk and confused local motion of the minute parts of a body’.208 The world as we experience it is more fabrication than real. We should not project it back out to nature. Nor do substances escape Boyle’s contingent identification. They are classified according to ‘convenience’ rather than any transcendental map. Following Bacon and presaging Locke, a ‘species’ is only a particular conglomeration of secondary qualities. He picks up a perennially fascinating example: gold. All that we understand by this word is the ‘aggregate or convention of qualities’ we observe, for example, ‘very malleable and ductile, fusible and yet fixed in the fire, and of a yellowish colour’. To further distinguish it, say from brass, we add that it is ‘indissoluble in aqua fortis’. None of these qualities are ‘essential’ to a body.209 All of them are accidental and subject to change, as, for example, in the case of ‘white gold’, or rotting fruit.210 These variations do not indicate the destruction of substantial forms but only an amendment of the underlying material properties. ‘A pear grafted upon a thorn . . . will bear good fruit’.211 The ‘tacit agreement’ of men carves up the world into 203

204 207 210

Sydenham 1696, sig. a5v: ‘it is plainly impossible that physicians should understand those causes of diseases which have no manner of commerce with the senses’. Sydenham’s symptomatic, superficial approach to bodies must have influenced Locke. Harrison and Laslett (1965, p. 242) list eight works of Sydenham’s which Locke possessed, including two editions of Opera universa. Boyle 1979a, p. 13. 205 Boyle 1979a, p. 31. 206 Boyle 1979a, pp. 15–16. Boyle 1979a, p. 31. 208 Boyle 1979a, p. 27. 209 Boyle 1979a, pp. 38; 39. Boyle 1979a, pp. 39; 52. 211 Boyle 1979a, p. 66.

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‘species’.212 They agree what ‘concurrence of all those qualities’ are ‘necessary and sufficient’ to denominate the body.213 Our classifications cannot capture the infinite variety of things. Following Lucretius, Boyle thinks of the multiplicity of words that can be made out of twenty-four letters and considers what untold myriad of corpuscular arrangements there must be which deserve, but lack, ‘distinct appellations’. Things are named for pragmatic rather than truly encyclopaedic purposes. So, we differentiate between a ‘gold ring’ and a ‘wedge of gold’.214 There are no known diagnostic criteria for ‘discriminating and limiting the species of things’. Names tend to be taken for things, but really they indicate our own interests and perceptions. Boyle warns us that specific distinctions are ‘more arbitrary than we are wont to be aware of ’.215 But we are not making it up entirely. These conglomerations of qualities are caused by particular arrangements of primary qualities which Boyle calls ‘essential forms’. Boyle’s words do, in the way that (according to Boyle) Aristotle’s absolutely do not, follow things, albeit in a very free translation.216 I have left Hobbes to the end because he stands at perhaps the furthest extreme of this debate. At first glance, he looks like other new philosophers, declaring that words signify thoughts that in turn are caused, in a link of non-resemblance, by things.217 However, there are three ways in which Hobbes cuts away at the thread that joins words, thoughts and things. The first and fundamental step he takes in removing speech from the world is his bold and bald assertion that words signify conceptions, not things. We heard this war cry in chapter 1. He responds to the scholastic debate about whether words signify thoughts or things with the apparent fact that when one speaks or hears the word ‘stone’ one can only form a thought of a stone. A real stone does not enter one’s head, as we saw Sergeant suggest.218 While he has the scholastics squarely in his sights, Hobbes also targets his lazy contemporaries, who call with careless abandon for the congruence of words and things. The second way Hobbes drains words of their conventional plenitude is by threatening to dissolve the link – and make imperceptible the line – between the mind and the world. He presents an exceptionally 212 213 216 217

218

Boyle 1979a, p. 45. Boyle 1979a, p. 52. 214 Boyle 1979a, p. 49. 215 Boyle 1979a, pp. 72; 71–2. Boyle 1979a, p. 62; see p. 58 on Aristotelianism respecting ‘rather words than things’. Hobbes 1996, pp. 13–14. See Leijenhorst (2002a, p. 221) on Hobbes’ retention of realism insofar as ideas are ‘causally dependent on external bodies which act on us by means of local motion’. Hobbes 1981, p. 15. See Leijenhorst (2002b) for the way in which Hobbes’ theory of language is indebted to, as well as a revision of, late Aristotelianism. For a Wittgensteinian reading of Hobbes’ linguistic theory, see Heinrichs 1973.


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subjective, sceptical account of our imaginative encounter with the world. Recalling Protagoras’ dictum, he declares that ‘men measure, not onely other men, but all other things, by themselves’.219 He goes beyond the familiar contemporary assertion that the qualities we perceive in things do not inhere in them, but in us.220 His style, as well as his arguments, shroud us from the world behind a particularly thick veil of obscure and uncertain ideas. Experience is like a dream, disorientating and uncertain. Having asserted the unreality of our sense experience, he concludes that ‘whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they are not there, but are seemings and apparitions only’. The reader is placed in a peculiar state of dislocation, subject to ‘the great deception of sense’.221 When objects are gone, their ‘phantasies’ remain, which we compound to create ‘fictions of the mind’.222 When we sleep we dream in images which ‘are not obscure, but strong and clear, as in sense itself ’.223 Indeed, ‘a dreame must needs be more cleare, in this silence of sense, than are our waking thoughts . . . And because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreames, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts; I am well satisfied, that being awake, I know I dreame not; though when I dreame, I think my selfe awake.’224 Hobbes’ point is driven home by his wordplay and the reader is unsettled, the line between fiction and reality eroded in the disconcerting poetry. He reaches a crescendo in his story about the ‘difficult[y of] discerning of a mans dream, from his waking thoughts’, when he introduces ‘visions’.225 These waking dreams are often induced by fear of ‘fayries’, and spun in our minds by ‘crafty ambitious persons’. They enthral ‘the simple people’ and threaten civil obedience.226 Hobbes turns his sharp pen on these fantastic religious insinuations in the final part of Leviathan, explaining away the presence of demons by appealing to the excessive operations of the imagination. ‘It was hard for men to conceive of those Images in the Fancy, and in the sense, otherwise, than of things really without us.’227 The final and most distinctive way that Hobbes muddies the linguistic waters is his severance of language from the mind, as well as from things. He rejects the view that language is a perfect reflection of thought. According to him, the understanding is filled with particular and unique 219 222 225 227

Hobbes 1996, p. 15. 220 E.g. Hobbes 1969, p. 6; 1996, p. 14. 221 Hobbes 1969, pp. 7; 8. Hobbes 1996, p. 16. 223 Hobbes 1969, p. 8. 224 Hobbes 1996, p. 17. Hobbes 1996, p. 18. 226 Hobbes 1996, p. 19. Hobbes 1996, p. 440. Flathman (1993) and Tuck (1988a) paint variously sceptical portraits of Hobbes, in contrast to Sorell (1993b) and Skinner (1996, p. 9).

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images, just as the world is filled with particular and unclassified things. Only words are universal. ‘There being nothing in the world universall but names; for the things named, are every one of them individuall and singular.’ A general term does not signify a general or abstract idea. There are no such things. Instead, a general term covers a host of particular ideas of things on the basis of ‘similitude in some quality’.228 When we speak or hear a general term, we bring to mind one particular. When Hobbes declares, sounding very familiar, that ‘the generall use of speech, is to transferre our mental discourse, into verbal’, he is not being strictly frank.229 The process is not, as it is for his contemporaries, one of pure translation, but one of radical development. Language is of a very different character from thoughts. From the mind’s point of view, as well as the world’s, it does not ring true. Hobbes exemplifies the necessary arbitrariness of our linguistic classification with the now familiar example of the monstrous birth. The absence of natural right reason determines the need for an ‘arbitrator’, the sovereign, to decide the content of natural terms: ‘Upon the occasion of some strange and deformed birth, it shall not be decided by Aristotle, or the philosophers, whether the same be a man or no, but by the laws’.230 Although it may not have been Hobbes’ intention, he was perceived as ripping language apart from things.231 He shocked his contemporaries with the claim that ‘true and false are attributes of speech, not of things’.232 This is because truth, like reason or science, concludes universally, and so can only deal in names, not thoughts and things, which can only ever be particular. The Port-Royal Logique echoes Descartes’ outrage about this assertion.233 We remember that Hobbes objected to Descartes that reasoning concerns names not things. ‘All we can infer’, he elaborates, ‘is whether or not we are combining the names of things in accordance with the arbitrary conventions which we have laid down in respect of their meaning’.234 Half-purposefully, half-provocatively, Hobbes strands the human speaker a long way from the world, unable to arrive, imaginatively and creatively drawing his own conclusions.

228 231 232 234

Hobbes 1996, p. 26. 229 Hobbes 1996, p. 25. 230 Hobbes 1969, p. 189. On the need for ‘evidence’ in language see Hobbes 1969, p. 25. Hobbes 1996, p. 27. 233 Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 27; Descartes 1984b, p. 126. Hobbes 1996, p. 126.

c h ap t e r 5

Semantic instability: a containable threat

The confident assumption of semantic universality is implicit in earlymodern linguistic theory. Though philosophers rarely spell it out, it is this that grounds their system of communication. They take it for granted that there is one set of meanings that underlies all languages and that, as a result, people can mean the same things and communicate with each other. Semantic uniformity is inferred from the uniformity of human understanding and the unity of the world.1 Philosophers take their cue from that seminal passage in De interpretatione where Aristotle declares that although languages diverge, the thoughts and, in turn, the objects they signify ‘are the same for the whole of mankind’.2 In his commentary on this passage, Aquinas reminds us of the reason why this is so: ‘simple conceptions of the intellect’, such as the essence of ‘man’ (while they have been actively abstracted by men) have not been ‘composed’ or ‘divided’, are incapable of truth or falsity, and therefore ‘must be the same in all’.3 The impression of a common semantic discourse is entrenched by the grammarians and logicians who talk unconcernedly about that res which convention has assigned to a certain verbum. A meaning is treated as though it were one unproblematic, discrete object – indeed, we have seen how this characterisation teeters on the brink between figural and real. The elision of the difference between thought and thing only serves to deepen the coincident impression that a meaning is a determinate, public entity upon which people agree to impose a word. However, the examination of the trivium revealed various points where semantic universality comes under pressure, either because concerns are raised internally, or because certain junctures appear vulnerable when 1

2

See Dawson (2003) on the various ways in which a common mental discourse was presented and defended. Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. 3 Aquinas 1998, p. 463.

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subjected to external scrutiny, or, indeed, because writers, particularly rhetoricians, actually celebrate semantic abundance. While the strong current of the logico-grammatical tradition pushes forward a faith in a universal semantic discourse, we have encountered some eddies that run in a contrary direction. Knowledge of ambiguous words and their use in fallacious arguments had always been central to a gentleman’s training. But the logical problem of ambiguity is neatly circumscribed and not considered to drain into language as a whole, except, as we saw, by the Port-Royal Logique that considers, albeit marginally, wide-ranging temporal and cultural semantic relativism. A serious theoretical threat also comes from those grammarians who postulate that languages are neither inter-translatable, nor underpinned by one deep structure. Developing the humanist commitment to language as contingent usage and Bacon’s interest in a culturally relative semantics, historicist grammarians claim that language is not rooted in reason and the world, but in diverse and mutating human contexts, thereby jeopardising its univocity. Rhetoric further diffracts language – particularly moral language – which is to be the major location of philosophical anxiety about semantic instability. Rhetoricians present words as loosely attached to meaning, to be applied variously and wilfully. It is an exhibition of professional aplomb, in the use of figures, to wrench words from their proper places. Moreover, in tropical speech it is up to the audience to make up meaning. Informing all three arts is the fundamental disunity between sign and signified; they are joined in a purely arbitrary, and therefore potentially unstable, way. Picking up these already unravelling threads, early-modern philosophers begin to undo the story of semantic universalism. Broadly speaking, they articulate two types of concern. The first is that people agree on the meaning of a word, but disagree as to how it ought to be applied to the world, as when forensic orators argue about whether an action is ‘murder’, or if it is ‘liberal’ or ‘extravagant’. The second and more profound way in which words are thought to become equivocal is when people disagree about the meaning or definition of the word itself, as may be the case with ‘freedom’ or ‘God’.4 However, writers do not consistently hold these two concerns apart – in accordance with their habit of coagulating concept and thing. Again, therefore, I subsume what we would now distinguish as meaning and reference under the overarching title of ‘meaning’, and call the whole issue one of ‘semantic’ instability, 4

See Skinner (2002a, pp. 161–2) on this distinction.


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although we ought to remember that this includes divergent applications, as well as divergent definitions, of terms. I ought also to stress that the polysemic potential of words was not necessarily a cause of concern. This is, in part, because there might be said to be two distinct and opposing aspects of polysemy. There is, on the one hand, the manageable and even marvellous semantic cornucopia of poets, rhetoricians and speakers at large, which positively enhances understanding and intersubjectivity. On the other, there is uncontrollable, undetected, and often unintentional semantic instability which entrenches and engenders misunderstanding and isolation. Many who worry about the second, negative aspect do not necessarily perceive any distinction between the two and attack rhetoricians for the dim effects of playing with words. While it is in the main the downbeat voices that I shall educe, some of them, such as Pufendorf ’s, are at times neutral, even encouraging, about the fact that words might mean many things. They indicate the other, optimistic side of the argument about the merits of semantic multiplicity – a side which arguably increasingly lost (explicit) favour in the seventeenth century. With the exception of the poetic fraternity, who taxonomise semantic plurality and maintain that it increases communication, the issue is not addressed or questioned systematically until Locke, who argues that, on the contrary, miscommunication ensues. Due to the overwhelming and often unconscious subscription to basic semantic universality, reservations about it only emerge sporadically in texts, whose disparate authors therefore generate the structure of the present chapter. scepticism and montaigne The rediscovery of ancient scepticism is important not only for provoking the perception of grave disjunctions between words and the world, but also for questioning the capacity of words to signify univocally. Sextus Empiricus had put his finger on a powerful reason why a particular class of meanings might diverge. As opposed to ‘natural objects’, ‘conventional objects have no existence’, and are therefore ‘easily liable to change and variation’.5 In the same way that Locke will account for the diversity of mixed modes, Sextus explains that it is because they ‘depend upon ourselves’ that conventional objects alter and deviate. It is because we make them up that non-natural ideas multiply between people. 5

Sextus 1976, p. 291.

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Montaigne takes up the commanding fact of cultural diversity, and thereby evokes the possibility of semantic diversity, especially with evaluative terms. Moral words are exposed as blowing in the wind of custom. ‘Nothing in all the world has greater variety than law and custom. What is abominable in one place is laudable somewhere else.’ He mentions infanticide and polygamy as instances of acceptable customs. Evaluative consensus is also lacking in the attribution of ‘beauty’: ‘for a painter in the Indies beauty is black and sunburnt, with thick swollen lips and broad flat noses . . . In Peru, big ears are beautiful.’6 The perceptible world does not contain its aesthetic and ethical status within it, but is vulnerable to endless redescription. Unfortunately, semantic dissolution does not stop within the same culture, but creeps there too by virtue of disagreement between compatriots. Rather than interpreting the fall of Babel as indicative simply of verbal diversity, Montaigne interprets it as signifying ‘the infinite, endless altercation over discordant opinions and arguments which accompanies the vain structures of human knowledge, enmeshing them in confusion.’7 Semantic flexibility is further assured by the fluidity of language itself – the exemplary creature, or victim, of custom. ‘It goes flowing through our fingers every day, and during my lifetime half of it has changed. We say that it is perfect now: each age says that of its own. I do not think it has reached perfection while it is still running away and changing form.’8 There is another, more innovative and radical way in which Montaigne lays waste the claim that words are windows with one view. He places meaning in the hands of the audience, and so proffers endless semantic proliferation.9 Once words leave the speaker he is no longer in control of their content; they become free-floating signs for others to tie down as they desire. In his Apologie de Raimond Sebond Montaigne presents texts as blank tablets on which readers can write whatever they please. He muses on the common experience ‘that once you start digging down into a piece of writing there is simply no slant or meaning – straight, bitter, sweet or bent – which the human mind cannot find there’. He exemplifies his claim with reference to biblical hermeneutics, that promiscuous field where interpreters do not translate, but generate, meaning. ‘Take that clearest, purest and most perfect Word there can ever be: how much 6 9

Montaigne 1991, pp. 654–5; 537. 7 Montaigne 1991, p. 623. 8 Montaigne 1991, p. 1111. See Cave (1979) for a suggestive interpretation of the generative and devious characterisation of language in the French renaissance; Ronberg (1992) on the inconstancy of verbal meaning in English renaissance literature; McCanles (1990) on the free play of the signifier in Bacon; Fish (1971b and 1972) on the ‘self-consuming’ language of seventeenth-century literature.


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falsehood and error have men made it give birth to! Is there any heresy which has not discovered ample evidence for its foundation and continuance?’ Despite his striking depiction of semantic indeterminacy, he does imply that there is one proper reading. It is the ‘founders of . . . erroneous doctrines’ who misunderstand God’s word, and take refuge in the one and only form of ‘proof’ available to them: ‘evidence based upon exegesis of words’.10 Divergent exposition seems here to be a possible result of ill will, not an inevitability. However, Montaigne’s return to the subject in De l’expe´rience renews his assault on the naı¨ve appeal to ‘the express words of the Bible’. They ‘cannot be serious’, he says of those who think they can end religious quarrels with recourse to Scripture. The reader is no less a productive agent than the writer. ‘Our minds do not find the field any less vast when examining the meanings of others than when formulating our own.’ The same goes for law. ‘There is as much scope and freedom in interpreting laws as in making them.’11 ‘All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.’12 Not content with discrepancies between individuals, Montaigne bores his dissecting gaze into individuals themselves. He opens up our mercurial nature in a way that leaves its mark on his successors and shakes the early-modern presumption of semantic stability to near lifelessness. ‘Never did two men ever judge identically about anything’, declares Montaigne, ‘and it is impossible to find two opinions which are exactly alike, not only in different men but in the same man at different times’.13 The linguistic ramifications are almost audible: given that one says what one thinks, semantic divergence will be equivalent to mental divergence. Moreover, the meaning of my words will not only differ from my fellows’, but also in me from moment to moment. This personal miscellany looms large in the context of Montaigne’s shattered ‘self ’, whose shards appear in his self-confessed act of literary self-constitution – ‘for it is my 10 11

12 13

Montaigne 1991, p. 661. Cf. Eden 1997; Jeanneret 1999. Montaigne 1991, p. 1208. In a somewhat inscrutable passage, Montaigne refers to the active participation of the audience in speech. ‘Words belong half to the speaker, half to the hearer. The latter must prepare himself to receive them according to such motion as they acquire, just as among those who play royal-tennis the one who receives the ball steps backwards or prepares himself, depending on the movements of the server or the form of his stroke’ (p. 1235). The comparison with tennis dashes the traditionally passive characterisation of the reader, and substitutes an energetic, constructive and indispensable player. Cf. Bauschatz 1980; Cave 1982; O’Neill 1982. Montaigne 1991, p. 1212. Montaigne 1991, p. 1210 (1962, p. 1044: ‘jamais deux hommes ne jugerent pareillement de mesme chose, et est impossible de voir deux opinions semblables exactement, non seulement en divers hommes, mais en mesme homme a` diverses heures’.)

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own self that I am painting’ – in his broken and borrowed attempts. ‘I cannot remain fixed within my disposition and endowments.’14 He quotes Plutarch approvingly: ‘I am not the same person when I am well: being different, my opinions and ideas are different too.’15 Du repentir begins in a flood of self-dissolution. ‘I am unable to stabilize my subject . . . I grasp it as it is now, at this moment when I am lingering over it. I am not portraying being but becoming: not the passage from one age to another . . . but from day to day, from minute to minute. I must adapt this account of myself to the passing hour’. The only truth, the only closure accessible to this sceptic is ‘Michel de Montaigne’, but it eludes him.16 If a man’s centre cannot hold then neither can his words; meaning slips out in all directions. ‘the argument is about words, not things’ Most seventeenth-century philosophers do not approach Montaigne’s extreme scepticism about mental uniformity, but instead bear witness to the generic ‘thoughts’ or res we encountered in the trivium. Semantic universality is so axiomatic that it regularly forms a self-evident premise for an argument. For example, Hobbes uses it to prove the arbitrary connection between res and verba: given semantic universality, linguistic universality would follow if there were natural connections between words and meanings.17 The universal language movement, a principal goal of which is, as Lodwick puts it, a ‘common writing’, is predicated on the belief in a universal human mind (and world).18 Babel might be repaired or as Bacon, the father of the movement, hopes, ‘the curse of the confusion of tongues’ might be lifted, precisely because underneath the mess of 14 16

17

18

Montaigne 1991, pp. lix; 39. 15 Montaigne 1991, pp. 635–6. Montaigne 1991, pp. 907–8. Cf. p. 634: ‘How our judgements vary! How frequently we change our ideas! What I hold and believe today, I hold and believe with the totality of my belief. All my faculties, all my resources hold tight to that opinion and vouch for it with all their might. It would be impossible to me to embrace and maintain any truth more strongly. I am wholly for it, truly for it. But – not once, not a hundred times, but every day – have I not embraced something else with the same resources and under the same circumstances, only to be convinced later that it was wrong?’ Hobbes 1993, p. 39. Demonet (1992, p. 286) gives this as ‘le principal argument aristote´licien contre la naturalite´ des langues’. Cf. Descartes (1984b, p. 126) and Arnauld and Nicole (1996, p. 28), who use the premise, contra Hobbes (as they understand him), to prove that reasoning does not depend on names. Lodwick 1969 (the title of the work is A Common Writing, whereby Two, although Not Understanding One the Others Language, yet by the Helpe thereof, May Communicate their Minds One to Another). Cf. Clauss 1995, p. 42.


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languages, men share the same thoughts.19 Wilkins declares that ‘as men do generally agree in the same principle of reason, so do they likewise agree in the same internal notion or apprehension of things’.20 Dalgarno claims that language conveys ‘the most intimate motions and conceptions of the soule, by which all humane societies are united’.21 Besnier explains that, while in their present form languages are subject to ‘the whisling oyishness of custome’, they can be united because they ‘are unquestionably founded on reason’.22 In a letter to Mersenne, dated 20 November 1629, Descartes lays out his ambitious manifesto for a universal language. It would be made of ‘all the thoughts which can come into the human mind’.23 A common mental base also emerges in the prevalent beliefs in innate ideas and maxims.24 Lamy lists ‘natural and original truths’ which are ‘fundamentally inherent in our natures’, such as ‘That we are to give every man his due; That it is impossible for a thing to be and not to be at the same time’.25 In his De veritate (1624) Herbert of Cherbury lays down ‘common notions’ of sense (like the common idea of a rose) and also ‘principles’ that are inscribed in every mind (like ‘nature does nothing in vain’).26 Robert South mounts a similar attack on Aristotle’s ‘rasa tabula’. He declares that there are certain ‘universal notions’ which are ‘ingenite, and imprinted by the finger of nature’, such as ‘the whole is bigger than the part’. Like Lamy and Herbert, he asserts that these principles are of a practical, as well as a speculative nature, such as ‘that God is to be worshipped; that parents are to be honoured, that a man’s word is to be kept’.27 In his Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality Ralph Cudworth attests to ‘universal and immutable truths’, ‘ectypal signatures’ ‘printed’ in our minds.28 Within the broad, unquestioned framework of mental universality, contemporaries explore moderate versions of semantic diversity. In their desperation for perspicuous language, they express unease about equivocity. Philosophers do not generally present the problem as endemic to language but use it to attack their enemies. Boyle begins his Sceptical Chymist (1661) 19 22 24

25

26 27

28

Bacon 1857, iv, pp. 440–1. 20 Wilkins 1968, p. 20. 21 Dalgarno 2001a, p. 90. Besnier 1971, p. 3. 23 Descartes 1981, p. 5. See Yolton (1993, pp. 30–48) on the ‘firmness’ (p. 30) of the innatist tradition in English moral and religious thought. Lamy 1986, pp. 184–5. See Kraye (1998, p. 1303) on the Malebranchian moral truths known with the same clear and distinct certainty as mathematical truths. Herbert of Cherbury 1937, pp. 78; 132. South 1823a, pp. 36; 39. Locke was given volume three of South’s Sermons by the author (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 236). Cudworth 1731, pp. 258; 251. See Kraye (1998, pp. 1290–2) on Cambridge Platonist morality, which was against voluntarism and (therefore) ethical relativism; Hutton (1999) on the still strong hold of Aristotelianism over Cudworth.

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with an assault on the ‘obscure, ambiguous, and almost aenigmatical’ expressions of chemists.29 Bemoaning their ‘intolerable Ambiguity’, he feels compelled ‘to take notice to you and complain of the unreasonable liberty they give themselves of playing with names at pleasure’.30 Beyond accusing their opponents of outrageous linguistic licence, philosophers intimate a more comprehensive problem, to which even the best-willed speakers sometimes fall victim. Boyle returns to verbal multivocity in A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1686). There he enumerates the meanings that cluster invisibly under the name ‘nature’. He identifies eight ‘absolute acceptions’, but says that ‘it has divers others’. He laments that ‘the very great ambiguity of this term, and the promiscuous use men are wont to make of it’, causes unintelligible, improper, and false speech. However, he proposes that the mists can be dispersed if, when people speak a word, they ‘would add a word or two to declare in what clear and determinate sense they use it’.31 Some perception of the problem of semantic individualism underpins the century’s conciliatory refrain that the argument is not real but merely verbal. Bacon explains that, due to the ontologically unsound foundations of words, ‘great and solemn debates between learned men often end in arguments over words and names’. He advocates the favourite remedy of defining one’s terms.32 The thought is that different people have the same basic ideas, but that they attach them differently to names, and that therefore they would agree if they spelt out exactly what they meant. Boyle declares that without definitions ‘wranglings about words and names will be (if not continually multiplied) still kept on foot, as are wont to be managed with much heat, though little use, and no necessity.’33 He repeats the commonplace: ‘for aught I can perceive, the differences betwixt the more sober men of both parties is more about words than things’.34 At a time when the explanatory ground was moving under their feet, the newly collaborative philosophers of the seventeenth century use verbal disagreement to pour oil on troubled waters. Descartes urges Regius to tone down his impolitic attack on scholastics by conceding that their disagreement is ‘merely verbal’.35 In his Regulae ad directionem ingenii he refers to the ‘obscurity of language’, and the way in which ‘in the vast 29 31 32 33 34 35

Boyle 1661, sig. A3r. 30 Boyle 1661, p. 199. Boyle 1979b, pp. 177; 178. Locke had this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 93). Bacon 1994b, p. 64. Boyle 1979b, p. 178. Boyle 1744, p. 481. Locke had this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 93). Descartes 1991, p. 206. On the self-fashioned, self-legitimating, open, public, consensual new science, see Eamon 1990; Feingold 1991, p. 74; Shapin and Schaffer 1985, pp. 333–6. Walmsley


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majority of issues about which the learned dispute, the problem is almost always one of words’.36 Descartes’ placatory optimism extends to the statement that ‘if philosophers always agreed about the meanings of words, their controversies would almost all be at an end’.37 While we saw the Port-Royal Logique explode the myth of semantic universalism at one point, they generally ignore it as they progress through the well-worn workings of ‘the mind’. They also fall into line by characterising interpersonal disagreement as superficial and soluble. When people do not bother to define their terms, ‘the majority of their disagreements are only verbal.’38 ‘Nominal definitions’ offer a passage out of these ‘useless disputes over words that one person understands one way and another in another way, as so often happens even in ordinary speech’.39 Spinoza is another citizen of the friendly republic of letters. He responds to Tschirnhaus’ attempts to reconcile his (Spinoza’s) view of freedom with Descartes’, by agreeing that it might indeed be the case that ‘although they use the same words, are yet thinking of different things’.40 He blames the wrangling so endemic to human interaction on careless communication. If men bothered to listen and to ‘explain their own mind’, their ‘vehement’ controversies would end, as they saw that ‘they either have the same thoughts, or they are thinking of different things, so that what they think are errors and absurdities in the other are not.’41 hobbes Not one to soften his blows, Hobbes has strong, if not contradictory, views on the matter. He maintains that every word – in the human sciences, if not the natural ones – has only one proper meaning.42 He

36

37 39

40 41 42

(1993) describes the new scientists’ candid, collective ‘conversational rhetoric’ (p. 386). See Shapin (1994) on the construction of the truth-telling gentleman scientist. Descartes 1985a, p. 53. He continues: ‘there is no need, however, to have such a low opinion of great minds as to think that they have a wrong conception of the things themselves when they fail to explain them in terms which are quite appropriate’. Descartes 1985a, p. 54. 38 Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 62. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 63. A nominal definition narrows down a word to one, clear definition in accordance with the speaker’s desire. Spinoza 1928, p. 294. He goes on to outline his determinism. Spinoza 1994, p. 62. Cf. 1994, p. 61, on different understandings of ‘circle’. Hobbes explains that natural knowledge can only be a posteriori because we do not know the causes of the phenomenal effects. But, as with geometry, where ‘we ourselves draw the lines’ and where the generation of figures ‘depends on our will’, we can have fully demonstrable a priori knowledge of ‘politics and ethics . . . because we ourselves make the principles – that is, the causes of justice (namely laws and covenants) – whereby it is known what justice and equity, and their opposites injustice and inequity, are. For before covenants and laws were drawn up, neither justice

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simultaneously offers a deeply subjective and divergent semantic theory, thereby seeming to dissolve his rigid semantic universalism. The first, dogmatic stance relates normatively to the artificial subject of the state, the second to natural man, although even the might of the commonwealth struggles to stem natural speech. I turn first to Hobbes’ confident claims for monolithic word-meanings. Reacting fiercely against the fluid morality embedded in the scientia civilis of the rhetorical tradition and its fatal application in the English civil war and regicide, he dictates an objective semantics.43 In his sights is the Aristotelian continuum of virtue and vice, whereby good might be redescribed as bad, by means of the rhetorical technique of paradiastole. ‘How unconstantly names have been settled’, he complains, ‘and how subject they are to equivocation, and how diversified by passion, (scarce two men agreeing what is to be called good, and what evil: what liberality, what prodigality; what valour, what temerity)’.44 He argues that his moral science, deduced from the reflexively accessible warring, rational nature of man, overthrows the evaluative paradigm whereby the human world is subject to self-interested revisions. Erasing his own authorship, he proffers a demonstrable theory of the virtues. He proves that which is conducive to peace, ‘good’, and ought to be so called. According to the (Hobbesian) rule of propriety, rebellion is necessarily unjust. Those who call it otherwise fall into the unreasonable, slavish and passionate practice of the wilful misapplication of words, naming ‘good and bad, according to their passions, or according to the authorities’ they admire (like ‘Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca’), rather than ‘their true and generally agreed-upon names’.45 Hobbes provides us with a reified map of axiomatic definitions. ‘All these words, Hee that in his actions observeth the Lawes of his Country, make but one Name, equivalent to this one word, Just.’46 It is the overarching aim of A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England to establish dialectically that ‘it is not wisdom, but authority that makes a law’.47 ‘Free’ means ‘free from being hindred by opposition’, making a mockery of the ‘absurd’ phrases ‘free-will’ and

43

44 47

nor injustice, neither public good nor public evil, was natural amongst men any more than it was among beasts’ (Hobbes 1993, pp. 41–3). This is an uneasy epistemological division which Locke is to follow. It is uneasy in both authors because the adequate definitions in moral science still flow from the nature of man. See Skinner (1996) on Hobbes’ reformulation of scientia civilis as a demonstrable civil science; see also Skinner 1991; Skinner 1993. Cf. Boonin-Vail 1994; Silver 1996. Hobbes 1969, p. 23. 45 Hobbes 1969, p. 177. 46 Hobbes 1996, p. 26. Hobbes 1971a, p. 55. Cf. Cromartie (1995) on common law as the practical embodiment of natural law; Pocock (1987) on the eternal/historical constitution.


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‘free subject’.48 When Hobbes turns to Scriptural exegesis in the second half of Leviathan, he inflexibly refers to the ‘proper’ senses of words. His uncompromising materialism leads him to reject the use of ‘spirit’, in any other than a metaphorical sense.49 Satan emerges as ‘an earthly enemy of the church’, and hell as a miserable life on earth.50 While Hobbes’ use of language differs wildly from his contemporaries’, particularly in the sphere of biblical hermeneutics, he envisages a perfectly univocal language. With the help of a metaphor (the professional agent of semantic proliferation as it rips words from their proper meanings) he describes his linguistic idyll. ‘The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity.’51 The common nature of man can ground mental–semantic uniformity. As Hobbes says, ‘reason is no less of the nature of man than passion, and is the same in all men, because all men agree in the will to be directed and governed in the way to that which they desire to attain, namely their own good, which is the work of reason’.52 By ‘reading himself’ and thereby discovering ‘man-kind’, he deduces an eternally and universally true civil science.53 This bold advertisement for semantic universalism turns out to be more of a pipe dream than a realistic description of linguistic praxis. There is a desperate quality to Hobbes’ Eden, as though he fears his words are falling – as ever – on deaf ears. This undercurrent finds a torrent of expression at other points in the oeuvre. I probe two areas of concern. The first is a sense that in our everyday speech there is an inadvertent, endemic semantic instability and miscommunication. Linguistic signs are just one section of the disconcerting semiotic prospect that constitutes our experience. Innumerable images – of bodies, events, demeanours – fly at us, their significance unclear and often unknowable. Words are part of this onslaught. Their strange phonetic qualities land upon our ears. They gradually, uncertainly gain semantic content through repeated observation of their context. It is on the basis of uncertain conjecture that most people learn what a sound means by noting when people call things ‘just and unjust’, for example, and trying to establish a standard of uniform reference.54 48 49 52

53 54

Hobbes 1996, p. 34. Cf. Skinner (1990) on the proper signification of liberty according to Hobbes. Hobbes 1996, p. 270. 50 Hobbes 1996, p. 314. 51 Hobbes 1996, p. 36. Hobbes 1969, p. 75. Cf. 1996, p. 35: ‘For all men by nature reason alike, and well, when they have good principles.’ Hobbes 1996, pp. 10; 11. Hobbes 1969, pp. 16–17: ‘We cannot from experience conclude, that any thing is to be called just or unjust, true or false, nor any proposition universal whatsoever, except it be from remembrance of the use of names imposed arbitrarily by men. For example: to have heard a sentence given

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Hobbesian semantic dissension goes far beyond the ‘equivocal names’ in sophisms.55 Opening up an endless panorama of possibility, he says that ‘all the significations of almost all words, are either in themselves, or in the metaphoricall use of them, ambiguous; and may be drawn in argument, to make many senses’.56 In the Elements of Law (written 1640) he radically multiplies the tidy, and faintly ridiculous, binary ambiguities of words such as ‘dog’.57 Many words lack constant signification, but bring to mind other thoughts than those for which they were ordained . . . And there is scarce any word that is not made equivocal by divers contextures of speech, or by diversity of pronunciation and gesture. This equivocation of names maketh it difficult to recover those conceptions for which the name was ordained; and that not only in the language of other men, wherein we are to consider the drift, and occasion, and contexture of the speech, as well as the words themselves; but also in our own discourse, which being derived from the custom and common use of speech, representeth not unto us our own conceptions.58

When words are animated in moving, feeling, alien individuals, they become obscure to the listener. Their ‘true meaning’– the intention of the speaker – is hidden from sight.59 And even in our own mouths, words are not so much our own, as the product of communities to whose decisions we have neither wholly nor consciously consented. Hobbes elaborates on self-reflexive semantic obscurity in an abuse of speech whereby ‘men register their thoughts wrong, by the inconstancy of the signification of their words; by which they register for their conceptions, that which they never conceived; and so deceive themselves’.60 Unbeknown to us, our words belie their smooth surfaces, their meaning diversifying and evaporating. Hobbes repeats his concern over our quotidian mutual unintelligibility when he discusses ancient texts. If word meaning is only just discernible

55 57 58

(in the like case the like sentence a thousand times) is not enough to conclude that the sentence is just (though most men have no other means to conclude by); but it is necessary, for the drawing of such conclusion, to trace and find out, by many experiences, what men do mean by calling things just and unjust, and the like.’ It is worth noting that this, Hobbes’ experiential account of how men learn the meanings of words according to common use, sits somewhat uneasily with his scientific account of how individuals use their reason to deduce the definitions of words – a process which often involves the rejection of common parlance. These tensions between communal and individual use, and between uncertain conjecture and certain knowledge about meaning, simmer beneath the surface of early-modern philosophy of language. Ross (1987) asserts that Hobbes’ ‘ordinary language theory’ anticipates Wittgenstein’s approach to linguistic usage (pp. 46; 48). Hobbes 1981, p. 20. 56 Hobbes 1996, p. 194. As we saw in chapter 1, ‘dog’ is a logicians’ example of ambiguity, meaning both a star and an animal. Hobbes 1969, pp. 20–1. 59 Hobbes 1969, p. 21. 60 Hobbes 1996, p. 25.


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through the careful inferences we draw in the living presence of speakers on the basis of their actions and context, then the practice of reading the classics becomes laughable: Though words be the signs we have of one another’s opinions and intentions; yet, because the equivocation of them is so frequent according to the diversity of contexture, and of the company wherewith they go (which the presence of him that speaketh, our sight of his actions, and conjecture of his intentions, must help to discharge us of): it must be extreme hard to find out the opinions and meanings of those men that are gone from us long ago, and have left us no other signification thereof but their books; which cannot possibly be understood without history enough to discover those aforementioned circumstances, and also without great prudence to observe them.61

Hobbes intimates the way in which a speaker’s intention, which it is the job of words to communicate, gets lost in the act of articulation, fading almost entirely when the speaker is absent and all that remains is de-located text. Far from being secured to words, meanings proliferate irretrievably. Despite his own self-proclaimed hermeneutic virtuosity, Hobbes’ treatment of textual exegesis concedes some constructive role to the reader. His vehement insistence on the sovereign’s right to interpret both law and Scripture evokes the necessity of interpretation, and the multiple readings inherent in texts.62 Of themselves, texts do not signify effectively, but require further elucidation. ‘All Laws, written, and unwritten, have need of Interpretation.’63 He depicts a great distance between the original intention of the writers of Scripture and the words themselves. ‘For it is not the bare words, but the scope of the writer that giveth the true light, by which any writing is to bee interpreted.’64 Hobbes’ use of the Pauline distinction between the spirit and the letter of the law indicates that the letter of the law does not communicate effectively but that its ‘spirit’, ‘intendment, or meaning’ or ‘the sense of the legislator’ has to be eked out by an authoritative reader.65 His concern about verbal promiscuity leads him to advocate concise laws. ‘All words, are subject to ambiguity; and therefore multiplication of words in the body of the Law, is multiplication of ambiguity.’66 In a rare contemporary remark about the communication process Hobbes refers to the way in which meaning is constructed differently in speaker and hearer. His stringent nominalism leads him into a stunning statement of interpersonal semantic incommensurability: ‘it is plain 61 64 66

Hobbes 1969, p. 68. 62 E.g. Hobbes 1996, p. 269. 63 Hobbes 1996, p. 190. 65 Hobbes 1996, p. 415 (cf. p. 425). Hobbes 1996, p. 190. Hobbes 1996, p. 240. Cf. Locke 1975, p. 480 (iii.ix.9).

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therefore, that there is nothing universal but names; which are therefore also called indefinite; because we limit them not ourselves, but leave them to be applied by the hearer.’67 Words are not ‘perspicuous’, to quote Hobbes back at himself.68 His second concern about semantic instability is more specific and relates to the indeterminate applications of evaluative terms. The protestations which I recounted above about free-floating evaluative terms and their misapplication sound strained when we consider his view that there is no natural right reason, and therefore no univocal application of words, but as many applications as there are different interpretations.69 People take their passions ‘for right Reason’. This turns out to mean ‘no other mens reason but their own.’70 While it is, as Hobbes pleads, demonstrable, the law of nature has serious need of interpretation by the sovereign because it is so divergently understood by those who are ‘blinded by self love, or some other passion.’71 It is due to the deeply subjective, hedonistic use of language that the sovereign and his laws can be the only measure of justice. Only he can determine whether actions ‘be right or wrong, profitable or unprofitable, virtuous or vicious; and by them the use and definition of all names not agreed upon, and tending to controversy, shall be established.’72 Given that there are ‘so many men, so many opinions’, ‘a common standard for virtues and vices doth not appear except in civil life’.73 Hobbes’ semantic diversity has its roots in the heterogeneous view of humanity that we met in Montaigne. ‘In the condition of meer Nature’: Good and Evill, are names that signifie our Appetites, and Aversions; which in different tempers, customes, and doctrines of men, are different: And divers men, differ not onely in their Judgement, on the senses of what is pleasant, and unpleasant to the tast, smell, hearing, touch, and sight; but also of what is conformable, or disagreeable to Reason, in the actions of common life. Nay, the same man, in divers times, differs from himselfe; and one time praiseth, that is, calleth Good, what another time he dispraiseth, and calleth Evil.74 67

68 69 70 72

73 74

Hobbes 1969, p. 20. Cf. Nerney (1991, p. 75) on the continuity between natural linguistic ‘confusion’ and civil ‘understanding’. Hobbes 1969, p. 36. Remember the need for an ‘arbitrator’ to decide what is a ‘man’ or not (Hobbes 1996, pp. 32–3). Hobbes 1996, p. 33. 71 Hobbes 1996, p. 191. Hobbes 1969, p. 189. Cf. 1971a (p. 67) on the absence of ‘an universal reason agreed upon in any nation, besides the reason of him that hath the sovereign power’. Hobbes 1993, pp. 68–9. Hobbes 1996, pp. 110–11. Cf. 1969, p. 29: ‘every man, for his own part, calleth that which pleaseth, and is delightful to himself, good; and that evil which displeaseth him: insomuch that while every man differeth from other in constitution, they differ also one from another concerning the common distinction of good and evil’; 1993, p. 47: ‘since different men desire and shun different things, there must needs be many things that are good to some and evil to others’.


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Word meaning, comprising, as it does, the speaker’s ideas, is not only hostage to individual speakers, but to the multiple moods of the same speaker. We have already seen (in chapter 4) Hobbes draw on Protagoras’ claim, that man is the measure of all things, to intimate the fantasies that language estimates about the natural world.75 This ancient challenge also echoes through Hobbes’ meditations on the way in which the use of moral language says more about its users than its objects. He spells this out in a fascinating passage in Leviathan: The names of such things as affect us, that is, which please, and displease us, because all men be not alike affected with the same thing, nor the same man at all times, are in the common discourses of men, of inconstant signification. For seeing all names are imposed to signifie our conceptions; and all our affections are but conceptions; when we conceive the same things differently, we can hardly avoyd different naming of them. For though the nature of that we conceive, be the same; yet the diversity of our reception of it, in respect of different constitutions of body, and prejudices of opinion, gives every thing a tincture of our different passions. And therefore in reasoning, a man must take heed of words; which besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, have a signification also of the nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker; such as are the names of virtues, and vices; for one man calleth wisdome, what another calleth feare; and one cruelty, what another justice; one prodigality, what another magnanimity; and one gravity, what another stupidity, &c. And therefore such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can Metaphors, and Tropes of speech: but these are less dangerous, because they profess their inconstancy; which the other do not.76

Using paradiastole, the favourite model for the indeterminacy and manipulability of words, Hobbes explains how our passions dye our perceptions, and therefore our descriptions, of things. There is no singular description of the moral status of an action. There are only subjective interpretations. While metaphors confess themselves to be sites of multiple signification, evaluative language conceals a mass of referents, recording our peculiar reception of the world. The res–verba connection dissolves; meaning loses its objective status, and is incarnated only in the mouths and ears of individuals. pascal Riven by the indelible Fall, Pascal is extremely pessimistic about linguistic homogeneity. In the following penseé he refers to the possibility of semantic multiplication: 75

Hobbes 1996, p. 15.

76

Hobbes 1996, p. 31.

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We suppose (nous supposons) that everyone thinks of these things in the same way. But the assumption is mere conjecture, since we have no proof. I am aware that we use these words in the same situations, and that whenever two men see an object move they both talk about that object in the same words, both saying it has moved. From that identical set of words we draw the strong impression of an identical set of ideas (d’une conformite´ d’ideé). But that does not absolutely convince us with ultimate conviction, although we could well lay bets on it.77

Pascal illuminates an important element that lurks in early-modern philosophy of language. Harnessing his own innovative development of the concept of probability, he explains that we can never know for certain that our identical words mean the same things for different people, given the irrevocable invisibility of our thoughts.78 It becomes clear that he doubts, despite our (misplaced) confidence to the contrary, that one mental discourse underlies our uniform language. The odds are long. This is particularly likely to be the case for Pascal given that he stands, petrified, in the fragmented shadows of both the Augustinian and the Montaignian selves.79 And he himself can be seen in Locke when he (Pascal) writes ‘I feel that I might never have existed, since my self consists in my thinking.’80 He exposes the fluid possibilities that follow from identifying personal identity with consciousness. ‘Time heals pain and quarrels, because we change: we are no longer the same person; neither the offender nor the offended are the same. It is like a people whom we have angered and have come back to see after two generations: they are still French, but not the same.’81 In the following passage, Pascal evokes the miscellany that makes up human ‘nature’: Diversity is so great that all the tones of voice, ways of walking, coughing, blowing one’s nose, sneezing (are different). We distinguish grapes from among fruits, then from them muscat grapes, and then those from Condrieu, and then 77

78

79 80

81

Pascal 1995a, p. 35 (1963, p. 512). Pascal’s use of ‘suppose’ echoes the Terminists’ ‘supposition’ theory and presages Locke’s denunciation of the false ‘supposition’ of communication. Davidson (1979) explores the ‘dynamic and paradoxical way’ (p. x) Pascal plays with the meanings of the words which signify the means to an indubitable faith. See Hacking (1975a) on the emergence of probability and Pascal’s crucial place in the story (p. 70). Cf. Daston (1998) on the new probabilism in the seventeenth century. See Hunter (2002, p. 105) on Pascal’s Augustinian sense that we are a paradox to ourselves. Pascal 1995a, p. 44 (1963, p. 516: ‘je sens que je puis n’avoir point e´te´, car le moi consiste dans ma penseé’). Cf. Marin (1975) on fragmentation and meaning in Pascal; Norman (1973) on Pascal’s resistance to Jesuit casuistry and his attempt to bridge the gap between language and thought with a natural style. See Moriarty (2003) on the incursions into French solipsism and the supposedly self-contained Cartesian ego, especially by Malebranche’s presentation of human relations as ‘so many occasions of imaginative contagion’ (p. 250). Pascal 1995a, p. 146.


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those from Desargues, and then the particular graft. Is that all? Has it ever produced two bunches the same? And has a bunch produced two grapes the same? And so on. I have never judged something in exactly the same way. I cannot judge a work while doing it: I have to do as painters do, and stand back, but not too far. How far then? Guess.82

Pascal’s bewildering survey of grapes mirrors the diversity he identifies in and between people. If our minds are inconsistent and elusive, then so too are the contents of our words. Pascal explicitly links inter- and intrapersonal divergence to language in De l’art de persuader. He enumerates two methods of persuasion, ‘one of convincing, the other of pleasing.’83 While he can deliver universal rules for the former, the latter would be near-impossible, due to the ‘fickleness of our whims’.84 ‘The reason for this extreme difficulty comes from the fact that the principles of pleasure are not firm and steadfast. They are different for everyone, and vary in each particular, with such diversity that there is no one more unlike another than themselves at different periods’.85 Here again is that Montaignian tag, hinting at the infinite and untold semantic shreds which are pinned to words. Pascal explains that meaning is not controlled by the author, but created anew by individual readers. Often a brilliant author will have delivered his rich mind to the world, only to have it poorly understood. ‘It is then that the difference between the same statement in several mouths (bouches) is the most apparent.’86 He is concerned that his own art of convincing will be treated as a mere reiteration of the rules of reasoning long peddled in the schools, and in a rare moment of selfdefence he declares that ‘if they have penetrated the spirit of these rules, and if the rules have made sufficient impression to take root and establish themselves, these people will realize how great a difference there is between what is said here, and what a few logicians have perhaps written by chance somewhere or another in their works, which approximate to it’.87 While Pascal does suppose that a careful reader who internalises the 82 83 84 85

86 87

Pascal 1995a, p. 115. Pascal 1995b, p. 196 (1963, p. 356: ‘l’une de convaincre, l’autre d’agreér’). Pascal 1995a, p. 117. See Davidson 1983. Pascal 1995b, p. 196 (1963, p. 356: ‘ . . . ils sont divers en tous les hommes et variables dans chaque particulier avec une telle diversite´, qu’il n’y a point d’homme plus diffe´rent d’un autre que de soimeˆme dans les divers temps’). Pascal 1995b, p. 202 (1963, p. 358). Pascal 1995b, p. 200 (1963, p. 357: ‘mais s’ils sont entre´s dans l’esprit de ces re`gles, et qu’elles aient assez fait d’impression pour s’y enraciner et s’y affermir, ils sentiront combien il y a de diffe´rence entre ce qui est dit ici et ce que quelques logiciens en ont peut-eˆtre dećrit d’approchant au hasard, en quelques lieux de leurs ouvrages’).

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words might arrive at the anticipated meeting of minds, he thinks that, of itself and without inter-subjective labour, the text does not speak for itself, but is open to divergent (re)construction. By the same token, a thoughtless and accidental speaker can utter words whose significance is gathered, or made, by an avid listener. ‘The same thoughts sometimes develop quite differently in another than in their author: infertile in their natural habitat, copious when transplanted.’88 Meaning seeps alarmingly out from under the solid unit of a word, in innumerable and unpredictable directions. ‘From a distance a town is a town, and countryside countryside, but as you get closer there are houses, trees, tiles, leaves, grass, ants, ants’ legs, to infinity. They are all included in the word ‘countryside’ (tout cela s’enveloppe sous le nom campagne).’89 A seemingly circumscribed word admits endless content. There is apparently no semantic closure. What we think – and say – about the world depends on our selfregarding viewpoint. Verbally echoing Hobbes’ insight, Pascal says that our subjectivity colours our perception of the world, robbing it of any fixed objectivity. ‘Instead of accepting (recevoir) the idea of these things in their pure state, we tint (teignons) them with our qualities.’90 Perspective, rather than inherent value, determines meaning. ‘Those who lead disordered lives say to those who lead ordered ones that it is they who stray from nature, and believe themselves to follow it; like those on board ship think people on shore are moving away. Language is the same on all sides. We need a fixed point to judge it. The harbour judges those on board ship. But where will we find a fixed harbour in morals?’91 In the case of moral language, there seems to be no semantic bedrock. Words are not anchored to things. Both seem to flow by, eluding all fastening. Again then, moral language emerges as the principal site for contemporary concern about semantic instability. Pascal bemoans the lack of ‘one indivisible point which is the right position’ to adopt when we judge a painting. ‘But in truth and morality who will determine it?’ Evaluative terminology escapes a secure mooring place, as Pascal intimates in a 88

89

90

91

Pascal 1995b, p. 202 (1963, p. 358: ‘les meˆmes penseés poussent quelquefois tout autrement dans un autre que dans leur auteur: infertiles dans leur champ naturel, abondantes e´tant transplanteés’). Pascal 1995a, pp. 25–6 (1963, p. 508). Cf. Melzer (1986) on the tensions between the prison house of language, the hermeneutic circle, and extra-linguistic heartfelt truth in Pascal; Hammond (1994) on Pascal’s near-abandonment of the belief in semantic closure. Pascal 1995a, p. 72 (1963, p. 528). See Marshall (1994, p. 186) on Locke’s reading of the Penseés, and its influence on his hedonistic psychology. Pascal 1995a, p. 132.


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small, oblique sentence: ‘He lives across the water.’ In another fragment he expands this remark into an account of the variable application of moral words. ‘ ‘‘Why are you killing me?’’ ‘‘Well, don’t you live over the water? My good friend, if you lived on this side, I should be a murderer and it would be wrong to kill you. But because you live on the other side I am courageous, and it is right.’’ ’92 The migratory nature of words is coupled with another feature of semantic instability. While parties agree on the definition of a term, they differ on the evaluation they afford it, disagreeing whether it is a virtue or a vice. ‘Larceny, incest, infanticide, and parricide have all been accounted virtuous deeds’.93 Despairing at our corruption, Pascal sadly admits that, contingent and divergent but seemingly natural, custom is the arbiter of good and bad. ‘No doubt there are natural laws, but our fine reason having been corrupted, it corrupted everything.’94 He mocks the division between universal, immutable nature and unpredictable, changeable convention, positing that ‘nature’ is itself a construct, our original state being irretrievable. ‘Custom is a second nature which destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is custom not natural? I am very much afraid that nature is itself only a first custom, just as custom is a second nature.’95 Pascal successively undercuts the comforting notion that there is equity beyond justice, nature beyond convention. Instead there is only vogue. ‘Justice, like finery, is dictated by fashion’, and the word applied now to this, now to that, devoid of any stable reference.96 spinoza and biblical hermeneutics In the glare of Descartes’ example, Spinoza trusts in brilliant, adequate ideas that reasonable men can share. The Ethics culminates in a celebration of the possibility of human freedom, that is, of a full understanding of ourselves as part of nature, and an escape from the bondage of the passions. Men differ from each other insofar as they are subject to their particular affections.97 The more free (or rational) a person is, the more he is like like-minded men. Such an intellectual community will share ‘common notions.’98 ‘There are certain ideas, or notions, common to all 92

93

94 95 96

Pascal 1995a, pp. 13; 21. Cf. p. 24: ‘can there be anything more ludicrous than a man having the right to kill me because he lives over the water and his king has a quarrel with mine, even though I have none with him?’ Pascal 1995a, p. 24. See Skinner (2002a, pp. 169–71) on the distinction between the evaluative status and the definition of terms. Pascal 1995a, p. 24. Pascal 1995a, p. 39. Cf. p. 7: ‘True nature having been lost, everything becomes natural.’ Pascal 1995a, p. 25. 97 Spinoza 1994, p. 131. 98 Spinoza 1994, p. 57.

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men. For . . . all bodies agree in certain things, which . . . must be perceived adequately, or clearly and distinctly, by all’.99 In a moving letter to Peter Balling, Spinoza also intimates an imaginative or affective (rather than a rational) identity between people. ‘A father . . . so loves his son that he and his beloved son are like one and the same being’.100 However, Spinoza is sceptical about the realisation of mental agreement. This union is reserved for the brightest philosophers, while the great majority of men suffer under the yoke of their passions and differ accordingly. Spinoza explains that ‘each one has judged things according to the disposition of his brain; or rather, has accepted affections of the imagination as things’. He notes that this false supposition has caused ‘so many controversies’ and even ‘scepticism. For although human bodies agree in many things, they still differ in very many. And for that reason what seems good to one, seems bad to another.’101 It is the way in which men are torn apart from each other by the governing passions that motivates Spinoza’s political theory. Division is natural. The state of war makes it necessary for people ‘to give up their natural right and to make one another confident that they will do nothing which could harm others.’102 This difference between men is compounded by what is by now a familiar Montaignian thought about the difference within the same man, and the fluidity of the self. ‘Sometimes a man undergoes such changes that I should hardly have said he was the same man.’103 Spinoza recognises that the logical consequence of mental fragmentation is semantic fragmentation. The fact that ‘different men can be affected differently by one and the same object’ causes them to judge differently what is good and bad, which in turn is expressed in language, so that ‘some call intrepid’ what others call ‘timid.’104 Paradiastole is clearly in the back of Spinoza’s mind here, as he explains how our passions inform our description of the world, evoking an old image of words whose meaning fluctuates in line with the feelings of the speaker. As we have already seen, textual exegesis is also a locus of anxiety about semantic instability and readerly authority. Spinoza’s revolutionary Scriptural exegesis in the Tractatus theologico-politicus challenges the supposedly 99 100

101 104

Spinoza 1994, p. 54. Spinoza 1928, p. 140. See Byrne (1994) on the loss of individuality in intuition, and the association of suffering with individuality. James (1996) reveals ‘an ambivalence within the opposition between rational similarity and passionate difference’ (p. 228). Cf. Rice (1990) on the preservation of individualism in the Spinozist community. Spinoza 1994, p. 30. 102 Spinoza 1994, p. 136. 103 Spinoza 1994, p. 138. Spinoza 1994, p. 96.


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transparent univocity of words.105 At first inspection Spinoza seems to follow the Protestant sola Scriptura principle which demonstrates great faith in the window of the text itself. In his Institutiones christianae religionis Calvin had attacked the Catholic Church for arrogating the determination of Scripture to itself, ‘as if the eternall and inviolable truth of God did rest upon the pleasure of men’.106 Against these ‘Babblers’, Calvin employs a visual analogy to indicate the self-evident clarity of the Word. ‘Scripture sheweth in it selfe no lesse apparent sense of her trueth, than white and blacke thinges doe of their colour.’107 Contrary to other ‘giddie brained men’ who condemn the Bible as ‘the dead and staying letter’ and appeal instead to immediate revelation, Calvin asserts the spiritual plenitude of the letter itself.108 Spinoza seems to follow suit. ‘Our knowledge of Scripture must then be looked for in Scripture only.’109 He appeals unconcernedly to the ‘signification of the words’ for the ‘true meaning’ of the text. He announces that he has delivered the ‘sole true’ ‘method’ ‘for the complete understanding of Scripture’.110 No additional interpretative lens – ‘a supernatural faculty’, Reason or Authority – is needed to elicit the meaning. ‘Every man’ can understand the divine message. ‘The precepts of true piety’ are as clear as Euclid.111 ‘The whole duty is summed up in love to one’s neighbour.’112 The words speak for themselves. 105

On Spinoza’s biblical hermeneutics see Strauss (1965): chapter 5 on Spinoza’s ‘Bible science’, p. 251 on the influence of Maimonides and pp. 192–3 on the Calvinism of Spinoza’s view of God’s word in man’s heart; Popkin (1986 and 1996), who ascribes radical Protestant influences to Spinoza; Curley (1994) for an objection to Popkin’s analysis, and an argument for the influence of Cartesianism and Spinoza’s Jewish heritage; Lang (1989–90) on Spinoza’s ‘modernist turn’. See also Rudavsky 2001; Walther 1994. 106 Calvin 1634, p. 19. Locke owned two copies of Institutio Christianae religionis (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 99). 107 Calvin 1634, p. 20. 108 Calvin 1634, p. 29. Cf. Reedy (1985) on the contemporary Anglican movement that emphasised the literal, plain and moral aspects of Scripture (pp. 15; 143). 109 Spinoza 1951, p. 100. Locke had this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 238). See Rummel (1995, p. 195) on biblical interpretation and the humanists’ call ad fontes. 110 Spinoza 1951, pp. 101; 106; 108. Like nature, the proper interpretation of Scripture requires an ‘historical’ method – an historicist analysis of the language in which the Bible was written, and a breakdown of the contents of each book (p. 101). Whether words are to be taken literally or figuratively depends on their compatibility with the remainder of the text (a matter for the reader’s decision). For example, Moses’ pronouncements that ‘God is a fire’ and ‘God is jealous’ ‘must be taken metaphorically’ because ‘Moses says in several other passages that God has no likeness to any visible thing’ (p. 102). 111 Spinoza 1951, pp. 114–19; 113. Cf. Evans (1992) on Scriptural/human authority; Hill (1993) on the Bible in the seventeenth century; Mandelbrote (1994) on the exegetical crisis at the end of the century; Brett (2000) on the rational scholastic response to the Protestant challenge; Weimann (1996, p. 3) on the Bible as a battleground of authorisation; Miller 2001 on the widening scope of biblical scholarship to include the Orient and its manifestation in the London Polyglot Bible. 112 Spinoza 1951, p. 183.

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Or do they? While Spinoza never wavers from his belief that he has correctly read the simple moral strictures which constitute the sole meaning, or ratio, of the text, he simultaneously chips away at its clarity qua text. He suggests that the same text is susceptible to a number of readings, and also that it can mean different things for different authors, and can only be decoded when we know its context: It often happens that in different books we read histories in themselves similar, but which we judge very differently, according to the opinions we have formed of the authors . . . Thus it is evidently necessary to know something of the authors of writings which are obscure or unintelligible, if we would interpret their meaning; and for the same reason, in order to choose the proper reading from among a great variety, we ought to have information as to the versions in which the differences are found, as to the possibility of other readings having been discovered by persons of greater authority.113

Words themselves are poor, indeterminate signs, and must be supplemented by knowledge of their users in order to be understood. However, Spinoza’s historicist hermeneutics are often redundant given the way that language changes so completely over time.114 ‘A thorough knowledge of the Hebrew language’ is impossible to obtain; there is ‘absolutely nothing in the way of dictionary, grammar, or rhetoric’ to light the way. ‘The devouring tooth of time has destroyed nearly all the phrases and turns of expression peculiar to the Hebrews.’ Moreover, the words themselves are riddled with ambiguity, the letters being indistinguishable from one another, conjunctions and adverbs impossible to pin down, and vowels and punctuation absent.115 The text becomes obscurer still when Spinoza avows that context (the author and ‘time or occasion’ of writing), which is necessary for the recovery of meaning (the ‘intended aim of the author’), is unrecoverable. The multifarious strands of the Bible were written with particular purposes, now lost. Summing up the difficulties, he admits ‘I do not hesitate to say that the true meaning of Scripture is in many places inexplicable, or at best mere subject for guesswork.’116 Infuriated and inspired by Spinoza’s claim that Scripture is so much the creation – or mutilation – of men that it lacks authority,117 Richard Simon sets out to prove that the text is divinely inspired but in need of 113

114

115 117

Spinoza 1951, pp. 111–12. On subjective reading and the indeterminacy of meaning in the renaissance Bible see Shuger 1994. We saw in chapter 4 how an historicist understanding of language chips away at its status as a true reflection of the natural world. Miller (2001, p. 462) explains how seventeenth-century antiquaries, like the humanists before them, employed a thoroughly contextualist hermeneutic. Cf. Kelley (1970) on the historicist sensibility in relation to language in the French renaissance. Spinoza 1951, pp. 108–9. 116 Spinoza 1982, p. 112. Simon 1682, sig. a2r. Locke had this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 233).


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the extratextual interpretation of the Catholic Church, given the historical, human gap that divides us from it. In his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678) he ridicules the ‘Protestant’ and ‘Socinian’ faith in the sufficiency of the text alone, by pointing to the diametrically opposite readings these two groups educe. ‘Their principle is not so plain as they imagine, since these conclusions are so different and the one absolutely denies what the other affirms.’118 The ‘Letter’ is equivocal.119 pufendorf and legal hermeneutics Pufendorf makes two substantial contributions to the sporadic and not always consistent conversations I have been describing in this chapter. The first stems from his exceptionally arbitrary characterisation of words – a stance that we have seen sometimes related to semantic instability. Although most early-modern philosophers believe that words gain meaning by convention, they tend to reify and even naturalise these pairings once invented. They appeal to ‘propriety’ as though it were some primordial standard. As part of Pufendorf’s Hobbesian division of the world into nature and artifice in his De iure naturae et gentium (1672), words are located firmly in the latter camp. He rejects as ‘vain and absurd’ the Cratylic-Adamic view that there is some ‘analogy’ between the name and the nature it is supposed to represent. Even Adam’s ‘primitive’ words ‘signify merely at pleasure’. Pufendorf’s innovation is to elaborate on the contractual character of language. As we shall see now and in the following chapter, through his legal optic, he spells out the precarious implications of this fact. ‘All signs except those which we call natural, denote some determinate thing by virtue of human imposition, so this imposition is attended with a certain agreement, consent, or compact ( pactum), tacit or express.’120 And, as with all contracts, the participants are obliged to respect the terms. Pufendorf’s emphasis on the semantic contract illuminates its frailty, given the sad and infamous ease with which men break their word(s). It is neither clear nor tight, and so ushers in semantic instability. Although he confidently alludes to ‘full propriety in popular use’, he says that people 118

119 120

Simon 1682, sig. b1r. See Marshall (1994, pp. 337–42) on Locke’s intensive reading of Simon and other exegetes, especially Le Clerc’s De´fens des sentimens. Simon 1682, pp. 15; 7. Pufendorf 1703, IV, pp. 276; 278. Locke owned seven works by Pufendorf, including two editions of De iure naturae et gentium (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 215); he recommended this together with De officio for a gentleman’s reading (Locke 1997, p. 377). On the importance of Pufendorf for Locke, see Haakonssen 1998, p. 1345; Marshall 1994, passim; Tully 1980, pp. 30–2.

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understand words to a ‘larger’ or ‘stricter’ extent.121 For a start, there is regional variation. ‘It often happens that words of the same tongue have in different places different significations.’122 He takes a step further when he complains that ‘the way of the world is not to keep words strictly to that sense which they did originally bear; for men change at pleasure the things themselves, little regarding by what names they were first called.’123 ‘Use’ might be ‘the judge, the law, and rule of speech’, but ultimately that places the power of linguistic legislation in the mouths of diverse users.124 That words ‘derive all their force from publick imposition’125 is little strength against uncheckable private appropriation. The second way Pufendorf threatens verbal univocity is his theory that there are meanings additional to and distinct from the literal senses of words. Drawing on established divisions, he develops a theory of ‘connotation’ that supplements the strict ‘notation’ of words.126 The ‘additional signification’ is the expression of judgement, over and above the propositional, or locutionary meaning. He uses the example of calling someone a ‘liar’, whereby ‘I not only signify that his speech is disagreeable to his thought, but farther denote (connoto), that he did this with an ill intention, and an account of procuring my prejudice or hurt’. Sometimes this illocutionary, evaluative signification is derived from the words intrinsically, as in the case of calling someone an ‘impostor, or an ignoramus’. Sometimes it comes from ‘the tone of the voice . . . from the lines of the face, from particular gestures, and other natural signs, which are wont very considerably to alter, diminish, or increase the principal signification of words’. (Again, an unmistakable allusion to paradiastole, the classic site of semantic uncertainty.) The final cause of additional signification is the use of figurative speech, which ‘very often denotes some passion in the speaker; whereas a plain expression barely imports the thing asserted’.127 Pufendorf also voices the familiar division between the spirit and the letter that is so central to renaissance hermeneutics. Lawyers commonly distinguish between the mens legislatoris, the ratio legis, and the verba of the text itself.128 When discussing legal interpretation, Pufendorf alludes to the distance between the real and apparent senses of words. The original intention gets lost in the words. They are an imperfect medium, a dark glass which denies the reader access to the mind of the author. 121 124 126

127

Pufendorf 1703, V, pp. 1–2. 122 Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 279. 123 Pufendorf 1703, V, p. 51. Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 279. 125 Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 276. Lamy (1986, p. 201) and Arnauld and Nicole (1996, p. 67) also refer to this semantic supplementarity. Pufendorf 1703, IV, pp. 279–280. 128 See Maclean 1992, p. 142.


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Pufendorf suggests three places where we can find the real ‘design’ of obscure words. These are ‘subject matter’, ‘effect’ and ‘circumstance’. For example, ‘the effects and the consequence do very often point out the genuine meaning of the words: For where words, if they be taken literally, are like to bear none, or at least, a very absurd signification, to avoid such an inconvenience we must a little deviate from the receiv’d sense of them.’129 He follows Cicero’s hermeneutic stricture that ‘all laws . . . ought to be referr’d to the benefit of the common-wealth, and ought to be interpreted according to the publick advantage, not according to the letter.’130 Repeating his juristic forbears, Pufendorf goes on to say that ‘that which helps us more in the discovery of the true meaning of the law, is, the reason of it, or the cause which moved the legislator to enact it. This ought not to be confounded with the mind of the law (mente legis); for that is nothing but the genuine meaning of it (sententia legis genuine), for the finding out of which, we call in the reason of it to our assistance.’131 The letter can only inadequately express the full intention of the legislator because the finite generality of law must elude the infinite and unforeseeable variety of particular cases. An interpreter is required to judge when exceptions ought to be made to the letter, in order to fulfil the spirit. To recover the meaning of the lawgiver, then, one must depart from the words themselves. However, Pufendorf warns that ‘this liberty must not be indulged too far’, that our contraventions of the civil law must not be ‘repugnant to the law of God, or Nature.’132 Readers are trapped between verbal obscurity and their own corrupting potential. Good interpretation of texts is dependent on the moral, or rational, qualities of the interpreter, who has to pick his way between the spirit and the letter, both of which throng with candidates, and render risible contemporary appeals for verbal transparency. Meaning turns out to be located less in the words themselves than in extraneous connotations on the one hand, and on the other a separate, even contradictory mens, recoverable only by the just reader.

129 132

Pufendorf 1703, v, p. 54. 130 Pufendorf 1703, v, p. 55. 131 Pufendorf 1703, v, p. 56. Pufendorf 1703, v, p. 62; see also pp. 58–9 on ‘enlargement’ and ‘restraint’, when an interpreter ought to extrapolate from, or make exceptions to the words of the law.

chapter 6

Under cover of sensible and powerful words

The problems of semantic (un)reality and multiplicity become especially serious when they are considered as being irrevocably hidden behind an opaque front of language that has its own indomitable force. It is to the presence and power of words themselves that I now turn.1 We have met these qualities before. While logicians confidently merged terms, concepts and things, grammarians flaunt the independence of words through their semiotic (as opposed to semantic) analysis of language. The intricate play of detached signs lays bare the striking autonomy and sensibility of words. Rhetoricians further emphasise the signs themselves. They focus on the seductive sensibility of words, suggesting ways in which their sounds might affect the audience favourably. Far from worrying about these tools of the trade, they applaud their exploitation, leaving it to nervous onlookers to probe the consequences. Moreover, this beguiling sister, Dame Rhetoric, makes a profession out of the potentially duplicitous power of words, winning the day by telling not the truth, but the story she wants her listeners to believe. She thereby exposes the invincible, opaque and creative force of words. These aspects of language cause philosophers variously to think about its dangerous potency.

1

Commentators whose work touches on the subject of this chapter include: Ong (1958) on Ramism developing a quantified, spatialised and unitised approach to terms and things to the extent that discrete terms seem to transmute into things (p. 90); 1971, pp. 162 and 167; Ong (1982) on the technologising of words and their identity as and with things; Foucault (1970, pp. 17–45) on words in the world; Cohen (1977, p. 25) on the mid-century ‘lexical’ as opposed to ‘syntactic’ approach to language that presents words as objects; Katz (1981, p. 132) on the view that God created the world through speech and the consequent search for that logos in the seventeenth century; Vickers (1984) on the occultists’ confusion of words with things; Kroll (1991) on the publicity, palpability and artificiality of language, and its deployment by the organs of power; Anderson (1996) on the ‘thingness’ of words (p. 2).

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sensible words and (in)visible ideas It is generally accepted that words function by being sensible marks of insensible ideas. Their audible or visible status publicises otherwise private ideas. Sounds and images are the sole means of transporting their ideational cargo into the community. On the backs of palpable words, ideas enter the mind through the great gate of the senses. By definition, then, it is the sensible, rather than the semantic element of words that has actual priority in the communication situation, even though it is logically subordinate. And in themselves, sounds and scribbles are meaningless, being completely arbitrary. Moreover, even if those sensible signals are properly understood, that is, in accordance with the community’s semantic contracts, they might contradict the thoughts of the speaker, words telling their own sovereign story. The very dualism that underpins the success of communication simultaneously plants the seeds of its failure. Words are inherently insignificant images, but their impressive sensibility belies their semantic opacity. As we saw in chapter one, Augustine makes sensibility crucial to the definition of a sign: ‘a sign is a thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind, besides the impression that it presents to the senses’.2 Bacon elaborates that ‘whatsoever is capable of sufficient differences, and those perceptible by the sense, is in nature competent to express cogitations’, gestural sign language being a visible signifier.3 In his pertinently entitled Mercury, or, the Secret and Swift Messenger, Shewing How a Man May with Privacy and Speed Communicate his Thoughts to a Friend at Any Distance, John Wilkins explains that while angels communicate ‘spiritually’ and ‘perfectly’, ‘men that have organicall bodyes, cannot communicate their thoughts, [in] so easie and immediate a way. And therefore have need of some corporeal instruments both for the receiving and conveying of knowledge’.4 Pufendorf simply states that ‘a man cannot tell another man’s will except from acts and signs apparent to his senses’.5 ‘The condition of human nature’ makes the only communication route: ‘signs striking upon the senses (per signa in sensus incurrentia)’.6 The Latin illuminates how it is the sensible feature of words that enables their penetration of the mind, which is otherwise closed to the minds of others. In themselves, sensible signs communicate nothing; they do so only by 2

3 6

Augustine 1997, p. 30. On Augustine’s theory of signs see Markus 1996, pp. 71–124; Jackson 1972. Kirwan (1994, p. 211) accuses Augustine of being seduced by the ‘picture theory of reference’. Bacon 1996b, p. 230. 4 Wilkins 1641, p. 2. 5 Pufendorf 1991, p. 108. Pufendorf 1703, iv, p. 278.

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having meaning projected on to them by convention. As the Port-Royal Logique says, ‘the listeners must already view the sign as a sign, and . . . they need to know what it is the sign of ’.7 Flowing from its body/mind dualism, the Cartesian tradition presents an exceptionally strict disunity between the signifying word image and the purely intellectual idea signified. Descartes comments that the sounds of words ‘bear no resemblance’ to the ideas they cause in the mind.8 Spinoza makes an absolute distinction between corporeal words and intellectual ideas. He bemoans the fact that people confuse the two, thereby telling themselves, because they can, that they have ‘free will’, when in fact they have no adequate idea of what this phrase might mean. To dispel such delusions Spinoza implores us to flee and attend to the ‘nature of thought, which does not at all involve the concept of extension’ – the realm of embodied words. An idea is ‘a mode of thinking’ and ‘consists neither in the image of anything, nor in words. For the essence of words and of images is constituted only by corporeal motions, which do not at all involve the concept of thought.’9 The ‘principal end’ of Cordemoy’s explicitly Cartesian Discourse concerning Speech is to reveal the ‘distinction’ between thoughts and words.10 Thinking through the leap that so bothers rhetoricians, he is awe-struck by how men connect signs and ideas despite their ‘vast difference.’11 He refers to the ‘pains . . . which every one finds in conversation’ that stem not from the difficulty ‘to comprehend what another thinketh, but to extricate his thought from the signes or words.’12 The simultaneity of the theoretical gulf and the habitual intimacy between words and thoughts is ‘admirable’ and ‘remarkable’.13 An exile in France, Digby describes the process of ‘discoursing and expressing our thoughts to one another by words’ as a ‘mysterie’.14 The estranged relationship between words and meanings is illustrated by the metaphors used to characterise it. Blount declares that ‘speech is the apparel of our thoughts’.15 Comenius compares the Latin and English translations of the names of the pictures in his ‘dictionary’ of drawings to ‘a man clad in a double garment’.16 The clothes/body image intimates the pure superficiality of words – as well as the possibility for incongruous dress and disguise. Another common simile likens words to money and meaning to value. In the words of Bacon, ‘words are the 7 10 11 14

Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 123. 8 Descartes 1985b, p. 81. 9 Spinoza 1994, p. 64. Cordemoy 1668, p. 40. Cf. Cottingham 1992, p. 247, on language as a main argument for dualism. 12 13 Cordemoy 1668, p. 22. Cordemoy 1668, p. 90. Cordemoy 1668, pp. 22; 39. Digby 1645, p. 2. 15 Blount 1969, sig. A5r. 16 Comenius 1968, p. 93.


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tokens current and accepted for conceits, as moneys are for values, and . . . it is fit men be not ignorant that moneys may be of another kind than gold and silver’.17 The analogy itself, and Bacon’s reminder that anything might be ascribed value, paper just as well as gold, points to the arbitrariness of the connection between sign and signified. Moreover, the satisfyingly tangible signs contrast with their insubstantial significations. The sign appears as radically other from the signified. Sometimes the simile draws on the anxiety that the face value of coins does not match up to their real value, and thereby expresses concern about the nonsense or impropriety of words. Hobbes uses the metaphor in this way, playing on the fear of fool’s gold to evoke the worthlessness of words in a semantic vacuum. ‘Words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fooles, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other Doctor whatsoever, if but a man.’18 The monetary metaphor is also used to suggest a reliabile and transparent connection, even an identity, between sign and signified. This use draws on the intimacy which both convention and the State’s stamp establish between face and real value. Pufendorf proposes that words might be as successfully and obviously fixed to their conventional meanings as coins are to their conventional values. ‘He who will not comply with the coin ordinarily current, but frames a new kind according to his own fancy, and offers it in payment is manifestly out of his senses.’19 Phillips explains how new coinages are legitimately introduced when ‘the learned do acknowledge them to be good bullion stampt and well minted’.20 There are two further metaphors that describe the association between words and meanings and that also paint a closer, more optimistic, picture of the alliance. They embody meaning and confound the stark duality, thereby redressing the improper and frightening imbalance between the practical priority of words and the theoretical priority of meaning. The first occurs in a cluster of verbs that imply that meanings are things, with palpable existences. Scholastic terminology gives the image of words as ‘imposed’ on their referents. Pufendorf explains that we have ‘fix’d (imposuerunt)’ words upon things.21 Hobbes says that positive names are ‘put to mark somewhat which is in nature or may be feigned by the mind of man’.22 We see this subtle substantiation of ideas in South’s depiction of moral terms as being ‘applied’ 17 18 21

Bacon 1996b, p. 231. Lavatori (1996) explores the metaphor in Rabelais. Hobbes 1996, p. 29. 19 Pufendorf 1703, iv, p. 279. 20 Phillips 1969, sig. C5v. Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 274 (1934, p. 310). 22 Hobbes 1996, p. 30.

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to moral entities.23 Words also ‘carry’ things; Kersey’s Dictionary (1702) elucidates ‘to signify’ as ‘to import’.24 Finally, words ‘contain’ meanings; Justininan’s Digest uses ‘continere’ to describe the connection.25 Phillips takes ‘Explication’ as ‘an unfolding’.26 Henry Cockeram’s dictionary (1623) charmingly defines an ‘expression’ as ‘a squeezing or pressing out’.27 All these verbs quietly lend matter to meaning; there are objects for words to mark, carry and contain. The second, overlapping metaphor that goes against the grain of the sensible word/insensible meaning dualism compares meanings to visible entities that are manifested or illuminated by words. Transparent language had always been the ideal. For example, renaissance legal theory had held that the words of the law ought to make the legislator’s intention visible.28 Contemporary dictionaries teem with various renditions of this basic figure. Phillips’ entry for ‘explanation’ reads ‘a making plain or manifest’.29 Self-consciously reflecting on lexicography, Kersey explains that his job is to ensure that the words ‘are also illustrated with a clear and short exposition’. When we come to his own entry for ‘To expose’, we find ‘shew, or lay open’. We also discover: ‘To express, pourtray’, ‘To explain, or make plain; clear, manifest, unfold, or declare’.30 John Bullokar’s English Expositour (1616) provides: ‘Explicate. To unfold, open, or declare at large’, ‘Expose. To set forth, to set to view’.31 And Coles’ English Dictionary (1676) offers us: ‘Explanation, a making plain, clear or manifest’.32 The presentation of meanings as substantial, and particularly as visible, is endemic to the spectacle of early-modern philosophy of language. It lies behind the rhetorical pursuit of perspicuity, as well as the anti- or new rhetorical advocacy of ‘plainness’. It is also (and interrelatedly) central to the new philosophy, most obviously in the bandying about of ‘clear and distinct’ ideas, to the extent that the metaphor is willed into becoming a reality. The sensible priority of words is trampled by the march of statements declaring the irresistible evidence of meaning, relegating words to their proper, subservient place. Philosophers swap the material and spiritual nature of words and meaning around, asserting the clarity of meaning by contrast with the obscurity of words. They urge each other to 23 26 28

29 31 32

E.g. South 1823b, p. 111. 24 Kersey 1969, sig. Cc3v. 25 E.g. Digest 1985, iv, pp. 934 and 935. Phillips 1969, sig. O4v. 27 Cockeram 1968, sig. E4r. Maclean 1992, p. 96 explains how it was thought that signification ought ideally to be ‘as unproblematic as visual representation’. Phillips 1969, sig. O4v. 30 Kersey 1969, sig. A2r; sig. K1r. Bullokar 1684, sig. D9v; sig. D10r. Coles 1971, sig. N2r. Locke had this dictionary and included it in his reading list for gentlemen (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 113; Locke 1997, p. 379).


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turn from the darkness of words to the brilliance of things, to the ‘simple and naked truth’.33 Ironically however, meanings are pushed to prominence by comparing them with visible objects, drawing on the potency of sight in a move which recalls those of grammarians and orators. Angel Day reminds us that we say ‘we see well, when we meane wee understand well’.34 The albeit figurative recourse to vision in order to describe the self-evidence of cognition evinces the ultimate sovereignty of sense perception and begs the dark question of what lies behind the metaphor. Famously undeterred, Descartes makes a permanent contribution here with his indubitable, clear and distinct ideas. Somewhat paradoxically, he uses the invincible clarity of ‘the noblest and most comprehensive of the senses’ to elucidate the character of these ideas.35 Intellectual clarity resembles the visual clarity we get when something ‘is present to the eye’s gaze and stimulates it with a sufficient degree of strength and accessibility’.36 He contrasts mental illumination with ‘the fluctuating testimony of the senses or the deceptive judgement of the imagination as it botches things together’. Intellection delivers truth. It is ‘easy’, whereas imagination (in which camp, words are located) is difficult.37 He takes a figure of a thousand sides and declares that he understands it effortlessly, whereas he cannot imagine (see an image of ) it. He can just about imagine a pentagon, but only effortfully.38 Moreover, the word–image might be perfectly translucent, dissolving itself as the mind grasps the idea it signifies. Words are completely unlike their meanings, ‘yet they make us think of these things, frequently even without our paying attention to the sounds of the words, or to their syllables. Thus it may happen that we hear an utterance whose meaning we understand perfectly well, but afterwards we cannot say in what language it was spoken.’39 Spinoza reiterates Descartes’ confidence in irresistibly clear ideas, by contrast with the erroneous fog of images in which words are key players. The ‘light of reason’ as Spinoza calls it is counterpoised with the darkness of language. Our clear and distinct understanding of God is ‘far more excellent’ than any words could deliver.40 It is possible for words to be windows to these luminous ideas, so long as one keeps one’s eye on the latter. Spinoza declares that reading Euclid is like looking through glass, and language no obstacle.41 Spinoza’s self-assured identification of clear 33 34 35 38 41

Webster, John 1970, p. 73. Day 1595, p. 77. See Lyons (1989) on Descartes’ problematic metaphorical use of sight. Descartes 1985d, p. 152. 36 Descartes 1985e, p. 207. 37 Descartes 1985a, p. 14. Descartes 1984a, p. 51. 39 Descartes 1985b, p. 81. 40 Spinoza 1951, p. 14. Spinoza 1951, p. 113.

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meaning is coupled with a belief in the possibility of a language that simply dishes up the iridescent, unimpeachable res. The dream of visible meanings, of a literally perspicuous language, is common to early-modern philosophers. However, many do not share the Cartesian confidence in the clarity of purely intellectual ideas. Their clarity, at least for the ‘rationalists’, is, after all, only a metaphor. Instead, appealing (like the Cartesians) to the indispensable power of sense perception in cognition, some writers argue that meanings must be rendered literally sensible in order to transfix the mind. We have met these theorists before. Some want to make meaningful the sensible signs themselves, as in the Cratylic-Adamic tradition that enjoys a revival in the seventeenth century and in John Bulwer’s natural language of gesture. Others maintain that while fallen signs are doomed to opacity, meanings might be made sensible. We saw this goal in rhetoric, which seeks to paint pictures with words, and also in the educational movement which is typified by Comenius’ Visible World. In their different ways, philosophers want to reverse the sensible but meaningless priority of words, and to overcome the elusive abstraction of meanings by imbuing them with the superlative power of sense. However, the widespread commitment to the power and necessity of sense in cognition does not generally play into the hands of meaning, but into the hands of words. Despite the visionary proposals to the contrary, we are ordinarily left with sensible words and insensible meanings. Sense rules and so, therefore, do our sensible words. Bacon explains that our sensuous minds need ‘sensible and plausible elocution’ to moisten the dryness of philosophical ideas. But he says that this hinders our scientific understanding because it ‘quencheth the desire of further search, before we come to a just period’. We are seduced by rhetorical verbosity. We stop at pleasing, sensible words and do not probe the underlying matter. Bacon likens those men who ‘study words and not matter’ to Pygmalion: ‘for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture’.42 The power of sensible words is evinced in the various arts of memory. Verbal sensibility is crucial not only for the initial apprehension of ideas, but also for their retention. As one of the five parts of rhetoric, memoria was based on the need for images to bring things back to mind. 42

Bacon 1996b, pp. 139–40.


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Cicero elaborates a complex system of sensible loci and imagines in order that an orator might remember his speech. One ought to visualise one’s arguments because sight has the tightest grip on our minds. ‘Things not seen and not lying in the field of visual discernment are earmarked by a sort of outline and image and shape so that we keep hold of as it were by an act of sight things that we can scarcely embrace by an act of thought.’43 Quintilian objects that Cicero’s method is too convoluted, but he too reiterates the need for images – in this case, of the words themselves – for effective retention. He recommends learning one’s speech from the page rather than hearing someone saying it ‘because the perception of the eye is quicker than that of the ear’.44 Augustine had remarked on how the written word reifies fleeting orality.45 Bacon explains that a fundamental part of his new method for interpreting nature is the written tabulation of history. Not until experience has been laid before our eyes can it be interpreted scientifically. Once the experiments have been completed, ‘the understanding is still by no means capable of handling this material offhand and from memory, any more than one should expect to be able to manage and master from memory the computation of an astronomical almanac . . . no adequate inquiry can be made without writing’.46 Discussing the art of memory, Bacon says that emblems work by reducing ‘conceits intellectual to images sensible, which strike the memory more’.47 Holdsworth consistently stresses the importance of actively creating and using visual stimuli. Students ought to make marginal marks, organise their commonplaces spatially, and take notes from books.48 We remember Hobbes’ strong claim. He asserts that sensible words are necessary simply for thinking, as well as remembering. They are essential for ratiocination, not only because they are universal, but also because – in their spoken as well as written form – they enable us to remember ephemeral ideas. Even if we were alone in the world, without needing sensible words to communicate, we would still need them to register ‘the consequences of our thoughts; which being apt to slip out of our memory, and put us to new labour, may again be recalled, by such words as they were marked by’.49 ‘So fluctuating and frail are the thoughts of men, and so fortuitous is the 43

44 46 48 49

Cicero 1942, i, p. 469. On the arts of memory see Yates 1966 and Coleman 1992. On the relationships between memory, science and nature see Rossi 1991 and 2000; cf. DeMott (1957) on the tension between mnemonics and science. Quintilian 1920–22, iv, p. 231. 45 Augustine 1997, p. 32. See Ong 1982. Bacon 1994b, p. 109. 47 Bacon 1996b, p. 230. See, for example, Holdsworth 1961, pp. 635, 640, 624. Hobbes 1996, p. 25; 1981, p. 11. See Land (1986, pp. 9–29) for an interpretation of Hobbes’ linguistic theory and the centrality of mnemonics therein.

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recovery of them, that the most indubitable experiences can be lost to anyone.’ In order to stop thoughts from ‘slipping away’, ‘some sensible tokens are necessary, to which past thoughts can be reduced’.50 Hobbes offers an exceptionally evanescent view of ideas and their unceasing flow, and of the crucial role words play as rocks and dams. His is an extreme testimonial to the indispensable role of sensible words in thought. If we turn for a moment from the role of sense in the specific context of language to the wider context of human nature, we find that there too it is overwhelming, expressed in the general concern about the mind becoming enslaved to the body. The power of the flesh is attributed to its fundamental integration into human nature. Pufendorf says that, although moral entities are not ‘ingraffed in the substance of things’, it is useful to think of them as inherent in things because ‘our understandings are so immersed in corporeal images, as to be hardly capable of apprehending such moral beings any otherwise than by their analogy to those of nature’.51 Due to our moral corruption, short-sightedness, and laziness, the body usurps the mind. Pascal declares that ‘concupiscence’ – or love of feeling, or lust – has become man’s ‘second nature’.52 While writers do not necessarily extrapolate the implications for language of this concern – although many do – it seems fair to argue that if sense threatens to overpower the mind, then it will do so in language, and we will be left at the mercy of the glare of words. While Descartes extols the power of the ‘natural light’ of the mind, he is not immune to doubts that it might be extinguished by imagination. His scepticism seeps out uncontrollably from his dogmatic text. Contrary to his assured polemic, it requires great labour to stoke the fire of the mind, and sense might easily snuff it out. When he ‘relaxes’, his ‘mental vision is blinded by the images of things perceived by the senses’, and he can no longer remember why God necessarily exists, as he had previously deduced.53 Pascal dramatises the conflict. Imagination, ‘this proud, powerful enemy of reason’, ‘has established a second nature in man’.54 It blots out the intellect with alarming alacrity and dexterity. As Descartes has to admit, this is particularly the case with word images, the instruments of both our private and public reason: Because of the use of language, we tie all our concepts to the words used to express them; and when we store the concepts in our memory we always 50 53 54

Hobbes 1996, p. 12. 51 Pufendorf 1703, i, p. 3. 52 Pascal 1995a, p. 54. Descartes 1984a, p. 32. Pascal 1995a, p. 17. Of course, Pascal is also the enemy of reason, which proud faculty he opposes to the heart.


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simultaneously store the corresponding words. Later on we find the words easier to recall than the things; and because of this it is very seldom that our concept of a thing is so distinct that we can separate it totally from our concept of the words involved. The thoughts of almost all people are more concerned with words than with things, and as a result people very often give their assent to words they do not understand, thinking they once understood them, or that they got them from others who did understand them correctly.55

The corporeal, memorable nature of language intertwines itself so deeply in our thoughts, that it dominates, even constitutes them. Nicole mourns our obsession with sense: the result of our Fall. The mind is ‘reduced’ and ‘abased’ ‘by being shut up in a corrupted body’.56 He applies the terrible hierarchy of body over mind to the word–meaning duality. Our memories, repositories of sensible images, store up words with admirable aplomb, but we do not advance thence to ‘knowledge of the things themselves’, but remain stuck with this ‘empty kind of learning (cette sorte de science)’.57 (Locke, Nicole’s translator, adds the ‘empty’.) Nicole bows to the rhetorical insight that to reach the hearer’s mind the speaker has to employ particularly penetrative sensible tools. There must be no ‘dryness in discourse’. Rather we ought to ‘smooth’ ‘the things we deliver, with soft words, that may make them slide gently into the mind’.58 We cannot escape our embodied corruption and must therefore go with its flow to redeem ourselves. Malebranche’s De la recherche features a sustained exposition of our thraldom to the flesh. His goal is ‘to make the mind sensible of its slavery and dependence on all sensible things’.59 The mind is suspended between spirit and earth, being pulled down by the great weight of the body, making ‘perpetual essays to fortify its union with sensible objects’.60 The voice of the body ‘speaks lowder than God himself, but never speaks the truth’.61 The mind incessantly moves away from the ‘presence of God, or that Internal Light’, and is ‘dazzled’ by the body. ‘The eye of the soul has great difficulty distinctly to perceive any truth whilst the eye of the body is employ’d in the discovery.’62 Malebranche explicitly explores the ramifications for language of the effective sovereignty of the real over the metaphorical eye. Men attend more to corporeal words than to their incorporeal signification, which they do not care to pursue. They would 55 57

58 61

Descartes 1985e, p. 220. 56 Nicole 1828, pp. 68–9. Nicole 1828, p. 51 (1781, p. 25). In addition to translating Nicole’s Essais de morale, Locke owned three copies of them (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 192). Nicole 1828, p. 147. 59 Malebranche 1694, sig. b1r. 60 Malebranche 1694, sig. a2v. Malebranche 1694, sig. b2r. 62 Malebranche 1694, sig. a2v.

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rather ‘entertain their mind, with the noise and emptiness of words, than with the solidity of things’. If one wants to communicate a truth one must conjure with one’s most alluring sensible resources to secure its entrance. ‘Having always a great attention to what comes in to her by way of the sense’, the soul disregards ‘the reasons which she hears alledg’d’, concentrating instead on the ‘sensible pleasure she receives from the finely term’d periods, the conformity of the gestures to the words, from the genteel mein of the face, from the air and the way and manner of the speaker’. Our ‘eyes and . . . ears’, not reason, are the ‘judges of truth’ ‘because men apply themselves merely to the sensible and agreeable manners of men’.63 Superficial ploys affect the audience, not the rational core. Sensible words captivate us at the expense of insensible ideas. They also positively interfere with reasoning, leading our minds astray. Spinoza fiercely attacks sensible language as the source of error. In his tripartite division of knowledge into imaginative, rational and intuitive, he describes the first as created ‘from singular things which have been represented to us through the senses in a way which is mutilated, confused, and without order for the intellect’. He locates knowing ‘from signs’ in this first category, to which ‘pertain[s] all those ideas which are inadequate and confused; and so . . . this knowledge is the only cause of falsity’.64 This is a damning verdict on verbally transmitted knowledge. Language’s dark glass begets words which signify nothing – bodies without a soul – and therefore an end to sense and communication. We met this worry about the deprivation of res in the grammars and rhetorics. Montaigne insists that it is ‘for words to serve’, and ‘things to dominate’.65 But he attests to the possibility of the battle being lost in his depiction of verbal circularity in logical discourse.66 He also describes the (necessary) vacuity of our descriptions of God. ‘We confidently use words like might, truth, justice. They are words signifying something great. But what that ‘‘something’’ is we cannot see or conceive.’67 Early-modern texts abound with accusations of insignificance, most frequently against the scholastics whose mouthings are ridiculed as no more significant than those of fish. Hobbes mocks them for their ‘visible species’ which they grandly identify as the ‘cause of vision’ but which ‘in English’ turns out to

63 65

Malebranche 1694, i.i, p. 43. 64 Spinoza 1994, p. 57. See Savan 1973; Klijnsmit 1989. Montaigne 1991, p. 193. 66 Montaigne 1991, p. 1213. 67 Montaigne 1991, p. 556. Cf. p. 591.


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mean ‘a being seen’.68 Spinoza discredits the notion of ‘free will’ by appealing to the meaninglessness of this phrase.69 Sensible words are often presented as an opaque veil that hides the face, if such a thing exists at all. The depiction of language as an inscrutable mask appears in the context of the Bible. At times, ‘no meaning at all’ can be grasped, notes Augustine with relish, ‘so thick is the fog created by some obscure phrases’.70 Pascal repeats Augustine’s representation of Scripture as deliberately obscure, but decodable with humble interpretative labour, readable by the virtuous. From our paradoxical nature emanates both an inability to read the signs, and sporadic glimpses of the lovely countenance of God. ‘If there were no obscurity, we would not feel our corruption. If there were no light we could not hope for a remedy.’71 Scripture is a tight weave of language that threatens to remove all chinks of light. In the twin contexts of the sensible word/insensible meaning dualism and of the power of sense perception to which all early-modern philosophers subscribe, the semiotic as opposed to the semantic side of language emerges as the dominating force in thought and communication. It serves imperceptibly to cover, and thereby worsen, the problems of unreal, multiplicitous and empty signification that I have explored. Language is necessarily pre-eminent in communication, but it also holds sway in private thought, where we prefer to think in words, deluding ourselves about the perfection of the signification of our words. The problem of verbal sovereignty is aggravated or minimised according to the quality of meaning posited by different philosophers. However, even for those who believe that words signify truly and universally, the fact remains that words dominate, giving rise to a host of problems to which I now turn. Even the most optimistic speakers admit that language inherently threatens to dissolve into sound alone. In practice, words fill our heads and the air between us, as the Port-Royalists admit. ‘Our need to use external signs to make ourselves understood causes us to connect our ideas to words in such a way that we often pay more attention to the words than to the things’.72 And in themselves words take us no further than their sensible surface, given that they can only be defined with more 68

69 71

72

Hobbes 1996, p. 14. See Leijenhorst (2002b) on Hobbes on insignificant speech and scholasticism as the source as well as the target of his philosophy of language. Spinoza 1994, p. 53. 70 Augustine 1997, p. 32. Pascal 1995a, p. 169. See Melzer (1986) on this ‘aporia’. Cf. Markley (1993) on crises of representation in Newtonian England. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 58. They are repeating Descartes, e.g. Descartes 1985e, p. 220.

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words ‘and so on to infinity’.73 Bacon had expressed the same concern about the promiscuity of words. ‘Definitions themselves consist of words, and words beget words’.74 Words form a self-consuming circle which it is impossible to shirk. Descartes’ bold response that we can break out of the verbal darkness into the light of the mind sounds hollow when it is only by figurative recourse to vision, queen of the senses, that the move out of sensible language can be made. Hobbes makes this fatal assault in his Objections to the Meditations. He contends that the ‘great light in the intellect’ is only ‘metaphorical, and so has no force in the argument’.75 He adds that any obstinate, passionate bigot might appeal to the light, which in itself has no claim on truth. It produces only strongly held opinions. Indeed, it is only a verbal claim and it derives its resonance from the vivid power of sight-centred words. Descartes replies dismissively that the metaphor is used for its explanatory power and ‘as everyone knows, a ‘light in the intellect’ means transparent clarity of cognition’.76 In trying to distance himself from the metaphor he can only return to it. It seems to have no graspable referent. It turns back on itself, only deepening the sense that imagination – and verbal images – rule. duplicitous words The clearest instance of the absolute power of language is mendacity. In this case words do not function as they should, as a tunnel into the mind of the speaker, but as a devious propaganda painting, as a false reflection of the speaker’s mind. In interacting with others we only have their sensible words to go on. We just have to trust that they speak their mind. If they do not, we are none the wiser. Montaigne explains that language is the sole means of communication and that therefore if we speak duplicitously we stab the heart of society. ‘Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realised the horror and weight of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes.’77 Given his belief that ‘most of our actions are but mask and cosmetic’, our words are likely to follow suit.78 Bacon pinpoints words as particularly susceptible to untruth, advising the courtier, himself an arch dissembler, that ‘more trust be given to countenances and deeds than 73 76 78

Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 64. 74 Bacon 1994b, p. 64. 75 Descartes 1984b, p. 134. Descartes 1984b, p. 135. 77 Montaigne 1991, p. 35. See Zagorin 1990; Berti 1999; Iliffe 1999. Montaigne 1991, p. 263.


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to words; and in words, rather to sudden passages and surprised words, than to set and purposed words’.79 Hobbes reiterates that we can never know for sure that people mean what they say. They are bound only by what I shall call a tacit moral contract to speak their minds, and contracts, as Hobbes knows all too well, are effortlessly renegable. ‘Bonds . . . have their strength, not from their own nature, (for nothing is more easily broken than a mans word,) but from feare of some evill consequence upon the rupture’.80 It is because men cannot be trusted to keep faith that the mighty Leviathan must terrify them into justice. We can only hope that speakers express themselves ingenuously. However, the deceptive potency of language turns out to be one of its defining characteristics. Following Bacon, Hobbes divides communicative signs into those that ‘cannot easily be counterfeited; as actions and gestures, especially if they be sudden’, and those ‘that may be counterfeited: and those are words or speech’.81 Speech is ‘abused’ ‘when by words [people] declare that to be their will, which is not’.82 We are forever beholden to a man’s words, hence the impossibility of establishing the authenticity of a convert, or a penitent. ‘No man is able to discern the truth of another mans repentance, further than by externall marks, taken from his words, and actions, which are subject to hypocrisie.’83 As Hobbes says in the context of an Enthusiast who claims supernatural inspiration, a man ‘may err, and (which is more) may lie’.84 Elaborating on the moral contract, Pufendorf declares that the parties are obliged to keep to the terms – as it were – or else the system falls apart. His chapter heading on language reads ‘of speech, and the obligation which attends it’, as though the possibility of deceit were so close to the practice of speech that it inheres in any discussion of the subject. He highlights the great weight that presses on the fidelity of men, given that words themselves are irrevocably opaque. ‘Signs do not inform us of the minds of others by an infallible, but only by a probable certainty, men being naturally capable of dissimulation and disguise.’85 We lie when our words belie our conceptions and when ‘the person to whom the signs were directed, had a right to understand, and to judge of those conceptions; and we on our part, lay under an obligation to make him apprehend our meaning’.86 Pufendorf even goes so far as to suggest that the moral aspect of language is separate from and takes precedence over the 79 82 84 85

Bacon 1996b, p. 273. 80 Hobbes 1996, p. 93. 81 Hobbes 1969, p. 64. Hobbes 1996, p. 26. 83 Hobbes 1996, p. 348. Hobbes 1996, p. 257. See Capp (1972) on such men. Pufendorf 1703, iv, p. 278. 86 Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 281.

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paradigmatic mind-revealing aspect. He says that it is legitimate to speak falsely when it is in the ‘interest and safety’ of the hearer.87 Then, it is not called ‘lying’. Language is a powerful instrument that can be used to good and evil ends, and it is its honest use – with all the moral connotations of that word – that makes a good speaker. Pufendorf attacks one particular form of lying prevalent in his own time: so-called ‘mental reservation’, according to which it is not lying to say something you believe to be false and by which you intend to deceive the hearer, so long as you quietly add words that make the statement true to yourself.88 This casuist doctrine came to shocking light in the seventeenth century when it was adopted by Catholic priests under Protestant interrogation. When asked about their religious identity they vocalised things that would not incriminate them, but silently told the truth. Facing inquisition in 1606, the Catholic priest John Ward was asked by the Protestant authorities if he was a priest. He replied ‘no’, but later claimed he had not lied because he had silently added ‘of Apollo’.89 This mealy-mouthed justification cuts no ice with Pufendorf. He ‘abhors’ and ‘detests’ ‘those mental reservations’, ‘the effect of which is, that a person seems outwardly to affirm what he inwardly intends to deny’. By this practice ‘the whole use and design of speech’, which is ‘declaring what we conceive in our minds’, ‘is utterly perverted’.90 Speech is quintessentially a communicative, not a self-reflexive, action. Deceptive speech ravages the trust which fuels society. Unlike the angels, I cannot look into your mind, but must rely on words to publicise it, and am therefore at their mercy. The things which bind people together can tear them apart again. Another author who sees mendacity as tied ineluctably to speech itself is Pascal. Videte an mentiar, he scribbles at one point, alluding to God’s capacity to see through our words.91 Pascal sees our social condition as necessarily deceptive, given that we are desperate for the love of others, but so unworthy of it. The ‘charitable’ institution of confession is an emblem of our mutual suppression: we keep our sins secret from our peers so that we might ‘be esteemed by them as other than we really are’, and reserve our sacrilegious truth for God, whose censure we foolishly fear less than the community’s.92 Pascal feels himself drowning in a sea of lies. ‘Truth is so darkened nowadays, and lies so established, that unless 87 88

89 91

Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 287. I take my account of mental reservation from Sommerville 1988, a fascinating analysis of this practice. Somerville 1988, p. 160. 90 Pufendorf 1703, iv, p. 285. Pascal 1995a, p. 62. The allusion is to Job 6:28. 92 Pascal 1995a, p. 180.


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we love the truth we will never know it.’93 Lies seem endemic to speech. ‘Even when people’s interests are not affected by what they say, we must definitely not conclude from this that they are not lying. For there are people who lie simply for the sake of lying’.94 We lie not only to other people, but to ourselves as well, ejecting truth from our lives altogether. Even at our most honest, in the quiet cool of private reflection, we are polluted with self-deception born of self-love. ‘Our own interest is another wonderful means of pleasantly blinding ourselves ( pour nous crever les yeux agreáblement).’95 The self-righteous way that we speak belies the content of our words. ‘Speeches about humility are a matter of pride for those who care for reputation . . . we are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves’.96 Pascal’s affiliates in Port-Royal offer a deep account of self-deception and the key role that language plays therein. As part of their raft of observations on self-delusion, the Logique posits our internalisation of other people’s lies.97 Language is an amoral conveyance that bears truth and falsity alike. ‘Absurdities’ take hold of people because they are ‘happy to be tricked’.98 Nicole elucidates how people fall in love with false opinions. Having ‘dressed’ them up ‘with reasons of conscience’, ‘not perceiving this double motion of their hearts’, they become bathed in the warm light of ‘spiritual considerations’.99 Language plays a part in naturalising, even sanctifying, false opinions. Words cover the errors and confusion, and impose upon ourselves as well as our listeners: Man is so far removed from an acquaintance with truth, that he knows not the marks and signs of it. He often forms confused ideas of very clear and plain terms; and this makes, that he can apply them to those airy and glaring notions that dazzle him. All that pleases him becomes evident, and the manner also wherein he maintains it. And having, as it were, consecrated his own fancies, under the title of indubitable verities, clearly held forth by Scripture, (church, or 93 96

97

98 99

Pascal 1995a, p. 135. 94 Pascal 1995a, p. 136. 95 Pascal 1995a, p. 20 (1963, p. 505). Pascal 1995a, p. 127. See Moriarty (2003) on self-delusion and self-division in early-modern French authors. For example, the Logique explains how we misrepresent ourselves to ourselves in order to hide our baseness from our proud eyes. ‘By sinning we have similarly lost true greatness and excellence. So to love ourselves we are forced to represent ourselves as other than we really are, to hide our miseries and poverty from ourselves, and to include in our ideas of ourselves a great many things that are completely separate from this idea, in order to enlarge it and make it grander. Here is the usual cause of false ideas’ (Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 54). Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 6. Nicole 1828, p. 119. Another subtle story of self-deception is when, in response to criticism from others, people ‘disguise to themselves the secret displeasure they take’ at their own bruised egos by ‘persuading themselves’ that they are only upset because their assailants are in the wrong (p. 202).

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tradition) he stifles from thenceforward all the doubts that offer to rise in his mind, and suffers not himself to reflect on them. Or, if they ever come in his thoughts, he considers them under the ideas of doubts and difficulties and so disarms them of all the force that should make impression on his mind.100

We can feel Locke wholeheartedly embracing the sentiments of Nicole, as he exposes the undetectably (self-)deceptive power of our beloved words. The concern about linguistic deception is part of a more general anxiety about the public persona parting company with the private self, a divergence best perpetrated by language. This divided self haunts seventeenth-century texts on account of the new, Protestant emphasis on individual conscience, the increasing democratisation of authorship and the divisive demands of formal obedience from the fast-changing governmental and religious authorities in the period. The unturnable tide of print culture, the pockets of and the pressure for press liberty, and the valorisation of libertas philosophandi worked vigorously against oaths of allegiance, calls for religious observance, and censorship laws. This explosive dialectic heightened, exposed and forced painful discrepancies between inner belief and outward speech.101 The strength of this worry about speaking against one’s conscience is attested to by Hobbes, who struggles to dispel it in his plea for obedience. In the same way that the theory of ‘mental reservation’ is based upon self-reflexive as opposed to communicated truth, Hobbes maintains that ‘profession with the tongue is but an externall thing’ and irrelevant to our moral status – which is determined by our hearts.102 The subject who is ordered by the ‘lawfull prince’, upon pain of death, to worship in a certain way does not, by obeying, commit idolatry. ‘Seeming worship . . . joined with an inward, and hearty detestation’ does not impugn our souls.103 On a darker note, Hobbes, like the archetypal Renaissance courtier, positively gives thanks for the mask of words which enable us to dissemble our ‘obscene’ ‘secret thoughts’.104 Words afford us the opportunity of putting on a good face. Spinoza, a Jew whose family had fled the Spanish inquisition, only to be excommunicated from the synagogue for his own radical philosophy and forced to live in the dissenting shadows of the Netherlands, responds to the legitimisation of external perfidy with horror and disgust.105 In the 100 101

102 105

Nicole 1828, p. 66. See Bracken (1984, pp. 67–82) on the contemporary anxiety about oaths and the externalisation of the mind; cf. Berti 1999; Comparato 1996; Iliffe 1999. 104 Hobbes 1996, p. 343. 103 Hobbes 1996, p. 452 (see Ryan 1983). Hobbes 1996, p. 52. Yovel (1989) and (1992) emphasise Spinoza’s Marrano mentalite´ ; Feldman (1992) underplays it. See Israel (2001) on the contemporary importance of libertas philosophandi; on the radicalism of


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impassioned plea for freedom of speech that ends his Tractatus, Spinoza says that, even if it were possible to make people outwardly conform, this would lead to the corruption of both state and individual. If men are so terrified of speaking their hearts that ‘they do not dare to utter a whisper, save at the bidding of their rulers’, then ‘men would daily be thinking one thing and saying another, to the corruption of good faith, that mainstay of government, and to the fostering of hateful flattery and perfidy, whence spring stratagems, and the corruption of every good art’.106 Censorship pains the souls of ‘upright’ and ‘honourable’ people, who are treated as criminals ‘simply because they are enlightened’, and would rather die than lie.107 Words provide the terrifying means of betraying ourselves. doing things with words Many philosophers are concerned that, in their uniquely sensible capacity, words alone are at the forefront of human interaction. They, quite literally, make up our minds. This is most basically the case in the sense that we believe what we hear from trusted authorities. The premises and values that direct our lives are impressed by the mouths of others. We are never out of our formative years, forever being inscribed by those around us. The concern with what passes through the ears of children, which we encountered in the use-based grammars, is an ancient one. Plato banishes the poets precisely because of the moral weakness and falsehoods they sow in their captive audiences. ‘All the weird and terrifying language’ must be ‘discarded’.108 In The Politics, Aristotle warns that ‘the directors of education . . . should be careful what tales or stories the children hear’. In particular they should pay special attention ‘that they are left as little as possible with slaves’, whose poisonous tongues would leave their sting. Moreover, there is a slippery slope from speech to action, which is why children must be prevented from mimicking indecent words. ‘The light utterance of shameful words leads soon to shameful actions.’109 Bacon wants to erase mental graffiti.110 Descartes expresses the same anxiety about linguistic information. ‘Right from infancy our mind was swamped with a thousand such preconceived opinions; and in later

106 109

the enlightenment and Spinoza’s central place therein. See Strauss (1997) for an argument that Spinoza was writing between the lines. Spinoza 1951, p. 261. 107 Spinoza 1951, p. 263. 108 Plato 2000, pp. 71–87; 72. Aristotle 1996, p. 193. 110 Bacon 1994b, p. 106.

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childhood, forgetting that they were adopted without sufficient examination, it regarded them as known by the senses or implanted by nature, and accepted them as witty, true, and evident.’111 The contingent origin of words is obliterated over time. Their secure and brilliant presence makes them feel innate and true. ‘Because’ says Pascal, ‘you have been taught (vous a dit) in the schools that there is no such thing as a vacuum, your common sense, which understood the notion of a vacuum perfectly well before receiving this false idea, has been corrupted’.112 Recalling the problem of self-delusion, Pascal demonstrates the central role of speaking to oneself in the formation of belief. Our self-reflexive conversations substantiate and authorise our self-interested agendas: We are so made that by telling us that we are fools we believe it. The more we tell ourselves the same thing, the more we bring ourselves to believe it. For we alone hold an inner dialogue with ourselves, which must be kept properly in check . . . We must keep silence with ourselves as much as possible, conversing only about God, who we know is the truth. That way we persuade ourselves that he is.113

Hobbes worries about indelible words. Our opinions are often merely the verbal implantations of those who exert power over us; even belief in ‘articles of faith’ is caused by ‘the Hearing’ of ‘parents’ and ‘pastors’. Hobbes goes on to ask rhetorically by what means there could be such consensus in the Christian states that Scripture is the word of God, if subjects had not heard this ‘fact’ from their ‘infancy’.114 As a young man himself when writing the Elements Hobbes declares that men’s minds are filled with rubbish that is difficult to clean up. ‘But when men have once acquiesced in untrue opinions and registered them as authentical records in their minds; it is no less impossible to speak intelligibly to such men, than to write legibly upon a paper already scribbled over. The immediate cause therefore of indocility, is prejudice; and of prejudice, false opinion of our knowledge.’115 The roots of sensible words run deep in our absorbent brains. Later, in De homine, Hobbes alludes to our addiction to sensuous words. ‘And so those accustomed to wine from youth by no means easily break the habit; and those imbued with no matter what 111 113

114

Descartes 1985e, p. 219. 112 Pascal 1995a, p. 19 (1963, p. 505). Pascal 1995a, p. 33 (1963, p. 511. The translation is rather free here. The French is: ‘l’homme est ainsi fait qu’a` force de lui dire qu’il est un sot il le croit. Et a` force de se le dire a` soi-meˆme on se le fait croire, car l’homme fait lut seul une conversation inte´rieure, qu’il importe de bien re´gler . . . il faut se tenir en silence autant qu’on peut et ne s’entre tenir que de Dieu qu’on sait eˆtre la ve´rite´, et ainsi on se le persuade a` soi-meˆme’). Hobbes 1996, p. 406. 115 Hobbes 1969, p. 51.


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opinions from boyhood retain them even in old age.’ In the next sentence the image undergoes a horrible metamorphosis. ‘Religion and doctrine, which everyone hath been taught from their early years . . . shackle them forever’.116 Hobbes’ worry about the disfiguring, corrupting force of external ‘authorities’ on our minds focuses on the Greek and Roman republican books which ‘make the people’s disposition hostile to kings’. Alluding again to the sensibility of words, he compares another loathed tradition, that of the Presbyterian clergy, to that sweet music against which even Ulysses did not trust himself. People have been ‘corrupted by . . . the listening to siren songs of those who want supreme power in the kingdom to belong to an ecclesiastic in civil form’.117 Inscribing people is only one of the things that language does. Hobbes offers a taxonomy of the interpersonal uses to which people put language.118 The first I have just discussed: ‘teaching’, whereby we ‘beget’ our thoughts in others. This primary use is divided into ‘learning’ (when the speech is based on evidence) and ‘persuasion’ (when ‘there be not such evidence’).119 The second use is ‘counselling’, whereby the expectation of good or evil is engendered in the hearer.120 Hobbes goes on to enumerate ‘expressions of appetite’ (such as when by interrogation we seek knowledge, or by request, action), ‘expressions of intention’ (such as promising or threatening), ‘expressions of will’ (such as commanding) and ‘instigation and appeasing, by which we increase or diminish one another’s passions; it is the same thing with persuasion: the difference not being real’. This final use of speech illustrates not only that words are deeds, but reminds us that they might belie the truth without losing any of their potency. ‘For not truth, but image, maketh passion; and a tragedy affecteth no less than a murder if well acted.’121 In De cive Hobbes gives us an appalling instance of the fantastic power of words. ‘How many men have been killed by the erroneous doctrine that sovereign kings are not masters but servants of society?’122 By the time he concludes Leviathan, when his intimations of regicide had reached their bloody realisation, he goes so far as to codify the harm one does with words as an (ab)use of language: ‘when they use them to grieve one another’. Where nature ‘armed’ beasts with teeth and horns, she gave man his tongue.123 116 117

118

119 122

Hobbes 1993, p. 65. Hobbes 1993, p. 68. Serjeantson (2006) identifies Hobbes’ hatred of the universities as stemming from their status as mouthpieces for the Presbyterian clergy as well as the democratical gentlemen. Pufendorf (1703, iv, p. 273) follows Hobbes on this, explaining how by words we might ‘teach’ and ‘command’. Biletzki (1997) argues that Hobbes has a ‘pragmatic’ theory of language. Hobbes 1969, p. 64. 120 Hobbes 1969, p. 67. 121 Hobbes 1969, pp. 67–8. Hobbes 1998, p. 8. 123 Hobbes 1996, p. 26.

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In A Direction for the Government of the Tongue according to Gods Word (1593) the Puritan William Perkins articulates this contemporary concern about the ‘lamentable and fearefull . . . abuse of the tongue’. He lists the verbal means which cause ‘manifold sinnes against God, and innumerable scandals and grievances to our brethren’: ‘swearing, blaspheming, cursed speaking, railing, backbiting, slandering, chiding, quarrelling, contending, jesting, mocking, flattering, lying, dissembling’.124 He concludes that ‘the man of an evill tongue, is a beast in the forme of a man’, whose venom is more toxic than a serpent’s.125 While Spinoza pleads for free speech, he admits that in itself it may threaten the state. There are some words that must be censored due to their actively subversive force, such as when a citizen declares that ‘the supreme power has no rights over him’. Apparently ‘abstract’ doctrines can have a dangerous, revolutionary power.126 Pufendorf, quoting Hobbes, agrees that ‘the tongue of men is often us’d for a kind of trumpet of war and sedition; which is able . . . to propose false rules of living and of acting’.127 The active and informative power of language becomes especially important when it is considered in the context of the desperately socially orientated nature of the passions that drive us.128 Obsessed by our public appearance and how we compare to others, language is the means to fashion ourselves favourably and superlatively. When Bacon advises gentlemen how to strut on the political stage, he draws on the fundamentally linguistic resources of wilful redescription.129 The rhetorical strategy of paradiastole donates the means of donning an attractive, laudable face. ‘Whatsoever want a man hath, he must see that he pretend the virtue that shadoweth it; as if he be dull, he must affect gravity; if a coward, mildness’.130 Hobbesian men suffer socially motivated passions, jostling for power over each other. ‘All the heart’s joy and pleasure lies in being able to compare oneself favourably with others and form a high opinion of 124 126 128

129 130

Perkins 1603, sig. A2r. 125 Perkins 1603, p. 536. Spinoza 1951, pp. 260; 261. See Madanes 1992. 127 Pufendorf 1703, vii, p. 143. Spinoza (1994, pp. 68–113) offers a deeply interactive theory of the affects; cf. Descartes (1985f, p. 349) on passions as passively stimulated by external sources and pp. 350–404 for a typology of the often other-regarding passions; Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 207: ‘the human mind is not only naturally enamoured of itself, but it is also naturally jealous, envious, and malicious towards others’. See James (1997 and 1998) for peerless accounts of the integral role of the emotions in seventeenth-century philosophy. See Greenblatt (1980) on the poignancy of Renaissance self-fashioning. Bacon 1996b, p. 279. Cf. Shaw (1972, p. 98) on people’s inherent ‘tropicality’.


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oneself ’.131 Hobbes explains that one reason for rebellion is that people cannot bear being subject to others. Their discontent which troubleth the mind of them who otherwise live at ease, without fear of want, or danger of violence, ariseth only from a sense of their want of that power, and that honour and testimony thereof, which they think is due unto them. For all joy and grief of mind consisting . . . in a contention for precedence to them with whom they compare themselves; such men must needs take it ill, and be grieved with the state, as find themselves postponed to those in honour, whom they think they excel in virtue and ability to govern.132

The intense concern with one’s superiority and with impressing other people also induces people to copy those who glow in the eyes of their community. ‘They revere those who are praised and they imitate those whom they think worthy.’133 The vanity of man, exercised through language, appears throughout the Augustinian French texts. Our ‘indelible’ appetite for ‘glory’ is satiated by other people’s esteem.134 Pascal depicts a world where people are so gripped by the desire to be admired that they forge a purely fictional, second, external self. ‘We constantly strive to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one . . . we would happily be cowards if that gained us the reputation of being brave’.135 Virtue is turned on its head, hollowed out or reduced to that which brings us renown, while our true self stagnates in the dark. Nicole marvels at the way in which men are utterly in thrall to ‘the phantom of reputation’ that ‘possesses and dispossesses them, tumbles and turns them’, as Locke poetically renders it.136 Nicole cannot believe how we stake our happiness on that ephemeral ghost. ‘We soar aloft upon the opinions of men.’137 We are enslaved to the approbational gaze of others. ‘ ’Tis the opinion of the world that pushes him on – that drives him like an enemy at his heels, and suffers him to think of nothing else.’138 Malebranche repeats Pascal’s claim that we fashion a pleasant public self at the expense of our real, private ones. ‘They study more to acquire a chimerical grandeur in the 131

132 135 138

Hobbes 1998, p. 26. Nerney (1991, p. 69) argues from Hobbes division of names into (communicative) signs and (private) marks, that the Hobbesian mind ‘must already implicitly exhibit the structures of intersubjective representation’ and therefore that people are ‘more social by nature than an arrant wolf brought to heel’ (p. 71). Hobbes 1969, p. 169. 133 Hobbes 1993, p. 67. 134 Pascal 1995a, p. 173. Pascal 1995a, p. 147. 136 Nicole 1828, p. 76. 137 Nicole 1828, p. 82. Nicole 1828, p. 85. Cf. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 216: ‘we can generally say that most things in the world are admired only externally, because hardly anyone penetrates to the core and the foundation of things. Everything is judged by appearances, and woe to those who do not have a favourable appearance.’

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imagination of others, than to give their mind greater force and comprehension’.139 It is the ‘inclination all men have for eminency and greatness’ that ‘is a secret spur and incitement to our talking, walking, dressing, and deporting our selves’.140 Pascal is explicit that it is by language that we convince other people of our greatness. For example, he attributes curiosity to the desire to tell others what we have discovered. ‘More often than not curiosity is merely vanity. We only want to know something in order to talk about it (en parler). Otherwise we would not go on a sea voyage to say nothing about it, but simply for the pleasure of seeing things without ever hoping to describe them (jamais communiquer).’141 He denigrates knowledge in the same way. ‘There are those who go to extraordinary lengths to know about these things, not to become wiser but simply to show that they know about them.’142 Words are both literally and figuratively the means by which we impress other people, and so we identify with them. They are part of our beloved mask. We defend them fervently and cannot give them up, whatever their credentials, for fear of losing face. Nicole writes: man rejoices in the notions which he utters, says the Scripture; for, by uttering them, he owns them to be his: he makes them part of his possessions; and it becomes his interest to maintain them. To destroy them is to destroy something that belongs to him, which cannot be done, without showing him that he is deceived; and he is never pleased with that prospect.143

We seek the grail of esteem with our words, those cherished contrivances that project for the world a laudable image of ourselves. There is one final action which the sensible front of language performs. Words make things in their own image. Verbal description is simultaneously, but secretly, an act of creation. Words are supposed to follow things, but in many situations they precede and thereby constitute them. By the simple act of applying a word to a thing, it makes it so, and we are none the wiser. This is less the case with the natural world, which presses irresistibly on discourse. All the same, the more remote parts of the physical universe are subject to verbal invention. The cry of the seventeenth century not to take words for things, is grounded in anxiety about verbal fantasies passing for truth. Bacon is concerned that the idols of the marketplace not only 139

140 143

Malebranche 1694, sig. a1v. See Lennon (1993a) on interpersonal contagion; Moriarty (2003) on Malebranche’s acute sensibility to our imaginative communications. Malebranche 1694, i.ii, p. 85. 141 Pascal 1995a, pp. 28 (1963, p. 509). 142 Pascal 1995a, p. 47. Nicole 1828, p. 117.


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harbour misconceptions about the world, but positively constrain and control our view of it. ‘While men believe their reason governs words, in fact, words turn back and reflect their power upon the understanding.’ When an acute scientist wants to write a truer map of the world than that drawn by ‘common comprehension’, ‘words shout him down’.144 Descartes remarks on the way that common use clouds the truth and paints an alternative world. He interjects his description of his clear and distinct perception of wax with the following remarks about the way in which speech can deceive us, but as I reach this conclusion I am amazed at how weak and prone to error my mind is. For although I am thinking about these matters within myself, silently and without speaking, nonetheless the actual words bring me up short, and I am almost tricked by ordinary ways of talking. We say that we see the wax itself, as if it is there before us, not that we judge it to be there from its colour or shape; and this might lead me to conclude without more ado that knowledge of the wax comes from what the eye sees, and not from the scrutiny of the mind alone.145

Hobbes also bemoans the way in which our language forges misconceptions about reality. The very substantiality of words suggests equally clear and distinct, existent referents. He rails against insignificant sounds which, despite themselves, incarnate a purely fictional but apparently real world filled with ‘essences abstract, or substantial formes’. He explains how scholastic churchmen terrify their parishioners into rebellion and superstition by inventing ‘empty names’ that they spin out of the verb ‘to be’ such as ‘entity, essence, essentiall ’.146 These prattlers hoodwink their subjects with ‘ghosts’ and the ‘spirit’ of Christ in the bread. Hobbes laments the fact that ‘insignificancy of language . . . hath a quality, not onely to hide the truth, but also to make men think they have it’.147 He combats the magically creative power of language by deconstructing it, and revealing the absences that underpin various discourses. He repudiates the view that the law (rather than the sovereign) should govern by remarking on the powerlessness of ‘words, and paper, without the hands, and swords of men’.148 He dryly asks how ghosts can walk in churchyards, when motion can only be ascribed to body.149 This attempt to disenchant language is exemplified in his defusing the ‘word of God’. Hobbes undercuts its singular, embodied status by translating logos as 144 147 148

149

Bacon 1994b, p. 64. 145 Descartes 1984a, p. 21. 146 Hobbes 1996, pp. 464–5. Hobbes 1996, p. 473. Hobbes 1996, p. 471. See Salmon (1996, pp. 61–4) on the mystical-Christian belief in the power of words themselves. Hobbes 1996, p. 466.

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‘speech, discourse, or saying’.150 He denies any intelligible identity between the divine word and Christ, ‘they might as well term him the Nown of God: for as by Nown, so also by Verbe, men understand nothing but a part of speech, a voice, a sound, that neither affirms, nor denies, nor commands’.151 His target is a culture that tends to elevate words themselves to a level that belies their inherently meaningless status. Rejecting the miraculous power of words, he puts ‘spells’ down to ‘imposture, and delusion, wrought by ordinary means’.152 He is worried that the world is made in the image of language. He criticises people who say things like ‘the colour is in the body; the sound is in the ayre’, implying that our subjective perceptions are somehow ‘in’ the external bodies.153 The universality of names leads people to imagine a corresponding universality of things: This universality of one name to many things, hath been the cause that men think that the things themselves are universal. And do seriously contend, that besides Peter and John, and all the rest of the men that are, have been, or shall be in the world, there is yet somewhat else that we call men, (viz.) man in general, deceiving themselves by taking the universal, or general appellation, for the thing it signifieth.154

Having set out the Aristotelian predicaments in his Logic, Hobbes warns us not to imagine that they are ‘true of the diversities of the things themselves’.155 The Port-Royal Logique echoes Hobbes’ concern that the categories, with their pretensions to describe the world, do so for the frightening number of people who are ‘satisfied with words, and . . . imagine that they know everything when they know only their arbitrary labels’.156 By their mere presence, words conjure something out of nothing. Spinoza, with his special sensitivity to the erroneous but domineering images of words, is extremely concerned by the creative power of language. The fantastic notions that ‘ordinary people’ have of nature are substantiated ‘because they have names, as if they were [notions] of beings existing outside the imagination’.157 People ‘can will something contrary to what they are aware of’ simply by affirming with words that it is so.158 Errors proliferate because ‘the nature of words – not the nature of things – allows us to affirm them’.159 When Spinoza is enumerating ideas that we cannot ‘feign’ he breaks off with the sudden caveat that ‘there is 150 152 153 156 159

Hobbes 1996, p. 287. 151 Hobbes 1996, p. 289. Hobbes 1996, p. 304. Cf. Bacon (1996b, p. 217) on ‘fascination’ with ‘characters’. Hobbes 1981, p. 35. 154 Hobbes 1969, p. 21. Cf. 1996, p. 35. 155 Hobbes 1981, p. 25. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 34. 157 Spinoza 1994, p. 30. 158 Spinoza 1994, p. 64. Spinoza 1985, p. 38.


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nothing that cannot be put into words’. He then notes that because the idea of a soul is learned with the corporeal word the subject imagines ‘a corporeal soul: because he does not distinguish the name from the thing itself ’.160 The very sensibility of words makes us imagine that they stand for equally perceptible things. The creative power of words is even more problematic and acute when it comes to the moral world, whose strict non-existence provides no objective block to its description.161 Indeed, in a strong sense, it is constituted by language. Hobbes is concerned by evaluative terms being misapplied to things, ‘to make the unjust appear just, as may seem to suit the speaker’s purpose’.162 He rails against the ‘foole’ who speciously reasons – with his ‘heart’ rather than his head – that breaking one’s contract might be reasonable. So it is that ‘successful wickednesse hath obtained the name of vertue’.163 We have seen rhetoric positively enshrine words’ capacity to redescribe moral situations, ‘by which some men can represent to others, that which is Good, in the likenesse of Evill; and Evill, in the likenesse of Good; and augment, or diminish the apparent greatnesse of Good and Evill; discontenting men, and troubling their Peace at their Pleasure’.164 Evaluative redescription so effectively colours things that it actually causes immoral acts, such as regicide, so convinced are the murderers that theirs is a triumph of virtue over vice. In the masterbook of renaissance self-fashioning, Il cortegiano (1528), or The Courtyer as it was rendered in Thomas Hoby’s translation (1561), Castiglione explains how truth remains ‘hid’, while we call things according to our ‘fansye’ by means of linguistic redescription. Men are ‘alwayes coverynge a vyce with the name of the next vertue to it, and a vertue with the name of the nexte vice: as in calling him that is savage, bolde: hym that is sober, drie’.165 160 161

162 165

Spinoza 1985, p. 26. See Kraye (1998) on the ranges of moral philosophy in the period, and in particular on a shift from an ethics which rests ‘on the foundation of authority’ (p. 1307) to one ‘grounded on logically rigorous deductions from self-evident principles’ (p. 1279). On natural law see Haakonssen 1998; Simmonds 2002; Tuck 1987; on the innatism prevalent in English theological morality (Locke’s main target) see Yolton 1993, pp. 30–48. See Struever (1983) on the humanist presentation of a conventionally, discursively constructed, morality; Burke (1991) on reason of state and moral scepticism; Tuck (1988b) on the relation between moral scepticism and toleration; Tuck (1993) on humanist political thought. See Marshall (1994, p. 31) on Locke’s reading of ‘late sixteenth-century scepticism about the founding of any principles of morality’, and pp. 201–4 on Locke’s commitment to Pufendorf. Hobbes 1998, p. 123. 163 Hobbes 1996, p. 101. 164 Hobbes 1996, pp. 119–20. Castiglione 1994, p. 37. Locke had a copy of Il libro del cortegiano (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 103) and notes passages from the author in his commonplace book (e.g. MS. Locke d. 1, pp. 5; 29; 57; 61; 65).

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Robert South gives an even more direct account of the shockingly constitutive power of words in two aptly named sermons, Of the Fatal Imposture and Force of Words (1686). They are based on Isaiah v. 20: ‘woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil’. South reminds us of where we began in this chapter, at the invisibility of meaning and sovereignty of sensible words. He spells out the dangerous consequences of playing with these ‘dreadful weapons’.166 ‘Words are the signs and symbols of things . . . in the course of human affairs, words and names pass for things themselves: for things, or objects, cannot enter into the mind’.167 Things influence the mind according to the ‘respective names or appelations by which they are notified and conveyed to the mind’.168 All men are therefore ‘captivated and enslaved by words’.169 Their misapplication is undetectable, and their claims absolute. When something evil is verbally misrepresented as good, the mind understands it as such. It was the Devil’s saying to Adam that the apple would bring him immortality that caused his Fall. ‘God commanded and told man what was good, but the devil surnamed it evil, and thereby baffled the command, turned the world topsyturvy, and brought new chaos upon the whole creation.’170 By the same token, when inappropriate moral labels are pinned on private individuals they perfectly disguise the truth. ‘Honour’ – ‘the height and flower, and top of morality’ – applied to a dishonourable man, is like ‘a rich and glistening garment . . . cast over a rotten, fashionably-diseased body’.171 This form of evaluative creation is not restricted to obviously moral terms. It extends to a wealth of words that seem neutrally to describe but that in fact praise or censure. Using the example of ‘lie’, Pufendorf explains how the descriptive content of words is supplemented with an ‘additional’, evaluative one.172 The Port-Royal Logique likewise describes how saying to someone ‘you lied about it’ does not only mean ‘you know that the contrary of what you say is true’. Those pragmatic words carry ‘an additional idea of contempt and outrage. They make us think that the person who says them does not care whether they injure us, and this makes the words insulting and offensive.’173 And Lamy, using the same example, refers to the ‘contemptuous’ overtones of ‘lyar’.174 Hobbes gives the following pertinent example of this kind of subtle speech act. ‘A Tyrant originally signified no more simply, but a Monarch: But when afterwards 166 167 170 173

South 1823b, p. 123. See Reedy (1992, pp. 88–106) on South’s views on the misuse of language. South 1823b, p. 121. 168 South 1823b, p. 111. 169 South 1823b, p. 125. South 1823b, p. 111. 171 South 1823c, p. 269. 172 Pufendorf 1703, iv, p. 279. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, pp. 66–7. 174 Lamy 1986, p. 201.


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in most parts of Greece that kind of government was abolished, the name began to signifie, not onely the thing it did before, but with it, the hatred which the Popular States bare towards it.’175 When Charles I was called a tyrant, he was hated and ‘legitimately’ executed. Another example of an apparently purely descriptive term that in fact condemns is ‘heresy’. This takes us back to the radically unstable connections of words to meanings, and hence of the possibility of creative redescription. ‘Men give different names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own passions: as they that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that mislike it, haeresie: and yet haeresie signifies no more than private opinion; but has onely a greater tincture of choler’.176 South is desperately aware of the evaluative heart of supposedly neutral words, and of the fatal consequences of their misapplication, as becomes clear in his examples of the ‘absurd empire and usurpation of words over things’.177 The first is the charge of ‘popery’ that has subverted the church of England. This word seems harmless but in fact incites rebellion. ‘It is a certain word made up of six letters; that has been ringing in their ears ever since their infancy, and that strangely inflames, and transports, and sets them a madding they know not why.’178 The second example is ‘tyranny and arbitrary power’, an ascription that overthrew Charles I and threatened to do the same to his namesake. These are ‘rabble-charming words, which carry so much wild-fire wrapt up in them’.179 The true intention of the speech act is concealed beneath a carapace of words that trumpets the public good. More generally, words write the cultural structures we inhabit. For example, according to Hobbes, they incarnate God. ‘And because words (and consequently the attributes of God) have their signification by agreement, and constitution of men; those attributes are held to be significative of honour, that men intend shall so be.’180 We are subject to the way in which opaque words write the story desired by the speaker – the ‘praetext’ beyond which we cannot reach.181 Hobbes cites ‘transubstantiation’ as a completely wilful misreading of the Bible; its promulgation by authoritative churchmen confers upon it a truth value.182 One can say whatever one wants and, given favourable circumstances, such as power, one realises one’s fiction simply by virtue of its articulation. Hobbes lampoons the invocation of insignificant words that become 175 178 181

Hobbes 1996, p. 470. South 1823c, p. 207. Hobbes 1996, p. 402.

176

Hobbes 1996, p. 73. South 1823c, p. 243. 182 Hobbes 1996, p. 451.

179

177 180

South 1823b, p. 128. Hobbes 1996, p. 253.

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significant only by being invented, and proceed to unsettle peace. ‘Temporall and Spirituall Government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their Lawfull Soveraign.’183 This fantastic duality grips the people’s minds who, with perhaps a reference to the ancient account of seeing two suns at Bacchus’ revels, are driven mad trying to reconcile two masters, with devastating results for all concerned. We are at the mercy of what the words tell us, and of the responses they solicit. The following declaration of South serves as a fitting end to this chapter: ‘The generality of mankind is wholly and absolutely governed by words or names’.184 At the end of this part of the book we are confronted by a proliferation of concerns about language. However, they should not be overstated. I have pulled out anxieties about the relationship between sign and signified from texts that simultaneously, albeit to very varying degrees, exhibit a great deal of confidence in the possibility at least, of the truth, univocity, and plenitude of everyday verbal signification. It is a rich mixture of scepticism and faith that Locke inherits and to which he responds. But there is one thing upon which all are agreed. Words are a force to be reckoned with. All early-modern philosophers would concur with South that ‘there is a certain bewitchery or fascination in words, which makes them operate with a force beyond what we can naturally give an account of ’.185 It remains to be seen how Locke parries this ‘verbal magic’.186

183 186

Hobbes 1996, p. 322. South 1823b, p. 126.

184

South 1823b, p. 122.

185

South 1823b, p. 124.

part iii

Locke on language

chapter 7

Words signify ideas alone

Like the reader, Locke is immersed in the discursive framework that I have laid out. Emerging from his books, he vehemently attacks the widespread assumptions, echoed and bred in the logical tradition, either that words are an unmediated nomenclature of things or that the concepts which do mediate things represent them perfectly and realistically. These assumptions are apparent in the secret fusion of concepts and things which melts away or downplays the mentalism to which everyone simultaneously, if sometimes less obviously, subscribes. But Locke takes his ammunition from the very target of his fire. He repeats the universal assumption that a speaker expresses his ideas about the world and, in the context of his (r)evolutionary epistemology, pushes it steadily to its necessary conclusions. Given his twin beliefs that all our external knowledge is derived from sense perception, and that there is a radical discontinuity between appearance and reality, our words simply cannot capture the heart of things. While it was a well-worn conviction that we can only talk about the world as we know it, we have seen that concepts and things were frequently collapsed into each other with unabashed confidence, to present an apparently seamless continuity of language, mind and world. With unprecedented force Locke robs this triumvirate of its last man. His tirade about language therefore fits squarely into his overarching philosophical polemic. Just as he tightly reins in our claims to real– or ‘adequate’– knowledge, so does he bridle our mouths.1 Just as our knowledge about the world is limited to our reasoned experience of it, so are our words. With a series of fierce strokes Locke lays waste two prominent and ambitious epistemologies of the time. He sweeps aside the broadly Aristotelian view that bare experience is a route to nature, and the Cartesian view that while experience does bar the way, reason can grasp

1

Locke 1975, pp. 378–82 (ii.xxxi.6); 568–9 (iv.iv.11–12).

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things essentially.2 Given that Locke denies both the rationalist’s ‘eye of the mind’ and, sometimes connectedly, the existence of innate ideas, experience is all we have, but it falls far short of reality and we should not let our tongues run away to the contrary. As we saw in chapter 4, the new philosophers had already repudiated the Aristotelian unity of nature and experience, and the hylomorphic ontology that underpinned it. We also met a broadly sceptical and empirical tradition that had blazed Locke’s particular trail. In various ways, certain philosophers carved out a space between the world and our creative interpretation of it. But they were more keen than Locke to use a mixture of reason and experiment to hypothesise about the underlying structure of reality. Furthermore, they and the new philosophers more generally neither developed the rich extent of Locke’s new epistemological programme nor made the link nearly so explicit between epistemological and linguistic limits. Nor did they, with the exception of Hobbes, deal with language about things distinctly from and in addition to thought about things. Hobbes veered off down an extreme nominalist route that located universals in language alone and thereby put our imaginations, as well as things, a long way from our words. While Locke subscribes to the more traditional view that mental and verbal discourses might in theory run in perfect parallel, he fears that in practice they do not. His purpose is to prise off the mask of words and reveal what could possibly lie beneath, which is very different from what people had imagined. The gulf between language and the world had not received such sustained and rich exposure until Locke laid it bare. the subjective, sensible bounds of words Locke begins book iii of the Essay concerning Human Understanding – ‘Of Words’ – conventionally, by positing his fundamental semantic thesis that words signify ideas. He also reiterates the time-honoured opinion that we met in rhetoric: human beings are uniquely able to forge communities by virtue of their quintessential capacity for language. Locke agrees. It is ‘the great instrument, and common tye of society’ that God has given us in order to realise our ‘sociable’ nature.3 It works by ‘conveying’ ‘the thoughts of men’s minds . . . from one to another’.4 Later on, 2

3

Lennon (1993b, p. x) says that Locke’s ‘Essay can be read without exaggeration as an anti-Cartesian polemic from beginning to end’. Locke 1975, p. 402 (iii.i.1). 4 Locke 1975, p. 402 (iii.i.2).


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Locke reveals his thoroughgoing inheritance of the logical–grammatical presentation of language, according to which verbal discourse exactly articulates mental discourse. He repeats the fundamental distinction between categorematic and syncategorematic terms, that stand, respectively, for simple concepts and mental operations. That is to say, he explains that words are divided into ‘names of ideas in the mind’, and words which ‘signify the connexion that the mind gives to ideas, or propositions, one with another’. These ‘particles’, as Locke calls them, ‘intimate some particular action’ of the mind. He gives the familiar example of the copula: ‘Is, and Is not are the general marks of the mind, affirming or denying.’5 He seems to be singing an old tune.6 Language effects ‘the communication of thoughts’, without which there would be no ‘comfort and advantage of society’.7 But this calm, recognisable rendition of linguistic theory is interrupted by an urgent defence of the apparently uncontroversial thesis that words express thoughts. The change of pace and tone signals Locke’s departure from the received wisdom and the onslaught of his rebellion: Words in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing, but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them, how imperfectly soever, or carelesly those ideas are collected from the things which they are supposed to represent. When a man speaks to another, it is, that he may be understood; and the end of speech is, that those sounds, as marks, may make known his ideas to the hearer. That then which words are the marks of, are the ideas of the speaker: nor can any one apply them, as marks, immediately to any things else, but the ideas, that he himself hath: for this would make them signs of his own conceptions, and yet apply them to other ideas; which would be to make them signs, and not signs of his ideas at the same time; and so in effect, to have no signification at all. Words being voluntary signs, they cannot be voluntary signs imposed by him on things he knows not. That would be to make them signs of nothing, sounds without signification.8

This harangue, which echoes Hobbes’ blunt rejection of real stones in the head, labours the truism that we cannot talk about things of which we have no idea. It also alludes disdainfully to the supposition theory associated with Terminist logicians, and begins Locke’s systematic limitation of the 5

6 8

Locke 1975, p. 471 (iii.vii.1). See Berman (1984) and McRae (1998) on Lockean particles. On Locke’s success with regard to particles and the propositional attitude/content distinction see Ott 2004, pp. 34–52. On Locke’s scholastic background see Milton 1984. 7 Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.1). Locke 1975, pp. 405–6 (iii.ii.2). Ott 2002, p. 32, argues that one of the reasons why words cannot signify things for Locke is the ‘contingent fact’ that ‘whenever anyone utters the word ‘‘stone’’ ’, a stone does not appear. It seems to me that far from there being ‘no logical impossibility’ of words signifying things in this way, words can only ever signify ideas, and nothing else for Locke, because insofar as they are invented by men, words can only be applied to what men know, that is, ideas.

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scope of language to the speaker’s (albeit rationally manipulated) ideas and nothing else, fitting squarely into his overall aim of limiting the scope of knowledge to the thinker’s ideas and nothing else. He threatens to jettison the objective world from both language and knowledge. I turn first to his innovative highlighting of the speaker’s, rather than the words’ meaning. Part of Locke’s project is to insist that ‘knowledge’ can only be knowing for oneself. ‘We may as rationally hope to see with other mens eyes, as to know by other mens understandings.’9 In Of the Conduct of the Understanding, and as a kind of empiricist, Locke attenuates the relationship between seeing and knowing from one of comparison to one of identity. ‘Knowing is seeing, and if it be so, it is madness to persuade our selves that we do so by another man’s eyes, let him use never so many words to tell us, that what he asserts is very visible.’10 Just as we cannot know without ideas, so we cannot understand words without them, however lightly words trip off the tongue. Words only make sense insofar as they coincide with the thoughts of the language user. On probing the undisputed proposition that words signify ideas, Locke concludes that they must signify the ideas of someone, and are therefore limited to the ideas of particular speakers. He thereby shakes the prevailing orthodoxy out of its complacency. His emphasis on the individual speaker refocuses meaning from a generic and given set of thoughts to particular and contingent collections of them. We hear this new, individualist accent very early in the life of the Essay. In Draft B (1671) Locke declares ‘noe man could apply them [words] or make them significant of any ideas but those which he hath’.11 Its central place in Locke’s linguistic theory is clear from the Essay abstract (1689?). His amanuensis, Sylvester Brownover, traces the tenet that words ‘can be properly & immediately signes of noething but the ideas in the minde of him that uses them’.12 The point about words only meaning what particular individuals take them to mean recurs in many different contexts in the course of the published work. In the midst of Locke’s round rebuttal of innate ideas, he laughs at the absurdity of the belief that principles are written in the minds of babes who can have no ideas to correspond with the supposedly native inscriptions. A child cannot agree or disagree with such propositions as ‘it is impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be’, 9 10 12

Locke 1975, pp. 654 (iv.xv.1); 101 (i.iv.23). See Ayers (1991, i, p. 276) on ‘individualistic intuitionism’. Locke 1993, p. 77. 11 Locke 1990b, pp. 178–9. MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 62r. For further information on the organisation and provenance of Locke’s manuscripts, see Long 1959.


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‘for words being empty sounds, any farther than they are signs of our ideas, we cannot but assent to them, as they correspond to those ideas we have, but no farther than that’.13 With characteristic obviousness, when he is laying out the limitations of reason, Locke says that ‘it perfectly fails us, where our ideas fail’. And in case people think they can get away with fine-sounding words they do not understand, they should think again. ‘If at any time we reason about words, which do not stand for any ideas, ’tis only about those sounds, and nothing else.’14 Locke’s promotion of the speaker is part of his development of those broadly sceptical trains of thought which stress the human as opposed to the natural origins of language and knowledge. He puts an unprecedented emphasis on the subjectivity, artificiality and wilfulness of the ideas that form the irrevocable limits to language and knowledge: since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident, that our knowledge is only conversant about them. Knowledge then seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas. In this alone it consists.15

This inflexible ideational circumscription dominates the Essay as a whole and preys upon his mind until the end of his life. In 1703, in Some Thoughts concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman, he succinctly asserts that ‘the extent of our knowledge cannot exceed the extent of our ideas’.16 By the same token, our words cannot outstretch our ideas. Locke explicitly connects these two fundamental contentions over a familiar bugbear of the new mechanists: ‘real essences, or substantial forms’. Locke rejects these scholastic fantasies on the grounds of their unintelligibility. They ‘come not within the reach of our knowledge, when we think of those things; nor within the signification of our words, when we discourse with others’.17 We have no sense experience of a ‘real essence’ and therefore no idea of what such a thing might be. Having no idea of it, we cannot know it. Nor, to paper over the crack, can we name it. All the ‘vast store’ of ideas that we have comes from ‘experience’. The mind begins like ‘white paper, void of all characters’. It is then ‘painted’, either through ‘sensation’ (our perception of ‘external sensible objects’, giving rise to ‘sensible’ ideas), or through ‘reflection’ (our perception of ‘the internal operations of our minds’).18 Sensation is the absolute limit to 13 16 18

Locke 1975, p. 61 (i.ii.23). 14 Locke 1975, p. 682 (iv.xvii.9). 15 Locke 1975, p. 525 (iv.i.1–2). Locke 1997, p. 349. 17 Locke 1975, p. 461 (iii.vi.33). Locke 1975, p. 104 (ii.i.2). Ideas can be ‘sensible’ in the sense of being ideas of external objects (such as words, of which we have sensible ideas). But this usage ought not to detract from the opposition

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our ideas about things. Were we to ‘dive farther into the nature of things, we [would] fall presently into darkness and obscurity’.19 Locke lampoons ‘the affectation of knowing beyond what we perceive’.20 Already in Draft A (1671) Locke is drawing up the sensible frontiers which are also the static boundaries of our talk. All knowledge is ‘noe thing else but the compareing uniteing compounding enlargeing & otherwise diversifying these simple ideas one with an other’.21 Our knowledge, as it is recorded by our words, ‘reaches very little farther than our experience.’22 The reduction of knowledge and language to ideas would not be so devastating were it not for the opaque connections between things and a large number of our sensible ideas, connections which Locke takes from the new philosophy and shades darker. His project in the Essay is drastically to rein in our epistemological pretensions – and their linguistic accomplices under whose cloak the pretensions gain currency. His aim is ‘to examine our own abilities, and see, what objects our understandings were, or were not fitted to deal with’.23 He discovers that ‘the comprehension of our understandings, comes exceeding short of the vast extent of things’.24 The acuity of Locke’s sense that we see through a glass darkly emerges in his private journals. The year 1677, in France appropriately, seems to have been marked by doubt. On 12 February he jots distractedly: ‘our understanding sticks & bogles & knows not which way to turne’. On the 8th of that month he remarks that ‘our mindes are not made as large as truth nor suited to the whole extent of beings’ and goes on to muse on the ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘unintelligible’. By 26 March he is in full flow: ‘the extent of knowledg of things knowable is soe vast, our duration here soe short & the entrance by which the knowledg of things gets into our understandings soe narrow’.25 Back in England, early in 1680, Locke suggests that what seems ‘miraculous’ is only so because of the great inadequacy of our knowledge.26 It is our benighted state which gives urgency to (as well as taking succour from) his fashionable championing of the degrees of ‘probability’, and which underpins his passionate plea for toleration in the overlapping debates about morality, religion and nature that rage in Europe at the time.27 We ought humbly ‘to sit down in a quiet ignorance

19 22 24 27

I drew in chapter 6 and shall do in chapter 9, between public and palpable sensible words, and private and ephemeral insensible ideas. Locke 1975, p. 314 (ii.xxiii.32). 20 Locke 1975, p. 116 (ii.i.19). 21 Locke 1990a, p. 8. Locke 1975, p. 546 (iv.iii.14). 23 Locke 1975, p. 7 (Epistle to the Reader). Locke 1975, p. 45 (i.i.5). 25 MS. Locke f. 2, pp. 58; 42; 43; 87. 26 MS. Locke f. 5, pp. 36–7. See Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.5); see also pp. 654–68 (IV.xv) on not demanding ‘certainty, where probability only is to be had’. On Locke’s involvement in the emergence of probability, see


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of those things, which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities’, rather than arrogantly and noisily ‘be so forward, out of an affection for universal knowledge’ to pronounce upon them.28 So narrow are the bounds of our knowledge that we ought to ‘commiserate our mutual ignorance’, rather than pounce upon people whose views differ from our own, stigmatising them as ‘obstinate and perverse’. Locke’s blood is up when he considers the ‘magisterial’, ‘insolent and imperious’ way in which opinionated loudmouths ‘impose’ themselves on others.29 In Socratic mode, he feels that the more we know, the more we know that we know little, and the less right or disposition we ought to have to judge the beliefs of others. ‘The necessity of believing, without knowledge, nay, often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform our selves, than constrain others.’30 Ignoring his own injunctions about non-judgementalism, but following their premise, Locke is moved to write An Examination of P. Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing all Things in God (1693). He attacks Malebranche for the extraordinary arrogance immediately apparent in the title of his work.31 He ought to have ‘humility enough to allow that there may be many things which we cannot fully comprehend’.32 This knowledge deficit should stop our mouths.

28 30 31

32

Hacking (1975a, p. 86). On Locke’s crucial change of mind in favour of toleration see Dunn (1984, p. 20). Tuck (1988b) explains how moral and religious scepticism might be used to justify ‘excessive ideological repression’ (p. 21). On toleration see Ashcraft 1992a; Goldie 1991; Israel 1997; Rogers 1992. Yolton (1993) shows (especially pp. 48–71 and 169–81) that Locke’s Essay was regarded as a radical intervention in Enlightenment debates on religion and morality, and suggests (especially pp. vii and 115–17) that Locke cannot have been unaware of its subversive implications. Stewart (2000) urges us to see Locke as involved in the theological debates of the period, articulating a concept of the person which squared uneasily with the trinity, as much a ‘promoter of a particular religious epistemology’ (p. 246), as he was writing, as Padley (1985 and 1988, I, p. 350) puts it, ‘the epistemological manual of the Royal Society’. See Thiel (2000) on Locke’s argument for personal identity in the context of the South–Sherlock trinitarian controversy of the early 1690s, just prior to Locke’s publication of his chapter on identity. Marshall (2000, p. 184) makes the important point that while Locke might privately have held unorthodox beliefs, his overriding public concern was with toleration and anti-dogmatism and he was therefore loathe to pin himself to any sect for principled as well as pragmatic reasons. A private musing about the difference between soul and spirit within the same substance can be found at MS. Locke f. 33, fo. 131r. Locke 1975, p. 45 (i.i.4). 29 Locke 1975, pp. 660; 661 (iv.xvi.4). Locke 1975, p. 660 (iv.xvi.4). Locke owned four copies of De la recherche, as well as Desgabet’s and Simon Foucher’s Critiques of it (Harrison and Laslett 1965, pp. 182–3). See Nadler (2000, p. 2) on Locke’s identification of Malebranche as an Enthusiast. Locke 1706a, p. 142.

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However, our epistemological myopia – and therefore our linguistic confines – do not extend to a ‘perfect Scepticism’. Locke has no truck with this other extreme, nor is it the object of his serious engagement, as it was for some of his, particularly French, predecessors. Instead, he jocularly sweeps aside those who maintain that, if knowledge falls short of ‘the vast ocean of Being’, then we have none at all. Rather than ‘wander into those depths, where they can find no sure footing’ they ought to be content at the shore.33 He compares those who are ‘in despair of knowing any thing’ to someone who does not walk, but sits down and dies ‘because he had no wings to fly.’34 Locke entreats us to find the ‘horizon . . . which sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things’.35 In his journal, in April 1677, he lights upon this midway between dogma and scepticism, this mitigated form of doubt. ‘’Tis of great use in the pursuit of knowledg not to be too confident nor too distrustfull of our owne judgment.’36 Back in the metaphorical mass of the Essay he declares that while we might not have ‘broad sun-shine’ we ought not ‘idly’ to use this as an excuse for mental inaction, but do our ‘business by Candle-light’. Sounding a threatening note, Locke declares that it would be ‘unpardonable, as well as childish peevishness’ if we were to give up the pursuit of knowledge altogether, just because there are some things that cannot be known. While certainty is rare, it is rarely required, and probability is generally ‘sufficient to govern all our concernments’.37 God, our ‘bountiful author’, has given us the capacity to discover ‘whatsoever is necessary for the conveniences of life, and information of vertue’.38 ‘The candle, that is set up in us, shines bright enough for all our purposes’ and we must use it effortfully to light our way in this life and towards the next.39 God has given us minds that are perfectly coincident with his intentions for us, that is, that we should be preserved. Accordingly, at least until the end of his life, Locke is confident that we can arrive at demonstrative, or highly probable, knowledge of the divine or natural law, the only true standard of morality, on the basis of the certain knowledge we have of the existence of ourselves and God, ‘whose 33 35 37 39

Locke 1975, p. 47 (i.i.7). 34 Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.6; i.i.5). Locke 1975, p. 47 (i.i.7). 36 MS. Locke f. 2, p. 133 (p. 125). Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.5). 38 Locke 1975, p. 45 (i.i.5). Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.5); cf. p. 634 (iv.xi.8). For some crucial commentary on the centrality of teleology in Locke see Dunn 1969, p. 95; Harris 1998, pp. 327–8, and passim; Rogers 1996; Tully 1980, pp. 38–50, and passim. See also Nidditch 1975, pp. xviii–xx on the moral and religious motivation for the Essay.


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workmanship we are, and on whom we depend’.40 We do not need, and therefore do not have, the same certainty about the natural world. While we know almost certainly that there are things out there that cause in us sensations which enable us to preserve ourselves, we are ignorant of the primary causes and the connections between them and our sensations.41 With such massive gaps in our ideas and without knowing how the ideas that we do have connect to each other, we cannot have demonstrative knowledge of them.42 The effects of the world are designed for our convenience.43 They tell us precious little about the world itself. The majority of names of sensible ideas record the effects of objects on our senses as opposed to qualities innate to the objects themselves. Like new philosophers before him, Locke rejects, in the main, the homology between idea and thing, positing instead a purely causal connection. ‘We may not think (as perhaps usually is done) that they are exactly the images and resemblances of something inherent in the subject.’ He thereby rejects the tenacious, and broadly Aristotelian, view that concepts are facsimiles of things – forms abstracted from matter. Using the same analogy that Descartes had used in the context of light, Locke says that most sensations are ‘no more the likeness of something existing without us, than the names, that stand for them, are the likeness of our ideas, which yet upon hearing, they are apt to excite in us’.44 As words are arbitrary signs of ideas, ideas are natural ‘signs’ of things.45 In his Examination Locke speculates on the material causes of perception. He rejects the scholastic claim that ‘any material species carrying the resemblance of things . . . bring the perception of them to our senses’. He postulates instead that ‘from remote objects, material causes may reach our senses, and therein produce several motions that may be the causes of ideas in us’.46

40

41 42 44 46

Locke 1975, pp. 552–3 (iv.iii.21); 549 (iv.iii.18). On Locke’s use of probability to shore up his account of morality, see Tully 1993, pp. 312–14. In moral reasoning, Locke wants to argue that it does not matter that we have inadequate ideas of the substance of man. We can reason the rights and duties of ‘moral man’ from the ‘immoveable unchangeable idea’ of a ‘corporeal rational being’ (Locke 1975, pp. 516–17 (iii.xi.16)). See Tully 1980, pp. 27–8; Ayers 1991, ii, p. 188; Mattern 1998; Waldron 2002, pp. 44–82. Cf. Tully (1980, pp. 25–6) on the important thing for demonstration being not ‘clear ideas but . . . a clear perception of the agreement or disagreement between the relevant aspects of two or more ideas’. Harris (1998, pp. 152–9) explores the relationship between Locke’s claims about our imperfect knowledge of species and his strict hierarchical division between men and animals in his political theory. Yolton (2001) wants to insert embodied ‘man’ back into personhood. Locke 1975, pp. 634 (iv.xi.8); 537 (iv.ii.14); 545 (iv.iii.12). Locke 1975, pp. 556–9 (iv.iii.26–8). 43 Locke 1975, p. 564 (iv.iv.4); cf. p. 150 (ii.x.3). Locke 1975, p. 134 (ii.viii.7). Cf. Descartes 1985b, p. 81. 45 Locke 1975, pp. 720–1 (iv.xxi.4). Locke 1706a, pp. 147; 152. This goes even for vision.

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Echoing Boyle, as he does so often and so closely, Locke distinguishes between primary and secondary qualities of things.47 The former constitute the actual, possibly corpuscularian, constitution of things. They include ‘solidity, extension, figure, motion, or rest, and number’. They exist independently of us and are therefore ‘real qualities’.48 The ideas they would and sometimes do cause in us are indeed ‘exact resemblances of something in the things themselves’.49 Primary qualities cause so-called secondary qualities. These are in fact ‘nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us’. They produce, and are somewhat indistinguishable from, their effects on us, such as ‘colours, sounds, tasts, etc.’50 These ideas bear ‘no resemblance’ to the objects themselves.51 While they seem to be in the objects, they are in fact wholly the product of the interaction of our senses with the objects, and would not exist in our absence. Repeating every new philosopher, Locke thereby rejects the Aristotelian view that sensible species are distinct entities which inhere in objects as well as minds and which are substantiated and reified in their ‘abstract’ terms like ‘whiteness’.52 While Locke’s characterisation of primary qualities seems to accord us an impressive foundation for real knowledge – and speech – in fact we have a negligible grasp of them. The deep being of the world is hidden from view and, while we can make probabilistic hypotheses about it we can do this only tentatively – and even then there are moral matters of greater importance. Locke subscribes to ‘the corpuscularian hypothesis, as that which is thought to go farthest in an intelligible explication of the qualities of bodies’.53 47

48 50 52

53

Locke owned sixty three works by Boyle (Harrison and Laslett 1965, pp. 91–3). Alexander (1985) puts Locke squarely in the context of the scientific revolution, arguing for Boyle’s enormous influence on Locke whom he sees as developing Boyle’s ‘hypothetico-deductive argument’ (p. 7) and the implications of his corpuscular hypothesis (p. 8) as well as his primary/secondary quality distinction (p. 8). See Givner (1991) on the way Locke’s scientific preconceptions, born of his friendships with Boyle the matter theorist and Sydenham the physician, motivated his experiential philosophy of language; Schuurman (2000, pp. 42–3) on Sydenham’s medical-historical influence; Milton (2001) on the centrality of Locke’s medical concerns. Bolton (1983) traces a Pyrrhonian influence. On Locke’s (muddled?) primary/secondary quality distinction see Alexander 1974; Ayers 1991, i, pp. 62–6, 183–4 and 207–17; Bennett 2001, ii, pp. 74–90; Campbell 1998; Curley 1991 (1st edition, 1972); Lennon 1993b, pp. 249–50 and 298–307; Yolton 1970, pp. 121–31. 49 Locke 1975, pp. 135 (ii.viii.9); 137 (ii.viii.17). Locke 1975, p. 373 (ii.xxx.2). Locke 1975, p. 135 (ii.viii.10). 51 Locke 1975, p. 137 (ii.viii.15). Du Trieu (1826, p. 11) defines an abstract term as one ‘which signifies only the form, but not the subject: such as this utterance, whiteness’ (‘qui significat solam formam, non autem subjectum: ut ista vox, albedo’). Cf. Locke (1975, pp. 474–5 (iii.vii.1–2)) on the duplicity and insignificance of abstract terms. Locke 1975, p. 547 (iv.iii.16).


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Beyond this general characterisation of the world that lies behind the veil of appearances, we cannot even guess at its more specific details. Instead, our heads swim with ideas of secondary qualities which tell us nothing about the underlying reality from which they emanate. Locke evokes the dissimilarity between the ‘blue colour, and sweet scent’ of a violet and those ‘insensible particles of matter’ which cause them, by comparing them, respectively, to ‘the idea of pain’ and ‘the motion of a piece of steel dividing our flesh’.54 In a strange and vivid thought experiment inspired by the amazing inventions of modern times, Locke demonstrates just how much it is the human perspective that determines our descriptions of things and how wildly these diverge from reality. He imagines a man with acute, microscopic senses that could ‘discern the minute particles of bodies, and the real constitution on which their sensible qualities depend’ and imagines how different the world would seem to him. The yellow colour of gold, so central to its essence, would ‘disappear, and instead of it we should see an admirable texture of parts of a certain size and figure’.55 The trademark redness of blood fades under a microscope, showing ‘only some few globules of red, swimming in a pellucid liquor’.56 The redness would evaporate altogether were this mythical man’s eyes 10,000 times stronger than the best ‘glasses’. While such a man might indeed pierce to the nature of things and get ‘ideas of their internal constitutions’, he ‘would be in a quite different world from other people’.57 And it is their world, not the real one, that language describes. While Locke articulates a causal realism, whereby things relate to ideas as causes to effects, these ideas – and the words that express them – possess a subjective and superficial intentional content. The fog of ideas does not pose the radical sceptical or idealist consequences for Locke that commentators have imposed upon his theory.58 54 56 58

Locke 1975, pp. 136–7 (ii.viii.13). 55 Locke 1975, p. 301 (ii.xxiii.11). 57 Locke 1975, p. 302 (ii.xxiii.11). Locke 1975, p. 303 (ii.xxiii.12). This sceptical interpretation of Locke was immediate (Yolton 1993, pp. 72 and 98–114). The realist/ representationalist/idealist debate is still raging. Tipton (1999) exposes the problems of ‘traditional’ critics (e.g. Aaron 1971, p. 101) but agrees that the sceptical problem remains for Locke. Cf. Bennett (1971, p. 69): ‘Locke puts the objective world, the world of ‘‘real things’’ beyond our reach on the other side of the veil of perception.’ Yolton (1970, pp. 118–37) strongly opposes the representationalist Locke, locating him in the tradition which begins with Aristotelian ‘formal’ awareness, and seeing him as attempting ‘to preserve perceptual realism’ (pp. 127–8), according to which our ideas of primary qualities (though not of secondary ones) resemble the object’s qualities. For Yolton, the way of ideas is just elaborating the truism that things must be known by the mind (p. 131). Yolton (1984) asserts that Locke’s ‘doctrine of idea-signs’ (p. 212) makes ideas ‘not things, but ways of knowing, of being perceptually acquainted with objects as groups of experienced qualities’. See also: Armstrong (1965) on Locke’s ‘new metaphysics’, according to which the idea signifies the thing in a causal rather than a qualititatively similar relationship; Alexander (1985,

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His ‘way of ideas’ does not build the ‘castle in the air’ that Sergeant bemoans in his Solid Philosophy Asserted, against the Fancies of the Ideists (1697).59 Locke turns the criticism on its head, reminding his readers what they already knew: that the mind knows the world by means of ideas. ‘’Tis evident, the mind knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them.’60 These ideas do not block the way for Locke but form an, albeit straightened and transformative, passage to the world. He does entertain Descartes’ hyperbolic doubt that our ideas represent nothing external, but concludes that our senses give us ‘an assurance that deserves the name of knowledge’.61 Presumably alluding to Descartes’ meditation in the stove, Locke curtly declares that ‘I believe he will allow a very manifest difference between dreaming of being in the fire, and being actually in it.’ The pain gives us the kind of evidence that ‘puts us past doubting’.62 Our simple, sensible ideas are ‘real’ and afford us ‘real knowledge’ because they exhibit a ‘steady correspondence . . . with

59

60

61

pp. 303–4) on the real knowledge Locke envisages. Land (1986, pp. 31–77) presents Locke as an ‘idealist’. Soles (1988, p. 172) argues that Lockean ideas are not objects, but modes of thinking. See Ayers (1991, i, pp. 36–43 and 62–6) on simple ideas as natural signs of their regular causes which do not resemble them but which enable ‘real knowledge’, pp. 44–51 on ideas as images, pp. 52–66 on Locke’s relation to the Malebranche/Arnauld furore and Yolton’s Arnauldian interpretation of Locke; Ayers (1997, p. 5) on Locke’s ‘undogmatic realism’; Ayers (1998c, p. 25) on Locke’s ‘direct causal realism’; Lennon (1993b) on Locke the representationalist, whose ideas are material images or objects (p. 247) which are caused by things, but (with the exception of ideas of solidity) bear no resemblance to things (p. 303). Watson (1995, p. 66) asserts that Locke’s circumscription of essential knowledge removes the worry about ideas not resembling objects. See Mackie (1998) on Locke’s intentional object representationalism; Prinz (2000), who interprets Locke as anticipating the modern claim that ‘our concepts have two kinds of content’, determined by the world and by the mind (p. 1); Hight (2001) on Locke’s handling of the debate as to whether ideas are substances or modes; Ott (2004, pp. 138–49) on Locke’s externalism with regard to ideational representation. On a related point see Rorty (1980, pp. 141–2) on Locke’s ‘naturalistic fallacy’, whereby he confuses a mechanistic, causal account of belief with a justification for that belief. Formigari (1988) comes from a different angle at the question of the relationship between language and the world for Locke, claiming that they are linked by ‘an arbitrary pattern’ (p. 99); see Crouch (2001) for a response to Formigari. Sergeant 1697, sig. a1r; sig. a4v. Locke owned this edition (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 230). Sergeant says that the ‘ideists’ (Locke and Descartes) ‘ground all their discourses on ideas; that is . . . on similitudes or resemblances; which similitudes . . . are meer fancies: mine is to build them solely and entirely on the things themselves’ (sig. a4v ). Locke 1975, p. 563 (iv.iv.3). See Ashworth (1981 and 1984) on the scholastic background to Locke’s comments about words’ signifying ideas (and things); Vickers (2002, p. 314) on Locke’s appropriation of the ‘Aristotelian triad’. While it is absolutely right to recognise Locke’s enormous Aristotelian debt, one ought not to forget his vehement rejection of the isomorphic Aristotelian link between concept and thing; Locke might keep the triad in some ways but he lays waste its symmetry. Some commentators, in very different ways, argue for a more robust role for things: Alexander 1985, p. 242; Colman 1983, p. 110; Guyer 1994, pp. 120–3; Kretzmann 1968; Landesman 1991; Losonsky 1994, pp. 135–8; Ott 2004, p. 93; Yolton 1970, pp. 206–7. Locke 1975, p. 631 (iv.xi.3); cf. p. 537 (iv.ii.14). 62 Locke 1975, p. 537 (iv.ii.14).


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the distinct constitutions of real beings’.63 That is, certain ideas are regularly produced by certain things.64 However, for all their causal conformity with things, ideas (and the rational work we do with them) are the limits of our knowledge – and therefore our speech – about the world. Any other claims are more or less fictional – or nominal. It is here that the problem of language in relation to the world really comes to the fore. While words can hook on to the world in a phenomenal, experiential, and therefore ‘real’ way, we are led by our neat and apparently penetrative system of everyday words like ‘gold’ and ‘man’ to imagine a greater referential depth than can ever be the case. Locke also cites the great number of learned words which seem to pick out things, but which must be devoid of content because we have no sensible ideas of them – the only means of grasping and describing things out there. His ears ringing sympathetically with the accusations of insignificance which his predecessors had levelled against their foe, Locke makes it his business to tear down the grand linguistic edifices which purport to reflect the universe. He exposes the ideational vacuum that underlies the terms of art which are the building blocks for ontological constructions. His targets fall into two overlapping categories. There are words which are just pure fantasy. ‘The Platonists have their Soul of the World, and the Epicureans their endeavour towards motion in their atoms.’65 There are also words which signify things we can reasonably suppose to exist but of which we have no clear or distinct ideas, such as ‘substance’, which is used by ‘the whole tribe of logicians’ as though they knew exactly what it meant.66 This general anxiety about our words outrunning our ideas motivates Locke’s excited strictures on the ideational limits of our words. I deal in the final chapter with Locke’s despair both at our taking words for things and at insignificant but impressive words. Now I sketch the shadowy and manufactured world which goes beyond simple, sensible ideas and about which Locke does speak – mindful of its limits – if only to lay bare its unspeakableness.

63 65 66

Locke 1975, pp. 372–3 (ii.xxx.2). 64 Locke 1975, p. 564 (iv.iv.4). Locke 1975, p. 497 (iii.x.14). Locke 1706b, p. 192. See Ott (2004, pp. 95–113) for an interesting investigation of whether Locke’s limitation of meaning to ideas prohibits him from talking about things of which we have no idea, particularly ‘God’, ‘real essence’ and ‘substance’. Rogers (1995) explores Locke’s empiricist, antirationalist, specifically anti-Cartesian, successful mission to talk about ‘infinity’ without the notion of an innate idea.

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Locke, language and early-modern philosophy manufactured maps

Locke demolishes the precise, essentialist taxonomies that logicians and their philosophical students present as real. It is not nature but we who divide up the world into substances such as ‘gold’. Their names signify certain collections of sensible ideas that we observe regularly to go together, such as ‘a body yellow, of a certain weight, malleable, fusible, and fixed’.67 Recalling and blurring the scholastic division between substance and accident, this formulation echoes new empiricist descriptions of substances as a ‘troop’ of qualities, and particularly Bacon’s and Boyle’s summations of gold.68 This combination of simple ideas, or ‘complex idea’ as Locke calls it, is the absolute semantic limit to substance terms. Our minds do not penetrate beyond the superficies of things, and neither, therefore, can our names. The perceived divisions between things, instantiated by names, are all that we have to divide things. Complex ideas are therefore the ‘nominal essences’ of substances and it is these alone ‘that the name, which is the mark of the sort, signifies’.69 Our knowledge cannot cross this line and, despite their singular and precise appearances, words too can go no farther. Words pick out things as our experience delineates them, not, Locke insists again and again, on the basis of any real delineations. They do not denote the ‘real essences’ of substances or ‘the real internal, but generally in substances, unknown constitution of things’.70 We have no idea of this ‘constitution of the insensible parts of that body’ on which its sensible properties depend and therefore must not imagine that they ground our own talk.71 We only suppose that ‘essences’ exist, without knowing anything about them, except that they differ completely from their sensible manifestations.72 Challenged by Stillingfleet, Locke asserts more unambiguously the existence of ‘real essences’, whose ‘certainty’ ‘nobody . . . ever denied’. But he reasserts with equal vigour the fact that we ‘have no idea or conception at all of what they are’, which therefore restricts the signification of our names of substances to ‘simple ideas of sensation and reflection’ and ‘no further’ or ‘perfecter’.73 Locke compares our ignorance of the real essence of ‘man’ to a ‘gazing country-man’ looking at the ‘famous clock at Strasburg’, unable to see beneath the face to the ‘springs and wheels’.74 67 68

69 71 73

Locke 1975, p. 439 (iii.vi.2). Bacon 1994b, p. 137. See chapter 4 above, p. 100 and p. 125 on Bacon’s and Boyle’s experiential accounts of gold. 70 Locke 1975, p. 443 (iii.vi.7). Locke 1975, p. 417 (iii.iii.15). 72 Locke 1975, p. 439 (iii.vi.2). Locke 1975, p. 442 (iii.vi.6); 419 (iii.iii.18). 74 Locke 1823, pp. 82; 26. Locke 1975, p. 440 (iii.vi.3).


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Locke further proves that language does not fit the world by appealing to the process of democratic linguistic legislation we have already seen lurking in the trivium. Common use, certain grammarians and rhetoricians had reluctantly admitted, is forged not by the learned, but by the masses. It is they, in their carelessness, who have carved up the world. Therefore, even if we might know the world better, it will not be reflected in our linguistic classifications. These were ossified long before the scientists arrived, wielding their ‘forms and essences’. The ‘ignorant and illiterate people . . . sorted and denominated things, by those sensible qualities they found in them, thereby to signify them, when absent, to others’.75 Not only does language harbour the mundanity (and sometimes the errors) of the mob,76 but it is a hopelessly thin representation of the great expanse of experience. Picking up another familiar complaint, especially prevalent at a time of scientific development, Locke declares that ‘there are not words enough in any language to answer all the variety of ideas, that enter into men’s discourses and reasonings’.77 The deficiencies of language could be partially reformed by and for philosophers, and, indeed, this is precisely Locke’s aim in his discussion of language. When they ‘come to have ideas different from the vulgar and ordinary received ones’, they can make new words, or else ‘use old ones, in a new signification’.78 Yet philosophers will always be partially constrained by the mob, hoping that ‘common use’ will admit their novelties.79 Developing the popular commonplace that ‘man should speak as the vulgar, and think as the wise’, Locke explains how philosophy cannot entirely insulate itself, but must clothe itself in the ordinary garb of the country.80 A far more serious obstacle blocks even philosophers from the world. They can never know what simple ideas to collate under the names of substances. Even if, says Locke, we could discover the primary qualities of bodies, we could never know how they relate to the secondary qualities. We will therefore never know whether a certain set of ideas necessarily coexist.81 Having no sure hold on ideas of substances, we have no material for certain demonstrative science. Without adequate ideas of substances 75 76 77 79 80

81

Locke 1975, pp. 453; 452–3 (iii.vi.25). See e.g. p. 93 (i.iv.15) on ‘vulgar’ significations of ‘God(s)’. Locke 1975, p. 13 (Epistle to the Reader). 78 Locke 1975, p. 515 (iii.xi.12). Locke 1975, p. 471 (iii.vi.51). Bacon 1857, iv, p. 434; as E. S. De Beer tells us, this was also the motto of Sir Henry Blount, the father of Tyrrell’s brother-in-law. Tyrrell cites a version in a letter to Locke of 29 August 1687: ‘loquendum cum vulgo; sentiendum cum philosophis’ (Locke 1976–89, iii, p. 257); Locke 1975, p. 243 (ii.xxi.20). Locke 1975, pp. 545 (iv.iii.13); 546 (iv.iii.14); cf. pp. 556–60 (iv.iii.26–29).

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we simply cannot perceive whether they agree or disagree with each other – the perception of which is the definition of knowledge. Nor do we have much more luck with the underlying causes of our ideas. The constant coexistence of certain sensible ideas leads us to suppose that there is one thing to which they belong, from which they emanate and to which we give the name ‘substance’, but of which we have ‘no clear distinct idea at all’.82 The mind ‘takes notice also, that a certain number of these simple ideas go constantly together’ and presumes they ‘belong to one thing’.83 It is Locke’s claim for an obscure idea of substance(s) that so upsets Stillingfleet. In response to Stillingfleet’s protest that we have clear and distinct ideas of substances, particularly of ‘man’, Locke reaffirms that we have a ‘very obscure idea’ of the ‘substance, wherein the properties of a man do inhere’. Clarity and distinctness of ideas obtain only to ideas of sensation and reflection, to figures ‘that I clearly see’, or sounds ‘that I distinctly hear’.84 Locke systematically lays waste confident contemporary talk about substance which is widely broadcast by the eclectic majority of his contemporaries as holding the key to the heart of the world. He probes our ‘notion of pure substance in general’ which, though a legitimate postulate, has no clear content. He compares us to children who, when asked what it is that underpins the perceptible world, ‘readily give this satisfactory answer, that it is something; which in truth signifies no more, when so used, either by children or men, but that they know not what; and that the thing they pretend to know, and talk of, is what they have no distinct idea of at all, and so are perfectly ignorant of it, and in the dark’.85 Locke thereby bursts the learned, ontological bubbles by reducing substance to an ‘obscure and relative idea’, which simply signifies ‘support’ or, ‘in plain English, standing under, or upholding’.86 Locke is ambivalent about the reality of any kind of essence, insofar as the concept generally refers to a man-made class. He does sometimes 82 83 86

Locke 1975, p. 316 (ii.xxiv.37). 84 Locke 1975, p. 295 (ii.xxiii.1). Locke 1823, pp. 35; 25. 85 Locke 1975, p. 296 (ii.xxiii.2). Locke 1975, p. 296 (ii.xxiii.2). There is a debate over whether Lockean ‘substance’ is a naked logical subject or a real thing. Bennett (2001, ii, pp. 108–17) proposes the ‘argument from language’ whereas Ayers (1991, ii, p. 15) postulates that substance is ‘the fundamental nature or essence which, in interacting with perceivers and surrounding things, is responsible for the object’s various appearances’; substance is therefore unknowable not in principle, but because of our poor cognitive reach (cf. Ayers 1998c, pp. 34–44). Bolton (1998b, p. 127) argues that ‘discourse about substances has existential import; it implies that something, having certain qualities, actually exists . . . to have a substratum is to be an actual thing with an internal constitution (or real essence) which lawfully gives rise to certain properties’. See Von Leyden (1969) on Locke’s ambivalence towards substances as knowable/fictional.


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admit talk of real essences which exist but are undiscoverable, but these are nothing like – and indeed are wielded in opposition to – a determinate set of specific ‘substantial forms’ which make individual species what they are.87 It is often this corrupt, Aristotelian sense of ‘essence’ that Locke does his best to cut down to its nominal size.88 He rejects scholastic real essences as not only unimaginable but completely fictitious – most of the time, that is. In chapter 4 we saw the sway essentialism held over philosophers and even Locke cannot entirely eradicate its mark. If we turn to his manuscripts we see the power of the old taxonomies. In some notes on the division of the sciences he lays out a kind of Wilkinsian skeleton of knowledge, dividing ‘homo’ (‘anima rationalis’) from ‘animalia’ (‘anima brutorum’), which includes ‘serpentia’, ‘reptilia’, ‘insecta’.89 Although his categories include human artifice (for example, putting ‘cultus’ and ‘tempus festi’, under ‘theologice’), they do grate with the rabidly conventional, anti-essentialist polemic of the Essay. In his journal entry for 27 July 1677 he betrays another attachment to his pedagogical inheritance: In reading of books & making adversaria methinks these are the principall parts or heads of things to be taken notice of The first of which is the knowledg of things their essence & nature properties causes & consequences of each species which I call philosophica & must be divided according to the severall orders & species of things. And of these soe far as we have the true notions of things as really they are.90

While these strange excursions into the enemy camp are surely not indications of a hidden philosophical commitment, but are merely about how to organise and remember material, they reveal the staining signature of scholasticism.91 Beyond the recesses of his private papers, Locke is generally passionate about killing the essentialist myth. When Locke does allow that there are real essences he explains, with a mundane, debunking eye for the etymology, that these are simply what things are. In the new de-animated, corpuscularian world, the real essence of a thing is just ‘that constitution of the parts of matter’ on which a certain collection of sensible qualities depend.92 As Locke says to Stillingfleet, ‘the real essences of things’ are, 87 89

90 91 92

Locke 1975, p. 445 (iii.vi.10). 88 Locke 1975, p. 417 (iii.iii.15). MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 158r. Cf. MS. Locke f. 8, p. 175 on ‘Bruta non cogitare’ (written 29 September 1684). MS. Locke f. 2, pp. 247–8. See Yeo (2004) on Locke’s method of commonplacing and its connection to his theory of memory. Locke 1975, p. 442 (iii.vi.6).

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unmysteriously, ‘the very real constitution of things’.93 But the extent to which these are essences is minimal or even, according to some of Locke’s pronouncements, non-existent because ‘even in this sense’ they relate ‘to a sort’, to an idea that we have made up rather than particulars in the world.94 None of the sensible qualities on the basis of which we distinguish between things is essential or ‘inseparable’ to any ‘individual parcel of matter’, says Locke, alluding to the scholastic patchwork of essential, inseparable and separable properties of substances.95 In a typical piece of self-deconstruction Locke explains how ‘there is nothing I have, is essential to me. An accident, or disease, may very much alter my colour, or shape; a fever, or fall, may take away my reason, or memory, or both; and an apoplexy leave neither sense, nor understanding, no nor life.’96 Qualities such as ‘reason’ or ‘life’ are only essential to the nominal essence of ‘man’. He expands his point with reference to a ‘parcel of matter’ which possesses all the qualities associated with ‘iron’ except ‘obedience to the load-stone’. It would be ‘absurd to ask’ whether such a thing ‘wanted any thing essential to it’.97 Properties are essential to things only insofar as they are part of the abstract idea of a thing. Essentiality itself is a purely human construction, grounded in the notion of a ‘sort’ or universal which is inapplicable to nature, being made up entirely of particulars, themselves constituted by matter in motion.98 ‘All things, that exist, being particulars’, all universals – which cover the great majority of words – must be the result of human fabrication.99 Developing the long, nominalist tradition but falling short of Hobbes’ denial of universal ideas, Locke describes the gulf that separates experience from language and reason. ‘General and Universal, belong not to the real existence of things; but are the inventions and creatures of the understanding, made by it for its own use, and concern only signs, whether words, or ideas’.100 The process of abstraction, whereby we positively contrive general ideas, is coincident with the introduction of the language that we use to express them. Together these generalising capacities mark ‘a perfect distinction’ between (our abstract ideas of !) ‘man and brutes’.101 Together they haul us out of the world of experience into a world that we actively create. Most of the time, it is this artificial world we inhabit. ‘The 93 95 96

97 99

Locke 1823, p. 83. 94 Locke 1975, p. 442 (iii.vi.6). Locke 1975, p. 442 (iii.vi.6). See Atherton 1998. Locke 1975, p. 440 (iii.vi.4). Cf. Colie (1969) on self-(de)construction as an essayist; Gray (1999) on the essay form. 98 Locke 1975, p. 441 (iii.vi.4–5). Locke 1975, p. 442 (iii.vi.6); cf. p. 440 (iii.vi.4). Locke 1975, p. 409 (iii.iii.1). 100 Locke 1975, p. 414 (iii.iii.11). 101 Locke 1975, p. 159 (ii.xi.10).


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far greatest part of words, that make all languages, are general terms.’102 We abstract particular ideas by ‘separating them from the circumstances of time, and place, and any other ideas, that may determine them to this or that particular existence’, and thereby make them ‘general representatives of all of the same kind’.103 Locke explains how children, at first only familiar with particular complex ‘pictures’ of their mother and nurse, on meeting other things that ‘resemble’ these images, frame an abstract complex idea of ‘man’. They proceed to omit further particular ideas such as man-shape and construct the idea and the term ‘animal’.104 While abstraction comes from the heart of the Aristotelian tradition, Aristotle and his logical interpreters see the process as intimately related to the nature of the world and even reaching to its very core. Locke, by contrast, sees the process as in some ways an amputation of the world. He administers a distinctive blow to the names of substances when he explains that the so-called ‘simple’ concepts that logicians had presented as insulated from human judgement and therefore from truth or falsity, are in fact not immune at all. In the logics we saw ‘man’ standing innocently, subject to neither affirmation nor denial, before the second, judgemental or compounding propositional stage of thought. Locke counters with the ground-breaking claim that the name of a substance is ‘in effect an affirmation’.105 The mind does not passively receive the (complex) ideas of substances, but actively affirms a collection of qualities to go together and to belong to one thing. At first, when he says that the mind neither affirms nor denies at the level of simple conception, he seems conventional. However, he is talking about simple ideas of sensation and reflection. According to his Baconian, Boylean, redefinition of simplicity, whereby sensations are simple and substances complex, the mind stirs before the propositional stage, when it unites various simple ideas into a complex one. ‘As the mind is wholly passive in the reception of all its simple ideas, so it exerts several acts of its own, whereby out of its simple ideas, as the materials and foundations of the rest, the other are framed.’106 The wilful, judgemental nature of the construction of the ideas of substances makes them at least as human as real. Moreover, in flagrant breach of the received wisdom, it introduces the possibility of 102 103

104 106

Locke 1975, p. 409 (iii.iii.1). Locke 1975, pp. 411 (iii.iii.6); 159 (ii.xi.9). In the debate over Lockean abstraction, Ayers (1991, i, pp. 242–63) argues that Locke has a ‘partial consideration’ theory. Walmsley (2000) agrees that this is so for Locke’s early thought, but contends that he later adopts the ‘separation’ position (see Walmsley 1999). Bennett (2001, ii, pp. 16–17) also makes the case for separation. 105 Locke 1975, pp. 411–12 (iii.iii.7–8). Locke 1990a, p. 8. Locke 1975, p. 163 (ii.xii.1); cf. p. 373 (ii.xxx.3).

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truth and falsity into the very building blocks of thought. Whereas the first sections of logic textbooks had exempted simple concepts (and terms) from such veridical scrutiny, Locke lifts the bar in the corresponding section (book ii, ‘of ideas’) of his own logic. By locating complexity in advance of the propositional stage, he makes the reality of our most basic thoughts balance precariously on the uncertainty of human discrimination. A complex idea might be ‘false’ if it joins ‘simple ideas, which in the real existence of things, have no union’. A ‘false idea of an horse’ might be composed of the shape and size of a horse, and ‘the power of barking like a dog’.107 Substantial complexity advances the moment of human intervention in the reasoning process. Locke thereby opens the floodgates of human error and diversity into the keep of the castle. These contingent fabrications are the true sources of the extravagant tables of substance that adorn the various encyclopaedic projects of the period. It is they that lie at the roots of the Porphyrian tree. Essences are no more than abstract, complex ideas.108 ‘This whole mystery of genera and species, which make such a noise in the schools, and are, with justice, so little regarded out of them, is nothing else but abstract ideas, more or less comprehensive, with names annexed to them.’109 Locke proves that our verbal taxonomies are manufactured, as opposed to natural, by appealing to nature herself. Were our specific divisions coincident with ‘certain precise essences or forms of things’, she would bear this out.110 However, particular things fall foul of our blueprint, thereby exposing its authorship. Locke’s favourite example is the symbol of the monstrous birth which we met in Plato, Montaigne, Gassendi and Hobbes. The tight grip of this leitmotif on contemporary imaginations becomes clear at the embryonic stage of the Essay. ‘Even that species which we may be supposed to know best & cal man is not soe readily distinguished from beast.’111 This rubbishes the dictum that rationality divides men from animals. The claim can amount to ‘noe more but that the idea I have framd which I call man conteins in it the idea which I cal rational & soe is but a predication of names suited to my idea but not to the knowledg of things existing in rerum natura. It being evident that children for some time & some men all their live times are not soe rational as a horse or dog’.112 Locke subtly appropriates the negative and 107 109 112

Locke 1975, p. 391 (ii.xxxii.18). Locke 1975, p. 412 (iii.iii.9). Locke 1990a, p. 27.

108 110

Locke 1975, p. 439 (iii.vii.1). Locke 1975, p. 448 (iii.vi.14).

111

Locke 1990a, pp. 9–10.


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distasteful connotations of monstrosity and affixes them to the peddlers of the view that rationality is a ‘specific difference’ of things themselves. Only unreasonable fools think reason can be essential to what is only an invented idea. The instances of ‘irregular and monstrous births’ which proliferate in the pages of the fully fledged Essay must make us doubt the essential division between man and beast that is peddled so freely in the logics and beyond.113 Those who believe that there are ‘a certain number of forms of molds, wherein all natural things, that exist, are cast’, ought to be rendered speechless in the face of ‘changelings, and other strange issues of human birth’; things which have the same essence must have the same properties.114 How could it be that things supposed, in Aristotelian jargon, to be ‘inseparable’ from a species are in fact lacking, such as reason in the case of what is otherwise, apparently, a man? Locke’s obsession with this topic, and with this example in particular, further emerges from his manuscripts. In his journal on 18 November 1677 he explores the fact that language does not fit the world. ‘If a woman should bring forth a creature perfectly of the shape of a man that never shewed any more appearance of reason than an horse nor had noe articulate language. And another woman should produce an other with no thing of the shape but the language & reason of a man I aske which of these you would call by the name man.’ So much did the false and seductive fable of a real language prey upon his mind, and so much did he want to drive home the point that our carving up of nature is ‘voluntary’, that in the fourth edition of the Essay he added an historical incident to emphasise his point.115 His draft of this addition explains how the Abbot of St Martin testifies that when ‘he was borne he had so little the figure of a man but rather a monstre. Twas for sometime under deliberation whether he should be baptised and declared a man provisionally.’116 While Locke does not generally reference his sources, he does so on this occasion. In the 1700 edition he tells us that the anecdote comes from ‘Monsieur Menage’, precisely locating its position as ‘Menagiana 278/ 430’.117 Locke harnesses an actual case, where it was up to men to decide whether a creature was to be included in their tribe or not. This appeal to experience is characteristic of the experimentalist fever that heated the new science and that produced ‘histories’ of everything imaginable. Locke’s 113 115

116 117

114 Locke 1975, p. 448 (iii.vi.16); cf. pp. 450–2 (iii.vi.22). Locke 1975, p. 418 (iii.iii.17). r MS. Locke f. 2, pp. 356–8. Cf. MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 36 ; Locke 1976–89, iv, p. 626 on the relation between language and species. MS. Locke e. 1, p. 184. The published version of the story is at Locke 1975, p. 454 (iii.vi.26). Locke 1975, p. 454 (iii.vi.26).

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enthusiasm for snippets of ‘experience’, particularly from travel literature, is abundantly obvious in his manuscripts, which teem with them.118 Many record the disjunction between fluid experience and fixed language. In his journal for September 1683, he cites ‘Glanius’, who has heard of ‘men in Formosa with long tails like beasts’, which the author did not believe until he saw with his own eyes a prisoner tied to a stake whose ‘tail was above a foot long, all coverd with red hair, & very like to that of an ox’. A month later Locke is still reading Glanius and writes in his diary that ‘the women in Formosa . . . have great beards grow upon their chins as well as men, & were they not very diligent in pulling it out they would be much better furnished’.119 We write our map of things. While God might indeed have designed a great chain of being whose species ascend ‘by gentle degrees’, it is quite opaque to us.120 In a piece of breathtaking cinematography Locke pans out from our talk about this world to reveal that we are only on a ‘stage’, ‘in the hands of a faithful creator and a bountiful father, who disposes not of his creatures according to our narrow thoughts or opinions, nor distinguishes them according to names and species of our contrivance’.121 To our short-sighted eyes, in the context of the ontological handiwork that we have woven in the dark, nature seems anarchic. ‘There are fishes that have wings’ and birds that swim in water.122 Even the perceptible world runs roughshod over our pragmatic lines. Locke does accept that, despite the blurred edges, there seem to be natural kinds.123 It is not just wilful imagining, but our experience of resemblance, that motivates our linguistic divisions. ‘I do not deny, but Nature, in the constant production of particular beings, makes them not always new and various, but very much alike and of kin one to another.’124 He also admits that there is a natural, objective benchmark for our names of substances. That is, there are things out there which act upon people in a uniform way. The ideas we combine have a public union which grounds the creation of nominal essences. ‘The mind, in making its complex ideas of substances, only follows nature; and puts 118 119 121 123

124

See Carey (2004) on Locke’s use (and abuse) of travel literature in repudiating innate ideas. MS. Locke f. 7, pp. 132; 139. 120 Locke 1975, p. 447 (iii.vi.12). Locke 1975, p. 570 (iv.iv.14). 122 Locke 1975, p. 447 (iii.vi.12). Mackie (1976, pp. 93–100) argues for Locke’s near-anticipation of Kripke on natural kinds; cf. Troyer (1975) on Locke’s version of Kripke’s ‘causal account of meaning’, whereby ‘the extension of terms like ‘‘gold’’ – is determined by essential features of the kind of thing instances of which are used to fix the reference of terms’. Stanford (1998) challenges Mackie, postulating instead that Locke anticipated the challenge to Kripke’s causal theory of reference. See also Laporte 1996. Locke 1975, pp. 462 (iii.vi.37).


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none together, which are not supposed to have an union in nature.’ We do not combine the baa-ing of a sheep with the shape of a horse. Such fantastic conglomerations would make it impossible for us to understand each other, the public standard for communication being erased. ‘If they will be understood, when they speak of things really existing, they must, in some degree, conform their ideas to the things they would speak of: or else men’s language will be like that of Babel.’125 It is because the names of substances are not completely arbitrary but are ‘referred to standards made by nature’, albeit experiential rather than essential ones, that they are not liable to endless semantic proliferation.126 In Locke’s mythic exploration into the generation of language, he conjectures that ‘the standard’ for the names Adam gave to substances was ‘made by nature’. He was bound by the ‘necessity of conforming his ideas of substances to things without him, as to archetypes made by nature’.127 However, while nature prompts us to collect certain ideas together into arrangements which might be called ‘real’, we remember that they can never amount to either the real (corpuscularian?) essences of substances or even to the full and necessary complement of sensible features which belong to a substance. In Draft B he sets out the compatibility between taking our lead from nature and taking absolute responsibility for the specific lines we draw. ‘Though nature made many particular things which doe agree one with an other in many qualitys or simple ideas, yet it is men who takeing occasion from those qualitys wherein they finde them to agree that destinguish them into species in order to their naming for the conveniency of speech.’128 In the Essay itself Locke develops his view that our present ignorance about the real constitution of a substance from which sensible properties flow makes it impossible to say which properties are indispensable to its description and which are not. ‘We can never know what are the precise number of properties depending on the real essence of gold, any one of which failing, the real essence of gold, and consequently gold, would not be there, unless we knew the real essence of gold it self, and by that determined that species.’129 Moreover, our irrevocable ignorance about how ‘the real constiution’ relates to its perceptible 125 127 129

126 Locke 1975, pp. 455–6 (iii.vi.28). Locke 1975, p. 481 (iii.ix.11). 128 Locke 1975, pp. 468 (iii.vi.46); 470 (iii.vi.51). Locke 1990b, p. 190. Locke 1975, p. 449 (iii.vi.19). Bolton (1998c) argues that, rather than there being no objective essences, the basis for Locke’s belief that kinds are determined by abstract ideas alone is his ‘ideatheoretic’ argument, that is, ‘the idea has a content defined by what is immediately perceived and intuitively known, and the idea represents exactly those things that conform to its content’, so that ‘a referentialist theory of the signification of kind terms is precluded by the way Lockean ideas function’ (p. 225).

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qualities bars us from ever knowing whether those qualities necessarily coexist.130 While we do have an objective pattern to go on, the lines we draw between species lack the precision and necessity required for taxonomy. While it is ‘obvious’ that ‘Nature in the production of things, makes several of them alike’, as demonstrated most clearly by ‘all things propagated by seed’, ‘the sorting of them under names, is the workmanship of the understanding’.131 That is, while we might make our words ‘true’, in the sense of fitting them to experience, insofar as we take them to represent essences or kinds of any sort, this is our, not nature’s, labour.132 Our linguistic classifications record our uniquely human perspectives and needs. The division between ‘sun’ and ‘stars’, for example, is a (probably false) distinction resulting from our proximity to the sun and the important role it plays in our lives.133 Locke evokes the pragmatism at the heart of language when he reflects on whether an ‘English-man, bred in Jamaica’ who knew nothing of ‘ice’, coming to England and finding the water frozen in his basin, would think it anything other than ‘harden’d water’ – rather than another species.134 Given that the essences of things can only be nominal, ‘rain is as essentially different from snow, as water from earth’.135 We can see that the convenient origins of species were of consistent and early concern to Locke if we look at a diary entry he made in September 1676. ‘How many sorts of insects are there that we have not distinguished into species but passe under the generall names of flies or wormes & that because haveing litle use of them we have not ranged them under more distinct & precise names & consequently into species’.136 On 18 November the following year he mused on the same point. ‘The species of things are distinguished & made by chance in order to naming & names imposed on those things which either the conveniency of life or common observation brings into discourse.’137 We choose which simple ideas are to be included in the complex idea – or meaning – of a substance. This choice ‘depends upon the various care, industry, or fancy of him that makes it’.138 And generally, people pick only ‘some few sensible obvious qualities’ which enable them to distinguish things ‘for the common affairs of life’, rather than spend ‘time, pains, and skill’ on enlarging and fixing the extension of the word.139 Our names of 130 132 134 135

136 139

Locke 1975, p. 546 (iv.iii.14). 131 Locke 1975, p. 415 (iii.iii.12). 133 Locke 1975, pp. 385 (ii.xxxii.5); 390–1 (ii.xxxii.18). Locke 1975, p. 439 (iii.vi.1). Locke 1975, pp. 447–8 (iii.vi.13). Locke 1975, p. 416 (iii.iii.14). Cope (1999) argues that Locke’s ‘taxonomic flatness’ is the ‘hallmark of Locke’s empirical, anecdotal worldview’ (p. 49). MS. Locke f. 1, p. 442. 137 MS. Locke f. 2, p. 356. 138 Locke 1975, p. 456 (iii.vi.29). Locke 1975, p. 457 (iii.vi.30).


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things tend to answer our convenience rather than pursue reality. We are not supine receptors of a given world, but write it in accordance with our (albeit collective) subjective experience, interests and beliefs. As the products of our understanding, animated and fixed in names, essences are immutable and eternal, while nature is like Proteus. The ‘real constitutions of things . . . begin and perish with them. All things, that exist, besides their author, are all liable to change.’ Alexander and Bucephalus might die, grass become sheep and then human flesh, and a fish-woman not exist at all, but ‘man’, ‘horse’, ‘grass’, ‘sheep’ and ‘mermaid’ remain ‘safe and entire’ in our minds and on our tongues, our creatures all.140 And it is words that play the crucial part in this ontological inscription. Although they logically succeed our complex ideas, they give life to species and make them ‘pass for such’ in society. Locke gives the examples of a ‘silent and a striking watch’ which ‘are but one species, to those who have but one name for them’.141 The name ‘clock’ introduces a wholly new species with a distinct meaning. Without this distinct nomenclature, there would be no such essential distinction of things. Towards the end of his lengthy discussion of substance terms, Locke is brought up short by the difficulty of talking about this subject, so completely is he at the mercy of the words and divisions which limit what he can say. In trying to get us to see that our names of substances pick out the experiential innovations of people rather than the real essences of things, he cannot talk about ‘man’ without immediately calling up its nominal essence – the ultimate frontier of its meaning and a far cry from reality. But if he does not use the word ‘man’, he says nothing. He has no way of referring to ‘man, as he is in himself, and as he is really distinguished from others’, outside the term ‘man’.142 In chapter 9 I shall probe the consequences of the position that I have laid out in this one: our words are, fundamentally if not completely, strangers to the world itself, and create the world as we know it.

140 142

Locke 1975, pp. 419–20 (iii.iii.19). Locke 1975, pp. 465–6 (iii.vi.43).

141

Locke 1975, p. 463 (iii.vi.39).

chapter 8

Semantic instability: an inherent imperfection

While some early-modern philosophers had brushed with the problem of verbal equivocity, Locke makes it a central plank in his critique of language. It was a deeply embedded assumption that men share the same mental discourse. Think, for example, of the universal language projects, and in particular of the frontispiece of Cave Beck’s Universal Character, where an Englishman (is it Bacon, the father of the movement?), a Turk, a grass-skirted American and a figure who is harder to decipher (is it an African, or a Roman in the shadows of time?) all communicate with each other at the table.1 Think also of the generic mind of the trivium, the rationalising, ‘philosophical’ grammarians and the worldwide res. Reacting against this commonplace and drawing on its detractors, Locke goes so far as to say that semantic instability is endemic to language. His predecessors had probed the phenomenon, particularly in the contexts of the elocutionary use of language, superficial semantic disagreement in the selfconsciously conciliatory republic of letters, textual hermeneutics, hedonistic moral terminology and mental divergence. While Locke repeats and develops these themes, he also takes the radical step of identifying the problem as one that affects language per se. It is part and parcel of the human condition. If we talk at cross purposes then we cannot understand one another, and language as a whole becomes a bankrupt enterprise. No one besides Locke had made semantic proliferation a quintessential feature of language, with the possible exception of Pascal, who had speculated on the probability of miscommunication. But while he may well have passed on his linguistic scepticism to Locke, Pascal’s was coming from a very different, fallen and non-systematic place. Locke’s disquiet emanates from his consideration of the individualistic depths of human understanding. His forbears, Montaigne in particular, had explored mental multiformity, but they had not squarely inserted this into philosophy of 1

See cover illustration, this volume.

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language. And Locke himself, while he takes the problem much further than ever before, is nevertheless caught between his grisly inkling of semantic instability and the conventional subscription to uniformity and communication. We will see Locke tussling, half-aware, with these two extremes, demonstrating the kind of stresses that are so characteristic of his linguistic theory as a whole and even of his general philosophical outlook. a play on words Before I examine this profound deconstruction of language, I look at the more superficial and intentional ways in which words become equivocal according to Locke, and which are basically reiterative of old concerns. The most straightforward inheritance is from the heart of the logical tradition – which we saw dealing with ‘connotative’, as well as equivocal, words. At the end of the Essay – his own reformed logic – in the same, ultimate, location ordained by all practitioners, Locke repeats that verbal ambiguity is a source of erroneous argument and knowledge. ‘The arguments being . . . brought in words, there may be a fallacy latent in them’.2 A deeper concern is stimulated by the characteristically rhetorical view of words as detachable from, if not completely unattached to things. Echoing the anti-eloquent cries of the century, Locke is horrified at the breach of the semantic contract between sign and signified in which orators take such pride and which, it will be remembered, had come to be synonymous with the discipline as a whole. The five elements of the subject had been reduced to one: elocutio, the figures and the tropes, whose very job it is to play with words and disrupt their semantic bed. Locke explicitly refers to this development, and his disgust at it, in the finale to his chapter ‘of the abuse of words’. There, ‘figurative speeches, and allusion in language’ are identified with ‘all the Art of Rhetorick’. Eloquent speakers apply words as they desire and positively misdescribe the world. ‘If we would speak of things as they are’, then ‘all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented’ is ‘wholly to be avoided’. Locke renames eloquence ‘the Arts of Fallacy’.3 In addition to this fierce denunciation, the whole chapter reverberates with outrage at semantic fission – the cardinal linguistic sin. There is even a verbal echo in his description of another abuse of words – their 2 3

Locke 1975, p. 715 (iv.xx.13). Locke 1975, p. 508 (iii.x.34). See Walker (1994) on Locke’s own ‘rhetoric’, and Zerilli (2005) on Locke’s use of rhetorical structure in his political theory.

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inconstant use. While rhetoric is a ‘perfect cheat’, this is ‘a perfect abuse of language’ and a ‘plain cheat’.4 To ‘make them stand sometimes for one thing, and sometimes for another’ is either ‘great folly, or greater dishonesty’, words’ whole signifying power flowing from ‘a voluntary imposition’.5 Being joined to meanings by purely arbitrary connections, applying them variously makes them perfectly unintelligible, these fragile threads being the only mechanisms by which language works at all.6 Locke compares breaking the semantic contract to the debtor who calls ‘8 sometimes seven, and sometimes nine, as best served his advantage’, and to the marketeer ‘who sells several things under the same name’.7 A further abuse of language, ‘affected obscurity’, also involves words in an unclear relation to their meanings. Old words are applied to new significations, ambiguous words are coined, or words are compounded ‘as may confound their ordinary meaning’. Locke’s targets are philosophical sects, particularly the Aristotelians and Cartesians, who ‘cover’ their necessarily ‘imperfect’ knowledge in obscure words and ‘confound the signification of words, which, like a mist before peoples eyes, might hinder their weak parts from being discovered’.8 Locke blames the blossoming of this abuse on ‘the admired Art of Disputing’. By privileging victory over truth, it positively encourages men to ‘perplex, involve, and subtilize the signification of sounds, so as never to want something to say, in opposing or defending any question’.9 This ‘learned gibberish’, this knavish attitude towards the communal linguistic legislator, enables gentlemen ‘to prove, that snow [is] black’.10 This is Anaxagoras’ proof which we saw in Sextus and Montaigne, and which associates disputation with scepticism. Locke ends his attack on a dark note. He dramatically changes the register by explaining how this abuse affects not only ‘logical niceties’, but assaults ‘the great concernments of humane life and society’. It has ‘obscured and perplexed the material truths of law and divinity; brought confusion, disorder, and uncertainty into the affairs of mankind; and if not destroyed, yet in great measure rendred useless, those two great 4

5 6

7 9

Locke 1975, p. 508 (iii.x.34). Bennington (1987) argues that Locke cannot eliminate the figural from language. Locke 1975, pp. 492–3 (iii.x.5). Almond (1999, pp. 126–42) argues for the importance of the Adamic cause in the seventeenth century, and for the revolutionary nature of Locke’s rejection of it. According to Aarsleff (1982, pp. 27 and 42–83) it is Locke’s anti-Adamicism that motivates his views on language, and also the Essay as a whole. Vickers (1984, pp. 110–13) also locates Locke in the anti-occultist movement. See Hacking (1988) for a criticism of Aarsleff’s interpretation. Locke 1975, pp. 493 (iii.x.5); 506 (iii.x.28). 8 Locke 1975, p. 493 (iii.x.6). 10 Locke 1975, p. 494 (iii.x.7). Locke 1975, p. 495 (iii.x.9–10).


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rules, religion and justice’.11 Locke’s wrath is perhaps aimed at the unholy alliance of Filmerian absolutists and Anglican clergy, who spin out of Scripture and law the divine right of kings and persecutors, and thereby instantiate a terrifying blend of savagery and authoritarianism in Church as well as State.12 These rightless factions ‘demonstrate’ the fancy of iure divino power. They expropriate dissenters in the name of the ‘law’, thereby obliterating the entire rationale of the law, which is to protect people’s property. They gratuitously, malignantly, interpret their seminal texts, such as the Bible and the Clarendon Code. Projecting shadows that suit their cause, they ‘darken truth, and unsettle peoples rights; to raise mists, and render unintelligible both morality and religion’.13 These abuses, wilfully rending res from verba, are grounded in the fundamental disunity between sign and signified that lies at the heart of early-modern philosophy of language. Locke jocularly refers to the severability of words in a love letter of July 1659, perhaps to Anne Evelyn. He teases that she will rue the day she mis-fixed a favourable appellation to his writing. ‘You will finde your ponishment in being ingaged to read what you have nicknamed good.’14 When he expresses his general abhorrence at licentious uses of language, he is echoing the concerns and the well-established modes of attack of his contemporaries. His correspondence provides a good example of this hall of mirrors. There philosophers walk, all using the same theoretical claims to console or insult. On 26 October 1697 William King writes to William Molyneux about Locke’s unforgivable acts of linguistic re-legislation of the terms ‘agreement’ and ‘disagreement’ with regard to knowledge and certainty, which Locke says refer to the relationship between ideas rather than between ideas and things. The ‘liberty’ Locke claims is allowed in new, but not in known, words. While ‘words were indeed arbitrary signs of things in those, that first imposed them . . . they are not to us. When wee use the best caution wee can we are apt to transgress in changing them, and when wee do so out of weakness, wee must ask pardon, but must not claim it as a liberty, it being really a fault’.15 King turns Locke’s strictures back upon him; it is unacceptable to rupture the morally inviolable union between word and meaning, even if the speaker announces his action. The anxiety about res being displaced from their proper verba is fostered by the ease with which it can be achieved, and by a rhetorical and disputing culture that positively encourages it. 11 13

Locke 1975, p. 496 (iii.x.12). Locke 1975, p. 497 (iii.x.13).

12 14

See Goldie (1983) on this alliance. Locke 1976–89, i, p. 93. 15 Locke 1976–89, vi, p. 241.

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Thus far, however, Locke has not distinguished himself from the limited and traditional claims for semantic instability. It is still fundamentally circumscribed by a faith in one proper word meaning and the voluntary crimes of the abusers who betray propriety. textual exegesis Textual exegesis is another site of concern about semantic instability on which Locke leaves his mark. Textual obscurity challenges the supposedly one-to-one word–meaning pairings that common use is meant to effect. Locke reveals a rich, complex view of the relationships between text, context, speaker’s intention and reader, shattering the neat res–verba coupling by presenting it as a necessarily polygamous affair. He chips away at the self-evidence of words by renovating the old disjunction between literal sense and intention. He explains that where he diverges from a strict translation of Nicole’s Essais, he is following the (extra-verbal) intention of the author. ‘I made bold to follow his designe rather then his words.’16 He broadens the issue of plural interpretation when he considers the divergent reception of his own Essay. He excuses its repetitiousness by appealing to the fact that it has to be ‘dressed’ in many ways, because ‘we have our understandings no less different than our palates.’17 He further questions verbal transparency when he alludes to the endless hermeneutic webs spun by religious and legal commentators. ‘In the interpretation of laws, whether divine, or humane, there is no end; comments beget comments, and explications make new matter for explications.’18 He despairs at the necessary opacity of God’s design, being represented in indeterminate human language. ‘Nor is it to be wondred, that the Will of god, when cloathed in words, should be liable to that doubt and uncertainty, which unavoidably attends that sort of conveyance, when even his son, whilst cloathed in flesh, was subject to all the frailties and inconveniences of humane nature, sin excepted.’19 The comparison of 16

17 19

MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 44r. In a letter to Molyneux of 20 January 1693 Locke applauds his friend’s reading skills, which penetrate the authorial intention despite the words. ‘But it not being reasonable for me to expect that every body should read me with that judgment you do, and observe the design and foundation of what I say, rather than stick barely in the words’ (Locke 1976–89, iv, p. 624). Cf. the letter to Molyneux of August 1693: ‘I hope my words express no such thing, for it is quite contrary to my sense, and I think would be useless tyranny in their governors’ (p. 720); v, p. 677, to Molyneux in August 1696 on the subject of Mr. Burridge’s translation of his Essay: ‘so he has but my sense, I care not how much he neglects my words’. Locke 1975, p. 8 (Epistle to the Reader). 18 Locke 1975, p. 480 (iii.ix.9). Locke 1975, p. 490 (iii.ix.23).


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words with Christ’s flesh is shocking, indicating the depth of Locke’s cynicism about perspicuous words. They cannot be simply peeled away to reveal one true meaning beneath. They are integral to meaning. Or even, they are all we have. Locke’s contingent, readerly view of meaning seems sometimes to shake the authority of the law and the Bible. They are not necessarily the public and fixed standards by which we know how to order our lives. In a manuscript which debates the question whether ‘an infallible interpreter of Holy Scripture be granted in the church’ (written 1661–2), Locke explains that the right of interpretation affords its holders great power because ‘anybody may attach a new meaning to the words to suit his own taste’.20 His sensitivity to the obscurity of bare text, and to the room for divergent readings, is shown in a little comment he makes in his journal in November 1686 about a Pensylvania law. ‘Whosoever shall speake loosely & profanely of Almighty God Christ Jesus the Holy Spirit & the Scriptures of Truth shall pay . . . or 5 days imprisonment.’ Locke queries: ‘what is loosely or prophanely’?21 He publicly echoes this sensitivity in 1695 when he objects to the punitive Licensing Act of 1662, whose indeterminate wording afforded extensive censorship: Some of these termes are so general and comprehensive or at least soe submitted to the sense and interpretation of the Governors of Church or state for the time being that it is impossible any book should passe but just what suits their humors. And who knows but that the motion of the Earth may be found to be Heretical, etc, as asserting Antipodes once was?22

The prohibition of ‘heretical, seditious, schismatical or offensive books’, as the Act has it, effectively licenses the government to ban any book they like.23 The unstable content of discretely evaluative terms is a subject that had vigorously exercised Locke in his Letter concerning Toleration (1689). There, he had expressed the truism that ‘every Church is Orthodox to it self; to others, Erroneous or Heretical’. ‘Idolatry’ is another word which has no fixed referent, but is understood divergently and conveniently.24 While it is not clear from his well-known works, if we turn to his manuscripts and correspondence we discover that Locke himself is increasingly obsessed with Scriptural exegesis.25 His scribblings disclose a mitigated 20 23 25

Locke 1997, pp. 204; 205. 21 MS. Locke f. 9, p. 33. 22 Locke 1976–89, v, p. 785. Locke 1997, p. 330. 24 Locke 1983, pp. 32; 42. E.g. in 1685 Locke purchased Boyle On the Style of the Holy Scriptures (MS. Locke f. 8, p. 300), and notes on the New Testament, which record the influence of Boyle can be found in a parchment box (MS. Locke f. 30, fo. 1r). At the beginning of 1686 Locke registers an interest in Grotius’ scriptural work (MS. Locke f. 9, p. 1). See MS. Locke f. 9 (p. 117) on ‘Ludovi Cappelli’ and the Old

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view of verbal uncertainty. In a letter to Samuel Bold on 16 May 1699, he reveals the reader’s role in creating meaning. Commentators ‘wind and twist and pull the text’, making it say what they like, so that it accords with their ‘system’ or ‘denomination’.26 But while meaning can be made to proliferate by the reader, Locke maintains that the text safeguards one authorial, divine meaning, which good readers (like Locke) can figure out through the fog of language. His extensive and minute engagement with Scriptural exegesis discloses both his awareness of the possibility of semantic confusion and his belief in one, recoverable authorial intention behind the words. It would be wrong to over-modernise Locke’s depiction of the scriptable text. His concerns about endlessly re-interpretable words should be considered more in the context of an attack on bad interpreters, rather than a Derridean denial of one true meaning. The authorial intention is, after all, the object of Locke’s intense exegetical quest, and according to his polemical philosophy of language, the only feasible meaning of words. However, it turns out that the meaning of words tends towards multiplication in the minds not only of malevolent readers but of benign ones too. It is precisely because meaning is created subjectively by the author and not by one standard of common use, that interpretation is needed to disperse the linguistic mists.27 Locke’s contextualist, even cornucopian hermeneutic approach shows that he thinks words are not paired reliably with meanings, but are dependent for their specific application on particular speakers in particular historical situations who have untold figurative and imaginative reserves. On 3 July 1676 Locke records John Lightfoot’s comment on Maimonides. This great contextualiser of the Bible provides ‘the great register of the Jews customs, & Antiquity’.28 Locke’s notes on the New Testament contain examples of his historicist exegesis. On verse six of Paul’s first epistle to Timothy, Locke writes: ‘foundation . . . is here Helenistically taken & answers Heb . . . which signifies both a foundation and a Bil or contract made’. And on Revelation, verse 11: ‘Angel. In the

26 27

28

and New Testaments. On 19 November 1692 Locke received Cudworth’s Discourse concerning the Notion of the Lord’s Supper (MS. Locke f. 10, p. 169). Following his close reading of Simon, possibly in 1691, Locke makes notes on the books of the Old Testament (MS. Locke f. 32, e.g. fos. 28r; 45r; 48v; 65v). Locke 1976–89, vi, p. 629. Cf. Locke (1976–89, viii, pp. 69–70) on his recommendation of certain commentators (Hammond, Whitby, Mede, Lightfoot), presumably because they help to discover Scripture’s true meaning; MS. Locke f. 6, pp. 84; 85, where Locke copies out Hale’s interpretations – which allow for metaphor and multiple signification. MS. Locke f. 1, p. 306. On 22 November 1685, Locke makes notes on Maimonides (taken from Spencer) about Hebrew rituals and Mosaic law (MS. Locke f. 8, p. 300).


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synagogue he that was called the Angel 1. praid in the synagoge. 2. cald that who were to read.’29 Among the last things that Locke wrote were lengthy pieces of Scriptural commentary. There, we encounter the Bible as an ambiguous text, demanding hermeneutic effort to hone down the plethora of semantic possibilities to the intended sense. In the Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans he supplies a synopsis of the letter, in which he uncovers the unseen motivation of Paul’s polemic, namely that the Jews were insisting that the new Christians obey Mosaic law and partake in ancient rites.30 At one point in the commentary he writes ‘it is visible by the context that what he opposed was Juddaisme’.31 He divides the work into text and paraphrase/notes. The latter part forms a massive metatext which far outstrips its source. Locke cross-references, alerts us to figurative passages and words, does some philological work, and generally instructs us how to read, teasing out the original intention, divorced as it is from the literal text.32 For example, ‘to take the thread of Paul’s words here right all from the word Lord in the middle of the 3rd to the beginning of this 7th must be read as a parenthesis’.33 In his Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians there is an interesting comment on the problems of translation, on the incommensurability between, and the particularity of, languages, and on the possibility of attaining understanding nevertheless: Clear This word answers very well . . . in the Greek: but then to be clear in English is generally understood to signifie not to have been guilty; which could not be the sense of the Apostle, he having charged the Corinthians so warmly in his first Epistle. His meaning must therefore be that they had now resolved on a contrary course & were so far clear. ie were set right & in good disposition again.34

In the synopsis of A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians Locke elucidates the speaker’s intention. It is not apparent from the words alone. ‘The business of it is to dehort & hinder the Galatians from bringing themselves under the bondage of the Mosaical law.’35 As so often, however, the obscurity of the speaker’s meaning is undercut by appeals to the self-evident univocity of words. Like Protestants before 29 32 33 35

MS. Locke f. 30, fos. 86v; 114v. 30 MS. Locke e. 2, fo. 1r. 31 MS. Locke e. 2, fo. 4v. Cf. Limborch on the ‘literal and the mystical’ senses of prophecy (Locke 1976–89, v, p. 210). MS. Locke e. 2, fo. 4r. 34 MS. Locke e. 2, fo. 184r. MS. Locke e. 2, fo. 201r. In a letter to Locke, querying his reading of a section of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, Newton offers an alternative which suits ‘well to the words and designe of St. Paul’ (Locke 1976–89, viii, p. 2).

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him, Locke champions textual transparency in his sola Scriptura belief. ‘The most certain interpreter of Scripture is Scripture itself ’.36 In a draft letter to Gabriel Towerson in December 1660, Locke declares that he is ‘only content with that light which the Scripture affords its self, which is commonly the clearest discover of its own meaning’.37 In his lengthy biblical rebuttal of Filmer in the First Treatise, Locke appeals to the ‘direct and plain meaning of the words’, as though they were uniformly lucid, only dulled by misreaders.38 He also invokes the perspicuity of common use. In The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) he urges us to attend to the ‘plain direct meaning of words and phrases, such as they may be supposed to have had in the mouths of the speakers, who used them according to the language of that time and country wherein they lived’.39 He follows this up with an attack on the ‘learned, artificial, and forced senses’ of the text which are avoidably imposed by various religious parties. Sometimes therefore, Locke talks as though there were just one ‘ordinary vulgar sense of the word’ upon which everybody agrees.40 the epistemological roots of semantic instability Locke’s extraordinary innovation with regard to semantic instability flows from his inter-determinate philosophies of mind and language. While verbal univocity starts to slide into divergent, individual meanings in the context of textual interpretation, his way of ideas threatens to dissolve objective word meaning in a sea of subjectivity. Locke’s appeal to the ‘literal sense’ is revealed as whistling in the wind. His revolutionary contribution to early-modern linguistics is to assert that language is inherently and inadvertently equivocal. Although he draws on the sporadic voices of his predecessors, it is from his distinctive epistemological views that an equally distinctive – and damning – account of this innate imperfection flows. 36 39

40

Locke 1997, p. 209. 37 MS. Locke e. 7, fo. 35r. 38 Locke 1988, p. 165. Locke 1993, p. 5. On the transparency and propriety of God’s word see also Locke 1988, p. 173 and 1997, pp. 206; 208. Cf. Mandelbrote (1994) on the use of the Augustinian dictum Scriptura humane loquitur in the seventeenth century. Locke 1976–89, vi, p. 629; cf. Samuel Bold (in a letter to Locke of 18 October 1699) on the way in which common use does change over time, but is identifiable at a given time nonetheless: ‘me think’s a Critick should know that the words in which a revelation is delivered, must stand for, and signify the ideas, of which they were designed to be marks or signs, at that time when the revelation was delivered: and if they were then used to signify other ideas, then they did ordinarily signify, what those different ideas were, must then be made known, so that who so ever wil insist on a spiritual or mystical sense of words, must prove the alteration of their sense at the time of the revelation, otherwise it leaves us in the depth of uncertainty’ (p. 712).


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The starting point for his reformulation of semantic instability is the same fundamental truism that drives his whole polemic about language. We saw him wield it to expose the gulf between words and the world: words can only ever signify the speaker’s ideas. Words ‘in every man’s mouth, stand for the ideas he has’.41 Given that ideas do not occur in one generic mind but in the minds of individuals, they will vary accordingly. The corollary of the view that words signify the speaker’s particular ideas is that, once uttered, they also signify the hearer’s ideas. At all points in a word’s travels, meaning is constructed subjectively. In the Conduct of the Understanding Locke refers to the sovereign reader. ‘Words having naturally none of their own, carry that signification to the hearer, that he is us’d to put upon them, whatever be the sense of him that uses them.’42 In a letter to William Molyneux of 20 September 1692 Locke comments on the discontinuity between writer and reader. ‘What men by thinking have made clear to themselves, they are apt to think, that upon the first suggestion it should be so to others, and so let it go not sufficiently explained; not considering that what may be very clear to themselves may be very obscure to others.’43 Language emerges as a web of empty signifiers, hovering indeterminately, except as incarnated in the mouths and ears of particular men. However, semantic individualism does not necessarily make Locke a private language theorist who prohibits the possibility of a common mental discourse and communication.44 Indeed, like his predecessors, he uses the axiomatic premise of semantic universalism to prove that words are connected to their meanings arbitrarily. If there were a ‘natural connexion’, he says, ‘there would be but one language amongst all men’.45 41 44

45

42 Locke 1975, p. 406 (iii.ii.3). Locke 1993, p. 106. 43 Locke 1976–89, iv, p. 523; cf. p. 623. I am not using ‘private language’ solely in a Wittgensteinian sense, but in addition to indicate the privacy of meaning. For a detailed analysis of Locke’s communication theory and the secondary debate on the issue see Dawson (2003). See Martinich (1996, p. 493) and Miller (1998, p. 36) on Locke as the ‘locus classicus’ for private language theory. The entry on Locke in the Concise Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language (1997) declares that he concludes that language is an imperfect vehicle for communication due to the privacy of ideas. Amongst those who maintain that Locke does not have a workable theory of meaning are Alston (1964, pp. 22–6), Apel (1976, p. 42), Bennett (1971, p. 5), Jolley (1999, pp. 163–5), Land (1986, pp. 35–42), Lowe (1995, pp. 149–50), Lycan (1999, pp. 78–9), Odegard (1970, p. 14) and Taylor (1984, p. 209). Locke’s apologists include Colman (1983, pp. 110–11), Cope (1999, p. 67), Formigari (1988, p. 117), Kretzmann (1967, p. 380 and 1968), Landesman (1991), Losonsky (1994), Ott (2004, pp. 129–37) and Yolton (1970, pp. 205– 15). Ashworth (1984 and 1981), and Hacking (1975b, pp. 51–2) take a more historicist approach, and I am greatly indebted to them both. See Ayers (1991, i) for a stunning elucidation and defence of the Lockean position that ‘consciousness is the source of meaning’ (p. 301). Cf. Ott (2004, p. 138–43) for a defence of Locke’s mentalism. Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.1).

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Locke also repeats the commonplace that the argument is about words not things, indicating the uniformity of the semantic bedrock. ‘I am apt to imagine, that when any of them quitting terms, think upon things, and know what they think, they think all the same: though perhaps, what they would have, be different.’46 In Draft A he had trotted out the old dictum that most of our disputes are ‘rather about the signification of words than about the natures of things’.47 There are two parts to Locke’s account of how it is theoretically possible to communicate. In the first place, the uniformity of our perceptive faculties and the ideas that result, together with our capacity for abstraction by which particular ideas become general, enable us (probably) to have the same ideas.48 Then the ideas, still private, become the publicly accessible objects of conventional linguistic legislation in the following way. Sensible ideas are caused by external things and can therefore be identified and named by the community through ostensive definition.49 There is a still a question, however, as to how we agree the names of ‘ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses; v.g. to imagine, apprehend, comprehend, adhere, conceive, instill, disgust, disturbance, tranquillity’. His rather tenuous answer, but an answer nonetheless, appeals to the metaphorical use of names we met in Peacham. The ostensively definable names of sensible ideas are applied to ideas of reflection. ‘Spirit, in its primary signification, is breath; angel, a messenger; and I doubt not, but if we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all languages, the names, which stand for things that fall not under our sense, to have had their first rise from sensible ideas.’50 Locke thereby accounts for the communication of all ideas of sensation and reflection – which are the rudiments of our entire mental edifice.51 While it is possible for different individuals to mean the same things by their words, it is not necessarily the case. For a number of reasons, that I shall now lay out, Lockean minds turn out to be diverse and mutable. This mental kaleidoscope is shadowed in the semantic realm and menaces the community of meaning that enables communication and secures linguistic intelligibility. The principal reason Locke gives for semantic diversity is that we voluntarily and therefore possibly divergently make up the meanings of 46 47 48 49 50 51

Locke 1975, p. 504 (iii.x.22). Locke 1990a, p. 2. Cf. Locke 1975, p. 480 (iii.ix.9); Locke 1975, p. 511 (iii.xi.7). Locke 1975, pp. 180 (ii.xiii.27); 303 (ii.xxiii.12); 409–10 (iii.iii.3). Locke 1975, pp. 403–4 (iii.i.5). Locke 1975, p. 403 (iii.i.5). For Peacham, see chapter 3, p. 73. Locke 1975, p. 292 (ii.xxii.9).


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the overwhelming proportion of our words. While we probably do agree in the meanings we give to the names of simple ideas such as ‘blue’, this is not the case for the names of complex ideas. Whereas we passively receive simple ideas, we actively compound them into complex ones.52 They are therefore liable to vary from individual to individual, as experience and judgement varies. ‘Tis plain, that the mind of man uses some kind of liberty, in forming those complex ideas: how else comes it to pass, that one man’s idea of gold, or justice, is different from anothers? But because he has put in, or left out of his, some simple idea, which the other has not.’53 At the inception of the Essay Locke expresses the revolutionary view that it is quite possible, indeed highly probable, that men speak their language perfectly, and converse endlessly with each other without communicating. They talk ‘according to the grammar rules of that language . . . yet speake gibberish to one another the notions their words which are but signes stand for not being agreed & determind amongst them’.54 Locke’s compositional nominalism, and his early location of mental action in the cognitive process result in profound semantic instability. This stunning charge cuts to the quick of language. If words are to communicate, ‘it is necessary . . . that they excite, in the hearer, exactly the same ideas, they stand for in the mind of the speaker. Without this, men fill one another’s heads with noise and sounds’.55 If speaker and 52

53 54 55

Locke 1975, p. 163 (ii.xii.1). For an account of the way in which communities do and do not control nominal essences, see Holmes 1996. Locke 1975, p. 373 (ii.xxx.3). Even Adam made them up (pp. 466–9 (iii.vi.44–7)). Locke 1990a, p. 14. Locke 1975, p. 478 (iii.ix.6). Locke (p. 389 (ii.xxxii.15)) seems to contradict himself by saying that the meanings of colour terms are determined by the public objects which cause them rather than the private sensations of those colours; he says of a man who sees in a marigold what others see in a violet, that he would use the terms ‘blue’ and ‘yellow’ in the same way. Locke therefore seems to distinguish between public meaning and private ideas, and to make the latter immaterial in communication. However, Locke’s thought experiment occurs in a chapter on true and false ideas, where he is primarily concerned to prove that simple ideas are always ‘true’ because they conform to their (public) causes. He concludes that he believes ‘nevertheless’ that people do have the same simple ideas. And in numerous places elsewhere he identifies the meaning of names with the qualitative experience (e.g. with the meaning of ‘pineapple’ (p. 424 (iii.iv.11)), as well as expressing mystification about how people could communicate if they did not have the same (qualitative) ideas (e.g. the man with microscopic eyes (p. 303 (ii.xxiii)). On Locke’s incoherence see Bennett 1971, pp. 6–7 and Miller 1998, pp. 39–41. For a credible defence of Locke see Ayers 1997, pp. 207–9. Alexander (1985, p. 248) argues (against nearly everything Locke says) that the public use of words is more important for Locke than the private one. Ott (2004, p. 133–7) uses Locke’s treatment of the inverted spectrum to suggest that while it is necessary for people to have the same ideas to communicate, what determines the sameness of ideas is not their qualitative content, but their significative role. Ott concludes that ‘Locke’s insistence on the causal connections between mental representations and their referents is not so far removed after all from Putnam-style externalism’ (p. 141).

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hearer do not mean the same things by their words, they can not understand each other, and communication is impossible. There are two types of names of complex ideas. The first are substances, names of ‘things’, like ‘man’ and ‘gold’. Second, there are the names of mixed modes. Mixed modes are ‘dependences on, or affections of substances’.56 These have no settled or necessary existence, such as ‘murder’, ‘apotheosis’, ‘reprieve’. Relations are relations between ideas, such as ‘identity’ and ‘morally good and evil’. Locke tends to include relations under the broad heading of mixed modes, and I shall do the same.57 Turning first to the names of substances, we have already seen that they can signify only collections of simple ideas regularly observed together. These collections are ‘made by the mind, and not by nature’, and are therefore ‘by different men, made very differently’.58 ‘For were they nature’s workmanship, they could not be so various and different in several men, as experience tells us they are.’59 The meanings of names of substances are circumscribed by the particular experiences, education and decisions of individuals. They are ‘those several simple ideas, which he has usually observed, or fancied to exist together under that denomination’.60 A Cartesian who believes that the essence of ‘body’ is ‘extension’ has a different understanding of the word ‘body’ to, say, Locke, who deems ‘solidity’ essential.61 To emphasise the point that people understand the world differently, Locke uses his favourite example of the monstrous birth. Given our ignorance of real essences and our construction of nominal ones, ‘if several men were to be asked, concerning some odly-shaped Foetus, as soon as born, whether it were a man, or no, ’tis past doubt, one should meet with different answers’.62 Divergent ideas splinter meanings, further demolishing the table of substances that was 56 57

58 60 61

62

Locke 1975, p. 165 (ii.xii.4). Locke 1975, p. 437 (iii.v.16). Locke titles book iii, chapter v: ‘of the names of mixed modes and relations’, but discusses only ‘mixed modes’. 59 Locke 1975, pp. 453 (iii.vi.26); 458 (iii.vi.31). Locke 1975, p. 453 (iii.vi.26). Locke 1975, p. 298 (ii.xxiii.6). Locke 1975, p. 441 (iii.vi.5); cf. p. 450 (iii.vi.21) for Locke’s repudiation of the view that extension is the essence of body. Locke 1975, p. 454 (iii.vi.27). Locke’s vision of semantic diffusion is indebted to Bacon’s idols of the marketplace, but Locke reverses Bacon’s view that the names of qualities are clear and the names of substances obscure. Using the same experiential language that Locke is to inherit, Bacon (1994b, p. 65) explains how names of qualities cover a sprawling mass of meanings. He peels away ‘moist’ and finds it teems with disparate significations. ‘It signifies not only something with no definite boundaries and unable to become solid; something which yields easily in every direction; something which easily subdivides and scatters itself; or easily coalesces and becomes one; easily flows and is set in motion; easily adheres to another body and makes it wet; and which easily liquefies, or melts, when it was previously solid.’


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apparently set in stone. Locke declares of the names of substances that ‘I believe it is very seldom that in speaker and hearer, they stand for exactly the same collection.’63 Locke’s account of semantic divergence is notable for the innocence it affords speakers. Rather than maliciously twisting words, they inadvertently and necessarily mean different things by them. This is most clearly the case when it comes to divergent sense experience. Locke puts this guiltless spin on the issue in Draft A, where he says that a ‘skilful horsman’ will understand the word ‘horse’ differently from someone less acquainted with the animal. As a result, a name is the ‘same in every mans mouth through a whole country speakeing the same language, yet the collective idea which a man thinkes on or intends to expresse when he hears or names that word is in men using the same language very different, soe that to one man it stands for one thing & to another man for an other’.64 In the published work we meet the (al)chemist, the ordinary man and the boy, whose divergent experience cannot but make their understanding of ‘gold’ differ.65 The boy, who has noticed only ‘the bright shining colour’ in gold takes that colour for the meaning of word ‘gold’, applying it equally to a ‘peacocks tail’. For the man feeling the ring on his left hand, the word might also signify ‘great weight’.66 The chemist would add ‘solubility in Aqua Regia’, ‘fusibility’ and ‘ductility or fixidness’.67 Although this point occurs in the midst of the Essay, tucked away in book iii, it is at the front of Locke’s mind in 1671 when he first conceives the work. The same boy who takes the word ‘gold’ to mean ‘shineing yellow’, and applies it equally to ‘guilded cork’, appears at the beginning of the very first draft.68 One name is voiced by all, but all ‘frame very different ideas about it; and so the name they use for it, unavoidably comes to have, in several men, very different significations’. ‘It will always unavoidably follow’, announces Locke, ‘that the complex ideas of substances, in men using the same name for them, will be very various; and so the significations of those names, very uncertain’.69 However, it is really only in philosophical discourse, where ‘general truths are to be established’ and precisely constituted nominal essences are necessary, that the problem of semantic individualism in the names of substances becomes acute or important. The situation is less serious in 63 65 67 68

64 Locke 1975, p. 487 (iii.ix.18). Locke 1990a, p. 10. Locke 1975, pp. 482–3 (iii.ix.13); 406 (iii.ii.3). 66 Locke 1975, p. 406 (iii.ii.3). Locke 1975, p. 483 (iii.ix.13). Locke 1990a, pp. 3–4. 69 Locke 1975, pp. 482–3 (iii.ix.13).

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‘civil and common conversation’, where ‘the general names of substances, regulated in their ordinary signification by some obvious qualities . . . do well enough, to design the things men would be understood to speak of ’.70 While severe problems attend philosophical communication about substances, there are objective (or collectively subjective) ‘patterns to follow’ which enable, albeit inexact, communication. People can ‘regulate the signification of their names by the things themselves’, and thereby have a pragmatic modicum of communion in ordinary conversation.71 Not so for mixed modes. They are ‘scattered and independent ideas, put together by the mind’ and formed for our convenience, such as ‘obligation, drunkenness, a lye’.72 Unlike substances, which, however superficially and uncertainly, ‘are referred to standards made by nature’, mixed modes have ‘no real standards existing in nature, to which those ideas are referred, and by which they may be adjusted’.73 There is therefore no objective block on the meanings of these names. While the public world checks talk about itself, the mind has complete ‘liberty’ to construct mixed modes. Their essences are ‘not only made by the mind [as substances are, too], but [unlike substances, are] made very arbitrarily, made without patterns, or reference to any real existence’. People actively gather together ideas to make an ‘archetype’, whether such a thing exists ‘in rerum natura, or no’.74 Hence it is that lawyers can legislate about actions which have never been committed, and have ‘no other existence, but in their own minds’. ‘Resurrection’ is an example of an idea that existed before the event.75 Even if the mixed mode does occur existentially, it may not publicly reveal all its attributes. ‘Pulling the trigger of the gun’ would need the addition of the invisible ‘intention of the mind’, which itself ‘has no natural connexion’ with the shooting action, to make it ‘murder’.76 The completely ‘arbitrary’ status of the meanings of mixed modes, combined with their unwieldy complexity, makes them ‘liable to great uncertainty and obscurity in their signification’.77 Contrary to those commentators who have accused him of falling naively into the private language trap, Locke emerges as concerned about the problem of miscommunication caused, precisely, by the privacy of meaning. Mixed modes will be different for different people because they ‘have no certain connexion in nature; and so no settled standard, any where in nature existing, to rectify and adjust them by’.78 70 73 76 78

72 Locke 1975, p. 484 (iii.ix.15). 71 Locke 1975, p. 481 (iii.ix.11). Locke 1975, p. 288 (ii.xxii.1). Locke 1975, p. 481 (iii.ix.11). 74 Locke 1975, p. 429 (iii.v.x). 75 Locke 1975, p. 430 (iii.v.5). 77 Cf. Locke 1975, pp. 478–9 (iii.ix.7). Locke 1975, pp. 479 (iii.ix.7); 477 (iii.ix.5). Locke 1975, p. 477 (iii.ix.5).


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Moral ideas are Locke’s most vexed examples of mixed modes and it is sometimes hard to see, on Locke’s own account, why these are susceptible to multiplication. At first sight, it seems odd that these should diverge, given Locke’s commitment to the one true and (whether certainly or probably) knowable natural law. While Locke does, towards the end of his life, lose faith in our rational potential, he never wavers from his belief in God’s law. For the most part he is confident that we can reason to it, and even when we do so not demonstratively but probabilistically, this is nothing less than a ‘celebration’ of our God-given powers.79 We can reason to God’s law by two interconnected means. First, the certain knowledge we have of ourseleves as rational beings, and of God, who made us and ‘on whom we depend’, enables us to work out what God wants us to do, and why we are obliged to obey him.80 Second, knowing perfectly the real essences of moral ideas (because we construct them), we are able to perceive precisely the agreement or disagreement of those ideas – that is, to achieve demonstrative knowledge of morality.81 This should make moral ideas less, not more, plural than ideas of substances, which we can neither know adequately, nor (therefore) reason with demonstratively. Indeed, morality should not and need not proliferate at all. However, Locke believes that in practice people do not reason to God’s law, but make up an erroneous array of normative rules. While he does not thereby (contrary to his contemporaries’ accusations) become a moral relativist, he rejects the still strong raft of innatist and ‘authoritybased’ morality, and argues instead, partly following Pufendorf, that we invent morality and therefore might invent it differently.82 I use the word ‘invent’, the sense of which balances between ‘create’ and ‘find’, to try to elucidate Locke’s sometimes contradictory account of morality, to indicate how Locke might simultaneously maintain that morality is arbitrarily manufactured and truly demonstrated. It is not hard to see how ideas like ‘steal’ and ‘worship’ are the random brainchildren of men. Their status as morally good or bad is determined by their conformity or not with a law.83 It is Locke’s conception of law that is difficult to square with his artificial account of morality. While purely positive human laws are clearly fabricated, the natural law, which underpins his entire 79 82

83

Tully 1993, p. 312. 80 Locke 1975, p. 549 (iv.iii.18). 81 Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.16). See Yolton 1970, p. 173 and 1993, pp. 26–71 and 115–17. Kraye (1998, p. 1307) puts Locke among the reformers who transformed ethics into a ‘rationally based discipline’. See also Pufendorf 1703, i, pp. 2–3. Carey (1997) argues that Locke verged on moral scepticism and was influenced by anti-Stoic scepticism. Locke 1975, p. 351 (ii.xxviii.5).

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ethico-political theory, is the will of God and is discovered, rather than written by men. In a manuscript entitled Of Ethic in General (c. 1686–8?), he explains that it is ‘not made by us, but for us’.84 However, it is still up to us to work out (like we might work out a mathematical problem) the law on the blank slates of our minds. We incarnate its true and universally accessible dicta. But while we would invent even the one true law, Locke fears that for the most part, out of idleness, pliancy and self-interest, we do not, attending instead to customary and state law – the more obvious fruits of men. Sometimes Locke proposes that conventional laws coincide with the natural law, which also speaks against the proliferation of morality. When he is elucidating ‘moral relations’ in the Essay, he says that, in the main men applaud that which is in their interest and disdain that which is not. This pursuit of personal advantage simultaneously ‘advances the general good of mankind’, which is God’s will. ‘’Tis no wonder’, then, ‘that esteem and discredit, vertue and vice, should in great measure everywhere correspond with the unchangeable rule of right and wrong, which the law of God hath established ’.85 While Locke repeats this view in other works, he is also, more often and urgently perhaps, keen to stress the frequent opposition between interest and the natural law, as well as the multiplicity of sinful or non-Christian standards that various cultures, including his own, hold dear. Only a few paragraphs after he has announced the concurrence of the laws of nature and fashion, he explains that duelling is a ‘sin’, but ‘in some countries, valour and vertue’.86 His lifelong denial of innatism is partly grounded in the diversity and wickedness of moral laws. It is because entire cultures deposit children into the graves of their dead mothers, or abandon the terminally ill to the elements, or eat their children, that Locke knows that people do not have the law of God engraved on their hearts, but concoct it erratically.87 This commitment to the abundance of moral systems (and therefore to the widespread ignorance of the law of nature) is particularly strong in Locke’s treatment of language. One of his prime purposes in book iii is to show that because moral ideas are devised by us, they proliferate wildly.88 While they are incarnated in conventional language and theoretically 84 86

87 88

Locke 1997, p. 302. 85 Locke 1975, p. 356 (ii.xxviii.11). Locke 1975, p. 359 (ii.xxviii.15). On the coincidence of interest, conventional morality and the natural law see also Locke 1954, p. 207 and 1997, p. 299 (Of Ethic in General). On the opposition between interest and the natural law, see 1954, p. 207. Locke 1975, pp. 70–1 (i.iii.9). Cf. 1954, pp. 137–45 and 161–79. E.g. Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.15).


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ought to exist inter-subjectively, the purely normative banks of common use cannot stem the rivulets of private use.89 The fabricated, archetypal, ‘adequate’ status of moral ideas, which is what makes them candidates for demonstrable science, simultaneously releases the demons of semantic plurality.90 Moral language had always been a prominent locus of semantic instability. However, while Locke’s predecessors had neither explicitly nor consistently held the two apart, their qualms had centred on the indeterminate application of moral terms to a state of affairs (such as calling ‘liberality’ what one might call ‘prodigality’), rather than on the instability of the senses of the terms themselves. Locke’s radical contribution was to systematise this deep form of semantic diversity. His vision of a manufactured and contingent moral semantic structure threatens the prospect of its universality. Semantic fissures begin to open up at the intercultural level. Developing the grammatical claim that languages are not intertranslatable, Locke gives a philosophical reason for the incommensurability between languages and the semantic systems that underpin them. He explains why it is that ‘when men come curiously to compare’ moral terms ‘with those they are translated into, in other languages, they will find very few of them exactly to correspond in the whole extent of their significations’.91 Mixed modes reflect the customs and conveniences of particular cultures. There are therefore ‘in every language many particular words, which cannot be rendred by any one single word of another. For the several fashions, customs, and manners of one nation, making several combinations of ideas familiar and necessary in one, which another people have had never any occasion to make, or, perhaps, so much as take notice of ’.92 Locke’s treatment of mixed modes coincides with his fascination with travel literature.93 Beyond monstrosities, these sources abound with exotic 89

90 92 93

Locke 1975, p. 479 (iii.ix.8). For an example of Locke’s confidence in common meanings of mixed modes, see p. 466 (iii.vi.43): ‘the complex ideas of modes, are referred sometimes to archetypes in the minds of other intelligent beings; or which is the same, to the signification annexed by others to their received names’. See Tully 1980, p. 15: ‘mixed modes and relations, and so the objects of which they are the essences, are not subjective but inter-subjective; existing in the continued normative employment of their names in the language of common use’; Colie (1991) on the intimate relationship between language, individual and society in Locke; Walmsley (1995) on the balance between our ethical obligation to common use and our liberty rationally to stray from it, which liberty Walmsley asserts is the main concern of book iii (p. 421). Cf. Markus (1996, pp. 105–24) on Augustine on the essential involvement of the community in meaning. Locke 1975, p. 565 (iv.iv.7). 91 Locke 1975, p. 433 (iii.v.8). Locke 1975, p. 290 (ii.xxii.6). See Chase 1997. See Paxman (1995) on the relationship between language and travel literature in Locke; Batz (1991) for an interpretation of Locke’s political theory that sees it as motivated, justified and even

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practices and beliefs which Locke devoured, as they fed and proved his moral conventionalism.94 The Essay shows traces of Locke’s interest, as when he notes that ‘there are places where they eat their own children’.95 But the scale of his preoccupation only becomes clear in his journals. On 20 March 1682, Locke writes: ‘many ancient authors have treated of the different laws & customs of severall nations’.96 He mentions Plato, Sextus, Nicole and Casaubon. In addition to François Bernier’s The Religion and Suppositions of the Heathen of Indostan, Jean Baptiste Tavernier is another important author, supplying Locke with a place where they make their children ‘euenuchs they often cut off all & many of those that are soe served die of the operation’.97 In July 1677 Locke notes under the heading of ‘Polygamie’ that ‘a` Marroc chacun a deux ou trois femmes et plusiers concubines’.98 In November 1686 he enumerates the ‘Pensilvania Laws’ which include: ‘adultery to be punishd with 12 months imprisonment’. He also remarks on their policy of toleration and free speech: ‘if any person shall abuse or deride any other for his different persuasion & practise in manner of Religion such shall be looked on as a disturber of the peace & be punished accordingly’.99 Locke’s plural vision also pierces particular cultures over time. Fashion is mercurial, and so too therefore is the language that informs and is informed by it. ‘Languages constantly change, take up new, and lay by old terms.’ This is a surface transformation that reflects deeper shifts. ‘Change of customs and opinions’ are concomitant with ‘new combinations of ideas’ that ‘become new species of complex modes’.100 Locke alludes to a familiar example of this type of semantic gulf: ‘the true meaning of ancient authors’ is almost irretrievable. Therefore, sighs Locke, not without relish, ‘we may lay them aside, and without any injury done them’.101 His historical interest provides fuel for his fire; in his journal between 1684 and 1685, he makes notes on Jose´ de Acosta’s Histoire de’origine et du progress des revenus ecclesiastiques, writing that ‘the government of the church, was at 1st

94 95 97

98 100

borrowed from his reading of travelogues, especially Acosta’s The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies (1604, English translation). Cf. Glat (1991, pp. 631–2) on Locke’s use of America in the Two Treatises. E.g. Locke 1975, pp. 70–2 (i.iii.9); pp. 87–8 (i.iv.8). Locke 1975, p. 71 (i.iii.9). 96 MS. Locke f. 6, p. 50. MS. Locke f. 1, p. 255 (journal, May 1676); MS. Locke f. 2, p. 260 (journal, September 1677). Locke included The History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogul (1671), A Continuation of the Memoirs (1672), and other travel writings in his reading list for gentlemen (Locke 1997, p. 378). Cf. MS. Locke f. 2, p. 257, on ‘poligamia’; MS. Locke c. 25, fo. 25r on ‘polygamie’. MS. Locke f. 2, p. 216 (p. 208). 99 MS. Locke f. 9, p. 33. Locke 1975, p. 291 (ii.xxii.7). 101 Locke 1975, p. 481 (iii.ix.10).


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democratical, afterwards aristocratical’.102 Apparently immemorial and sacred institutions (like maxims) have murky human beginnings. Cultural contingency does not in itself jeopardise the possibility of communication within speech communities at a given moment. But Locke does not stop there. He intensifies his microscopic analysis and comes to rest on individuals of a supposedly common tongue. He finds that semantic diversity underlies even their unitary moral language. ‘Justice is a word in every man’s mouth, but most commonly with a very undetermined loose signification.’103 It becomes clear that this is at the forefront of Locke’s mind at the conception of the Essay, if we look at the manuscript contents list of Draft B. There Locke writes that ‘if it be hard to finde the exact complex ideas of substances it is harder to agree in the complex ideas that morall words shall stand for it be more arbitrary’.104 The very last words of this early sketch concern the ‘uncertain signification’ of ‘morall words’.105 In the finished product he expands on the generality and blamelessness of the phenomenon. It occurs not simply between enemies in a mode that we met in chapter 5, but even between those ‘that have a mind to understand one another’.106 Beyond the arbitrariness and complexity of the ideas themselves, Locke puts this phenomenon down to the way children, their minds blank slates, learn first the sounds, and then only loosely (if at all) the meanings.107 All these factors conspire to create a situation where ‘though the names Glory and Gratitude be the same in every man’s mouth, through a whole country, yet the complex collective idea, which every one thinks on, or intends by that name, is apparently very different in men using the same language’.108 One world of sounds fills the air between countrymen, while as many worlds are played out as there are people. fractured speakers In addition to Locke’s ideational compositionalism, the pressure on semantic universality comes from another albeit related angle. Meanings are further diversified by the deeply partial nature of Lockean man.109 102

103 106 108 109

MS. Locke f. 8, p. 211. See Formigari (1988, p. 136) on Locke’s ‘historicist semantics’. Glat (1991) argues, contra Pocock, that Locke was a ‘historicist’ rather than a ‘rationalist’, a claim he evidences with Locke’s historical understanding of language. See McLaverty (1995) on the influence of Locke’s historicist understanding of language on Johnson. 104 Locke 1975, p. 513 (iii.xi.9). MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 36r. 105 MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 40r. 107 Locke 1975, p. 479 (iii.ix.8). Locke 1975, p. 480 (iii.ix.9). Locke 1975, p. 479 (iii.ix.8). Dunn (1969, p. 191) argues powerfully that ‘the intention of the entire epistemological venture’ was to ‘restrain the encroaching flood of partiality’ by providing a ‘morals of thinking’.

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His self-referential passions imbue nearly every thought he has. Just as there is barely a sensation in his body that is not painful or pleasurable, the great majority of his ‘perception[s] of the mind’ are ‘accompanied also with pleasure or pain’.110 Our minds are not cool, uniform receptors, but rather like furnaces that mould every incoming idea in accordance with the particular relishes that our unique history has entrenched. Moreover, in the hedonistic, Epicurean mode that so upset his contemporaries, Locke expains how naturally good and evil are those things that cause pleasure and pain in us. ‘Things then are Good or Evil, only in reference to Pleasure or Pain. That we call Good, which is apt to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain in us.’111 Our evaluative language is therefore saturated with the concoction of desires and dispositions that habit has ingrained in us. While Lockean man has his gaze trained avidly on his ineluctably social context, and his behaviour is overwhelmingly socially constructed and conscious, all this springs from his own self-interested desires. The selfcentred constellation of his mind plots a unique course for his words. Our moral partiality lies at the core of Locke’s mature political theory. It is because we cannot be trusted to be indifferent that we have to give up our right of executing the law of nature – that is, of preserving mankind – to a common (impartial) judge. The state of nature, where every man has the right to judge and punish breaches of the law, is a perilous and uncertain place. As Locke says in Two Treatises of Government (1689), ‘it is unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases’, because ‘self-love will make men partial to themselves and their friends. And on the other side . . . ill nature, passion and revenge will carry them too far in punishing others’. One ought not to expect a man who ‘was unjust as to do his brother an injury’ to ‘be so just as to condemn himself for it’.112 The reason that motivates us to quit the state of nature is the same reason that determines judicial action once we arrive: ‘nobody’s testimony about himself is acceptable’.113 The inevitability of moral partiality is also an argument against absolute monarchy. An unchecked prince is liable to the same, if not more, injustice feared of men in the state of nature. The desperate one-sidedness of our judgements plays a key role in Locke’s argument in favour of religious toleration. The fight between different churches over orthodoxy can never be resolved on this earth. We remember that ‘every church is orthodox to it self’. There is no ‘Judge, either at Constantinople, or elsewhere upon the earth, by whose sentence’ doctrinal 110 112

Locke 1975, p. 229 (ii.xx.1 and 3). 111 Locke 1975, p. 229 (ii.xx.2). Locke 1988, pp. 275; 276. 113 Locke 1997, p. 207.


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quarrels ‘can be determined’.114 Our indelibly selfish understandings make our descriptions of the world unlikely to converge. Our private interest, often unbeknown to ourselves, colours our opinions. Verbally echoing Hobbes, Locke pleads that since propositions ‘can receive no evidence from our passions or interests, so it should receive no tincture from them’.115 As a leading participant in the new holistic approach to logic, Locke is concerned with the ethics of understanding. In the Conduct of the Understanding, a work specifically devoted to this cause, he identifies a miscarriage of the mind. It involves putting ‘passion in the place of reason’ and acting and speaking only insofar as it suits our ‘humour, interest, or party’.116 Our cognitive partiality is not just moral, but determines all the thoughts of the great majority of people, who either cannot be bothered or are not brave enough to step outside their subjective cocoons. Locke recalls Paul’s meditation on the dark glass that is locked in front of human eyes. ‘We see but in part, and we know but in part . . . no one sees all, and we generally have different prospects of the same thing, according to our different . . . positions to it’.117 The circumstances into which we happen to be born determine the specific blinkers which we cannot shake from our skulls. The ‘day labourer’ and the ‘country gentleman’ are both victims of their confinement, whether it be ‘poor conversation’ or ‘claret’.118 Locke’s thoroughgoing rejection of innate ideas makes our minds the subjects of whatever chance puts in our path. Interpersonal semantic multiplication is guaranteed by the nature of the scripts that experience writes on our souls. Each one is irrevocably unique. Locke does not stop there. Not satisfied to let semantic instability rend our interpersonal relations, he proposes that it is also an intrapersonal phenomenon. Meanings not only differ from person to person, but in the same individual from moment to moment. ‘Moral words, have seldom, in two different men, the same precise signification; since one man’s complex idea seldom agrees with anothers, and often differs from his own, from that which he had yesterday, or will have tomorrow.’ Here is that Montaignian dictum, previously employed primarily to indicate cognitive fluidity, inserted explicitly and systematically by Locke into the heart of language.119 114 115

116

117 119

Locke 1983, p. 32. Locke 1975, p. 698 (iv.xix.1); cf. Hobbes 1996, p. 31. Locke owned Leviathan (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 155). Locke 1993, p. 7. MS. Locke c. 25, fos. 23r-23v lists a plethora of passions in Locke’s journal index for 1676. Locke 1993, p. 8. 118 Locke 1993, p. 13. Locke 1975, p. 478 (iii.ix.6). Locke owned both the 1669 French edition of the Essais and Florio’s 1603 translation (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 191).

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The thoughts of an individual appear prone to change if we reflect on Locke’s dynamic representation of personal formation in, most conspicuously, his Thoughts concerning Education. Drawing on an extensive externalist tradition involving Aristotle, renaissance humanists, and those custom-focused grammarians we met in chapter 2, Locke registers his own commitment to the awesome power of education. ‘I think I may say’, he announces, ‘that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. ’Tis that which makes the great difference in mankind.’120 If we add to this the deconstruction of personal identity that, almost despite himself, Locke lays bare, the self looks very unsteady. As Sydenham had taught him, ‘the human body is . . . a continual flux of particles’.121 And the self is ‘nothing but consciousness’.122 Although Locke did not add the chapter on identity (ii.xxvii) to the Essay until the second edition of 1694, we can see from a journal entry of 3 June 1683 that early on he located the self in the capacities of memory and consciousness. ‘Identity of persons lies not in having the same numerical body made up of the same particles, nor if the minde consists of corporeal spirits in their being the same. But in the memory & knowledg of ones past self & actions continued on under the consciousnesse of being the same person whereby every man ownes himself .’123 While Locke is concerned to intervene in a longstanding philosophical debate that has huge ramifications for the trinity and resurrection, and while he wants a robust account of the self that is accountable to God on the Day of Judgement, Locke’s location of the self in consciousness and memory is somewhat like locating it in quicksand.124 Ideas fly through the camera of our minds in bewildering 120 122

123 124

Locke 1989, p. 83. 121 Sydenham 1696, sig. a1r. Locke 1975, p. 343 (ii.xxvii.21). Cf. MS. Locke f. 8, p. 5, on Malebranche on the different characters of men; Locke 1976–89, v, p. 162 where James Tyrrell writes to Locke in October 1694 that ‘this supposition will not onely make a mad or drunken man another person, from himself when sober; but also will make those that quite forget, (as some have done) all that ever they did in their lives, tho’ not to be different men, yet different persons from what they were an hour agone, and consequently they will be as many different persons, as they make different reflections upon themselves, or their own actions, without any concerne of what is past, which seems very hard if not impossible to conceive’. See Colie (1966, 1969 and 1991, pp. 268–9) on the Lockean self; Eng (1980) on fixing the fleeting self; Thiel (1998b, pp. 888–99) on conceptions of personal identity in seventeenth-century philosophy, and (1998a) on principles of individuation, especially pp. 233–44 for an atomist treatment of identity over time, including Locke’s and a criticism of it. MS. Locke f. 7, p. 107. On our only being accountable to God for what we are conscious of see Locke 1975, pp. 343–7 (ii. xxvii.22–6). There is perhaps a tension between this and Locke’s frail description of human memory. It looks as though we might not be accountable for those bad thoughts we have forgotten, but this cannot be Locke’s intention. Presumably, he means that we are accountable for whatever we were conscious of at the time, regardless of whether we forget it subsequently.


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and fleeting numbers. Most leave ‘no more footsteps or remaining characters of themselves, than shadows do flying over fields of corn; and the mind is as void of them, as if they never had been there’.125 In a sad simile that seems to dissolve the self entirely, Locke compares our aging minds to ‘those tombs, to which we are approaching; where though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away. The pictures drawn in our minds, are laid in fading colours; and if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear’.126 An early journal entry, dated December 1678, reveals that our metamorphic identity is a perennial and deep preoccupation. ‘It is impossible to set a standing rule of recreation to ones self Because . . . the unsteady fleeting condition of our bodys & spirits require more at one time than another’.127 In the context of the ‘constant decay of all our ideas’ Locke’s concern about semantic instability within one and the same man comes sharply into focus.128 The dark room of our minds, where the great anthology of our ideas lies mostly forgotten – some ideas, sometimes, ‘by some turbulent and tempestuous passion’, launched back into the light, but most overlooked, or repressed forever – is a rickety home for our words, which must be subject to endless caprice.129 the empty appeal to common use The semantic contract ought to stem this tide. Common use ought to effect semantic closure. Locke does sometimes appeal unproblematically to ‘vulgar use’ as the standard to which our speech is bound, breaches of which are ‘very ridiculous’.130 He explains that ‘common use, by a tacit consent, appropriates certain sounds to certain ideas in all languages, which so far limits the signification of that sound, that unless a man applies it to the same idea, he does not speak properly’.131 While Adam ‘voluntarily’ forged the names/ideas of ‘jealousy’ and ‘adultery’, his children are ‘obliged’ to apply those names to the same archetypes. ‘By degrees’ these applications of sounds to ideas ‘grew into common use’.132 Locke often writes as though common use were perfectly clear and brooked little argument. For example, he says that he dislikes the conventional definition of ‘schism’. It is understood as the ‘errors . . . in worship or discipline’, which makes it a tool of righteous persecutors. 125 128 130 132

126 Locke 1975, p. 151 (ii.x.4). Locke 1975, pp. 151–2 (ii.x.5). 127 MS. Locke f. 3, p. 352. 129 Locke 1975, p. 151 (ii.x.5). Locke 1975, p. 153 (ii.x.7). Locke 1990a, p. 14; Locke 1975, p. 471 (iii.vi.51). 131 Locke 1975, p. 408 (iii.ii.8). Locke 1975, pp. 467 (iii.vi.44); 468 (iii.vi.45); 467 (iii.vi.45).

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It should signify ‘an ill-grounded separation in ecclesiastical communion’, and so pour cold water on the Church’s fire. But Locke bows to ‘common use’ on the grounds that ‘use . . . is the supream law in matter of language’.133 He counts it an abuse of words, when men ‘apply the common received names of any language to ideas, to which the common use of that language does not apply them’.134 To remedy the problem of semantic confusion he draws on the well-worn monetary metaphor and prescribes that men apply their words ‘as near as may be, to such ideas as common use has annexed them to. For words, being no man’s private possession, but the common measure of commerce and communication, ’tis not for any one, at pleasure, to change the stamp they are current in; nor alter the ideas they are affixed to.’135 No sooner has Locke recommended ‘propriety’ than he bombards its efficacy, and ultimately its existence in a succession of strikes. To begin with, he picks up the tired concern of his predecessors and notes the fragile human base of the semantic contract. In Lockean society, where trust is invested more often out of necessity than desire, the contracts that are made by men may just as easily be broken by them. The bonds that tie res to verba can be shattered as they were forged, by the will of man, and this with alarming ease given the ineluctable opacity of language that I shall discuss in the next chapter. Locke inveighs against the abuse of language whereby speakers ‘apply . . . [words] amiss’. His example is an explicit dig at the rhetorical trick of paradiastole and the breach of contract it epitomises: ‘when I apply the name frugality to that idea which others call and signify by this sound, covetousness’.136 However, the problem with the law of propriety is much more serious than Locke’s predecessors had thought. It is not just that it can be disobeyed. It is that it threatens to evaporate altogether. As he had made plain in the Two Treatises, ‘no body can be under a law, which is not promulgated to him’.137 It is hard to see how the law of propriety can be any such thing, given that it is nowhere promulgated. As Locke admits, ‘common use has not so visibly annexed any signification to words, as to make men know always certainly what they precisely stand for’.138 If ‘the rule and measure of propriety’ is ‘no where established’, then it effectively boils down to no more than an echoing chamber of the same sounds to which different people apply ideas as they personally see fit, in sometimes

133 136

Locke 1983, p. 58. 134 Locke 1975, p. 504 (iii.x.23). Locke 1975, p. 507 (iii.x.33). 137 Locke 1988, p. 305.

135

Locke 1975, p. 514 (iii.xi.11). Locke 1975, pp. 514–15 (iii.xi.12).

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overlapping ways.139 Common use turns out to be ‘a very uncertain rule, which reduces itself to the ideas of particular men’.140 We are supposed to have given up the liberty that Adam had to construct ideas and join them to sounds as he liked. We are supposed to be locked in a set of reciprocal obligations to use words in a certain way. Yet given the private, ideational nature of meaning, the semantic contract cannot really get off the ground. Man still ‘has so inviolable a liberty, to make words stand for what ideas he pleases’. To demonstrate the impossibility of linguistically legislating for others, Locke declares that even ‘the great Augustus himself, in the possession of that power which ruled the world, acknowledged, he could not make a new Latin word’. In the last analysis, ‘no one hath the power to make others have the same ideas in their minds, that he has, when they use the same words, that he does’.141 The absence of a linguistic legislator makes a mockery of the idea of the law.142 Given that nobody has the ‘authority to establish the precise signification of words’, there must be ‘great latitude’ in usage.143 The extraordinary conclusion that common use is, in fact, no such thing takes the wind out of the attacks on those who wilfully break the semantic contract. If we think back to Locke’s own example of this offence, we are forced to wonder if ‘covetousness’ and ‘frugality’ have any agreed meaning to be subverted. And indeed, at another place, Locke himself admits this very point. ‘Covetousness’, he declares, is ‘to one man, which is not so to another’. Individuals remain free, precisely not bound by any linguistic obligations, to engage in the process of semantic fabrication. The reason that complex ideas, such as covetousness ‘are often, in several men, different collections of simple ideas’ is that ‘these essences, or abstract ideas, (which are the measures of names, and the boundaries of species) are the workmanship of the understanding’.144 The speaker who longs to communicate can only do so by losing all the convenience of the names of complex ideas and by minimally, laboriously enumerating the simple ideas that make up his train of complex thought and that are (probably) intelligible to all. Unfortunately, men will not be so inclined. Moreover, they are unlikely to see the need for such scruples. The void at the heart of conventional language is especially problematic because speakers are not only unaware of it, but positively imagine the opposite to be the case. Echoing Pascal, Locke declares that people, driven 139 141

142 144

Locke 1975, p. 479 (iii.ix.8). 140 Locke 1975, p. 522 (iii.xi.25). Locke 1975, p. 408 (iii.ii.8). Cf. Pufendorf 1703, v, p. 51: ‘Caesar might, if he pleased, naturalize men, but words he could not.’ Locke 1975, p. 483 (iii.ix.14). 143 Locke 1975, p. 479 (iii.ix.8). Locke 1975, p. 416 (iii.iii.14).

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by their desire to be understood, unconsciously and misguidedly ‘suppose their words to be marks of the ideas in the minds also of other men, with whom they communicate’, whereas really they share only the names.145 While a semantic communion is to be hoped for, it must not be taken for granted, given that individual uses in practice rarely overlap. This leaves Locke in a strange position. If the connection between words and meanings is purely arbitrary, then common use is the only mechanism whereby words have any public meaning at all.146 Communication (in Locke’s sense) and meaning (in ours) are thereby rendered impossible. At the end of the last chapter of his book on language, having written off common use as a suitable remedy for verbal obscurity, Locke makes a final and muted suggestion. He says that individuals ‘should use the same word constantly in the same sense’.147 But almost in the same breath he dismisses this final hope. Given the paucity and vulgarity of the words at hand, even the best intentioned speaker will ‘be forced often to use the same word, in somewhat different senses’.148 Without an infinitesimal account of the simple ideas that make up his discourse the hearer will be at a loss as to the intended meaning. And so, on this quiet note of despair, when he has run out both of words and of any confidence in their communicativity, ends Locke’s book on language. Before ending my own chapter, I ought to sound a note of caution. It would be wrong to overplay Locke’s repudiation of ‘common use’, given that it must remain the lifeblood of communication, words only having public meaning by convention. Moreover, he publishes at length, which betrays some faith in a semantic communion. He often refers straightforwardly to ‘common use’, as though it were existent, apparent and in charge.149 Sometimes he suggests that it is only philosophers who need worry about the indeterminacy of words, and that ordinary people do just fine, ‘civil’ (as opposed to ‘philosophical’) use serving ‘for the upholding common conversation and commerce’.150 While philosophers must know precisely what their words mean so that they can reason with them, common use ‘regulates the meaning of words pretty well for common conversation’.151 145

146 148 150

Locke 1975, pp. 406 (iii.ii.4); 387 (ii.xxxii.11). See above chapter 5, p. 144, for Pascal’s critique of the supposition of communication. This is the first of two ‘secret references’ (the other being taking words for things) Locke says people mistakenly make for their words. Several commentators interpret them as elucidating communication and reference, where Locke’s bare signification theory fails. See below chapter 9, p. 263, on the commentary and for Locke’s rejection of these secret references as false suppositions. Locke 1975, p. 514 (iii.xi.11). 147 Locke 1975, p. 523 (iii.xi.26). Locke 1975, p. 524 (iii.xi.27). 149 For example, Locke 1975, p. 471 (iii.vi.51). Locke 1975, p. 476 (iii.ix.3). 151 Locke 1975, p. 479 (iii.xi.8).


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However, even this concession is hard to square with what Locke says elsewhere. At other times his reason for attending to philosophical use and leaving civil use alone is not that the latter is satisfactory for rudimentary needs but precisely that it is so full of ‘obscurity, doubtfulness, or equivocation’ and its practitioners so unreachable, that there is no hope of reform.152 If we take Locke’s effusive claims about semantic instability seriously, it is difficult to know how civil use can ‘serve pretty well the market, and the wake’.153 Admittedly, it might well be the case for names of substances; if a farmer were looking to buy a ‘horse’ from a horse breeder, the two would probably be able to cut a deal, even though one had a far larger understanding of the word than the other. However, in the case of the names of mixed modes, like ‘liberty’, ‘prayer’ and ‘justice’, where the nominal essence is all there is, and the inclusion or exclusion of a particular idea is crucial to its identity, it is hard to see how people can communicate when there is not a perfect match. Moreover, the Straits of Messina seem to bear down on even the philosophers, for whom Locke admits that semantic indeterminacy is a real problem, and who, after all, are the speakers (and readers) Locke is primarily addressing. It seems that they cannot escape the vagaries of the vulgar, but must bow down before them: ‘Philosophy itself, though it likes not a gaudy dress, yet when it appears in publick, must have so much complacency, as to be cloathed in the ordinary fashion and language of the country, so far as it can consist with truth and perspicuity.’154 And even amongst themselves, philosophers cannot easily extricate themselves from the maze of common use which is their ineliminable starting point in speech, and which hems them in at every turn with disorder and obfuscation. The ‘gaudy dress’ is a motley number, and philosophers still have to struggle with it in private. Even if they were able to shake it free, they would remain subject to the mental divergence between themselves which Locke is at such pains to expose. There is probably no way of resolving the overarching tension between Locke’s confidence in common use and his denial of the same, except to say that he believed in neither absolutely. Neither wholly sceptical nor wholly optimistic, Locke sketches human interactions that are both vexed and illuminated by language, men neither perfectly isolated nor perfectly united, but negotiating their way through the dappled light. What can be said for certain about Locke’s view of communication is that, insofar as his theory of endemic semantic instability is radically different from anything 152 153

Locke 1975, p. 509 (iii.xi.2–3). Locke 1975, p. 514 (iii.xi.10).

154

Locke 1975, p. 243 (iii.xxi.20).

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that had been said before, Locke’s concern is to push this home. While he doubtless believes that individual uses overlap and sometimes even match, he wants to show that it is wrong simply to assume semantic uniformity. The polemic of book iii is to explode the complacent contemporary faith in ‘proper’ speech. ‘The signification of words, in all languages, depending very much on the thoughts, notions, and ideas of him that uses them, must unavoidably be of great uncertainty, to men of the same language and country.’ In each author that we read, we will find ‘a distinct language, though the same words’.155 From our deeply subjective standpoints, we make up the meanings of our names of complex ideas, whose resultant multiplicity is inestimable and untold. ‘These Ideas of men’s making, are, by men still having the same power, multiplied in infinitum’.156 When we hear Locke repeating the familiar claim ‘that the greatest part of disputes were more about the significations of words, than a real difference in the conception of things’, this is not the light-hearted rapprochement it is for his philosophical friends, or indeed for our modern selves who still like to put our disagreements ‘down to semantics’.157 It is a truth that leaves Locke in despair. While his forbears railed against the breach of the semantic contract, Locke doubts its very presence. While an extraordinary range and number of his contemporaries sought to repair Babel, Locke laughs it off as an impossibility, gainsaying the universal language movement. ‘I am not so vain to think, that any one can pretend to attempt the perfect reforming the languages of the world, no not so much as that of his own country, without rendring himself ridiculous’.158 Even when he and Limborch lock horns over ‘liberty’ in letter after letter, spelling out their different understandings of the word, they cannot agree and the consequences for toleration are severe.159 Locke’s presentation of semantic plurality shreds the cultural lexicon. While some of his forbears had intimated this divided picture of speech communities, they had not explained it in any systematic way or presented it as endemic. In the context of Locke’s epistemology and the central place he accords language in a person’s mental and practical life, his charge that ‘most disputes are about the signification of words’ is one that should make us seriously question the ‘community’ we inevitably inhabit.160 155 157 158

159

Locke 1975, p. 489 (iii.ix.22). 156 Locke 1975, p. 480 (iii.ix.9). Locke 1975, p. 485 (iii.ix.16). Locke 1975, p. 509 (iii.xi.2). Colie (1991, p. 267) proposes that Locke’s flexible view of language was grounded in the flux of both nature and epistemology. Locke 1976–89, vii, pp. 274ff. 160 MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 35v.

chapter 9

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Locke’s profound deconstruction of the signification of words, prosecuted by both his arguments and his self-reflexive example, is designed to make his readers humble, cautious and careful speakers. Having seen words crumple under the searing glare of his inquiry and having wound along its circuitous route, so that we could not but get his meaning, we are supposed to reflect continually on the superficial and manufactured nature of the meanings of words and on the likelihood that we talk at cross purposes. Having realised the limits of our linguistic horizon, we can move forward with language toward knowledge and communication, realistically and properly using what is indeed a wonderful God-given instrument. However, Locke is pessimistic of us resetting our sights. This is partly because we are lazy, proud and deluded, but also because language itself positively encourages the kind of problematic speech against which we have seen him rail. Language allows us to corrupt ourselves; it promotes vanity and introversion, not only in speech but even in thought. We might arrogantly assume impossible knowledge and proffer deaf ears to our fellow men, but it is the nature of words that enables, if not causes us to hold forth and cogitate in an overambitious and self-centred way. It enables us to mouth sounds without signification. Locke spells out a man’s predicament: words are ‘external sensible signs, whereby those invisible ideas which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others’.1 The sensible, inherently opaque façade of language covers its imperfections and abuses, and projects only itself. In communication and often in private thought as well, words are all we have. We are caught in the dangerous situation of saying what we like and being victims of the linguistic world we inherit. We remember from the logics and from the Ockhamist presentation of the oratio mentalis that thought had often been considered discursive, but 1

Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.1).

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in the sense that mind and language were deemed exactly parallel, the former firmly dictating the latter. Locke turns this hierarchy on its head, drawing on the anxieties of his predecessors about the rule of words. We saw them grappling with a terrifying host of consequences about practical linguistic pre-eminence. While Locke repeats the sensible word/insensible meaning duality, he integrates it deeply into his anxiety about language and locates it squarely in the more general tension between visceral sensation and ethereal intellect that so engrosses seventeenth-century philosophers. His forbears remark on the duality in the context of language almost in passing, neither connecting it systematically to their wider concerns about the mind/body conflict, nor to their vociferous concerns about language. While they did indeed address the implications of the practical predominance of words, they did so without referring particularly to their sensible character. Locke makes explicit what they had implied. He provides a theoretical basis for the old concerns. While I actively drew out the connection between the dual nature and the practice of language for his predecessors, Locke makes it himself, having internalised – like the reader – their anxious words. the rule of sense ‘All knowledg is founded on and ultimately derives its self from sense.’2 This belief, here in its stark immaturity in the first sentence of the first draft of the Essay, underpins Locke’s linguistic theory as much as it does his epistemology. In addition to setting semantic limits, it has an impact on words themselves. Given that, for Locke, the mind begins as a tabula rasa – the myriad ideas it has about the external world being painted solely by sensation – the sensible quality of words is exceptionally important.3 We have no access to the ideas of others except by the mediation of (the sensible ideas of) words. As the Essay abstract puts it, ‘the ideas in mens mindes are so wholy out of sight to others that men could have noe communication of their thoughts without some signes of their ideas’.4 In the Essay itself, Locke elaborates that the thoughts of a man ‘are all within his own breast, invisible, and hidden from others, nor can of themselves be made appear’. Thus isolated, men would be denied ‘the comfort, and advantage of society’.5 They cannot ‘divine’ each other’s thoughts by ‘immediate communication’, as the spirits do, communing 2 4

Locke 1990a, p. 1. 3 Locke 1975, pp. 104–5 (ii.i.2–3). MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 62r. 5 Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.1).

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mind to mind.6 Imprisoned in bodies, we are bound ‘to make use of corporeal signs, and particularly sounds’.7 ‘The use then of words, is to be sensible marks of ideas.’8 By definition then, while meaning is logically prior to language, in communication language is experientially prior to meaning. Moreover, sensible words take up a strong and autonomous position in our minds. In and of themselves they are fixed there, part of ‘that vast store’ of ideas that furnishes it.9 ‘Every articulate word is a different modification of sound.’10 In written form they are visible ‘ideas of . . . letters’.11 Insignificant words exemplify how words, in their intrinsic identity as ideas, subsist in the mind quite independently of meanings. Locke blames ‘the several sects of philosophy and religion’ for introducing these ‘empty sounds’ that buttress their correspondingly empty dogmas.12 His favourite, familiar target is scholastic language whose ‘substantial forms’ and ‘real essences’ signify nothing.13 Members of a party ‘think it enough to have them often in their mouths, as the distinguishing characters of their church, or school, without much troubling their heads to examine, what are the precise ideas they stand for’.14 The isolation and meaninglessness of words themselves also emerges in Locke’s insistence that the names of simple ideas are indefinable. ‘For words being sounds, can produce in us no other simple ideas, than of those very sounds . . . he that thinks otherwise, let him try if any words can give him the taste of a pineapple’. Locke picks an exotic fruit that few of his contemporaries have eaten. Only its name exists in their minds, seductively but strictly unintelligible. To try and explain its meaning in words would be like trying to explain to a blind man what a ‘rainbow’ was.15 Telling him about ‘light and colours’ will not clear ‘up the darkness of . . . [his] mind’.16 ‘To hope to produce an idea of light, or colour, by a sound, however formed, is to expect that sounds should be visible, or colours audible.’17 One cannot talk someone into knowledge. Locke’s point is partly aimed at scholastics and Cartesians who purport to define all terms, but whose definitions fold in upon themselves as they swap words for words, travelling rather than breaking the verbal 6

7 10 12 14 16

Locke 1975, pp. 368 (ii.xxix.12); 316 (ii.xxiv.36). Cf. Locke (1954, p. 261) on the need for outward worship ‘to testify that inward one to men’. Locke 1975, p. 316 (ii.xxiv.36). 8 Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.1). 9 Locke 1975, p. 104 (ii.i.2). Locke 1975, p. 224 (ii.xviii.3). 11 Locke 1975, p. 634 (iv.xi.7). Locke 1975, p. 491 (iii.x.2). 13 Locke 1975, pp. 444–5 (iii.vi.9–10). Locke 1975, p. 491 (iii.x.2). 15 Locke 1975, pp. 424 (iii.iv.11); 426 (iii.iv.13). Locke 1975, p. 127 (ii.vi.6). 17 Locke 1975, p. 425 (iii.iv.11).

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circle, and leaving their readers baffled without ideas.18 Inherently, words do not signify beyond themselves; as Locke says, they are ‘but empty sounds’, except insofar as ‘they are signs of our ideas’.19 They only become signs of ideas ‘by a perfectly arbitrary imposition’, and are therefore intrinsically opaque.20 ‘Words, by their immediate operation on us, cause no other ideas, but of their natural sounds.’21 When we look at Locke’s manuscripts, we find that the native meaninglessness of words is a perennial preoccupation. It is preying on his mind in the summer of 1676 when he scribbles in his journal: ‘simple ideas cannot be defined. Nor can we ever gain any notion of them by words.’ On 26 March 1677 he attacks insignificant speech. ‘Words are of noe value nor of use as they are signes of things, when they stand for noe thing they are lesse than cyphers for instead of augmenting the value of those they are joyned with, they lessen it and make it noe thing.’22 Alone, words are worse than useless. Their presence positively confuses. The blind man, who so poignantly exemplifies Locke’s point, appears in the first draft of the Essay. He can have no understanding of the word ‘blew’ – that can only be got ‘by the senses them selves’.23 ‘All the words in the world’ cannot convey the idea ‘unless it be of the sound its self ’.24 The centrality to Locke’s philosophy of language of the separateness and sensibility of words also appears in the Essay abstract. ‘Words then are signes of ideas but no articulate sound having any natural connection with any idea but barely of the sound itself .’25 Locke therefore gives sustained voice to the century’s sporadic concern about embodied linguistic circularity. In his optimistic moments, he talks as though the palpable independence of words were no object, as though they acted as they ought: the ‘common conduit’ that transports the thoughts of one man to another.26 Moreover, the ideas, to which words seamlessly direct us, might be more apparent than the words that represent them. Locke repeats the Cartesian wonder at the almost imperceptible mediation of words in communication which habit has inculcated. Certain sounds become associated with certain ideas, ‘as if the objects themselves, which are apt to produce them, did actually affect the senses’.27 ‘A man who reads or hears with attention, takes little notice of the characters, or sounds, but of the ideas that are 18 20 22 24 27

Locke 1975, pp. 422–4 (iii.iv.8–10). 19 Locke 1975, p. 61 (i.ii.23). Locke 1975, p. 408 (iii.ii.8). 21 Locke 1975, p. 689 (iv.xviii.3). 23 MS. Locke f. 1, p. 392; MS. Locke f. 2, p. 90 (p. 88). Locke 1990a, p. 7. Locke 1991, p. 7. 25 MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 62r. 26 Locke 1975, p. 509 (iii.xi.1). Locke 1975, p. 407 (iii.ii.6). Cf. Descartes 1985b, p. 81.

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excited by them.’28 We read best when we ‘fix in the mind the clear and distinct ideas of the question stripp’d of words’.29 Ideally, the sensible images flit into our minds and as swiftly disappear, leaving behind their luminous ideational cargo. Falling yet more precisely into step with his visionary forebears, Locke urges us to ditch words when we can. While they are indispensable to communication, we ought to banish them from private reasoning. In the Conduct of the Understanding he records his commitment to extralinguistic knowledge: being only the perception of the relations between ideas, ‘which is done without words; the intervention of a sound helps nothing to it.’30 Words are not only unhelpful, but positively harmful to thought. By contrast with brilliant ideas, that are only and completely what they seem, words are obscure and duplicitous, their meanings shifting or nonexistent. Words are not bound to ideas and can therefore, and must, be cast off. In his journal, in April 1677, Locke makes some prescriptions ‘concerning study’, identifying words as an obstacle to truth and the cause of confusion and error. As a remedy, he confidently prescribes that we ‘thinke upon things abstracted & separate from words’. ‘Tis better to lay them aside & have an immediate converse with the ideas of the things. For words are in their signification for the most part soe uncertain and undetermined, which man even designedly have in their use of them increasd.’31 If we think in ‘pure ideas separated from sounds’, our minds will be ‘divested of the false lights and deceitful ornaments of speech’.32 Words often having no definite or clear meanings, we must settle the ideas themselves in our minds, ‘if we would make any clear judgment about them’.33 Locke’s appeal to the clarity of ideas is understandable in the context of simple ideas, such as ‘black’, ‘sweet’ or ‘judge’, which are as, if not more conspicuous than the words that represent them. His case is more surprising in the context of unwieldy complex ideas and particularly of ephemeral mixed modes. Nevertheless, he frequently extends even to them the mantle of illumination. Indeed, one of his most startling, if sometimes faltering, claims is for the absolute intelligibility of moral ideas and the connections between them. One of the Essay’s principal aims is to insist on the knowability (and reality) of true morality, whether by probable or demonstrative reasoning.34 At his boldest, Locke declares that 28 30 33

Locke 1975, pp. 146–7 (ii.ix.9). 29 Locke 1993, p. 122. Cf. Locke 1975, p. 567 (iv.iv.9). Locke 1993, p. 10. 31 MS. Locke f. 2, p. 132 (p. 124). 32 Locke 1993, p. 124. Locke 1993, p. 39. 34 Locke 1975, pp. 281–2 (ii.xxi.70); Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.16).

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moral science is possible due to the completeness of a maker’s knowledge. It is because mixed modes are ‘not of nature’s, but man’s making’ that they are ‘perfectly’ knowable.35 As Hobbes had also argued, ‘moral knowledge is as capable of real certainty, as mathematicks’ because in both cases, as their draughtsmen, we know the ‘archetypes’ – the ‘real essence[s] of the things moral words stand for’.36 Unlike our ideas of natural substances, the real essences of which we do not know, our knowledge of the real essences of moral ideas (which are also their nominal essences) enables us to discover certainly the ‘congruity, or incongruity of the things themselves . . . in which consists perfect knowledge’.37 Having ‘adequate, and complete’ moral ideas, we can perceive exactly how they agree and disagree. And for Locke, ‘the perception of the agreement, or disagreement of our ideas’ is the definition of certain knowledge, demonstrable knowledge being the result of a chain of such perceptions.38 While this argument threatens to open the way to any internally coherent system of moral ideas, Locke grounds the one true morality in the divinely created nature of man and so secures its reality. From the knowledge of our own existence, we can demonstrate the existence of God our maker ‘on whom we depend’ and thence our obligation to preserve mankind.39 Locke elaborates this in the Two Treatises – a work driven by intelligible natural law. Given that God made us, we are rightfully subject to his will.40 We can work out what this is from the (divine) facts of our common, rational existence.41 He made us, so we 35

36

37 39

40 41

Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.15–16). Cf. Tully 1980, pp. 16–27. On the importance of maker’s knowledge in contemporary science, see Pe´rez-Ramos 1991; Bates 2000. Hobbes 1991, pp. 41–3; Locke 1975, p. 565 (iv.iv.7), Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.16). Locke also draws the comparison between ‘mathematiques & morality’ in his journal on 26 June 1680 (MS. Locke f. 5, p. 82). Cf. his journal on 25 February 1676, where he writes that ‘there are virtues & vices antecedent to & abstract from society. v.g. love of god. unnatural lust’ (MS. Locke f. 1, p. 123). Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.ix.16). 38 Locke 1975, p. 565 (iv.iv.7). Locke 1975, p. 549 (iv.iii.18); cf. pp. 552–3 (iv.iii.21). See Yolton (1970, p. 169). See also Tully (1980) on the workmanship model as ‘a fundamental feature of all Locke’s writing’, founding morality (and property) (p. 4), and repudiating Hobbesian egoism (p. 47), and p. 43 on rewards and punishments not as the grounds for obligation but as ‘psychological inducements to the man who does not control his desires with his reason’ and pp. 40–2 on the question of the grounds of obligation. On the voluntarist/rationalist natural law debate see: Aarsleff 1969, pp. 105–29; Abrams 1967, p. 107; Ayers 1991, ii, pp. 189–202; Colman 1983, p. 235; Dunn 1969, pp. 187–99; Oakley 1997; Rogers 1999; Tuckness 1999; Tully 1993, pp. 179–241 and pp. 281–314; Yolton 1970, pp. 179–80. Locke 1988, pp. 179; 271. See Waldron (2002, pp. 76–82) for his argument that Locke’s account of human equality has an inextricably theological basis.

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must assume that he wants us to be preserved. We are his ‘property’, ‘made to last during his, not one anothers pleasure’.42 For our purposes, the important thing to note in Locke’s natural law theory is his recurrent assertion of its luminosity, its effortless presence to our minds. We have ‘but [to] consult’ our reason and we will learn its right precepts.43 God’s law, ‘the only true touchstone of moral rectitude’, comes to us by the ‘light of nature’.44 Even in the Reasonableness of Christianity, the text in which he almost completely turns his back on rational deduction in favour of revelation, Locke declares that someone who has never read the Bible, has never even heard of Jesus, can find out God’s law through the exercise of his reason.45 He too has ‘this candle of the lord’.46 Locke’s commitment to the self-evidence of morality is sometimes so strong that he talks like the innatists against whom he otherwise rails, most explicitly in the Essays on the Law of Nature (c. 1663– 64).47 In the first ‘essay’ he asserts baldly that ‘this law, then, is not written, but innate’,48 and ‘implanted in our hearts’.49 It ought be to noted that the authenticity of the work is complicated. It is a series of disputations that emerges out of his time as Censor of Moral Philosophy at Christ Church. It was designed for the Bachelors, whose MA examinations consisted in part of disputations. Locke was therefore concerned to teach them not only about the natural law, but also how to win an argument and what lines of argument they might marshal. It could be 42 45

46 47

48 49

Locke 1988, p. 271; cf. pp. 350–3. 43 Locke 1988, p. 271. 44 Locke 1975, p. 352 (ii.xxvii.8). Locke 1999, pp. 148–51: ‘’tis too hard a task for unassisted reason, to establish morality in all its parts upon its true foundations; with a clear and convincing light . . . Experience shews that the knowledge of morality, by meer natural light, (how agreeable soever it be to it) makes but slow progress, and little advance in the world . . . ’tis plain in fact, that humane reason unassisted, failed men in its great and proper business of morality. It never from unquestionable principles, by clear deductions, made out an entire body of the law of nature. And he that shall collect all the moral rules of the philosophers, and compare them with those contained in the New Testament, will find them to come short of the morality delivered by our Saviour, and taught by his apostles; a college made up for the most part of ignorant, but inspired fishermen . . . But such a body of ethicks, proved to be the law of nature, from principles of reason, and reaching all the duties of life; I think no body will say the world had before our Saviour’s time.’ Dunn (1969) argues that the ‘Reasonableness offers an immediate and effective psychological instrument’ (p. 194) to overcome our rational and instinctive shortcomings. Cf. Yolton (1970, p. 179) on Locke turning to revelation on account of it being a ‘clearer statement’ of the law of nature than reason can deliver; Harris (1998, pp. 292–3) on the way in which Locke views revelation as a useful substitute for reason; Parkin (1999, pp. 215–22) on Locke’s difficulties with the natural law, and his relations to Hobbes and Richard Cumberland. Locke 1999, p. 139. According to Yolton (1970, pp. 174–5), Locke’s more overt view that one can reason to the good itself resembles ‘dispositional’ innatism, especially that of Nathaniel Culverwel. Locke 1954, p. 117 (Von Leyden adds ‘i.e. natural’ in his translation). Locke 1954, p. 111. He comes close to admitting an innate idea of God in the midst of his antiinnatist tirade at the beginning of the Essay (Locke 1975, p. 92 (i.iv.13)).

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that Locke, here the exemplary polemical dialectician, is raiding the topic and taking all arguments that suit his cause pro the law of nature. It could also be that in the first disputation Locke is running through, rather than condoning the arguments which are generally made in favour of the existence of natural law, which he will analyse in subsequent quaestiones, and in some cases reject. Certainly, a later disputation is devoted to denying that the law of nature is ‘inscribed in the minds of men’.50 Whatever the status of this piece of juvenalia, he still expresses some commitment to ‘the light of nature’ at the end of his life, when it had come to seem so terribly dim. He rekindles it in a manuscript entitled ‘Error’ (1698). He states that while an illiterate ploughman might know little, ‘he has a conscience’.51 While Locke is normally interested in jettisoning the Enthusiast’s easy, justificatory refuge in ‘conscience’, here the simple farmer cannot but be confronted with the blazing ideas of right and wrong. Locke’s affirmation of the clarity of ideas themselves also emerges in the metaphors he uses to characterise them. Like his forbears, he draws on sensuous figurative funds to suggest the substantial palpability of ideas. His frequent characterisation of words as ‘conveying’ ideas indicates that there is some thing to carry.52 Rehearsing his forbears, he urges us to ‘strip’ ideas of their verbal clothing and look on the ‘naked truth’, as though it were a body.53 His main figurative reserve is the rich well of visual imagery. Calling ideas ‘visible’ accords them the highest degree of self-evidence, sight being the ‘most comprehensive’ and ‘most instructive of our senses’.54 Locke’s work is suffused with the potential ‘clarity’ of ideas. The use men have of words is ‘to bring out their ideas, and lay them before the view of others’.55 Words ‘fail’ when they ‘lay not open one man’s ideas to anothers view’.56 In Draft A Locke appeals confidently to ‘clear & destinct & perfect’ simple ideas.57 He explicitly compares the mind to the eyes and ideas to things seen. In a letter to Limborch on 28 September 1702, referring to the way in which we are free to look, but not free not to see when looking, he writes ‘what I have said of the eyes may be transferred to the understanding: the principle is the same for both’.58 In the Essay he explains that ‘the understanding’ is ‘like the eye’, that the ‘perception of the mind’ is ‘most aptly explained by words relating to 50 52 53 54 56

Locke 1954, pp. 137–45. 51 Locke 1997, p. 347. E.g. Locke 1975, pp. 401 (iii.1.2); 504 (iii.x.23); 505 (iii.x.24). Locke 1975, pp. 368 (ii.xxix.12); 567 (iv.iv.9). Locke 1975, pp. 146 (ii.ix.9); 303 (ii.xxiii.12). 55 Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.2). 57 Locke 1975, p. 1 504 (iii.x.23). Locke 1990a, p. 15. 58 Locke 1976–89, vii, p. 681.

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the sight’ and that ‘our knowledge . . . has a great conformity with our sight’.59 He describes the fundamental first step in knowledge as perceiving the ‘identity’ of ideas – perceiving that an idea is what it is. This form of knowledge resembles the immediacy and indubitability of vision. It is perceived ‘at first sight’, ‘as soon and as clearly as the ideas themselves are, nor can it possibly be otherwise’.60 Echoing the new, natural logic, Locke dismisses verbal syllogising and enjoins ‘the eye or the perceptive faculty of the mind’ to do its work. We ought ‘to lay the naked ideas’ out in chain and, ‘taking a view of them’, judge the inferences.61 In the Conduct of the Understanding he refers to the brilliant visibility of extralinguistic ideas and lays down the law that we should regulate our assent according to the ideational evidence, rather than the numerous extrinsic factors which move us to opine. In response to his own rhetorical question as to how this might be done, he replies that we are to use our eyes: ‘there is a correspondence in things, and agreement and disagreement in ideas . . . and there are eyes in men to see them if they please’.62 Locke’s visual metaphors do not consume themselves in the way that Descartes’ did. According to Locke’s empirical epistemology, ‘understanding’ is in a strong sense and at a basic level the same as ‘sensing’, and more particularly ‘seeing’.63 On 22 January 1678 Locke presents ideas as images in his journal. ‘Memory is always the picture of something the idea whereof hath existed before in our thoughts as neare as life as we can draw it.’64 In his journal the previous year, he had remarked on the clarity of ideas, this time by contrast with the obscurity of the words that represent them. ‘He that would call to minde his absent friend, or preserve his memory does it . . . most effectually by reviveing in his minde the idea of him & contemplating that & tis but a very faint imperfect way of thinking on ones friend barely to remember his name & thinke upon the sound he is usually cald by’.65 Locke makes good his claims to escape the gloom of words and shed light on their meanings in his proposal for a pictorial dictionary of things. Participating in the explosion of graphic natural histories, such as that recommended by Sydenham of diseases, or the Micrographia of Robert Hooke (1655), and recalling the empiricist grammarians, particularly Comenius and his Visible World, Locke writes 59 60 63

64

Locke 1975, pp. 6 (Epistle to the Reader); 363 (ii.xxix.2); 650 (iv.xiii.1). Locke 1975, p. 526 (iv.i.4). 61 Locke 1975, pp. 674; 676 (iv.xvii.4). 62 Locke 1993, p. ii. Cf. Ayers (1991, i) who writes brilliantly about the role of consciousness in knowledge, see especially pp. 264–8 and 301–4; Law (1993) for an account of the relationship between vision and language in Locke; Walker (1994) for an alternative examination of Locke’s figurative representations of the mind and ideas; Weinsheimer (1997) on Law’s proposals. MS. Locke f. 3, p. 17. 65 MS. Locke f. 2, p. 133 (p. 125).

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that ‘words standing for things, which are known and distinguished by their outward shapes, should be expressed by little draughts and prints made of them’.66 He therefore continues the mission of making meaning visible. However, while Lockean ideas are clear in a way that Descartes’ cannot be, this clarity extends only a little way before it too becomes a wilful metaphor whose referent is obscure. While it works for ideas (even complex ones) of sensation such as cold and gold, and of imagined extrapolations of sensation such as unicorn, it collapses into an empty figure for more ethereal ideas. Locke’s claims for their luminosity are undercut by more convincing claims to the contrary. In addition to advocating their brilliance, the Essay pushes the view that mixed modes, moral ideas in particular, are extremely obscure. While morality is theoretically demonstrable and like mathematics, both the claim and the comparison turn out to be practically duplicitous. The silence on any systematic moral demonstration in Locke’s oeuvre speaks loudly for his doubts. He himself almost admits defeat in a letter to Molyneux in September 1692. ‘I thought I saw that morality might be demonstratively made out, yet whether I am able so to make it out is another question.’67 The difficulty stems in part from the elusive sophistication of moral ideas. Locke wants to appropriate for morality both the visible ideas and their extrication from obscure words which mathematics enjoys. Three months after he had expressed doubts about his capacity actually to deliver a full moral science, Locke writes again to Molyneaux, now wistfully, enviously, commenting on the deverbalised minds of mathematicians. They are ‘open’d, and disintangl’d from the cheat of words’, free of these ‘doubtful and fallacious’ interventions.68 However, their angelic condition owes 66

67

68

Locke 1975, p. 522 (iii.xi.25); Sydenham (1696, sig. a1v) says the art of medicine would be improved by ‘a history, or description of all diseases, as graphically and naturally as possibly may be’. Locke’s 1680 journal teems with notes on disease and medicine (MS. Locke f. 4). Locke 1976–89, iv, p. 524. Locke has been condemned for failing to deliver a demonstrable morality; see Von Leyden (1991, p. 13 (originally 1956)) on Locke’s failure to derive obligation from reason; Abrams (1967, p. 98) on Locke’s belief that while an objective morality exists and is theoretically discoverable, it is ‘perenially undiscovered’ due to the passionate partiality of men. Dunn (1969, p. 92) argues that ‘the Essay breaks off at the point at which Locke is confronted by his inability to present morality as a system of universally intelligible obligatory truths’. Yolton (1970, pp. 171–2 and 176–7) attributes Locke’s failure to produce a demonstrable, true morality to his inability to reveal the inferential connections between man as God’s work (p. 169) and moral obligation. See Marshall (1994, p. xviii) on Locke’s inability to reconcile hedonism and social duty, pp. 436–9 and 453. Tuckness (1999) argues that The Reasonableness of Christianity, the Essay and the Two Treatises are the products of a ‘coherent mind’. Locke 1976–89, iv, p. 609.

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itself to something that is forever out of reach of the moral scientist. The mathematicians’ ideas are visible because their signs are perfectly transparent. In the case of shapes, this is because the connection between sign and signified is natural. Triangles on a page do not so much represent the ideas they stand for, as positively present them, closing the gap between the two. This is almost the case for numbers and mathematical notation. Their meanings are so unambiguous and obvious to all alike that their primordial conventionality is almost erased. The geometer’s demonstrations ‘can be set down, and represented by sensible marks, which have a greater and nearer correspondence with them than any words or sounds whatsoever. Diagrams drawn on paper are copies of the ideas in the mind, and not liable to the uncertainty that words carry in their signification’. This translucency cannot be replicated with the arbitrary words that the moral scientist is bound to use. A perfect mirror cannot be erected for moral ideas. They have ‘no sensible marks that resemble them’ and ‘nothing but words to express them by’. The inherent opacity of moral words is further darkened by the semantic proliferation I explored in the previous chapter. While the words ‘remain the same, yet the ideas they stand for, may change in the same man; and ’tis very seldom, that they are not different in different persons’.69 Their internal complexity and insensible elusiveness clouds moral thought and puts it a fair distance from singular, fixed and sensible words. Locke’s overt rhetoric about the clarity of moral ideas is often underwritten by his fear of their obscurity. Indeed, one can regard his political theory as emanating from this ambivalence. Men, equal and free in the state of nature, decide to subject themselves to the might of government on account of the unintelligibility, as well as the intelligibility, of the natural law. It clearly obliges us to enter the commonwealth precisely because it is obscure to most men, ‘being unwritten, and so no where to be found but in the minds of men, they who through passion or interest shall mis-cite, or misapply it’.70 The reasonable Locke sees at once our obligation to preserve mankind and the myopic, partial view his fellows have of the matter. Although Locke sometimes talks as though moral ideas might be as light as day and extricated from words, in his darker moments he is bound to conclude that they need sensible representation, and this necessarily comes in the form of obscure signs. Given that we 69 70

Locke 1975, p. 550 (iv.iii.19). Locke 1988, p. 358. See Dunn 1967, p. 182 on the ‘unedifying drama’ of the ‘shifting struggle in every human conscience of reason and passion, good and evil’ and the ‘bizarre’ fact that the ‘sole sufficient rationale’ of human life ‘must remain in another world than this’.

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have no sensible means of naturally signifying our moral ideas, we are bound to rely on opaque words. Locke’s anxiety about the inevidence and insensibility of certain ideas is invigorated by his commitment to the might of the senses. Locke worries so much about the insensibility of ideas because they are partnered inescapably by sensible and therefore powerful words. His concerns about the relative powers of words and ethereal ideas are motivated by the longstanding despair at the pull of sensuous things on our weak human souls. Locke reiterates the point, which we heard, notably from certain French philosophers in chapter 6, that the senses have us by the nose, while insensible things leave us cold. In his journal in 1676 he explains that we cannot conceive of spiritual pleasures because ‘being immersed in the body and beset with material objects, when they are continually importuning us, [we] have very little sense or perception of spiritual things, which are as it were at a distance and affect us but seldom’.71 In the Conduct of the Understanding Locke spells out this worry in the context of language. He is concerned about those ‘corporeal objects that constantly importune our senses, and captivate our appetites’ which ‘fail not to fill our heads with lively and lasting ideas’ so that ‘the mind wants room’ for more useful ideas. Words, leading examples of sensible objects, shove ‘moral and more abstract ideas’ out of the mind.72 Our embodied minds yearn for sensible marks with which to think. They do it neither easily nor well with insensible ideas. The mathematician can perceive precisely and unmistakably the connections between his plethora of ideas because they ‘can be set down, by visible and lasting marks, wherein the ideas under consideration are perfectly determined’.73 And while it is practically beyond the bounds of human possibility to remember these demonstrable chains of ideas, they can be fixed, ‘unalterable in their draughts’. The mathematician has ‘in view before him the result of all his perceptions and reasonings’. The moral scientist has no such transparent marks to correct and reify his reasoning. His ideas, lacking any perspicuous, sensible representatives, ‘slip’ out of ‘view’. ‘The mind cannot easily retain those precise combinations’ of mixed modes, and therefore tends to think only in their sensible but arbitrary and ambiguous verbal counterparts.74 While men’s ‘thoughts flutter about, or stick only in sounds of doubtful and uncertain significations’, they cannot ‘discover the agreement or disagreement of ideas themselves’ which is 71 74

Locke 1997, p. 242. 72 Locke 1993, pp. 37; 36. Locke 1975, pp. 551–2 (iv.iii.19).

73

Locke 1975, pp. 535 (iv.ii.10).

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requisite to knowledge.75 Unable to ‘abstract’ thoughts from names, they think on ‘sounds’ and engender the ‘perplexity, puddering, and confusion’ which had always been the great obstacle to the advancement of learning.76 Locke’s belief in the power of sense in cognition and more particularly in the inescapable presence of words in private thought (as well as in communication) emerges partly out of a traditional claim for the mnemonic function that words perform. Following Hobbes’ binary division of words into communicative signs and self-reflexive marks, Locke explains that people need them not only to communicate but also to ‘record their own thoughts for the assistance of their memory’.77 The sensibility of words is indispensable for fixing otherwise evanescent ideas in our minds. It prevents them from disappearing as fast as they enter. The memory, ‘no very sure repository’ for ideas, needs words to ‘record them for our own use’.78 In a letter to Samuel Bold of 16 May 1699 Locke recommends Bacon’s advice ‘never to go without pen and ink’, in order to retain thoughts that otherwise ‘slip from you’.79 In his journal in December 1686 Locke is preoccupied by the way people confuse the imagination with the intellect. Among the remedies he suggests is the use of words; by fixing them univocally to the concepts, one is less likely to be led astray. Another is the use of characters, in emulation of mathematical aids.80 Required to retain insensible ideas, sensible words weave themselves into the fabric of our minds. Mixed modes are in particular need of private, sensible representation. These complex ideas, entirely fabricated in the mind, would disperse again and be quickly forgotten, if they did not have names to hold them fast.81 Indeed, the use of names is not only mnemonic but positively constitutive. Mixed modes only really exist as a unity in virtue of their names. ‘It is the name’, declares Locke, ‘that seems to preserve those essences, and give them their lasting duration’.82 Words incarnate ideas. Whereas his predecessors had mainly characterised language as the external, servile replica of thought, Locke breaks new and prescient ground by arguing that language is intimately implicated in (re)membering thought. Words are, in practice, profoundly important in the way we think – or not, as the case may be – and are therefore fundamental to, rather than a mere copy of human understanding. When Locke is 75 76 78 80

Locke 1975, p. 561 (iv.iii.30). Cf. Hobbes 1996, p. 28 on fluttering. Locke 1975, p. 561 (iv.iii.30). 77 Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.2); cf. p. 476 (iii.ix.2). Locke 1975, p. 721 (iv.xxi.4). 79 Locke 1976–89, vi, p. 627. MS. Locke f. 9, p. 65. 81 Locke 1975, p. 437 (iii.v.15). 82 Locke 1975, p. 434 (iii.v.10).

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discussing ‘truth’, he admits that ‘it is very difficult to treat of ’ thought and words ‘asunder’. This is necessarily the case for Locke, who is writing about the understanding. In his book ‘it is unavoidable, in treating of mental propositions, to make use of words’. When Locke comes to exemplify a case of perfect reasoning, he is bound to lay out the connection of ideas in words.83 The proposition ‘that men can determine themselves’ is inferred in the following way: ‘Men shall be punished, – God the punisher – just punishment, – the punished guilty – could have done otherwise – freedom – self-determination’. Locke proudly advertises this as a ‘chain of ideas thus visibly link’d together in train’, but they are visible only by virtue of their verbal representation.84 The ideas inevitably slide into words in communication, and Locke does not stop at this truism. We also use words in private thought.85 In Draft A Locke talks of men ‘most commonly fixing their owne thoughts within them upon words when they would thinke of things’.86 This is particularly so in the case of the names of universal ideas which are distant and abstracted from experience, and even more particularly in the case of abstract, complex ideas. These are so much the fabrications of the mind, so abstruse and unwieldy and only permanently existent in their names, that the names are more manageable and gratifying than the ideas themselves. While we do think extra-linguistically about simple ideas that have their own graspable sensibility, like ‘white or black, sweet or bitter, a triangle or a circle’, we cannot so easily do so for complex ideas like ‘man, vitriol, fortitude, glory’. Then, ‘we usually put the name for the idea’. Names are ‘more clear, certain, distinct, and readier occurr to our thoughts’ than ‘imperfect, confused, and undetermined’ ideas. We think only of the names of substances because we like to imagine that they signify some correspondingly singular and knowable real essence. Having no such ideas, however, we signify absolutely nothing by the names. As for the names of mixed modes, we think only on them, either because it takes too much ‘pains’ to recollect their unwieldy and abstruse ideational combination or because we have ‘never troubled . . . [ourselves] in all . . . [our] lives to consider’ what the words mean and so have only words.87 While Locke does believe in the theoretical possibility of complex thought outside language, he fears that in practice the two cannot be held apart, nor, moreover, in their proper hierarchy. More often than not people use ‘sounds for ideas’. He appeals to the experience of ‘every one’ to prove 83 86

84 Locke 1975, p. 574 (iv.v.3). Locke 1975, p. 673 (iv.xvii.4). Locke 1990a, p. 4. 87 Locke 1975, p. 575 (iv.v.4).

85

Locke 1975, p. 574 (iv.v.4).

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that ‘even when men think and reason within their own breasts’, they use ‘names . . . instead of the ideas themselves’.88 The inextricability of language from thought is in large part due to the way children learn simple, sensible names before, if ever, they gather their complex meanings.89 The situation is especially perilous with the names of mixed modes that have no ostensible public referents and are therefore ‘got, before the ideas they stand for are perfectly known’.90 The child is either ‘beholden to the explication of others’ or left to work them out for himself. These unforthcoming methods leave ‘these moral words . . . in most men’s mouths, little more than bare sounds’.91 In Draft A Locke writes that ‘it is far easier to learne the sound gratitude’ than painstakingly to discern which precise collection of simple ideas might go into the meaning of that word.92 In the Essay itself he elaborates. Neither words nor meanings are born with children. They must be learnt, and learnt separately, because they are not naturally connected. ‘We by degrees get ideas and names, and learn their appropriated connexion one with another.’93 Learning language is an incremental, contingent process that is unlikely to result in a perfect symmetry between sign and signified, but rather to remain on the surface of sounds. Our linguistic education positively facilitates insignificant speech. ‘From their cradles’ people ‘easily’ obtain and retain the names of complex ideas, but do not ‘take the pains’ to settle their complicated meanings. They do not care to ‘trouble their heads’ with seeking out the meanings because they can say the words and so conceal their ignorance.94 The shocking consequence is that ‘Wisdom, Glory, Grace, etc. are words frequent enough in every man’s mouth; but if a great many of those who use them, should be asked, what they mean by them? They would be at a stand, and not know what to answer.’95 ‘By familiar use from our cradles’ sensible words are secure in our memories and ‘readily on our tongues’, so that we think ‘more on words than things’.96 Our frail and lazy sensual minds prefer to cogitate in language. Beyond our ‘natural’ linguistic education, Locke attacks the grammatical tradition that, as we saw, emphasises the semiotic aspect of language at the expense of the semantic. Following on from those reformist grammarians who pour sense into sounds, Locke blames the discipline for inculcating into the educated elite the habit of making ‘a noise without any sense or signification’. They master the custom of 88 91 94 96

Locke 1975, p. 579 (iv.vi.1). 89 Locke 1975, p. 61 (i.ii.23). 90 Locke 1975, p. 437 (iii.v.15). Locke 1975, p. 480 (iii.ix.9). 92 Locke 1990a, p. 13. 93 Locke 1975, p. 60 (i.ii.23). Locke 1975, pp. 491–2 (iii.x.4). 95 Locke 1975, p. 491 (iii.x.3). Locke 1975, pp. 407–8 (iii.ii.7).

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manipulating bare signs with vacuous heads. ‘For all such words, however put into discourse, according to the right construction of grammatical rules, or the harmony of well turned periods, do yet amount to nothing but bare sounds, and nothing else.’97 It is language, on the wings of its seductive sensibility but utterly insignificant per se, which fills our minds. Locke’s insistence that ‘men use to think of words instead of things’, as he puts it in the contents list for Draft B (1671), verbally recalls the complaints of his predecessors.98 Locke’s concern springs, in part, from the same source: words do not map the world and therefore the currency of our thoughts is purely verbal. However, Locke’s anxiety is also fuelled by a deeper consideration of the reasons inherent in language as to why it is so ‘common . . . for names to be made use of, instead of the ideas themselves’.99 Our incorporated selves accord prominence to the sensible ideas of words themselves. We either cannot, or cannot be bothered to, think in unadulterated, abstruse ideas, but wander ‘in the great wood of words’.100 In a letter of 1693 to William Molyneux, Locke admits that writing book iii ‘cost me more pains to express than all the rest of my Essay’ and he fears there is ‘in some places of it obscurity and doubtfulness’.101 Locke struggles to say what he means, so deeply are words enmeshed in thought. When it comes to talking about the fog of words, it closes in, and consumes itself in a flood of unintelligibility. In the midst of trying to illuminate the limits of the meaning of the word ‘gold’, Locke feels the duplicitous force of that word on his page. ‘So hard it is, to shew the various meaning and imperfection of words, when we have nothing else but words to do it by.’102 We are locked in a verbal circle. Locke echoes Bacon. We cannot solve problems about words with more words. They count for ‘noething but being mere sounds unlesse where they signifie’.103 To explicate words simply by means of other words is to embark on an infinite regress.104 If we approach ‘whole volumes of lexicons & dictionarys’ in search of enlightenment, we find ourselves caught in promiscuous words.105 There is certainly no escape in communication because ‘one man’s mind could not pass into another man’s body’, and get ‘behind’ the words.106 The same seems to go for private thought, so much do sensible words predominate.

97 99 101 103 105

Locke 1975, p. 505 (iii.x.26). 98 MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 34r. Locke 1975, p. 579 (iv.vi.1). 100 Locke 1975, p. 561 (iv.iii.30). Locke 1976–89, iv, p. 629. 102 Locke 1975, p. 449 (iii.vi.19). Locke 1990b, p. 168. 104 Locke 1990b, p. 169; cf. Locke 1975, p. 421 (iii.iv.5). Locke 1990b, p. 176. 106 Locke 1975, p. 389 (ii.xxxii.15).

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While Locke does subscribe to the traditional theory that language is logically subsequent to thought and a mere expression of it, in practice the two are disturbingly tangled. ‘It is impossible to discourse with any clearness, or order concerning knowledge’ without probing the nature of words, because knowledge, ‘being conversant about propositions, and those most commonly universal ones, has greater connexion with words, than perhaps is suspected’.107 In the abstract of the Essay Locke comments that he is not sure whether to explain the intimate connection between language and knowledge in terms of ‘custome or necessity’.108 The abstract is interesting because it suggests that in addition to there being a habitual integration of words in thought (as he claims in the Essay), there cannot be thought without words. If we recall Locke’s refiguration of the words as clothes metaphor, where he compares words to flesh and meaning to the soul, we see that lurking behind his injunction there to strip ideas of words, is the painful suggestion that language is deeply integral to thought.109 Locke’s metaphor rebels against its author’s purpose, and is emblematic of the optimistic/pessimistic struggle that might be said to characterise his philosophy of language as a whole. It is Locke’s sense of the intense relationship between words and thoughts that motivates him to insert a whole book about words into an essay on understanding, or, more precisely, into a natural logic of ideas. At the end of book ii he explains that he had intended to move straight from ideas to knowledge, but that ‘upon a nearer approach, I find, that there is so close a connexion between ideas and words; and our abstract ideas, and general words, have so constant a relation one to another, that it is impossible to speak clearly and distinctly of our knowledge, which all consists in propositions, without considering, first, the nature, use, and signification of language’.110 We know that he is, in part, being disingenuous here, his concern about language appearing on the first page of the first draft of his Essay. Nevertheless, he is also recording a genuine cultural shock at the way that the old house of concepts that logicians had built, and in which his early-modern predecessors had grown up, seemed to come tumbling down without words to hold it up. Locke’s separate treatment of language from thought, his sharp break between verbal and ideational signs in his ·„"¶!¶ ·, or semiotike – as he also calls his ‘Logick’ (his Essay) – is one of his most remarkable innovations in logic and in thinking about human understanding more generally.111 It is 107 109 111

Locke 1975, p. 404 (iii.ii.6). Locke 1975, p. 490 (iii.ix.23). Locke 1975, p. 720 (iv.xxi.4).

108 110

MS. Locke c. 28, fos. 61v–62r. Locke 1975, p. 401 (ii.xxxiii.19).

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true that logicians had, as we saw in chapter 1, often included a discussion of the division of terms in between discussing concepts and the affirmation/ negation of the same, although this was in no way to indicate a linguistic obstacle but instead to elaborate the symmetry between thought and language. Locke’s trajectory from ideas, to words, to the agreement/disagreement of ideas clearly draws on traditional logic. And his treatment of language records the familiar division of terms into abstract and concrete, categorematic and syncategorematic (or names and particles, as Locke calls them) and even, simple and complex – although in the latter case, as we have seen, Locke’s intention is to demolish and invert the time-honoured complacencies about mental simplicity. The Essay, therefore, records the depth of Locke’s immersion in his scholastic heritage as much as it displays his revolution, and speaks against those commentators who stress the radical novelty of Locke’s logic, particularly those who declare that language is largely irrelevant to his ‘new’ logic of ideas.112 While some new logicians, such as Descartes and Spinoza, do banish language from their directions for the mind, Locke absolutely did not. Instead, he attacks the new guard, as well as their shared scholastic enemy, for assuming that words simply copy ideas and for not analysing them on their own. Indeed, his quarrel with the new, natural logicians is particularly fierce because they (pretend to) ignore words, concentrating with self-assurance on ideas alone, and because often the ‘clear and distinct ideas’ of which they proudly speak seem, in fact, to be empty words. Locke’s protest, against all logicians, is that the smooth words they use betray a rough picture. It is ironic that historians of logic and early-modern philosophy have asserted a change of focus from terms to ideas when in fact both sides of 112

We can find a further indication of Locke’s familiarity with and internalisation of scholastic logic (and the place of language therein) in a manuscript entitled ‘Logica’. It rattles out the familiar refrains, differentiating between categorematic and syncategorematic, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, univocal and equivocal terms (MS. Locke f. 33, fo. 8r; fo. 9r ). This is absolutely not to say that Locke was not involved in the new movement of natural logic. Indeed, it is part of the ambition of this book to show the profundity of his involvement. I only want to complicate this picture, by indicating too the marks of the old, and the opposition to the new, that the Essay also exhibits. With regard to the relationship between words and ideas, it seems to me that, by contrast with his fellow innovators, albeit drawing on their concerns and sometimes despite himself, Locke sees language (and its dangers) as integral to an account of the understanding. Here I disagree with Schuurman 2004, p. 54, who describes book III as ‘a sideshow produced by an after-thought’ that is not integral to the bipartite structure (of ideas and knowledge) that Schuurman identifies as essential to the new logic of ideas, of which the Essay is a prime example and which Schuurman describes so well and so carefully. See also Jolley 1999, p. 168, who claims that book III is more epistemological than linguistic and ‘is essentially a propadeutic to book 4’.

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the putative Aristotelian/new philosophical divide were overtly concerned with mental entities while simultaneously considering them interchangeably with and prior to words. It is this collection of blithe assumptions on the part of Cartesians and their contemporaries, as well as Aristotelians that I noted in chapter 1, that leads Locke to treat words distinctly from ideas. Far from subserviently replicating ideas, words dominate them in thought as well as in communication. Moreover, they are not honest substitutes for them. They are clear and distinct. They are simple and palpable, whereas the ideas they signify are often confused, obscure, unstable and even non-existent. Unfortunately, however, the very reality and uniformity of the words themselves hides the underlying semantic vacuity and multiplicity and suggests a semantic foundation that is as solid as its verbal architecture. The ‘concepts’ that constitute many of the supposedly great systems of natural and ethical philosophy that Locke reads are really only words and the systems therefore more fantastic than real. Locke’s extraordinary divestment of ideas in book iii reveals not only that words do not reflect a correspondingly rich and uniform web of ideas but also that it is words and not ideas with which we think and which therefore conceal the ideational mess beneath. The problem of language is not only then that it is not true, full and stable, but that it seems as if it is, and so clouds our vision with layers of delusion and deceit. the deceitful cover of words As Locke’s predecessors had noted, lying is the most obvious demonstration of the effective sovereignty of language over thought. Despite the normative injunction to the contrary, our words need not reflect the inner workings of our minds. The inherent insensibility of our thoughts makes the tacit moral contract that obliges us to tell the truth weigh lightly on our shoulders. In ftacit, we can say anything; words act as an impenetrable cover. Speakers can paint the picture they want to project and imperceptibly betray the truth. What ‘lying’ is, is itself double. In his Truth Tried (1643) John Wallis had referred to the common distinction between ‘veritas logica’ (‘when the proposition agrees with the thing; and falsehood, when they disagree’), and ‘veritas moralis’ (‘when our words and actions agree with our mind, and is opposed to a lye, to hypocrisie’).113 While Locke reiterates the distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘real’ or ‘metaphysical’ truth, and while 113

Wallis 1643, pp. 1–2.

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he accepts the strict definition of ‘lying’ as saying what one does not believe to be the case, he also blurs the line between moral and real falsity by making men culpable for the latter.114 If they speak falsely where the truth could be discovered, even if they are not speaking disingenuously, they can be blamed and accused of a kind of lying.115 Both types of falsehood can obtain in the same instance. And as a precarious result of the magnetic combination of human vanity and the embodied nature of language, both types can veer on the inadvertent. One such potentially twofold, (un)conscious lie is the ‘opinion’ against which the Two Treatises fulminates: that princes ‘have a divine right to absolute power’.116 This lie is talked into a truth that legitimates illegality. It continues to preoccupy Locke in a manuscript written in 1690. Just as the stipulative, opaque power of language had given Charles II arbitrary power, so did it threaten William III’s regime. The Tory pamphleteers who noisily, passionately declare that the royal succession ought to be established jure divino, but really mean to charge William with illegitimate usurpation, may be speaking in good faith, but then they have deceived themselves and are enjoying the cloak of language just as much as their supporters. Locke is so concerned about these lies because he sees the ascription of language, even false language, as creative. To say that Charles II is appointed by and accountable only to God is in a strong sense to make him so. In turn, these linguistically constituted facts have their own catastrophic, practical effects. A king who rules by divine right can legitimately destroy parliament, sequester property and execute those he pleases. Words are deeds and, unhindered by the truth, can be the causes of war. Locke’s sensitivity to the concealing and creative power of language is especially excited on the subject of toleration. Language has such a duplicitous potency that sometimes it cannot be tolerated. In his early work, Two Tracts on Government (c. 1660–2), he goes so far as to oppose toleration altogether, on the grounds that ‘religion’ is a potent ‘shield’ for sedition, ‘all those tragic revolutions which have exercised Christendom these many years’ having assumed ‘the specious name of reformation’. The ‘flames’ that have desolated Europe, and that were only ‘quenched’ ‘with the blood of so many millions’, were ‘blown with the breath of those that attend the altar’. He inveighs against two particular 114 115

116

Locke 1975, pp. 578–9 (iv.vi.9–11); p. 292 (ii.xxii.9). This might be said to sit uneasily with Locke’s commitment to sincerity; see, for example, Locke 1983, p. 38. Locke 1988, p. 142. See Goldie (1983) on Locke’s distaste for those who flatter Charles II with what he wants to hear.

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self-righteous pretexts that enable zealots to enact the ‘greatest cruelty’: that it is their duty ‘to vindicate the cause of God with swords in their hands’, and to destroy heresy.117 These proclamations shroud the truth of the Christian calling. While Locke is converted to the cause of toleration by the 1680s, his Letter concerning Toleration still warns of opinions that look benign but secrete a hidden agenda. These are ‘dangerous to the commonwealth’.118 ‘A specious shew of deceitful words’ can ‘cover’ an attack on the ‘civil right of the community’.119 For example, the doctrine that ‘Dominion is founded on Grace’ is a way of stealing property. ‘Kings excommunicated forfeit their crowns and kingdoms’ can depose a king.120 Wrapped in Christian words, un-christian actions are facilitated. While really interested in personal gain, the oppressors ‘cry out continually the Church, the Church’.121 Locke jokes bitterly that the Anglicans could hardly claim convincingly, without watering their eyes and spinning a fiery speech, that they are in fact saving from the flames of hell the nonconformists they are burning.122 They ‘cover’ their ‘pride and ambition’, their ‘passion and uncharitable zeal’ ‘with some specious colour’, such as the ‘pretence of the publick weal, and observation of the laws’.123 Here Locke implicitly joins the chorus of disapproval about the colours of rhetoric – ‘that powerful instrument of error and deceit’ that is too beguiling to be gainsaid. ‘Eloquence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it, to suffer it self ever to be spoken against. And ’tis vain to find fault with those Arts of Deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be Deceived.’124 Locke also laments the post-Reformation trauma of being forced to lie by an intolerant government. He who makes an outward profession of worship that belies his inner faith, commits the sin of ‘hypocrise, and contempt of his divine majesty’.125 Although Locke himself was not subject to the strong kind of victimisation he railed against, he had to tread carefully as a holder of increasingly unorthodox religious views. He refuted original sin, for example, and may have been sympathetic to unitarianism.126 As the author of the controversial Essay, he was besieged 117 118 119 123 124

125 126

Locke 1967, pp. 160; 161–2. Cf. Tully 1993, p. 48. Locke 1983, p. 49. See Dunn (1991) on the illiberal limits to Lockean freedom of speech. Locke 1983, p. 49. 120 Locke 1983, p. 50. 121 Locke 1983, p. 30. 122 Locke 1983, p. 35. Locke 1983, p. 25. Locke 1975, p. 508 (iii.x.34). Cf. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 6: ‘anyone who sets out to trick the world is sure to find people who will be happy to be tricked’. Locke 1983, p. 27. Marshall (1994) gives a rich account of the radical developments in Locke’s religious thought. Cf. Nuovo (2002) on Locke’s credal minimalism; Marshall (2000) on Locke’s likely anti-trinitarianism

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for perpetrating deism and moral relativism.127 Moreover, his belief that ‘faith only, and inward sincerity, are the things that procure acceptance with God’ makes hypocrisy ‘the paramount sin’ which will itself see us in hell.128 People should not be forced to betray themselves and lose their chance of salvation. Locke’s concerns about the deceptive power of language are deeper than those of his forbears because for him, words dominate ideas in thought as well as communication. This has the disturbing result that deceitful words captivate speakers as well as hearers, thereby entrenching the imposture and evacuating any subjective space for the truth. Armed with his insight about the private potency of language, Locke deepens the old view that language operates as an unconsciously deceptive instrument. Selfish men think, as well as say, that they have right on their side and language sows the deceit. ‘Bias’ is a misconduct of the understanding; this is when men ‘suffer their own natural tempers and passions . . . to influence their judgments’ and cover ‘interest’ with ‘a pretence that it is for God, or a good cause’.129 Lying is often a matter of lying to oneself, an innocent rather than a malignant deception. This is why one must beware the ‘passionate zeal of the deceived’.130 Locke remarks perceptively that ‘there is no body in the commonwealth of learning’ who does not want to be thought of as a lover of truth, and that even though most of them are in fact ill-disposed towards and ill-acquainted with truth, they ‘perswade themselves’ that they love it.131 He even extends this olive branch of selfdelusion to the vain philosophers, whose ‘hard or misapply’d words, with little or no meaning . . . are but the covers of ignorance’. It is because erroneous authors are themselves in love with their ‘uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms’ that Locke has to spend so much time in book iii removing them: the ‘rubbish, that lies in the way to knowledge’. ‘So few are apt to think, they deceive, or are deceived in the use of words; or that the language of the sect they are of, has any faults in it, which ought to be examined or corrected.’132 Language itself is therefore ‘no small obstacle

127

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129 132

and his concurrence with aspects of Socinianism. Higgins-Biddle (1999, p. xv) explains how The Reasonableness of Christianity attracted charges (which Locke denied) of Deism, Socinianism and Hobbism. Yolton 1993. For various views of Locke’s radicalism, see Ashcraft 1986 and 1992b; Dunn 1984, pp. 4–6 and 8–13; Scott 1992. Hoffheimer (1986) argues for Spinoza’s direct influence on Locke’s political theory. Locke 1983, p. 38; Tully 1993, p. 53. See Tully (1991, p. 651) on how individuals must obey their conscience, even as they disobey the civil law. Locke 1993, pp. 50–1. 130 Locke 1967, p. 162. 131 Locke 1975, p. 697 (iv.xix.1). Locke 1975, p. 10 (Epistle to the Reader).

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in the way to knowledge’. It is by means of words of ‘uncertain or mistaken signification’ that men put ‘fallacies . . . upon themselves, as well as others’. These are particularly dangerous because far from being identified as a scourge, they are positively bred in formal education.133 By their singular and substantial presence, words seem to signify more than they really do or can, their meanings being prone to multiplicity, unreality and vacuity. Locke’s worry about words being both the subtle source of error and the means of covering those errors, surfaces in his journal for 11 November 1677. The ‘foundation of error & mistake in most men’ is not only ‘wavering obscure or confused notions of things’, but also: doubtfull & obscure words, our words always in their signification depending upon our ideas, being clear or obscure proportionably as our notions are soe & sometimes . . . litle more but the sound of a word for the notion of the thing. For in the discursive part faculty of the minde I doe not finde that men are soe apt to erre but it availes litle that their syllogisms are right if their termes be insignificant & obscure or confused & undetermined or that their internall discourse & deductions be regular if their notions be wrong.134

We seem to be reasoning perfectly when we organise our words according to syllogistic rules. However, the apparently seamless verbal construction conceals a mass of logical fissures that are unapparent to speaker and hearer alike. Words also emerge as the ‘secret and unobserved’ source of confused ideas.135 Given that men use names rather than ideas ‘for the most part’ when they reason within themselves and ‘always’ when they communicate to others, they assume that nominal distinctions mark ideational ones when none really exist.136 For example, the ‘clear and distinct’ ideas of which the Cartesians are so proud and which they oppose to the scholastics’ meaningless terms turn out themselves to be nothing other than clear and distinct terms that cover a mess of obscurity and confusion. While they trumpet the verbal distinction between a ‘chiliae¨dron, or a body of a thousand sides’ and a figure of 999 sides, they cannot imagine the two distinctly.137 Vaingloriously parading the names of ‘extension’, ‘substance’ and ‘infinity’, they are able to fantasise that they have a grip 133 134

135 137

Locke 1975, pp. 488–9 (iii.ix.21). MS. Locke f. 2, p. 347. See Barnes (2001) on Locke’s ill-grounded attack on seventeenth-century logic (as opposed to on Aristotle himself) and particularly on the syllogism, and on his own flawed inferential proposals. See De Gandt (2001) for a criticism of Barnes. Locke 1975, p. 367 (ii.xxix.10). 136 Locke 1975, p. 367 (ii.xxix.12). Locke 1975, p. 368 (ii.xxix.13).

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on the universe. The felicitous impression that words make in human minds is deep and ubiquitous. ‘Having frequently in our mouths the name Eternity, we are apt to think, we have a positive comprehensive idea of it’, but we have no idea of limitless time.138 The reign of language is secure because everyone, loving to be seduced, is implicated in the process of (self-)deception. writing our worlds The crushing weight of Locke’s anxiety about false language comes from his belief that it seems to be true. Words stick. They enthral our minds, regardless of their content. We have already witnessed the creativity of language as fall-out of its deceptive capacity. I now focus more closely on the creative power itself. While his predecessors were no strangers to the empire of lies, Locke was peculiarly sensitive to the way that everyday words were innocently taken to describe things they did not or could not. His polemic, sharpened by his epistemology and, within this, his belief in the dominion of sensible words, argues that the world as we know it is to a great extent created by language. He exerts so much energy explaining the manufactured nature of the meanings of words because the verbal surface is commonly perceived as a transparent glass, when in fact it reflects back only itself. The very substantiality of language, coupled with its inherent opacity, lends it an apparently insurmountable constitutive force. In Draft A Locke explains that he had to insert the discussion of words into his book because they are ‘soe apt & usuall to be mistaken for things’.139 He repeats the point in Draft B, defending his ‘long digression about words’ with the claim that he had to ‘distinguish’ between them and ‘things’, or else we would continue to confuse them, and to take words ‘for the constant regular marks of the natures of things when they are no more but the voluntary signes of our owne ideas’.140 His overarching mission is to show the great gulf that separates language from the natural and moral spheres and so strip it of its creative power. He has to convince people of the contingency of language in the face of a situation where ‘the greatest part of men take the sounds of words for the notions of things’.141 138 140

141

Locke 1975, p. 369 (ii.xxix.15). 139 Locke 1990a, p. 13. Locke 1990b, pp. 197–8. Cf. Richetti (1983, p. 116) on Locke’s dismantling of certainty through his essayistic, self-cancelling style; Clark (1998) on the limits of the Lockean mind and the need both to realise them and toil within their bounds. Locke 1990a, p. 13.

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Turning first to the natural world, Locke worries that people suppose that words stand for real ‘things’. This supposition had not been a worry – indeed, it had been positively encouraged as we saw in chapters 1 and 4 – when the correlate epistemologies and ontologies were strong enough. However, as Locke watched and then partook of the destruction of certainties old and new, and it appeared that words could no longer catch the essences of things, the problem of constitutive language raised its head. Words had become empty, or at best poor, subjective approximations of reality. Yet in their embodied might they seemed to describe bodies themselves. When he first sits down to write the Essay, two related polemics gush from his pen: we can only ever have phenomenal knowledge of things but words trick us into thinking that we know the essences of things themselves. He does not thereby only attack specific essentialist epistemologies but also announces a pervasive and innocent assumption, perpetrated by logicians, that a word’s unity denotes a corresponding unit-thing. While our ideas about substances are made up of collections of experiential ideas, the affixing of simple names belies the underlying complexity and superficiality, and suggests that we know the real essence. ‘By inadvertency’, Locke says, ‘we are apt . . . [after naming] to talke of & consider’ the substance ‘as one simple idea’.142 It is the introduction of language into our ideas about the world that causes such terrible misconceptions about it. By the time of the published work, Locke has codified these linguistically rooted errors into an ‘abuse’ of language: ‘the setting . . . [words] in the place of things, which they do or can by no means signify’. Although we can only ever know the nominal essences of substances, their general names make us imagine that we are describing real ones. When we talk about ‘gold’, for example, we imagine that we are talking about ‘what has the real essence of gold’. Talking leads us to this delusion. Unconsciously dissatisfied with our epistemological deficit, we ‘commonly tacitly suppose’ our names of substances to stand for real essences, proudly pushing our speech beyond our ken.143 This false identification of language with reality is a ‘secret reference’ that people make for their words.144 People’s general, impracticable desire to talk deeply and truly about things lures them into making their words ‘by a secret supposition, to stand for a thing’.145 If we recall the Terminists’ theory of ‘supposition’, whereby words are conceived as 142 145

Locke 1990a, p. 1. 143 Locke 1975, p. 499 (iii.x.17). Locke 1975, pp. 407 (iii.ii.5); 500 (iii.x.18).

144

Locke 1975, p. 406 (iii.ii.4).

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standing directly for things, we see where Locke’s attack is coming from.146 Having repudiated this common error, institutionalised by logicians, he asks ‘leave here to say, that it is a perverting the use of words, and brings unavoidable obscurity and confusion into their signification, whenever we make them stand for any thing, but those ideas we have in our minds’.147 This referential self-delusion is at the root of another abuse of words: ‘taking them for things’. Locke’s targets here are those dogmatic philosophical system-builders who pass off their imaginative pictures of the world as true. Members of a sect ‘come to be persuaded, that the terms of that sect, are so suited to the nature of things, that they perfectly correspond with their real existence’. First on his list of preposterous language-worlds is that invented by Aristotelians. Those who are ‘bred up in the Peripatetick Philosophy . . . think the Ten Names, under which are ranked the Ten Predicaments’ are ‘exactly conformable to the nature of things’ and are ‘persuaded, that substantial forms, vegetative souls, abhorrence of a vacuum, intentional species, etc. are something real’. He then proceeds to lampoon the fantasies of the Platonists and Epicureans.148 The great raft of insignificant words that keeps vain speakers afloat is dangerous because it seems significant. It does not matter that there is nothing, not even an idea, let alone a thing, behind the words. Locke is so worried about this verbal trickery that he lays it down as a ‘fundamental

146 147

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See above chapter 1, p. 29 on the Terminists. Locke 1975, p. 407 (iii.ii.5). Yolton (1970, pp. 205–6), Alexander (1985, pp. 240–2), Formigari (1988, p. 117) and Losonsky (1994, pp. 134–5) all draw on Locke’s discussion of the two ‘secret references’ (the other being taking our words to stand for ideas in the minds of others, see above, p. 236, fn. 145), to supplement what they see as his inadequate theory of signification, which they say fails to elucidate meaning and reference. See for example, Yolton 1970, pp. 205–6: ‘immediately and properly my words are only signs of the ideas I have, but Locke admits that we give words a ‘secret reference’ to other men’s ideas and also to things . . . Locke needed a doctrine of signs which could do more than stand for our ideas. The conditions for communication and the conditions for the reality of our talk make necessary these referential suppositions about words standing for other than our own ideas.’ Locke’s remarks (which these commentators omit to quote) about the two suppositions being a ‘perversion’ of the use of words reveal that language does not necessarily work in the ways that we suppose, and that therefore these automatic suppositions should be discouraged. While Locke does say that the ideational signification of our words should possess this ‘double conformity’ (Locke 1975, p. 386 (ii.xxxii.8)), it is a normative not a descriptive claim about language, rarely realised in the case of precise communication and never in the case of substantial real essences. Cf. (Ayers 1991, i, p. 275) on semantic individualism and (p. 269) on the secret references as ‘mistakes’; Aarsleff (1982 pp. 3–41) on double conformity as a ‘serious mistake’. Ashworth (1984, p. 64) claims that the double conformity is the basis for Locke’s ‘criteria for the meaningful use of language’. Locke 1975, p. 497 (iii.x.14); cf. p. 499 (iii.x.15) on materia prima. Jolley (1999, pp. 143–61) sees Locke’s principal aims in book iii of the Essay as to lampoon Aristotelian classification and to set out the limitations of our knowledge of things.

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rule’ in the Conduct of the Understanding : ‘not to take words for things, nor suppose that names in books signifie real entities in nature, ’till [one] can frame clear and distinct ideas of those entities’.149 Words accrue a false but forceful life of their own. In the intense debate between Limborch and Locke about ‘freedom’ and whether judgement is separate from or determines the will, Locke suggests on 12 August 1701 that his correspondent is seduced by the common misapprehension, enshrined in and constituted by language, that the ‘will’ is a distinct agent. He berates him for being ‘led away by a common way of speaking’, when he says that ‘the Will is master of our actions’. ‘How great is the force of custom in the use of words, which steals in from time to time while we are unawares.’150 While ‘names made at pleasure, neither alter the nature of things, nor make us understand them’, they ensnare us into imagining otherwise.151 Forced to use the invented linguistic map of the world, Locke cannot help but perpetuate its fallacies: But I desire, it may be considered, how difficult it is, to lead another by words into the thoughts of things, stripp’d of those specifical differences we give them: which things, if I name not, I say nothing; and if I do name them, I thereby rank them into some sort, or other, and suggest to the mind the usual abstract idea of that species; and so cross my purpose.152

Trapped in language, we cannot talk about the world. The creative power of language is even more effective in the moral sphere. While people can say what they like about nature, it presses irresistibly on discourse. The objective world, albeit only imaginatively known, sets a limit on what will be believed. The actions and particularly the intentions of men, however, provide no such block and fall victim to whatever labels are applied. Words bestow value on things. Locke therefore inherits the worry about the fact, flagrantly exploited by rhetoricians, that calling something good makes it so. He refers implicitly to paradiastole when he says that ‘in mixed modes, we are much more uncertain, it being not easy to determine of several actions; whether they are to be called Justice, or Cruelty; Liberality, or Prodigality’.153 Words make actions virtues or vices according to the speaker’s wish. Language not only masks injustice with specious words, but constitutes the moral complexion of the action. Rather than act as a transparent window to the truth, they describe it, and the audience has no 149 152

Locke 1993, pp. 86–7. 150 Locke 1976–89, vii, pp. 406; 405. 151 Locke 1975, p. 174 (ii.xiii.18). Locke 1975, p. 465 (iii.vi.43). 153 Locke 1975, p. 387 (ii.xxxiii.10).

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access to anything beyond. When Locke is defending the right of war against an unjust aggressor, he vehemently declares that the attack ‘is still violence and injury, however colour’d with the name, pretences, or forms of law’.154 Later, in 1690, when William is under siege for having stolen the throne, Locke explains how Louis XIV’s labelling William a ‘usurper’ has a creative effect. ‘I wonder not to hear that the French king calls him so, as the most pernicious opinion [which] can be fixed on him.’155 This example recalls a subtle means of evaluation that had been noted by Locke’s predecessors. He explicitly refers to the way in which apparently neutral, purely descriptive terms in fact perform an evaluative act. ‘The positive idea of the action, and its moral relation, are comprehended together under one name’, hiding its normative import, imperceptibly eliciting an emotional response. Locke gives the example of ‘stealing’. This word is ‘commonly understood to signify the moral pravity of the action, and to denote its contrariety to the law’.156 But taking away a madman’s sword is no sin, although it ‘be properly denominated stealing’ and undeserving of the ‘contempt’ the word inherently inspires.157 Locke also refers us to ‘the laudable and esteemed names of Subtlety and Acuteness’.158 He urges us to drain our descriptive terms of the evaluative content which dangerously clouds our judgement. By confusing the morality with the action ‘under one term, those who yield too easily to the impressions of sounds, and are often forward to take names for things, are often misled in their judgment of actions’.159 While Locke is basically echoing, if developing, old concerns, he makes an innovative contribution to the view that words create morality. As noted above, naming plays an indispensable part in the genesis of mixed modes. Having selected the simple ideas to be included, the mind unites them into one idea and ‘ties them together by a name’.160 There is so close a relationship between the nominal (and real) essence of a mixed mode and its name as to make them almost identical. Their essences ‘being made by the mind’ and nowhere existent ‘would cease again, were there not something that did, as it were, hold it together, and keep the parts from scattering. Though therefore it be the mind that makes the collection, ’tis the name which is, as it were the knot, that ties them fast together.’161 It is the sensible, fixative quality of language that brings morality into existence. The ‘fleeting, and transient combinations of 154 157 159 161

Locke Locke Locke Locke

1988, p. 281. 155 Locke 1997, p. 311. 156 Locke 1975, p. 359. 158 1975, p. 360 (ii.xxviii.16). Locke 1975, p. 494 (iii.x.8). 1975, p. 359 (ii.xxviii.16). 160 Locke 1975, p. 429 (iii.v.4). 1975, p. 434 (iii.v.10).

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simple ideas’ attain ‘a constant and lasting existence’ only in their names, which are therefore ‘very apt to be taken for the ideas themselves’.162 A moral idea is neither ‘noticed’ nor ‘supposed’ to exist ‘unless a name be joined to it’.163 Moral terms are therefore not only constitutive of the moral status of the thing to which they are applied, but the nature of the moral edifice itself is dependent on its instantiation in language. writing ourselves In addition to writing the natural and moral worlds outside us, language – literally, as well as figuratively – writes our selves. Locke’s characterisation of the mind as ‘white paper’ is only half a metaphor.164 To a great extent the views and values with and against which we identify our selves are written by others on our minds. Their truth is no object, ‘for white paper receives any characters’.165 Locke’s maverick rejection of innate ideas and principles, and his concomitant identification of sensation as the fount of all external knowledge make us the irredeemable victims of the words we hear. With added reason then, he reiterates the pedagogical and philosophical aphorism that people unthinkingly ingest authorities. This is a particularly grim predicament for Locke, as a consequence of his radical stance on the plurality – and therefore falsity – of belief systems, notably moral ones. Given that the drastic multiplicity of moralities necessarily fall away from the one true natural law, they must embody all manner of error. While he sometimes speculates on the goodness of conventional systems, Locke’s heart is generally heavy with the depravities that people applaud, asking us to remember, for example, ‘whole nations, and those of the most civilized people’ who condone the exposure of children.166 It is this sinful array that is whispered into the unguarded minds of men. As had long been noted, people are especially pliable when they are young and soft. In his Thoughts concerning Education (1693) Locke worries about the corrupting chatter of servants: a ‘contagion’ that ‘infects’ us with incivility and vice.167 More generally and inevitably, children ‘receive into their minds propositions (especially about matters of religion) from their parents, nurses, or those about them: which being insinuated into their unwary, as well as unbiass’d understandings, and fastened by 162 164 165

Locke 1975, p. 291 (ii.xxii.8). 163 Locke 1975, p. 435 (iii.v.11). Locke 1975, p. 104 (ii.i.2). See Eng (1980) for an interpretation of the tabula rasa metaphor. Locke 1975, p. 81 (i.iii.22). 166 Locke 1975, p. 70 (i.iii.9). 167 Locke 1989, p. 127.

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degrees, are at last (equally, whether true or false) riveted there by long custom and education beyond all possibility of being pull’d out again’.168 Contingent moral principles become naturalised and entitled ‘innate’ by their being whispered into the receptive and unsuspecting ears of babes. Doctrines with ‘no better original, than the superstition of a nurse, or the authority of an old woman’, with time and social endorsement, assume ‘the dignity of principles in religion or morality’. Adults ‘instil into the unwary, and, as yet, unprejudiced understanding’ those doctrines they have themselves swallowed.169 Words occupy such a prominent place in our formative experience that in the mouths of self-interested and shortsighted human beings they inconspicuously sow new seeds of error and bigotry, and yield a viciously circular harvest. In his 1677 journal Locke is concerned by the ‘opinions implanted . . . by education’, when we are too innocent to close our ears. The civil laws ‘must be questioned’. Instead, they are ‘looked on with reverence as the standards of right & wrong truth & falshood when perhaps those soe sacred opinions were but the oracles of the nursery’. This kind of brainwashing turns people into dupes. Rather than doing their duty and judging whether their government serves the public good, they idolise its dicta, which were inscribed in ‘time out of minde’. ‘Traditionall grand talke’ passes down generations without test. ‘This is the fate of our tender age which being seasoned early grows by continuation of time as it were into the very constitution of their minde.’170 The words of others seep into the kernel of the self, becoming inseparable from and identical with it, erasing their own adventitious and contingent origins. As lazy and socially enamoured ‘camelions’, we unthinkingly imbibe words and propositions, examining neither their meaning nor their credibility.171 The words of those we trust and whose interests we share successfully make up our minds, while our enemies’ speeches fall on deaf ears. In the Conduct, Locke inveighs against ‘those who always resign their judgment to the last man they heard or read’.172 We ground our opinions on propositions such as ‘the founders or leaders of my party are good men, and therefore their tenets are true’; ‘it is the opinion of a sect that is erroneous, therefore it is false’; ‘it hath been long received in the world, 168 169 170

171

Locke 1975, p. 712 (iv.xx.9). Locke 1975, p. 81 (i.iii.22). MS. Locke f. 2, p. 125 (117). Cf. Dunn (1969, p. 197) on how men inherit a moral vocabulary which embodies ‘the misapprehensions of the moral truth generated by the laziness and viciousness of their forebears. . . . All men are educated in historical societies and are thus trained in particular moral errors merely by learning their duties in the language of their society.’ Locke 1989, p. 126. 172 Locke 1993, p. 82.

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therefore it is true; or it is new, and therefore false’.173 Locke attacks the simple ‘imbibing’ of prejudices to which ‘education, party, reverence, fashion and interest’ lead us blindly.174 He rejects the ‘implicit faith’ with which we indolently swallow words.175 The ‘country gentleman’, that recurrent object of Locke’s distaste, knows no more than what he has learnt and heard from his books and his small circle of drunk, selfsatisfied company. Their education encourages them to copy and then rattle out ‘other men’s thoughts, floating only in the memory’ on one or other side of a question.176 In their easy, sensible guise words hang suspended, ungrounded but dominant in our minds. The adhesive depth of this internal inscription cannot be underestimated, given that we are objects of nurture. The thrust of Locke’s Thoughts concerning Education is to reveal the sovereignty of customary praxis. Custom has such potency that it merges with a man’s fibre, becoming indistinguishable from it. ‘Habits’ are ‘woven into the very principles of his nature’. They become ‘indiscernible’.177 If children are made to do something repeatedly, it ‘will be natural in them’.178 Likewise, statements we hear and echo repeatedly knit themselves into our nature. The contingency of the meanings of these verbal impressions – manufactured, unreliable and opaque as they are – is hidden. We are unaware that the beloved tenets that support us and that feel so natural are in fact the fabrications of ignorant and selfish external sources which insinuate themselves by ‘gentle and insensible degrees’.179 As so often in Locke’s philosophy of language, his innocent portrayal of men dominated by poor language marks out his account. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he does not accuse the great bulk of insignificant speakers of malign deception. They do not know that they do not know what they say but instead believe that their precepts, which chime so uniformly with their company’s, are good and true. Locke begins his Conduct with the incisive claim that we never do anything without a reason for doing it.180 Such reasons are never self-consciously evil or stupid, even in our private moments. Unable to bear the (self-)accusations of ignorance or falsity, we convince ourselves of the opposite, but the process of self-conviction barely reaches consciousness. As Locke remarks, 173

174 177 180

Locke 1993, p. 21. These closely recall the ‘sophisms of authority’ of the Port-Royal Logique, whereby we believe ‘not by sound and essential reasons which make the truth known to us’, but on account of external testimony (Arnauld and Nicole 1996, pp. 220–1). Locke 1993, p. 40; cf. p. 102. 175 Locke 1993, p. 9. 176 Locke 1993, p. 52. Locke 1989, pp. 110; 111. 178 Locke 1989, p. 120. 179 Locke 1975, p. 87. Locke 1993, p. 3.

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‘men would be intolerable to themselves, and contemptible to others, if they should embrace opinions without any ground, and hold what they could give no manner of reason for. True or False, Solid or sandy, the mind must have some foundation to rest it self upon’.181 ‘Everybody has some maxims which govern all their thoughts.’182 Ironically, it is our very love of ‘truth’ that ensnares us into believing the ‘fallacies’ that animate the mouths and minds of teachers and pupils alike.183 What Locke designates as prejudiced and ill-grounded principles, we embrace with clear consciences. We utter them ‘in earnest’, fully ‘persuaded’ of what we say.184 When we experience misfortune, this is precisely what it is; it is never our fault.185 The ‘country gentleman’ is ‘muffled up in the zeal and infallibility of his own sect’.186 Our tenets might be chance and fallible intrusions, but they feel incontrovertible. Our myopia about the false principles by which we live is acute not only because they have been stamped on us unawares but also, and somewhat contradictorily, because they are ultimately self-created. This is another aspect of the tension – or insightful complementarity – between the malleability and the agency of man that overarches Locke’s philosophy.187 His presentation of human pliability is powerfully coincident with his robust account of natural rights and responsibilities, his (albeit strained) theory of cognitive freedom and his rejection of the apologetic prop of original sin.188 In the final analysis, we have not been blindfolded by 181 185 187

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Locke 1993, p. 21. 182 Locke 1993, p. 28. 183 Locke 1993, pp. 120–1. 184 Locke 1993, p. 22. Locke 1993, pp. 24–5. 186 Locke 1993, pp. 13–14. See Tully (1993, pp. 4–5) on this juxtaposition, and the important caveat that ‘it does not follow from the point that humans are tractable that governments have a right to mould them as they please or that they will not rightfully resist’; cf. p. 179 on Lockean subjectivity as denoting ‘a subject who is calculating and calculable, from the perspective of the probabilistic knowledge and practices; and the sovereign bearer of rights and duties, subject to and of law from the voluntaristic perspective’. See also Balibar (1996) on the complex relations between subject, individual and citizen in seventeenth-century philosophy; Dietz (1990) on the subject/citizen identity in Hobbes. On political freedom see Tully 1993, pp. 315–23; pp. 281–314 on liberty and the natural law. On freedom of belief see Passmore 1986. On emotive motivation and the agent’s freedom to suspend their desires, see Ayers 1991, ii, pp. 192–5. On Locke’s strained account, see James 1997, pp. 284–8. See also Chappell 1994a and 1994b; Losonsky 1996 and 2001, pp. 72–104. Dunn (1990, p. 19) points to the tensions between Locke’s convictions that belief cannot be coerced and that people are ‘nevertheless unequivocally responsible for almost all their less edifying beliefs’. On property in the broad Lockean sense see Tully 1993, pp. 96–117. Cf. Tully (1983, p. 11) on Locke’s seminal part in formulating the discourses of ‘the sovereign individual and his or her subjective rights’; Brett (1997) on the history of the subjective rights discourse. Brown (1999) argues that Locke’s figuring of God as an absolute monarch ‘circumscribes the vaunted liberalism of Locke’s political philosophy’ (p. 100). On Locke’s rejection of original sin see Locke 1997, pp. 320–1; Locke 1999, pp. 7–9; Locke 2002, pp. 229–30; Marshall 1994, pp. 414–15. Vogt (1997) argues for the centrality of the Fall in Locke and the ‘noble, if anxious, rebel’ who results (p. 524).

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anyone but ourselves, and it is this which makes the problem of self-delusion so intractable. We have ‘put colour’d spectacles before our eyes’, and are therefore in thrall to what we see.189 Locke uses the potent symbol of sight – symbolising irresistible testimony – to show how deep our self-delusion goes. He refers to the powerful ‘disposition’ we have ‘to put any cheat upon our selves’.190 This self-imposition ‘is the strongest imposition of all others’.191 This self-‘persuasion’ (as Locke calls it, evoking the charms of rhetoric) reveals its indomitable power in Enthusiasts.192 They ‘perswade themselves’ that God speaks to them ‘by a ray darted into the mind immediately from the fountain of light’.193 Picking up on a ubiquitious image from the time, Locke explains how this mere ‘ignis fatuus’ has men by the nose because they are ‘most forwardly obedient to the impulses they receive from themselves’.194 Although Locke only added the chapter on Enthusiasm in the Essay’s fourth edition (1700), he is clearly thinking about the force of self-persuasion much earlier. In a manuscript dated December 1687 he asks whether ‘an inward inspiration’ should ‘be distinguished from a strong persuasion’.195 We are not then, just led by the ears, but are responsible for the speeches we internalise and replicate. Our autonomy therefore serves also as an exit from our habituated verbal bondage, but it takes punitive self-discipline to extricate ourselves. We are accountable for the cataracts that cloud our vision and we must remove them ourselves, as Locke says in one deliberately gruesome image.196 It is painful to see with our own eyes and speak with our own minds, rather than those of others. Just as the dancer on the tightrope got there by the sweat of his brow, and the land lies barren unless we cultivate it, we have to labour at becoming virtuous and wise.197 Rather than impose our vision upon the world, we must submit ourselves to its evidence.198 We ought as far as possible to haul ourselves out of our subjective mire, travel the world, converse with others and really listen, in an attempt 189

190 193 194

195 198

Locke 1993, p. 101. Spellman (1997, pp. 11; 17; 50) highlights Locke’s concerns about Enthusiasm and his despair at the ‘inglorious end’ to the ‘Cromwellian experiment’ as ignorant Protestant sectarians demonstrated their enslavement to their passions (p. 85). Locke 1993, p. 43. 191 Locke 1993, p. 45. 192 Locke 1975, p. 696 (iv.xix.1). Locke 1975, p. 699 (iv.xix.5). Locke 1975, pp. 702 (iv.xix.10); 669 (ix.xix.7). One pertinent example of this image appears in Hobbes (1996, p. 36), where he derides the ‘ignes fatui’ of rhetorical speech. This Hobbesian echo further intimates the rhetorical overtones of Locke’s concerns about Enthusiasm. Hobbes also seems to be in Locke’s mind in his circular description of the Enthusiast’s reasoning: ‘it is a revelation because they firmly believe it, and they believe it, because it is a revelation’ (Locke 1975, p. 702 (iv.xix.10)). Cf. Hobbes: ‘to say he hath spoken to him in a dream, is no more then to say he hath dreamt that God spake to him’ (1996, p. 257). MS. Locke c. 27, fo. 73r. 196 Locke 1993, p. 40. 197 Locke 1993, p. 7; 1988, p. 297. Locke 1993, p. 68.

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to widen our narrow view.199 While it upsets our pride to turn our critical faculties back upon ourselves, we must investigate the grounds of our habitual principles.200 Their contingency has a double edge: just as they can be implanted, so can they be weeded out again, but only if we work at it.201 Words enable and naturalise blind thought. They are both the cause of our thoughtlessness and the cover which keeps it secret from ourselves and others. We must rip off our linguistic masks, and examine what lies beneath. However, this disguise is so deeply embedded that it is indistinguishable from our natural face. To pull it off would seem to destroy ourselves, and Locke despairs of our doing that. The way in which we write ourselves with language proves especially important when we turn to the socially-driven nature of Lockean people. Most of us are, above all things, concerned to impress others, and words are the pre-eminent means of doing this. Locke is repeating the insight of his predecessors that emotions are extensively socially-orientated and in particular, that people are vain creatures in constant search of admiration. He develops this belief into a full-blown account of human motivation in the Essay.202 There are three forms of law that govern us: divine, civil and ‘the law of opinion or reputation’.203 The last-named is by far the most powerful and determines whether our actions be considered ‘virtues’ or ‘vices’. A virtue is simply that which is ‘thought praise-worthy’ and a vice that which attracts ‘discredit’.204 The normative framework of our community dictates our virtuous status and may or may not coincide with God’s law, but it is our peers rather than our maker who exert the strongest pull on us. The prospects of approbation and disapproval are the sharpest spurs to human behaviour. While ‘most men seldom seriously reflect on’ the eternal but distant punishments which attend the breach of the natural law, and hope that they will get away with breaking the civil law, no one can escape nor bear the contempt of his fellows. ‘No body, that has the least thought, or sense of a man about him, can live in society, under the constant dislike, and ill opinion of his familiars, and those he converses with. This is a burthen too heavy for humane sufferance.’205 Driven by our desire to be admired by others, words are the means whereby we might work the levers. 199 200 202 203 205

Locke 1993, p. 10. E.g. Locke (1993, p. 39; p. 127) on ‘bottoming’. Cf. Schouls 1994. 201 Locke 1993, pp. 29–30. See Tully (1993, pp. 179–214) on Lockean subjection to ‘juridical government’ (p. 179). 204 Locke 1975, p. 352 (ii.xxviii.7). Locke 1975, pp. 354 (ii.xxviii.11); 353 (ii.xxviii.10). Locke 1975, p. 357 (ii.xxviii.12).

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At times, as in Of Ethic in General, Locke scoffs at the powerlessness of the rule of virtue and vice which has for its enforcement only ‘reputation and disgrace’.206 Without the law of a superior wielding hellfire and bliss, Locke declares that ‘the force of morality is lost’.207 However, while it is correct that the greatest happiness and our ultimate interest lies in heaven and the avoidance of hell, generally Locke concedes that most of us only weakly perceive this; we are bowled over instead by the grail of reputation. Indeed, as though responding to his own ridicule, he declares in the Essay that ‘if any one shall imagine, that I have forgot my own notion of a law’, that is, as containing powers of enforcement, he who imagines that ‘commendation and disgrace’ are not ‘strong motives on men’ are ‘little skill’d in the nature, or history of mankind: the greatest part whereof he shall find to govern themselves chiefly, if not solely, by this law of fashion’.208 Outside as well as inside the Essay, it is this conventional law that generally seems to control us. In his journal Locke makes an entry in 1678 entitled ‘Credit, Disgrace’. ‘Reputation’ is the ‘principal spring from which the actions of men take their rise’, and holds more sway than civil laws.209 In his commonplace book he copies the following statement from Castiglione: ‘we al love commendations & very hardly defend ourselves from flattery’.210 We slavishly follow custom. Indeed it ‘serves for reason’.211 It makes things sacred.212 We do not ‘dare oppose it’, but parrot the favourite tenets of the crowd, for fear of being deemed cultural ‘heretic[s]’.213 In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke advises parents that rather than rods and sugar plums, ‘esteem and disgrace are, of all others, the most powerful incentives to the mind, once it is brought to relish them’.214 Praise and disgrace cause us to feel intense pleasure and pain respectively, and we therefore seek the former and flee the latter. Given that we are intensely selfconscious and social animals, it is fashionable words, at the interstices of human interaction, that constitute and impress our personalities with the greatest force. In turn, it is these words that we echo back and thereby impress our selves on others.215 The passionate mechanism that operates the law of reputation is something like vanity. While it pushes us toward sociability, it also wrenches us from it. Self-love inspires us to seek praise but it simultaneously 206 207

208 210 213

Locke 1997, p. 299. Locke 1997, p. 302. On unease at the want of some absent good as the basic determinant of the will, see Locke 1975, pp. 250–1 (ii.xxi.31). Locke 1975, pp. 356–7 (ii.xxviii.12). 209 Locke 1997, pp. 271; 272. MS. Locke d. 1, p. 57. 211 Locke 1989, p. 218. 212 Locke 1988, p. 183. Locke 1993, p. 103. 214 Locke 1989, p. 116. 215 Locke 1993, p. 18.

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infects us with a strong competitive streak. Our ambitious desire to dominate others, so patent in the Second Treatise, is at the root of Locke’s doctrine of the separation of powers.216 The legislative must be separate from the executive because ‘it may be too great a temptation to humane frailty apt to grasp at power, for the same persons who have the power of making laws, to have also in their hands the power to execute them’.217 The Letter Concerning Toleration is similarly riddled with dark intimations about the libido dominandi which underlies purportedly religious policy.218 These driving passions are part of an extensive typology of passions that track our relations with other people. For example, ‘grief ’ is stimulated by ‘the loss of a friend’.219 Words play a huge role in the exercise of these social passions because it is by them that we interact with other people. In a culture where linguistic virtuosity is highly prized, language itself might accrue glory and power. The disputing chicaneer is encouraged by the fact that his is a ‘laudable’ pursuit.220 The gentleman whose head is stored with ‘shreds of all kinds’, like a ‘magazine’, with which he can talk on any subject he gets thrown, will impress his company.221 Locke does not only snipe at men who make themselves with their words, but recognises the worth of language in one’s self-promotion. In the manuscript known as ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman’ (1703) he explains that reading is crucial for increasing our knowledge but also for enabling us ‘to deliver and make out that knowledge to others’, and it is the second of these uses that Locke suggests is ‘chief’. This is because ‘the greatest part of [a gentleman’s] business and usefulness in the world, is by the influence of what he says, or writes to others’.222 In his Thoughts concerning Education, he had already made the point, declaring that gentlemen are predominantly occupied ‘with their tongues, and with their pens’, for it is these which effect their ‘greatest business in the world’.223 It is therefore of immeasurable importance that they are taught to speak and write well when they are young. The better they do so, the more they will be esteemed by their peers. It appears, then, that language is woven into our personalities. Not only does it constitute thought, but it is a visible mark of our social identity, whose beauty we are overwhelmingly interested to invent. *** 216 219 222

Locke 1989, pp. 169–70. 217 Locke 1988, p. 364. 218 E.g. Locke 1983, p. 23. Locke 1997, p. 240. 220 Locke 1990a, p. 14. 221 Locke 1993, p. 56. Locke 1997, p. 349. 223 Locke 1989, p. 225.

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It should now be clear why Locke makes the innovative insertion of a book on language into what is otherwise a logic of ideas. Logicians, along with the vast majority of their readers, had taken it for granted that words were a perfect copy of the workings of the mind and did not require separate analysis. Locke’s counterclaim is that there is neither the hierarchy nor the harmony between words and ideas that had generally been supposed. While he subscribes to the conventional belief that words ought to comply with and replicate thoughts, he concludes that in practice they dominate and diverge, and therefore need individual treatment. The pre-eminence of words conceals and propagates a trio of semantic sins: a mess of unreality, instability and vacuity lurks beneath words which, undeterred, spin their own brilliant yarn. While the problem of language sometimes seems to be more about the ideas which words signify than the words themselves, it is the words that enable this ideational travesty. Indeed, in his discussion about the ‘imperfection of words’, Locke asks the pertinent question why he charges ‘this as an imperfection, rather upon our words than understandings’. He replies: though it terminated in things, yet it was for the most part so much by the intervention of words, that they seem’d scarce separable from our general knowledge. At least they interpose themselves so much between our understandings and the truth, which it would contemplate and apprehend, that like the medium through which visible objects pass, their obscurity and disorder does not seldom cast a mist before our eyes, and impose upon our understandings.224

In their beguiling, autocratic sensuality words fill our view and project only their own deceptive story. Locke wants to peel away the words and reveal the untold truth about what they can possibly mean. Locke demolishes the foundations of early-modern linguistic theory. He jeopardises reference, communication and truth. However, his dynamite comes from within the ancient walls. He wholeheartedly agrees with Aristotle and his multifarious, rebellious progeny that words are arbitrary signs which signify the speaker’s thoughts. Through the filter of his epistemology, and drawing heavily on the various detonations of his predecessors, he pushes the commonplace to its logical and disturbing conclusion. Internalising the theories of language he learnt in the trivium, and disturbed by the complacencies as well as the concerns about language he heard from philosophers, he paints a bleak picture of language, rejecting proposals for its reform as fatally flawed. While his predecessors had often focused on the rectificable abuses of language, Locke exposed 224

Locke 1975, p. 488 (iii.ix.21).

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its irredeemable imperfections. While his predecessors had often blamed men for the problems of language and could therefore plan for its rehabilitation, Locke insists that language itself played a guilty part, and therefore offers no easy solutions. Instead, he further, apparently ineluctably, entrenches the three linguistic concerns which impinged on and burst out of broader contemporary reflections on nature, morality, religion and politics. The effect is a kind of reasoned despair which is both unparalleled by and inexplicable without the unease about language which had haunted early-modern philosophy. Locke’s account of language goes far beyond what is usually claimed by modern scholars. While words do, absolutely, signify ideas, these ideas are themselves often forged in language and inscribed by other people. As innately vapid, intensely sensuous, socially-orientated (though not very sociable) creatures, our minds are scripted by the talk we hear applauded. Locke in no way presages the logical priority of language to thought which is now starting to sound like common sense. For him, language is representative rather than constitutive of thought, and consciousness is logically prior to words. However, he does probe the practical involvement of language in cognition. He believes that our contingent linguistic classifications largely determine our understanding of things. He therefore gives us another way of agreeing with Wittgenstein that ‘a picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably’.225 Locke has his own seductive story about how the boundaries are blurred between private and public, between thought and language.

225

Wittgenstein 1958, p. 48e.

chapter 10

Locke in the face of language

Locke is most famous not for his philosophy of language but for his epistemology and political theory. Having charted his linguistic concerns, this book concludes by considering how they might make us rethink his better-known contributions to philosophy. When his searing deconstruction of words is injected into his views on human understanding and civil society, various elements in these views come under pressure, while others come more sharply into focus. I investigate the ramifications of the following three aspects of his philosophy of language: first, the concealing and constitutive power of words which belies their ideational limits; second, the doubly contractual nature of language; and finally, Locke’s sometimes contradictory account of semantic individualism. I argue that these features of language unsettle, or rather further unsettle key ambitions of Locke’s philosophy: intellectual humility, toleration, political judgement, trust, community and sociability. The imperfections of words threaten to poison already weak minds and communities. This is therefore a more speculative chapter. It brings together claims of Locke’s that he did not himself connect, particularly when it draws out the consequences of language for society, and thereby throws up some apparent contradictions. It could be objected that such an approach is based on an unrealistic expectation of a unified authorial personality between and even within texts that are written with different purposes, ‘by’ different discourses, and for different audiences.1 This objection is particularly pressing in the case of Locke, whose oeuvre is notable for its changes of mind. However, it would be equally objectionable to eschew altogether the notion that it was one and the same man who put pen to the papers we have before us now, and not to inquire into their coherence. 1

See Dunn (2003, p. 257) on the implausibility of Locke’s life being, and even less, seeming, a ‘unified whole’. For a discrete analysis of the impact of Locke’s philosophy of language on his political project, see Dawson 2005a.

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Moreover, the contradictions, if such they are, often occur within individual texts, as well as between them. Locke’s incongruous commitments cannot therefore always be dismissed as functions of different contexts and purposes. Jostling and interlacing with each other on the page, it seems that in some way Locke held them together. And finally, as I have shown in this book, Locke’s concern with language is not confined to the Essay, but is a thread that runs throughout his writing, often appearing in a social context. Locke was concerned with the subject precisely because it seemed to him to strike so brutally at its users. To hear this sensitivity we only need recall his insistence that the ambiguous use of language does not merely attack the ivory tower, but ‘hath invaded the great concernments of humane life and society’ and ‘brought confusion, disorder, and uncertainty into the affairs of mankind’.2 A more patent expression of the applicability of language to society one could not find. It is therefore consistent with Locke’s purposes to probe further this bleak intersection. the contamination of the understanding Turning first to human understanding, Locke’s most basic claim is that it can reach no further than ideas. His stricture plays out in two opposing directions. On the one hand it severely restricts the scope of our knowledge of the objective world, and on the other it (sometimes, at least) removes all bounds to our knowledge of morality. This imbalance of cognitive facilities is the candle of the Lord.3 God has calibrated our intellectual sight in order that we can live precisely according to his will – to which, as his workmanship, we are rightfully subject. We can in part discover his will by assuming that he works teleologically, and thereby inferring that what is given or suggested by nature must be willed by its creator. So for example, the apparently involuntary love for her child that suffuses a mother is an inferential sign that we are obliged to preserve God’s creatures, as well as God’s way of nudging us to do so.4 By the same token, we must use the mental powers that (with the help of Locke’s Essay) we find ourselves with, rather than pretend to those we lack or ignore those we have.5 Our poor but by no means bankrupt capacity to know nature and our potentially unfettered grip on morality, ought to make us less zealous in pursuit of the former and relentless in search of the latter.6 As Locke announces at the 2 5 6

Locke 1975, p. 496 (iii.x.12). 3 Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.5). 4 Locke 1988, pp. 309; 181. On the obligation to use and improve the faculties we do have, see Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.5). Locke 1975, p. 646 (iv.xii.11).


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beginning of the Essay, ‘our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct’.7 This picks up the even straighter account of our purposes in the Two Treatises where it turns out that we are ‘sent into the world by his order and about his business’.8 Our business is God’s business, that is: to be moral. I shall deal with morality when I turn to Locke’s political philosophy. Now I focus on Locke’s modest agenda for the knowledge of nature, arguing that while at first sight his philosophy of language supports this agenda, on closer inspection it undermines it. An express aim of the Essay is to establish the limits of the understanding, and more particularly to establish how much and how little it can know about the outside world. This mission is backed up by Locke’s fundamental linguistic dictum that words can only signify ideas. Just as our knowledge about things is limited to the sensory ideas of those things, so is our language. These twin theories are intimately linked. The small extent of our knowledge ought to stop our strutting speeches, and encourage us rather ‘to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things, which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities’. We ought not to be ‘so forward, out of an affectation of an universal knowledge, to raise questions, and perplex ourselves and others with disputes about things, to which our understandings are not suited’.9 Locke’s insistence on ‘this incertitude of things’, as he puts it in A Letter concerning Toleration, is intended in large part as we have already seen to champion toleration. His epistemology makes it indefensible for us not only to persecute people for their beliefs, but also contemptuously to condemn those beliefs or hubristically to vaunt our own.10 Having brandished the indigence of the understanding, Locke uses the ideational confines of language to push home the point that we cannot talk with any certainty or depth about the world. ‘I think’, he writes in the key chapter in the Essay on ‘the extent of humane knowledge’, ‘that it becomes the modesty of philosophy not to pronounce magisterially, where we want evidence that can produce knowledge’. Given that we often have barely ‘faith and probability’, there is no space for dogmatism. The essential nature of things, particularly of ‘substance’, the subject of such fatal controversies between trinitarians and unitarians, is forever hidden. The vexing question ‘about the immateriality of the soul’ cannot be answered with 7 8 10

Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.6). Locke 1988, p. 271. 9 Locke 1975, p. 45 (i.i.4). Locke 1983, p. 36; cf. 1997, p. 276.

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‘demonstrative certainty’.11 Locke’s assertion of severely straitened ‘real’ knowledge is mirrored in his moderated presentation of speech.12 Book iii therefore carves deeper the groove already pugnaciously cut mid-way between dogmatism and scepticism by the other three books of the Essay and by mitigated and constructive sceptics before Locke, such as Gassendi and Boyle. Locke’s aim is not to silence the sceptics, whose less radical postulates had been fully appropriated into the new philosophical mainstream, while Descartes’ hyperbolic doubt no longer kept thinkers awake (if it ever did). Instead, Locke is concerned to attack dogmatists of all colours, particularly those who were then banging loudest on the drum – Aristotelians, Cartesians and ‘christians’. His limitation of the scope of both knowledge and language is designed to undercut the doctrinaire warriors in philosophical and religious battles. By cordoning off the space beyond which one cannot know or speak, Locke hopes to quell both the groundless, loquacious condescension of the philosophical ‘sects’, and the illegitimate expropriation of people’s rights by those whose ‘truth’ is accompanied by power and brandished in order to get more of it.13 His trumpet call that our knowledge and therefore our language about the world is circumscribed by the subjective and manufactured scope of our albeit ‘real’ ideas is designed to quieten the supercilious declarations of deluded speakers that they have got to the heart of matter and to restrain the brutality which is justified through this war of words. However, Locke’s dogged repetition that words can only signify ideas sounds strained in the light of the practical force of words that we have also seen him at pains to expose: they seem to – and we take them to, want them to and make them – stand for things. The ideational boundaries of language are belied by the improper power of language itself. Looking and sounding like an exact replica of the world, language threatens to undo the humiliating work at which Locke has laboured so hard. Language can be such a consummate liar in its mirror-like inscrutability that it is used by vain, gullible, peer-pressured, deceived but generally passionately sincere speakers to promulgate the fantasies of their party. So while words ought only to follow in the tiny, tentative footsteps of the ideas to which they are eternally shackled, they leap to marvellous truths. Language therefore undermines Locke’s tolerationist epistemological project by seeming to tell the truth about things which it cannot 11 12

13

Locke 1975, pp. 541–2 (iv.iii.6). On ideas of substances being ‘real’ when they ‘agree with the existence of things’ see Locke 1975, p. 374 (ii.xxx.5); on ‘real knowledge’ of substances see Locke 1975, pp. 568–9 (iv.iv.12). Locke 1975, p. 497 (iii.x.14).


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really divine. It brings into being that certainty which Locke is so intent on questioning. A large part of the purpose of book iii is therefore therapeutic. It is to identify and thereby disarm the false lights of words. In the same way that the obstacles to knowledge were cleared away by old and new logicians in their treatment of linguistic sophisms and cognitive errors, Locke brings to light the misconceptions and the gaping holes which are hidden beneath words, enabling – and forcing – us to think only in ‘determined’ ideas, which alone can constitute the meanings of words and be fed into ratiocination. He warns us against the supposedly infallible refuge of ‘clear and distinct’ ideas, which are themselves just another verbal cover for ‘obscurity and confusion’, for ideas that are not ‘seen and perceived to be’ in the mind, but only asserted in words.14 In addition to the Cartesian discourse which is clearly in his sights here, Locke strips all philosophical speech of its pretensions to a deep comprehension of the world. But there is an edge of hopelessness in Locke’s protestations about people taking words for things – which continue, unabated, to pepper book iv of the Essay. Locke’s strictures about the ideational limitations of words are as much a plaintive response to the compelling worldliness of words as they are the cool theoretical buttresses of his restrictive epistemology. At the contradictory heart of his philosophy of language lies the theoretical limitation of words to ideas coupled with the practical appearance of limitless words. These twin linguistic tenets by turns complement and defy his theory of knowledge. And since, as we have seen Locke discover in spite of himself, language cannot be separated from knowledge, the imperceptibly constitutive power of words must be integrated into epistemology, and problematise it accordingly. We know little, but our words make us believe the opposite. Turning now from the natural to the moral and political spheres, the scope of Locke’s epistemology is – in theory at least – markedly different. In the Essays on the Law of Nature, the Two Treatises and particularly strikingly in the Essay – on the whole a text that humbles the reader – Locke is abundantly confident that morality, and most importantly divine morality can be known, either probabilistically or even demonstratively. While God has not fitted us to know the world deeply, indeed has ordered us not to try, he has fully equipped us to know his moral law, the observance of which ought to pervade our being. As we have already seen, our facility for moral science has two parts. The first relates to the nature of moral ideas of all sorts. While our ideas of substances are 14

Locke 1975, p. 13 (Epistle to the Reader).

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inadequate ectypes, or copies, of the archetypes they are supposed to represent, our ideas of mixed modes are themselves the archetypes and therefore entirely ‘adequate’ and ‘real’.15 Unlike existential entities such as gold which are made by God and unknowable by us, moral entities are made by us and therefore absolutely knowable.16 It is because we know ‘the precise real essence[s]’ of mixed modes that we can perceive when they agree or disagree with each other and thereby arrive at demonstrative knowledge.17 The second part of our moral facility enables us to demonstrate the law of God, as opposed to any number of alternative, purely human moral systems. We can discover the law that obliges our nature in virtue of the little, but crucial certain knowledge we have of ‘the real, actual, existence of things’: intuitive knowledge of our own existence and thence demonstrative knowledge of our maker and our dependence on him.18 And even if we are not rational enough to work out precisely God’s law and why we must obey it, the ‘bare possibility, which no body can make any doubt of ’, of eternal happiness or misery, has weight crushing enough to induce us to be virtuous.19 Recalling Pascal’s wager, Locke celebrates the fact that even probable knowledge of our maker’s juridical apparatus can light our way. Unlike the natural laws of other creatures, such as stars, which are bound to shine, or plants, which grow as God decrees, the law of men is more normative than descriptive, men being free to oppose divine design.20 God’s law ought to be our nature. We avoid it on pain of everlasting hell. Sometimes Locke presents the flames of hell as licking so close upon our minds that God’s law seems to dwarf merely conventional moral codes which have only public censure and praise for their ‘utmost enforcement’.21 In addition to and as a result of being the organising principle of human life on the basis of which we stand or fall for eternity, the natural law is the foundation of Locke’s political theory. The duty to preserve mankind is what urges us out of nature into the commonwealth, what binds the government and what, when neglected, legitimates violence and revolution. The fulcrum on which political legitimacy rests is, at least on earth, the moral judgement of the people. While Locke wants to give an automatic account of the way in which a government is ‘dissolved’ and political power ‘devolves’ to the people when it acts against their good, he has to admit that in fact this requires agency on the part of 15 17 19

Locke 1975, pp. 375–84 (ii.xxxii); 373–4 (ii.xxx.4). 16 Locke 1975, p. 564 (iv.iv.5). 18 Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.16). Locke 1975, pp. 552–3 (iv.iii.21); 549 (iv.iii.18). Locke 1975, p. 281 (ii.xxi.70). 20 Locke 1954, pp. 109; 117. 21 Locke 1997, p. 299.


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the people.22 ‘Every man is judge.’23 Every man therefore has to decide when his king has broken the law of nature and attacked the public interest. He has to know what is owed to God and when that debt is unpaid. Knowing and acting on the law of nature is therefore central to the happiness of natural and political life, and sometimes Locke suggests that it is indeed intelligible and potent. However, there are powerful cross-currents that drag the reader on to a contrasting course. The conclusion of the Two Treatises that the people must judge the legitimacy of their government can be read not so much as a celebration as a regretful statement of that fact. While God waits in the wings for his grand appearance, and might even adjudicate on earth, as he did for Jephtha, in the first instance there are only men.24 The same clouded judgement that made the state of nature so unbearable, and the elimination of which is the whole purpose of entering the commonwealth, is ultimately all there is when we arrive.25 It is corrupt, but it is all we have got. Locke does not want to make the Hobbesian conflation of the state of nature – ‘a state of peace, good will, mutual assistance, and preservation’ – with the state of war – ‘a state of enmity, malice, violence, and mutual destruction’.26 However, it is the avoidance of war and injustice that is the ‘great reason of mens putting themselves into society, and quitting the state of nature’.27 It seems that the law of nature is too dim and feeble ever to have a natural reign. Locke’s somewhat preemptive attitude towards the suspicious behaviour of others indicates the depths of depravity he perceives. A man who takes absolute power over me, and likewise a thief, commit acts of war against me and I may kill them because it is reasonable to suppose that they want to kill me.28 The view that it is hard to internalise God’s commands also comes through sharply in, yet again against the grain of, the Essay. In various ways Locke’s impressive confidence about the demonstrability of the natural law is undermined. He worries that the inferential chains of mixed modes are too complex and abstruse for lazy thinkers. And while Locke’s optimistic unfurling of probability is intended as a salve for our uncertain minds, the doubts that he tries thereby to make irrelevant, about the nature of the soul and the existence of heaven and hell, answer 22 23

24 27

Locke 1988, p. 412. Locke 1988, p. 427. See Dunn (2003, pp. 277–8) on the ‘precariousness and onerousness, but also the endless revitalisation, of human judgment’ that is at the centre of Locke’s ‘vision of the human political predicament’. See also Hampsher-Monk (1996) on the increasing threat that subjectivity posed to the state. Locke 1988, p. 282. 25 Locke 1988, pp. 351; 324. 26 Locke 1988, p. 280. Locke 1988, p. 282. 28 Locke 1988, pp. 279–80.

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back, to create an agonised message that is so typical of Locke’s voice. At a more psychological level, despite his sporadic hopes to the contrary, he despairs of men being concerned with anything more than their immediate interest, their local, petty, empty habits, and their fuelling their amour propre with the esteem of their party. ‘They never employ’d their parts, faculties, and powers, industriously that way, but contented themselves with the opinions, fashions, and things of their country, as they found them, without looking any further.’29 Locke’s damning view of conventional moralities as embodying a morass of error and sin, makes men’s supine acceptance of them particularly disturbing. This supposition of faulty men is grimly confirmed by the way in which, untouched by innate morality, they leap at the chance of sin. To prove his point, Locke asks us to ‘view but an army at the sacking of a town, and see what observation, or sense of moral principles, or what touch of conscience, for all the outrages they do’.30 With the increase of Locke’s years, this pessimistic strand of his ambivalent attitude towards both the accessibility and the power of the natural law, hitherto vexed and negotiated, becomes the strongest. By the time of The Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke fears that the law of nature is obscure even to those, like him, who really seek it. This conflicted account of moral understanding is replicated and further disturbed by Locke’s linguistic theory. On the one hand, his moral optimism is shored up by his insistence that the significations of our moral terms are ‘not of nature’s, but man’s making’, and therefore candidates for demonstrative knowledge.31 Locke’s account of moral language not only duplicates his ambitious moral epistemology, but even contributes to it: we remember that the names of moral ideas are integral and indispensable to them.32 They are the knots that tie the otherwise scattered simple ideas into one lasting, memorable entity. On the other hand, the dark side of Locke’s philosophy of language impedes our moral and political judgement. Our propensity to immorality is fostered by linguistic interference. We can emit the hollow sounds of moral speech, putting a good face on what is either bad or non-existent. Moreover, in the unregulated idleness of living minds, language sheds its subservience to ideas and takes on its ugly, domineering aspect, covering the vacuous and confused ideational reality with a pleasing plenitude of verbal clarity. Ceaselessly circulating in and out of our minds, language forges an indiscernible but gaping loophole in rational moralising. 29 32

Locke 1975, p. 92 (i.iv.12). 30 Locke 1975, p. 70 (i.iii.9). Locke 1975, pp. 434–7 (iii.v.10–15).

31

Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.16).


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In addition to the customary, pleasurable psychological obstacles, moral thinking is further stunted because the conditioned, perplexed and shortsighted products of our scant efforts can be covered conveniently with finesounding words. The subject who must judge whether to lead a revolution, the magistrate who must choose whether to indict someone or the cleric who must decide what to do with a ‘heretic’, are all sunk deeper in the quicksand of adjudication, their heads filled with language that positively encourages moral myopia. Inherently persuasive words hide, with imperceptible motions, our corruption from ourselves and others, both spawning and entrenching that corruption. Far from illuminating the natural law, language admixes with the reasons why its knowledge hangs by a thread. trust The second aspect of Locke’s linguistic theory that I shall probe is the contractual nature of language. This has consequences for another pivot of his political theory: trust. Once more, language is a two-edged sword. It attests to the immense importance of trust at the same time as it displays human infidelity. And society, which depends on trust, is rocked this way and that by the information. The commonwealth is conceived and continued through trust. The people entrust their natural political power to the government on the condition that the government employs it ‘for their good’.33 If the government ‘acts contrary to their trust’, it is dissolved and what was only ever a ‘fiduciary power’ devolves to the people.34 Trust brokers not only the relationships between prince and people, but also between those people. They rely, in innumerable ways in nature as well as in the city on the good faith of others. In a manuscript from c. 1677–8, Locke explains that without compacts to determine the property of individuals, men would be at each other’s throats. Revealing the Hobbesian anthropological pessimism on which he was later, albeit incompletely, to renege, he insists that if men ‘enjoy all things in common’, ‘want, rapine and force will 33

34

Locke 1988, p. 381; cf. p. 427. Dunn (1985, pp. 34–54) brings out the crucial importance of trust for Locke; trustworthiness is the fundamental duty of men, ‘the constitutive virtue of, and the key causal precondition for, the existence of any society. It is what makes human society possible’ (p. 42). Dunn also captures the bracing contradiction of Locke’s conception of trust as ‘both indispensable and ineliminably hazardous’ (p. 3). Cf. Dunn (1990, p. 34) on the irrevocable twinship of trust and betrayal, and p. 5: ‘modern political legitimacy is an inescapably cooperative project for the denizens and operatives of a modern state. But it is also, even at best, a highly intermittent and sporadic achievement’. Locke 1988, pp. 367; 412.

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unavoidably follow’.35 He stresses the overwhelming necessity of honouring one’s compacts, even if it is not to one’s immediate advantage. Not to do so would make it permissible for others to do the same, ‘and then whatever I possess will be subjected to the force or deceit of all the rest of the men in the world’.36 The trust that we put in each other not to infringe each other’s rights is what keeps us safe and happy. In the sometimes brighter nature of the Two Treatises we observe men making ‘promises and compacts’ and ‘bargains for truck’.37 Marriages and master–servant relationships are ‘contracts’.38 Money, the lubricator of the world, is established through ‘common consent’.39 Its value derives from ‘the tacit agreement of men to put a value on it’.40 While this original settlement has almost become naturalised with time and greed, trust still features prominently in monetary exchange. People must believe that the face value of a coin is equal to the amount of metal on which it is stamped, and they must believe in the promise to pay a certain amount of money on a credit note – both tall orders at a time of monetary debasement and massive arrears. The pressure on trust appears yet firmer when we consider the social ramifications of Locke’s pessimistic assessment of men’s reasoning activity. Given that men guzzle the beliefs that suit and surround them, rather than painstakingly thinking things through for themselves, they must trust others to do their thinking for them. Locke had already come to this precarious conclusion as a student at Oxford in 1659. In a letter to one Tom, he declares that ‘men live upon trust and their knowledg is noething but opinion moulded up betweene custome and interest, the two great luminarys of the world, the only lights they walke by’.41 Sounding a note of despair that was to become symphonic in later life, he urged that in the absence of a rational grasp of the law of nature, we just take it on authority that we should honour our maker and love others. Twenty years later, in a 1679 manuscript entitled ‘Opinion’, Locke evokes our sorry dependence on the thoughts of others. ‘The greatest part of men’, he says, do not reason themselves but ‘take the common belief or opinion of those of their country, neighbourhood or party to be proof enough, as believe as well as live by fashion and example, and thus men 35 38

39 40

41

Locke 1997, p. 268. 36 Locke 1997, p. 269. 37 Locke 1988, p. 277. Locke 1988, pp. 321; 322. See Shanley (1979) on the reconceptualisation, through the development of social contract theory, of the marriage contract in the seventeenth century. Locke 1991, p. 374. Locke 1988, p. 293. Olivecrona (1974, p. 229) argues that Locke subscribes indirectly to the compact theory of property because the actual distribution of property is based on the agreement to use money. Locke 1976–89, i, p. 123.


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are zealous Turks as well as Christians’.42 The superiority of faith over reason is not a habit Locke condones but given its tenacity, he fervently hopes that we put our faith in the right sources. The load that trust bears for Locke is perhaps at its starkest in his refusal to tolerate atheists. In A Letter concerning Toleration, he explains why: ‘promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of humane society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, tho but even in thought, dissolves all’.43 Without a sense of the obligation to obey God’s will, pressed home by the prospects of heaven and hell, Locke cannot see how anyone could be brought to honour their words – a virtue which in itself is ‘necessary to the preservation of civil society’.44 In the Essays on the Law of Nature, Locke sums up what was to be his lifelong belief: societatis vinculum fides.45 If we turn to language, we find that there too trust is indispensable. Trust makes words work. I can use words to signify certain ideas to you only because you trust me to use those words in a certain way. More precisely, communication is possible as a result of two kinds of contract that we make with each other and trust each other to keep. The first I have called the semantic contract, whereby men agree with each other that certain sounds should signify certain ideas. Without this ‘tacit consent’, words have no public meaning at all.46 The second linguistic contract is the moral one, according to which men agree to speak their minds. Given the invisibility of ideas which makes words necessary in the first place, we have to trust that people tell the truth. These two contracts are the essential mechanisms of communication. They enable otherwise discreet individuals to become social. But they are based on leaps of faith which, with every passing word, we are forced to take. The trust-based nature of language intensifies the argument that trust more generally is crucial to society. However, other aspects of Locke’s linguistic theory tend in a more destructive direction, threatening the trust that fuels language and thereby, as well by implication, the trust that fuels society. In chapters 8 and 9 we saw that Locke is sceptical about people’s propensity to respect either linguistic contract. The violation of the semantic contract, when speakers disobey the law of propriety, is at its most flagrant in elocutio. It is equally if not more pernicious in slippery, self-serving legal and scriptural exegesis, and in illegitimate political wordplay that tricks people out of their rights. The breach of the moral 42 46

Locke 1997, p. 274. 43 Locke 1983, p. 51. Locke 1975, p. 408 (iii.ii.8).

44

Locke 1983, p. 49.

45

Locke 1954, p. 212.

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contract is buried in every lie that men tell, whether consciously or not, both to themselves and to others. Then they tear not only at truth but at society. The regular transgressions of the two linguistic contracts themselves wound the civil body, as well as suggest the disinclination of Lockean men to honour their words. The suggestion of infidelity reinforces the doubts which Locke raises in his broader political meditations and which make it look unlikely that his stringent demands on trust can ever be met. The sharpest point of the Second Treatise is to justify revolution precisely because Locke feels that Charles II, egged on by acquisitive and impious Anglican clergymen, has broken the people’s trust. Locke’s worry about faithlessness also surfaces in his interventions in the debate about how to resolve the currency crisis in the 1690s. We have already seen how issues of trust cluster around money, and here we see the strain on the trust which is required to make the world go round. In his Propositions Sent to the Lords Justices Locke explains that the rationale of ‘coind silver’ is to save a man the bother of weighing it in its natural unminted condition and to assure him ‘what quantity of silver he gives, receives, or contracts for’. ‘Clipping’ – slicing off the edges of coins – or melting and recoining them lighter or with a baser metal ‘defrauds’ people.47 These covert practices shatter the identity between face value and real value, running roughshod over the trust that people place in the identity and ultimately destroying their faith in the currency. However, these practices are rife, so little do people care for trust. Clipping, Locke says, is ‘so gainfull and so secret a robbery that penalties can not restrain it . . . it is grown so universal and men grown so skilful at it’.48 In his Answer to my Lord Keepers Queries he tries to convince Parliament not to take the counterproductive and useless measure of raising the face value of coins, the real value being determined by the quantity of metal, irrespective of its nominal stamp. In the course of explaining the rough mechanics of monetary exchange, he lets slip a telling image of the marketplace. It is populated with ‘strangers or such as trust not one another’, as though the two were interchangeable.49 The picture of perfidy becomes yet bleaker when Locke addresses the subject of credit. In Further Considerations concerning Raising the Value of Money he complains that the shortage of bullion in England is forcing its subjects to rely on ‘hazardous paper-credit’.50 He declares that ‘the necessity of trust and bartering is one of the many inconveniences springing from the 47 50

Locke 1991, p. 375. Locke 1991, p. 450.

48

Locke 1991, p. 377.

49

Locke 1991, p. 394.


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want of money’.51 Unlike silver and gold which have ‘intrinsick value’, paper money has as much value as its signature is trustworthy – which leaves it, in Locke’s eyes, pretty worthless. Even if I trust a friend to give me a ‘bill’, I cannot pass it on to a third party, and even less to foreigners, who justifiably doubt ‘that the man bound to me is honest or responsible’. Paper bonds ‘are liable to unavoidable doubt dispute and counterfeiting and require other proofs to assure us they are true and good security’.52 In various ways Locke’s treatment of money resembles his treatment of language, and both model his overarching conundrum: we must trust untrustworthy men. Indeed, in early-modern writing the analogy between money and language is itself a site that is busy with this conundrum. For Locke, both modes of exchange began with ‘mutual consent’.53 In arbitrary actions erased by time, and themselves barely transparent to their actors, ‘the tacit agreement of men’ made certain sounds come to stand for certain ideas, and certain types and amounts of metal for perishable goods.54 Gold being so much more solid than meaning, its value soon became determined, while meaning remained inherently contestable. The analogy then shifts: words are like the face values of coins, signifying a certain meaning or amount of metal. We have to trust that the signs signify what they profess. In both cases the signified is inaccessible although, again, money tends to have the upper hand in the analogy. The connection between the public stamp and the metal beneath is generally considered more dependable than that between words and meanings. This leads writers, Locke included, to appeal to money as the standard to which words should attain.55 However, the prospect of fool’s gold also looms large, and is compared to empty words.56 Wealth and communication both rest on loose ground. The figurative web that joins money and language exposes an earlymodern anxiety about fidelity to which Locke gives voice. It shows that we are unlucky hostages to good faith. It mimics and confirms the unsteadiness 51 52

53 55

56

Locke 1991, p. 451. Locke 1991, pp. 522–3. See Muldrew (1998) on the huge importance of credit networks in earlymodern England as consumption rose and supplies of gold and silver were limited. He demonstrates how the ‘community was redefined as a conglomeration of competing but interdependent households which had to trust one another’ (p. 4) and how the massive explosion of litigation in the period is testament to a pessimism about sociability and the strength of a man’s word. Cf. Muldrew (2001) on the social value of money in early-modern England, including Locke’s important contribution to the subject. Locke 1988, p. 300. 54 Locke 1988, p. 293. Locke 1975, p. 514 (iii.xi.11). Cf. Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 113. See Harrison (1996) on the hierarchies associated with the analogy between money and language in seventeenth-century French comedy; Shell (1982) on the disturbing breach of the link between face value and real value with the advent of paper money and on the internalisation of the monetary form in discourse. E.g. Hobbes (1996, pp. 28–9).

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of a civil society that is dependent on precisely the trust that Locke suspects. And language, the shady broker between individuals, is crucial in making and breaking that trust, as well as exemplifying the sad dependency. individualism The final aspect of Locke’s philosophy of language which I shall use to illuminate his broader concerns is his contradictory portrayal of semantic individualism. On the one hand, Locke tells us that individuals make meaning and therefore make it differently. On the other, he has a more social story about the development and exchange of meaning. These competing – or complementary? – accounts have two consequences for Locke’s social and political theory. The first seems to make Locke’s civil society logically impossible. The second indicates a more communal and cohesive, though not necessarily saved society. Turning to the first of these stories, we have seen Locke insist that words signify only the ideas that particular individuals happen to associate with them. We remember that this results in a thoroughgoing semantic instability, whereby words mean different things for different people. This questions the very existence of the semantic contract that attaches certain ideas to certain words. We saw it broken in the previous section. Now it appears to be a ghost that rarely materialises. While the breaches of the semantic contract can be reversed by the goodwill of men, the diffusion of meaning is an endemic condition that language users are far less able to cure. While the contract could be honoured and communication made possible with self-reform, it now looks systematically unfeasible. The problem of semantic plurality is particularly acute in names of mixed modes, that immense vista of words that structures cultural life. Mixed modes organise every aspect of non-‘natural’ experience, from marriage, market and adultery to government, ambition and revolution. They are the channels of social interaction and development and yet there is scant agreement about their meanings. This thesis of radical miscommunication casts a sinister shadow over Locke’s peculiarly sociable society. In the Two Treatises as well as the Essay, he makes it clear that language is necessary for even the most basic forms of society.57 As the means of interpersonal communication it was given by God to be the ‘bond of society’.58 However, if we take Locke at his word, it does not facilitate fellowship. The ‘great instrument, and common tye of 57 58

Locke 1988, pp. 318–19; Locke 1975, p. 402 (iii.i.1). Locke 1975, p. 497 (iii.x.13); cf. Locke 1988, pp. 318–19.


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society’ is defective.59 It offers a shaky bridge between solitudes. When semantic instability is painted into Locke’s picture of society, a strange new scene stretches out before us, where men brush past each other but barely feel it. They are divided by walls of public sound. In addition to problematising society in general, semantic instability challenges Locke’s account of how political society in particular is generated and sustained. The commonwealth, the only place where justice can flourish, is created and invigorated by two kinds of verbal compact that begin to look implausible in the light of semantic divergence among men. In the first kind of compact, discrete individuals unite and in the second, this unity erects a government.60 But how, at the first, can men agree to give up their ‘natural power’ to the community and meaningfully ‘incorporate, and act as one body’, given the radically disparate conceptual resources in play?61 And how moreover, at the second compact – the trust discussed above – can the trustee understand the same thing as the people when they entrust their ‘natural rights to execute the law of nature’ on the condition that the ‘public good’ is served? How can a man be of the same mind with his magistrate, when he gives him his ‘power . . . of doing whatsoever he thought fit for the preservation of himself, and the rest of mankind’, and more pertinently perhaps, his ‘power of punishing’?62 What myriad interpretations go through the minds of the people and their prince, both at the moment of the initial declaration and in the countless subsequent moments when the ‘public good’ must be determined? The pressure on what has been subsequently (and misleadingly) called ‘the social contract’ is particularly intense in Locke’s account because he is categorical (again, pace Hobbes) that consent cannot be tacit.63 ‘Nothing can make any man’ a subject or member of a commonwealth, ‘but his actually entering into it by positive engagement, and express promise and compact’.64 That is to say, the very genesis of political life depends on linguistic actions which are 59 60

61 63

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Locke 1975, p. 402 (iii.i.1). Locke is not always consistent about this bipartite arrangement, the first compact tending to get lost in the second, or forgotten altogether. However, he is keen to promote a two-stage process in order to see off Hobbes’ commonwealth which only exists in virtue of being represented by a sovereign. In contrast, Locke wants to establish a strong body of the people, independent of and prior to their prince. Locke 1988, p. 406. 62 Locke 1988, pp. 352–3. Locke 1988, pp. 347–8. While the first compact between individuals in the state of nature might be properly characterised as a ‘contract’, the compact between people and government is emphatically not. Contracts benefit all parties, whereas the second compact is designed purely for the benefit of the people. The legal relationship between government and people is a trust, whereby only one party (the people) benefits. I am grateful to Jim Murphy for clarifying this issue. Cf. Harrison 2003, p. 212. Locke 1988, p. 349.

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themselves dependent on a common understanding which Locke denies. The foundation of the state turns out to be made of sand. The distinctively high bar that Locke sets for politics accords with the commitment his contemporaries have to these metamorphic linguistic recitations. When men come of age they are required to take ‘oaths of fealty, or allegiance, or other publick owning of, or submission to the government of their countreys’.65 Locke’s fervent commitment to express consent therefore makes sense in the context of the culture of oath-taking in which he lived. Locke’s sensitivity is particularly acute as a result of the embarrassing series of oaths which had tracked the changing allegiances of the English people.66 In addition to these most fundamental of declarations, ordinary lives are also punctuated by speeches, in churches or courts for example, whereby people face up to their government. In all these instances, contrasting ideas throng to the voices raised in unison. The birth of the state is reliant on an agreement that is lacking. The body of political society looks still-born. Perhaps this is too strong. The role of express consent in Locke’s political theory should not be overplayed.67 Locke’s argument about consent is partly designed to rebut Filmer and is only part of his overarching polemic to limit political obligation and rationalise resistance. It shows that men are not born subjects but make themselves so and that they might, if the conditions of their consent are not met, resume their liberty. It is wielded to prove the freedom and equality of men, and to justify resistance to a government which does not serve the public good. Although Locke sometimes presents it as a necessary condition of political legitimacy, it is by no means sufficient and often fades away in the light of the deeper (though not unconnected) definition of lawful authority: government for the public good.68 Not only is consent not the (only) linchpin of Locke’s political theory, but it is hard to imagine. Even Locke loses the first compact in his story, or conflates it with the second, which itself begins to look uneasy in the face of a limited franchise, a hereditary monarchy and more generally, in the face of history.69 65 67

68

69

Locke 1988, p. 309. 66 See Dunn (1969, p. 141) on this ‘excessive multiplication of oaths’. Lively and Reeve (1989, p. 70) refer to Locke being ‘notoriously unclear’ on consent. For further discussions, see Brough 2003; Dunn 1967; Dunn 1969, pp. 130–43; Halldenius 2003, pp. 266–74; Harrison 2003, pp. 200–12; Simmons 1993. See, for example, Locke (1988, p. 137), where he makes ‘the consent of the people’ the only basis of ‘lawful governments’. On the centrality of the public good see for example the definition of ‘political power’ (p. 268). The more particular problems with the theory might not be as serious as is sometimes supposed. It is plausible that all the people consent to be ruled by an hereditary monarchy and by a legislature


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However, even if consent is in practice more behavioural and hypothetical than express, it still calls on ideas that are subject to interpersonal divergence and that are very probably, we remember, linguistically constituted. Even if men do not publicly articulate their relationship with the government, they still have to accept it, or not, using the unsteady currency of mixed modes. Even if people find, rather than put, themselves under government, they, who are naturally free, still have to decide whether they would consent to their government, were they asked. They still have to judge whether their ‘trustee . . . acts well, and according to the trust reposed in him’.70 Given the normative dislocation that afflicts the people, they are likely to judge distinctly from each other, let alone from their deputy. We have returned then, to the great load borne by political judgement. We have already seen it at an individual level, weakened by the deceptive power of words. Now we see it inter-subjectively, destabilised by plurality. To the extent that Locke is unequivocal that only express consent can transform us from discrete individuals into a political unity, then that political unity looks unfeasible in the light of semantic disunity. To the extent that his texts also speak against the historicity of these primordial performances, individuals must see, eye to eye, the rationale for their ruling and being ruled. Even if the architecture of compacts is more mythic than real, subjects and kings still have to agree the terms, as it were, of their relationships with each other. Insofar as they do so differently, they subvert the stability of Locke’s state. However, Locke’s account of meaning is not always uncompromisingly individualistic. Turning now to the more communal aspects of his account, I consider how these soften the lines that divide men from one another. In doing so, I provide a critique of the claims that Locke’s political theory is individualistic.71 These claims are problematic not only

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that is elected by a limited franchise. However, the latter does become problematic in the light of Locke’s majoritarian rubric for the second compact (Locke 1988, pp. 331–3). See Dunn (1967, p. 154) on how Locke’s theory of consent is not concerned with the form of government but with how individuals become subject to others. Locke 1988, p. 427. The debate that these claims have occasioned is persistent, wide-ranging and valuable. I shall give just a taste of it here. Lukes (1973, p. 141) classifies Locke as a political individualist, a claim that has normative as well as methodological content. Taylor (1989, p. 193) identifies him as an atomist. By contrast, Tully (1980) argues, against ‘common misunderstandings’ (p. 11), that Locke is not ‘a philosopher of atomised and abstracted individuals’ (p. 24) but that ‘society is an irreducible datum of man’s existence’ (p. 49). Dunn (1979) explores the societal relations that forged and limited Locke’s (and the Lockean) self. Holmes (1993, pp. 190–1) defends liberals – including Locke – against the charge of individualism. Lloyd Thomas (1995, p. 69) argues that Locke is ‘less individualistic than is usually supposed’ on the issue of rebellion.

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because they miss the collective elements of Lockean culture, but also because they confuse concepts which are distinct and draw modern distinctions which skew early-modern arguments. For example, the ways in which Locke might be termed a ‘methodological’ individualist (for whom individuals are logically prior to society) do not prevent him from being, Perhaps the most striking case for the prosecution was made by Macpherson (1954 and 1962). Brace (1998) develops Macpherson’s account of Locke’s individualistic theory of property in the context of the tithe disputes of the 1650s. Strauss (1953, p. 234) finds that he agrees with Macpherson, arguing that Locke’s doctrine of property embodies ‘the spirit of capitalism’ and that the rationale for civil society is to emancipate the acquisitiveness of individuals (p. 246); cf. p. 248 on how Locke made the ego the ‘center and origin of the moral world’. McNally (1988, p. 83) and Wood (1984) both characterise Locke as an agrarian capitalist. Wood (1983) offers a socio-political reading of the Essay and argues that ‘Locke’s ideal man is an individualist’ (p. 6). For commentary on similar themes, though often dissimilar in content see Cohen 1995, p. 188; Coleman 2005; Gough 1973; Grant 1987, pp. 1–5; Laski 1936, p. 160; Tarcov 1984; Taylor 1989, pp. 195–6; Waldron 1988, pp. 137–252. Macpherson’s case has been forcefully rebutted. Hundert (1977) shows that Locke’s theories of property and politics support those who are rational and industrious in general, and attack those who are lazy and irrational, be they peasant or lord. Dunn (1969, pp. 203–67) argues against Macpherson that Locke was a proponent not of a ‘rationality of infinite desire’ but one ‘firmly premised upon the reality of an after life’ (p. 262). See also Dunn (1968, p. 71) on Locke’s ‘ambivalence’ towards the balance between property rights and charity, (1979) on Locke’s punishing, religious individualism, (1993, pp. 38–41) on Locke’s suspicion of the market and the profound limitations of his liberal individualism. Tully (1980) reveals that Locke is a defender not of private property rights, but of inclusive claim rights from which exclusive use rights flow, all of which derives from the fundamental duty to preserve mankind, and which turns out to be ‘in hindsight, an obstacle to capitalism’ (p. 143). Cf. Tully (1979) for a further contextualisation of Locke’s claims and (1993, pp. 71–95) for further reflections on Macpherson. By contrast, and in detailed opposition to Tully, Waldron (1988, pp. 137–252) claims that Locke has a special rights, rather than a general rights justification of private property, thereby reasserting Locke’s individualism. See Tully (1993, pp. 118–36) for his response. Grant (1987, p. 131) argues that the natural law is primarily individualistic in the state of nature and collectivist in civil society. At the other extreme to Macpherson, Kendall (1965) argues that Locke’s majoritarian principles oppose individual rights. See also Kramer (1997), who argues that far from being an individualist, ‘Locke’s labour theory of property is rooted in a thoroughgoing communitarianism’ (p. ix). An important part of the debate relates to the status of rights and duties in Locke. Strauss (1953, pp. 226–9) argues that for Locke natural law (and duty) flows from natural right. Cf. Strauss (1959, p. 215) for the same suspicion. Cox (1960, p. 189) claims the ‘irreducible primacy of rights over duties’ for Locke. Simmons (1992) provides a powerful account of Lockean rights that are not ‘the mere shadows of the duties we owe to God’ (p. 3). See Dunn (1969, pp. 262–7) on the theological centre of Locke’s political thought and the questionable relevance of it for today; cf. Dunn (1985, p. 55, and 1990, pp. 9–25), where he modifies his old view. On the development of the interplay between self-interest and sociability see Hont (1987), who tracks the complex relationship between individualism and sociability and its connection to enlightened self-interest. Cf. Klein (1994) on Shaftesbury and sociability. On the development of individualism more generally and of the ‘self’ in the early-modern period see: Comparato (1996) on the uneasy advance of ‘individualism’ in the Baroque era; Balibar (1996) on how particular junctures in religion, politics and metaphysics contributed to and problematised the ‘invention’ of individuality. See also Booy 2002, p. 15; Chartier 1989; Coleman 1996; Mascuch 1997; Nardo 1991; Thweatt 1980; Webber 1968. Moriarty (2003) offers a particularly illuminating and corrective account of the fallen, neurotic, alienated and misanthropic ‘self’ that emerged in the turn ‘inward’. While it is a story about Descartes, Pascal and Malebranche, it has much to teach us about what Locke, who read those authors so deeply, thought about the individual.


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simultaneously, a kind of collectivist, for whom the common good takes priority over exorbitantly selfish desire.72 By the same token, Locke and, perhaps even more so, Locke’s predecessors, would not have recognised these categories; the influential Thomist–Aristotelian topos that man is a social animal is both descriptive and normative.73 Likewise, for the Cicero of De officiis, the gregarious nature of men is continuous with their duty to benefit one another.74 And for Locke, the natural inclination that drives men into society, itself planted there by God, cannot be separated from our moral obligations.75 I argue that Locke is less of an individualist than has been supposed, but in doing so I also suggest that his complex treatment of the individual in society defies the anachronistic dichotomies that have been forced on it. Locke reveals a place where agents and structures, and concern for oneself and others, bear down on each other with such a bewildering intricacy that they cannot be held apart. This is not to say, however, that this less crudely individualistic arrangement brings a Lockean politics back from the precipice. There are three ways in which Locke’s account of how meaning is generated and shared evokes a more integrated society. The first comes from the core of his theory of communication and opens up an intense arena of intersubjectivity. While the constructivist element of his epistemology prevents communication, his vivid attitude towards basic human experience plunges us into communication far more deeply than much recent philosophy of language would allow. We remember that for Locke, though meanings are ultimately the ideas of individuals, they can be common to all because all (probably) have the same, simple ideas. Only when individuals have the same ideas in their heads do they properly communicate. This stringent requirement delivers a peculiarly rich quality to mutual understanding. Just as a man can only grasp the meaning of the word ‘pineapple’ if he has tasted one, so can he only communicate about that fruit if both he and his friend have crushed one between their teeth.76 We might retort that Locke’s Europeans, who have only heard tell of what grows in the Indies, can use the word perfectly, 72

73 74

75

For expositions of the modern dichotomy between individualism and holism see Hollis 1994, pp. 5–20; Elster 1989, pp. 13–21. There are many (often non-normative) ways in which Locke may well be described as an ‘individualist’; see, for example, Tully 1993, pp. 53; 299; Simmons 1993, p. 21. Aristotle 1996, p. 14. Cicero 1991, p. 61. Remember too that in De inventione Cicero (and subsequent humanists) describe the ‘time when men wandered at large the fields like animals’ (Cicero 1976, p. 5). See Skinner (1978, ii, p. 157) on the humanist/Thomist debate on the solitary/social nature of man. Locke 1988, p. 318. 76 Locke 1975, p. 424 (iii.iv.11).

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that the sensation of a pineapple has nothing to do with the meaning of the word.77 While this might be strictly correct, it is a somewhat reductive view. Locke’s account evokes that heady cocktail of language and experience, whereby we can get a taste of another person’s mind. People who have had the same visceral encounters seem to communicate differently about those encounters than those who have not. To intimate the penury of language without consciousness, Locke explains how a blind man, desperate to discover what the ‘names of light, and colours’ meant, beating his head with visible objects and seeking the advice of books and friends, ‘bragg’d one day’ that ‘scarlet’ was ‘like the sound of a trumpet’.78 While this instance illuminates the holes in the language of a blind man, his groping for another sensation that approximates to the energy of scarlet captures the sensory pregnancy of words that the twentieth-century externalist misses.79 When the blind man converses about colours his communication is of a different order to that of those who can see. In the unmistakable presence of experience then, the barriers between people dissolve and meaning becomes a truly common entity. While Locke’s identification of meaning with ideas may well, in the case of complex ideas, cut individuals off from one another, in the case of simple ideas it brings them into an extraordinary intimacy. The second, social aspect of Locke’s semantic theory directly contradicts his individualistic thesis and posits profoundly incorporated human beings. According to this alternative thesis, it is the community, not individuals, that dictates which words and meanings are in common use.80 Language is an essentially collective construction, primarily intended to convey ideas between people, and legislated by them cooperatively.81 In particular, the mixed modes that we have seen in tatters now appear the most communal ideas of all. Almost in the same breath that Locke ties them to discreet individuals, he explains that they instantiate the practices of communities. While ideas of substances arise from the natural world, mixed modes – which themselves constitute the thick conceptual web that is culture – arise from collective habits of thought and action. That is to say, the entire symbolic system that structures experience for individuals derives from society. It is ‘customs and manner of life’ that determine 77

78 80

81

Locke 1975, p. 632 (iv.xi.4). See Ayers (1991, i, pp. 207–17) for an acute account of the way in which Locke’s theory grasps ‘what we might call the ontology of perception’ (p. 210). He argues, with Locke, that ‘there is something prior to language which makes language possible’ (p. 206). Locke 1975, p. 425 (iii.iv.11). 79 Cf. Ayers 1991, i, p. 273. For examples of Locke’s confident appeal to common use see Locke 1975, pp. 504 (iii.x.23) and 687 (iv.xvii.24). Locke 1975, pp. 402 (iii.i.2); 409 (iii.iii.3).


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what ideas a particular ‘country’ has.82 This is the reason why there are words in one language that have no translation in another. Locke is clear: ‘mankind have fitted their notions and words to the use of common life’.83 Far from controlling culture then, individuals draw breath from it. I do not so much speak, as the discourse into which I am born. While this holistic explanation of meaning is often eclipsed by the individualistic one, it persists nonetheless, making it unclear whether actors write the rules of the games they play. The third feature of Locke’s analysis that intimates the pull of society on individuals is darker and takes the argument into the moral sphere. While we are obliged by God, when our lives, liberties and estates are not in danger, to subordinate self-interest to the good of mankind, in practice we do not.84 While in the course of his life, Locke does struggle with the law of nature, in particular its relation to self-interest – sometimes looking into the abyss of hedonism – and while he admits that personal interest and conventional morality will often follow from and coincide with the divine law, he cleaves to the view that we are obliged by God to serve others, often at the expense of ourselves.85 The best of virtues, he declares in the Essays, ‘consist only in this: that we do good to others at our own loss’.86 However, the sad truth is that men readily break ‘the great principle of morality, to do as one would be done to’ in the service of their ‘interest’.87 The interesting thing is that while the reality is selfish, this selfishness has as its pre-eminent goal the esteem of others. In chapter 9 we met the law of fashion that dictates what the community applauds and disdains, and we saw how it rules with an iron hand.88 More than anything, men want to be liked by other men. They stop at nothing to avoid contempt. They are fixated on others as a result of being centred on themselves.

82 84 85

86

87

Locke 1975, pp. 432–3 (iii.v.8). 83 Locke 1975, p. 349 (ii.xxviii.2). Locke 1988, p. 271; 1975, p. 70 (i.iii.7). For a clear example of Locke’s exploration of the view that loving our neighbour is the best way to secure our present happiness see Ethica A (1692): ‘all the good we do to them redoubles upon ourselves and gives us an undecaying and uninterrupted pleasure’ (Locke 1997, p. 319). On the coincidence of natural law and interest (and customary virtue) see Locke 1954, pp. 207; 215; 1975, pp. 69 (i.iii.6); 356 (ii.xxviii.11); 1997, p. 299 (Of Ethic in General ). Locke 1954, p. 207. Indeed, he devotes an entire disputation to proving that ‘the basis of the law of nature’ is not ‘every man’s own interest’ (pp. 205–15). Cf. Locke 1975, p. 75 (i.iii.13). Contra ‘the Hobbist’ (p. 68 (i.iii.5)), our duty to others derives from God, and will often not coincide with our own interests but must nevertheless be obeyed – see p. 352 (ii.xxviii.8); Locke 1988, p. 271; Locke 1997, pp. 302–3 (Of Ethic in General ); Locke 1975, p. 75 (i.iii.13)). Locke 1975, p. 70 (i.iii.7). 88 Locke 1975, pp. 356–7 (ii.xxviii.12).

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This fervent desire to conform feeds into language, as egoism and a social conscience collapse into each other. Men who are frantically trying to be conventional will embrace the mixed modes and the beliefs of their community. For fear of ‘reproach’, men do not ‘dare venture to dissent from the received opinions of their country or party’.89 Eager to follow in the ‘foot-steps of others’, we give ‘our assent to the common received opinions, either of our friends, or party; neighbourhood, or country’.90 Almost literally then, individuals, like the words they utter, are fashioned by the community. However, these three communal elements ought not necessarily to comfort us. While there will be more communication than Locke sometimes suggests, the nature of the exchange may still be impoverished. It could be a trade of the shells of words, a swapping of impressive sounds rather than ideas. Even if it is ideas that are transacted, they are likely to come from that miscellany of conventional, defective beliefs, such as those that applaud polygamy, throwing oneself onto the funeral pyre of one’s husband, duelling, and religious intolerance.91 They are the ideas of ‘parties’ and of the marketplace, shot through with interest, dogma and error. Somewhat ironically, for all Locke’s dissatisfaction with semantic individualism and instability, he does not want us slavishly to emulate the ideas of the vulgar, or even of our benighted peers. He loathes those who are impervious to the ‘tincture’ of truth, but ‘camelion like . . . take the colour of what is laid before them’.92 He would much rather we turn away from the world, as he did in the Essay. With exemplary labour, Locke has ‘raised himself above the alms-basket, and not content to live lazily on scraps of begg’d opinions, sets his own thoughts on work, to find and follow truth’.93 The community of opinion is therefore not to be wished for, but it lures us all the same. The pull of the crowd militates against our responding to our highest calling and thinking for ourselves. reform It seems that Locke’s philosophy of language leaves men and their communities in an even more wretched state than that in which they already were. The communal aspects of his linguistic theory offer a bittersweet prospect that itself dims in the glare of Locke’s otherwise 89 92

91 Locke 1975, p. 83 (i.iii.25). 90 Locke 1975, p. 718 (iv.xx.17). Locke 1954, pp. 171–3. Locke 1993, p. 82. 93 Locke 1975, p. 6 (Epistle to the Reader).


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stringent semantic individualism. And in themselves, the legislative and normative powers of the community entrench flawed and egotistical activity. Is there any way out of this predicament? While language has the inherent propensity to falter in its tasks, it is a God-given faculty that could work sublimely if its human users worked at it. The problems of language are not theoretically necessary, and might therefore be solved. I end this book by considering what hope Locke offers of amending the way that people exploit words.94 While Locke’s anti-innatism denies easy access to God and morality, and seemed to his contemporaries to signal atheism and moral relativism, it does leave open the possibility of reform. If there are no limits to how individuals are scripted, they might be directed to a good part. In the mercurial course of Locke’s intellectual trajectory, he struggled to identify the cause of thought and action. He wanted it to be reason, but eventually decided that habit is at the root of even the deepest of our ‘instincts’.95 Even passion and interest, as well as philosophy and behaviour, are formed by repetitious practice.96 Depressingly, this insight gives ground to irrational contingency, but it also offers the opportunity of deep psychological transformation. While ‘education and custom’ have ingrained ‘ill habits’, these might be reversed by ‘contrary habits’.97 The delights of sin will pale in the practice of virtue, since ‘repetition wears us into a liking, of what possibly, in the first essay, displeased us’. Evoking their miraculous power, Locke goes on to declare that ‘habits have powerful charms, and put so strong attractions of easiness and pleasure into what we accustom our selves to, that we cannot forbear to do, or at least be easy in the omission of actions, which habitual practice has suited, and thereby recommends to us’.98 In a manuscript called Ethica that he wrote in 1693, he explains how men can be ‘made alive to virtue and can taste it’. A vicious man can be turned around if he is brought ‘to practise in particular instances and so by habits establish a contrary pleasure’.99 This belief in the formative authority of habit dates back to antiquity. In The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle had explained how ‘moral virtue comes about as a result of habit’, and therefore how crucial it is that children are 94

95

96 97

In doing so, I draw heavily on Tully (1993, pp. 179–241) and Hundert (1972), who have identified Locke as, among other things, a reformer. Cf. Taylor (1989, pp. 159–76) on Locke’s ‘punctual self’. Mehta (1992) criticises Locke’s disciplining, directive regimes for eliminating freedom and difference. Locke admits his change of mind and the ‘difficulties that may yet remain’ at Locke 1975, p. 285 (ii .xxi.72). For example, Locke 1975, pp. 261–2 (ii.xxi.45). Locke 1975, p. 281 (ii.xxi.69). 98 Locke 1975, p. 280 (ii.xxi.69). 99 Locke 1997, p. 320.

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tutored in good habits.100 ‘We ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and be pained by the things that we ought.’101 Locke develops these twin claims that the nature of man is pliable and therefore an appropriate subject for (benevolent) manipulation. His three juridical apparatuses – divine, civil and ‘humanist’, as Tully calls them – provide the motivational structures whereby men might be recovered.102 Of these, the last is to be used in pedagogy, the sanctions of praise or disgrace being ‘very sensible’, as Locke explains in Some Thoughts concerning Education.103 The stage is set for a metamorphosis of speakers. They might be habituated to limit words to ideas, to honour the linguistic compacts and to enumerate the simple ideas that they include under the name of a complex one. However, such an education would have to be so intense and disinterested that it might just be a fantasy. Certainly, it would only be accessible to the educated classes. Locke only came to write on the subject of education because his polite friends, Mr and Mrs Edward Clarke, asked him for advice on rearing their son. Locke is quite explicit that the rigours of linguistic reform can only be expected from the elite. In his distinction between the ‘civil’ and the ‘philosophical’ users of words, he dismisses the former as beyond the pale.104 Picking up on Bacon’s idols of the marketplace, and his despondency about them, Locke concedes that ‘the market and exchange must be left to their own ways of talking, and gossipings not be robb’d of their ancient privilege’.105 Locke is addressing the truly privileged, as opposed to the vulgar. It is not the speech of society as a whole then, that Locke wants to reform but that of gentle society – many of whose members would, according to the vast extension of the term at that time, have counted themselves ‘philosophers’. Arguably, it is this segment of society that Locke (and his contemporaries) often mean by ‘society’ and that has been such a large subject of this chapter. While he did sometimes widen his sights, as in the case of the (non-)working poor, and while he did sometimes talk of ‘the people’ in the comprehensive sense that his democratic champions have subsequently taken up, his audience and his reformatory concern was the literate body.106 100 103 106

Aristotle 1980, p. 28. 101 Aristotle 1980, p. 32. 102 Tully 1993, p. 225. Locke 1989, p. 116. 104 Locke 1975, p. 476 (iii.ix.3). 105 Locke 1975, p. 509 (iii.xi.3). Wood (1992) argues that Locke has an anti-democratic agenda. Ashcraft (1992b) counters with Lockean radicalism. In the Two Treatises Locke certainly argues for universal consent and thereafter a majoritarian principle (Locke 1988, pp. 330–1). Kenyon (1977) argues that while Locke was relatively radical, the Whigs were not his ‘deferential disciples’ (p. 1), but more conservative, the line between themselves and the Tories often blurring.


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Yet even within this learned group, the possibilities for reform are limited. Locke writes a whole book about the problem of language precisely because most ‘philosophers’ belie their name and abuse language in the ways that he describes. If they are to teach the young to speak, the same old muddles and duplicities will be embedded. Moreover, many philosophers have a vested interest in maintaining the mist of words. In the face of his linguistic ‘remedies’, Locke envisages that ‘the schools, and men of argument would perhaps take it amiss to have any thing offered, to abate the length, or lessen the number of their disputes’.107 The educative process will only recycle the fog. Locke’s Essay is the way out of this vicious circle. Logic was the means by which boys (and some lucky girls) learnt how to speak about the world. By proffering his own ‘Logick’, Locke intervenes at the very start of early-modern education, and so cuts off the indoctrinating supply at its source.108 It also confronts those men who have already drunk, deconstructing their talk until it is no longer palatable. By revealing the confused and empty contents of vaunted words and by putting words (back) in their subservient place, Locke reeducates his readers. Yet precepts alone will be of little effect. ‘No body is made any thing by hearing of rules, or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing without reflecting on the rule.’109 The passive receipt of the proposition that words signify the speaker’s ideas will result in the same unthinking, unproblematic acceptance of that fact that had always dogged philosophers. It will lodge inertly in our minds. Instead, we must travel again and again along the tracks of thought that elucidate and exemplify that proposition. Only then will we be embarrassed by immodest claims and get a relish for strictly ideational and agonisingly expository speech. Locke manages to invigorate us in this way by labouring and redecorating his point. ‘I shall frankly avow’, he confides directly to us in his epistle, ‘that I have sometimes dwelt long upon the same argument, and expressed it different ways, with a quite different design’. He goes on to clarify what ‘pains’ he has taken: Some objects had need be turned on every side; and when the notion is new, as I confess some of these are to me; or out of the ordinary road, as I suspect they will appear to others, ’tis not one simple view of it, that will gain it admittance into every understanding, or fix it there with a clear and lasting impression. There are few, I believe, who have not observed in themselves or others, that what in one way of proposing was very obscure, another way of expressing it, has made very 107

Locke 1975, p. 509 (iii.xi.3).

108

Locke 1975, p. 720 (iv.xxi.4).

109

Locke 1993, p. 19.

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clear and intelligible: though afterward the mind found little difference in the phrases, and wondered why one failed to be understood more than the other. But every thing does not hit alike upon every man’s imagination. We have our understandings no less different than our palates.110

The kaleidoscope of repetitions draws readers in until we can see with our own eyes what Locke sees. This experience of intersubjectivity not only enables us to internalise his arguments, but also gives us a long taste of one of them. It shows us true communication, where speaker and hearer attach the same train of ideas to a train of words. By turning the understanding in on itself, Locke makes an archetypal act of communication. There can be no doubt as to what is on his mind. The peculiarities and differences of his readers’ mental contents, that are usually obstacles to communication, cease to be so as Locke writes his mind in its labyrinthine entirety on to the page from every conceivable point of view. Locke’s circumlocutory elucidation of the problems of privacy and plurality simultaneously divulges the means by which they can be overcome. In cutting the furrows of Locke’s mind in our own, we learn how to effect such a perfect synchrony, the toil that is required for it, and the pleasure that it brings. The ‘delight’ that follows all these ‘pains’ of the understanding is like the ‘hunter’s satisfaction’, only greater, since the understanding ‘is the most elevated faculty of the soul’, and its exercise the most lovely.111 In form as well as content, then, the muscular forays of book iii are designed to habituate, identify and elate its readers, so that they emerge with a relish for ideational speech. Yet the possibility of linguistic reform only slightly illuminates the gloom. For the great majority of the very few members of Locke’s society who would be candidates, Locke fears that old habits will not die but continue to thrive as the second natures of men who are desperate to impress each other. In the tense lattice of the Essay, Locke expresses the same conviction about human intransigence as we have just heard on the subject of human mutability, and I suspect that his unhappy commitment to the former is the stronger. While he absolutely believes in the pliability of children, he is struck by the obduracy of men. Indeed, it is precisely because of the effectiveness of youthful casting that he has little faith in breaking the mould in later life. He complains in his journal in 1677 that the erroneous talk which we hear in the nursery dyes our mind so deeply that ‘afterwards [it] very difficultly receives a different tincture’.112 110 112

Locke 1975, p. 8 (Epistle to the Reader). MS. Locke f. 2, p. 125 (117).

111

Locke 1975, p. 6 (Epistle to the Reader).


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The Essay ends on this depressing note. The penultimate chapter is entitled ‘of wrong assent, or errour’, and details the inexorable motors of unreason.113 He explains how ‘wrong principles’, ‘riveted by long custom and education’ when men were children, are now ‘beyond all possibility of being pull’d out again’.114 The diverse and often appalled reception of the Essay would perhaps have confirmed Locke in his long-nursed anguish at the fractured and delusional community in which he lived. Certainly, at the very end of his life, he turns away from it and concentrates on the words of God rather than man. It seems likely then, that Locke feels that people will not mend their unrealistic and private speech. Urged on by the fragile nature of language itself, men will continue to pretend even to themselves and to turn their backs on each other. In turn, they will persist in hacking at the polished halls of Locke’s rational society. Locke’s philosophy of language throws up some apparently intractable tensions in his political thought. It reveals the shabbiness of men’s political judgement on which states rise or fall. It unmasks the terrifying powers of self-delusion and vanity that silence toleration. It suggests that the trust which makes society civil cannot be found in men. It threatens to blow apart the shared understanding that would give life to the community. And finally, it lays bare the moral individualism at the hollow core of Lockean society, an individualism that is, all the same, tenderly transfixed by the estimation and the false words of others. In the duplicitous face of language, the enlightened giant of Lockean liberalism looks unsteady on his feet. Or perhaps Locke is not the confident, idealistic champion that he is often claimed to be.115 Indeed, perhaps the obstacles that he puts in the path of politics are not embarrassing inconsistencies but acute insights into the ineluctably problematic reality of political life, into the dense layers of justification and motivation that organise human action and into the fissures between theory and practice that comprise our condition. To seek for a resolution of his paradoxes may be to labour under a 113

114 115

The final chapter is somewhat of an appendix, laying out the division of the sciences and locating the foregoing Essay, that is to say ‘‚o¶ ·, Logick’, within his framework. Locke 1975, p. 712 (iv.xx.9). Locke’s reputation as a liberal was established in the 1930s, for example by Laski 1936 (see Tully 1993, p. 97). More recently, Tarcov (1984, pp. 1–2) has explained how ‘there remains a very real sense in which Americans can say that Locke is our political philosopher’; Tarcov goes on to avow his ‘liberal politics’. A number of commentators have contested this modern ascription, notably Dunn (1993, pp. 38–41), Hundert (1977) and Tully (1993). On Locke’s characteristic realism see Dunn 1990, pp. 13–14 and 25. On the optimistic rationalism characteristic of liberalism see Waldron 1993, p. 43; Dunn 1993, p. 32.

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misapprehension about our nature. It may be that we just have to live with these septic imperfections. Locke’s commonwealth is no castle in the air made by the rational agents who are only the stuff of dreams. It is fantasy to expect that we should agree on a universal set of values and then live by them. Far from crafting our world according to reason, we are not even transparent to ourselves. Nevertheless, mired in false opinions and brutish passions, we can work at reason. Bravely treading the path between hope and experience, Locke shows us that though we are proud, unfaithful and insular, still we must judge, trust, and interact. Locke’s gift was not only the splendid architecture of his state, designed with equality, rights and duties in proportions that still enthral us, but also the clearsighted perception that it can only be built with frail men. His poignant meditation on language helps us to feel the captivating warmth of his imaginative arc and the brittle nature of its parts.

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Index

Aarsleff, Hans, 3, 16, 99, 102, 106, 107, 110, 212, 244, 264 Abbot of St Martin, 205 Abelard, Peter, 34 Abrams, Philip, 244, 248 abstraction, 30--1, 94, 95, 202--3 see also essences of substances; ideas; mind; universals/particulars Acosta, Jose´ de, 228 Adam, 23, 96, 98, 99, 102, 113, 160, 233, 235 Agricola, Rudolf, 66, 69, 83 Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius, 84 akatalepsia, 119 Alexander, Peter, 194, 195, 196, 221, 264 Allen, James, 21 Almond, Philip C., 99, 212 Alston, William, 219 Anaxagoras, 114, 117, 212 Anderson, Judith H., 154 angels, 155, 168, 240 animal language, 112 Aquila, Richard E., 110 Aquinas, 30, 40, 94--5, 129 archetypes/ectypes, 135, 207, 224, 227, 233, 282 Aristotle and Aristotelianism, 7, 8, 13, 25, 31, 37, 50, 52, 91--6, 257, 280 Art of Rhetoric, The, 65, 83 categories, 32, 35 continuing hold over new philosophers, 92, 98, 105--7, 129, 187, 201, 256, 275 experience, 93, 118 education, 171, 299 identity of concept and thing, 28, 93 in utramque partem, 82 language maps thought, 19, 20, 26--7, 47, 275 language maps world, 29, 93--4, 185 man a political animal, 295 Organon, 13, 28 simple concepts of substances, 30 sophistic speech, 38 semantic universality, 27, 56, 129

tripartite paradigm of word--concept--thing, 26--7, 92--4 verbal circularity, 124 verbal perspicuity, 70, 72, 77 virtue/vice, 85, 138 Armstrong, Robert L., 195 Arnauld, Antoine, 15, 58, 110, 134, 174 see also Port-Royal Ashcraft, Richard, 191, 260, 300 Ashworth, E. J., 3, 13, 14, 15, 18, 25, 28, 29, 38, 102, 196, 219, 264 atheism, 287 Atherton, Margaret, 92, 202 Augustine, St, 15, 69, 144, 155, 161, 165 authority, deference to and importance of, 37, 61, 138, 157, 171, 173, 267, 268--9, 286--7, 298 Ayers, Michael R., 3, 91, 92, 118, 188, 193, 194, 196, 200, 203, 219, 221, 244, 247, 264, 270, 296 Babel, 102, 104, 113, 133, 134, 238 Bacon, Francis, 130, 171, Aristotelian logic, 13, 22, 30 complex substances, 203 constitutive and deceptive power of words, 87, 166, 174 empty words, 68 ephemeral ideas retained by words, 161, 251 fascination, 178 gold, 198 grammar, 41 idols of the marketplace, 122, 176, 222 idols of the tribe, 121 importance of sensation, 160, 161 induction, 26 language maps nature, 98--101 money and language, 156--7 relationship between speech and writing, 47 semantic individualism, 136--7 sensible signs, 155 syllogisms, 21, 36

349

350

Index

tripartite paradigm of word--concept--thing, 121--3 universal language and philosophical grammar, 57, 62, 101--4 verbal circularity, 166, 254 Bailey, Alan, 115 Balibar, Etienne 270, 294 Bardout, Jean-Christopher, 23 Barlow, Thomas, 15 Barnes, Jonathan, 261 Barton, John, 79, 80 Batz, William G., 227 Beck, Cave, 50 Behan, David, 108 Bennett, Jim, 99 Bennett, Jonathan, 194, 195, 200, 203, 219, 221 Bennington, Geoff, 212 Berault, Peter, 122 Berkeley, George, 3 Berman, David, 187 Bernier, François, 228 Berti, Silvia, 166, 170 Besnier, Pierre, 92, 135 Bianchi, Massimo Luigi, 96 Biblical exegesis, 80--1, 132, 139, 141, 148--51, 165, 213, 214, 215--18, 287 Biletzki, Anat, 173 Black, Robert, 42, 49 Blackloism, 95 Blackwell, Constance, 13 Blair, Ann, 98 blind man, 241, 242, 296 Blount, Thomas, 14, 80, 84, 85, 156 Boehme, Jacob, 5, 103 Boileau-Despreáux, Nicolas, 74, 77, 83 Bold, Samuel, 216, 218, 251 Bolton, Martha Brandt, 94, 98, 194, 200, 207 Bono, James T., 3, 16, 99, 102 Borchardt, Frank L., 96 Boyle, Robert, 73, 124--6, 135--6, 194, 198, 203, 215, 280 Brace, Laura, 294 Bracken, Harry M., 111, 170 Brett, Annabel, 149, 270 Breva-Claramonte, Manuel, 54 Briggs, John Channing, 68, 98 Brinsley, John, 46, 50, 52 Brookbank, J., 50 Brown, Vivienne, 270 Brownover, Sylvester, 188 Buickerood, James G., 1, 14, 21, 22 Bullokar, John, 158 Bullokar, William, 43, 45, 53, 54 Bulwer, John, 70, 103, 160 Burgersdijk, Franco, 16, 19, 25, 26, 31, 32, 34

Burke, Peter, 91, 179 Buroker, Jill Vance, 111 Busby, Richard, 46 Byrne, Laura, 148 Cabalism, 96 Caesar, Julius, 65 Calvin, John, 149 Campanella, Thomas, 41, 52, 54 Carey, Daniel, 206, 225 Castiglione, Baldassare, 179, 273 Caussin, Nicholas, 69--70, 80, 83, 84 Cave, Terence, 3, 79, 85, 132, 133 censorship, 171, 215 Chappell, Vere, 270 Charles, David, 19 Charles I, 181 Charles II, 258, 288 Chartier, Roger, 294 China, 96, 102 Chomsky, Noam, 3, 54, 55, 110 church, the, 80, 81, 139, 149, 151, 177, 181, 213 Cicero, ambiguous words, 86 common use, 71 constitutive and deceptive power of words, 86 eloquence as a weapon, 83 importance for early-modern philosophers, 65 importance of sensation, 75 irony, 79 law, 153 meanings contingent on culture, 62 power of metaphor, 72 relationship between wisdom and oratory, 81 sight, 69, 77, 160 society, 70, 295 verba need res, 68 circularity, see words citizenship/subjection, 270 Clare, William, 50 Clarendon Code, 213 Clark, S. H., 262 Clarke, Desmond, 30 Clauberg, John, 17, 22, 23 Clauss, Sidonie, 104, 134 clothes metaphor, 42, 109, 156, 199, 246, 255 Cockeram, Henry, 158 Cohen, G. A., 294 Cohen, Murray, 3, 93, 110, 154 Coimbra commentaries, 15, 16, 19, 27--8, 31 Coke, Zachary, 35 Coleman, Janet, 161, 294 Coles, Elisha, 62, 158 Colie, Rosalie L., 202, 227, 232, 238 Colman, John, 196, 219, 244

Index Comenius, John Amos, 48, 50, 51, 56, 62, 104, 156, 160, 247 common use democratic and erroneous, 60, 71--2, 112--14, 122, 177, 199 problematic (insecure/inaccessible/nonexistent), 16, 234--8, 290 relation to philosophical use, 72, 199, 223, 236--7, 300 unproblematic, 70--1, 233--4, 236 see also semantic contract Comparato, Vittor Ivo, 170, 294 concupiscence, 162 confession, 168 conscience, 169, 170, 246, 260, 284 consent, express/tacit, 291--3 Coote, Edward, 82 Cope, Kevin L., 208, 219 copula, 20, 187 Cordemoy, Louis Gerauld de, 111, 156 Cornelius, Paul, 103 corpuscularianism, 124, 194, 201 Costello, William T., 42 Cottingham, John, 111, 156 Coudert, Allison P., 3, 16, 96, 103 Cowell, John, 14 Cram, David, 104, 105, 107 Cressy, David, 116 Croll, Morris W., 66, 98 Cromartie, Alan, 138 Cudworth, Ralph, 135, 216 cultural difference, 39, 62--3, 132, 152, 227--8 see also custom; words culture: structured by language, 181, 290, 295--6 see also custom; words Culverwel, Nathaniel, 245 Cumberland, Richard, 245 Cureau de la Chambre, Marin, 112 Curley, Edwin, 149, 194 currency crisis, 288 custom, 59--61, 71, 112, 132, 140, 147, 227--9, 286, 296, 299, 303 Dalgarno, George, 45, 59, 105, 135 Daston, Lorraine, 144 Davidson, Hugh M., 80, 144, 145 Davies, Tony, 98, 106 Day, Angel, 56, 66 Dear, Peter, 91, 98 De Dijn, Herman, 22 Deely, John, 15 De Grazia, Margreta, 99 De-Lawne, Nathanael, 24, 36 Della Rocca, Michael, 110

351

Demonet, Marie-Luce, 3, 16, 27, 134 DeMott, Benjamin, 104, 107, 161 De Rijk, L. M., 29, 34 Derrida, Jacques, 216 Descartes, Rene´, and Cartesianism, 7, 280, 281 book of nature, 101 clear and distinct ideas, 22, 30, 136--7, 156, 159, 193 deceptive power of words, 177 ‘deep structure’, 54 experience diverges from reality, 107--11 hyperbolic doubt, 196, 280 in new logic, 20, 30, 33 Le Monde, 4 method, 26 passions, 174 problematic metaphor of vision, 159--60, 166, 247--8 rejection of Aristotelian logic, 30 scholasticism, 37 syllogisms, 21 thought without language, 134, 166, 242, 256 tripartite paradigm of language--mind--world, 55, 108, 185 truth, 128 universal language, 135 words obscure ideas, 162--3, 171 Digby, Kenelm, 72, 123, 156 Digest of Justinian, 158 disputation, 35--7, 82, 212, 245 divine right, 213, 258 Drake, Stillman, 101 dreams, 127 Dugard, William, 66 Du Moulin, Peter, 24, 30, 36 Dunn, John, 191, 229, 244, 245, 248, 249, 259, 260, 268, 270, 277, 283, 285, 292, 293, 303 Dury, John, 48, 51, 61 Du Trieu, Philippe, 14, 20, 21, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 194 Easton, Patricia A., 14, 22, 23, 25 Ebbesen, Sten, 92 Eco, Umberto, 101 Eden, 75, 99, 104 education, 4, 35, 41, 50, 61, 160, 261, 274 moulds men, 22, 222, 232, 267--8, 269, 273, 303 see also self Egypt, 102, 103 elocutio, see rhetoric Elsky, Martin, 3, 103 Elster, John, 295 empiricism, 8, 37, 92, 118, 186, 188, 247 nihil est in intellectu, 50, 74, 108, 119

352 Eng, Erling, 232, 267 English Guide to the Latin Tongue, The, 44 Enthusiasm, 246, 271 Epicureanism, 21, 118, 197, 230 Epistemology, see, knowledge Erasmus, Desideratus, 68, 69 essences of substances Locke’s equivocation about, 198, 200--1 nominal not real, 125--6, 189, 198, 252, 263 real, 33, 93, 124 Euclid, 149 Evans, G. R., 149 experience, Aristotelian, 93 Baconian, 99, 101 diverges from reality, 34, 91, 107, 186 source of knowledge, 189, 240 see also ideas; mind; sensation fairies, 127 Farnaby, Thomas, 57, 82 Feingold, Mordechai, 19--25, 42, 64, 65, 136 Feldman, Seymour, 170 Felton, Henry, 61, 85, 113 Fenner, Dudley, 66, 80 Ferguson, Robert, 76, 78, 80, 81 Filmer, Robert, 213, 218, 292 Fish, Stanley E., 3, 98, 132--48 Flathman, Richard E., 127 Formigari, Lia, 3, 92, 104, 196, 219, 229, 264 forms Aristotelian, 95, 97, 119 Baconian, 100 Boyle’s, 124, 126 Foucault, Michel, 3, 16, 98, 101, 154 freedom, 138, 147, 156, 165, 238, 252, 265, 270 Frege, Gottlob, 3, 19 Garber, Daniel, 110 Gassendi, Pierre, imagination, 20 maxims, 37--8 mitigated scepticism, 118--21, 280 monstrous births, 204 new logic, 21, 22, 23, 24 probable argument, 26, 37 propositions, 21 simple perception, 31 thought as inner speech, 18 Gaukroger, Stephen, 22, 66 Geneva, Ann, 101 gesture, 102, 103, 155 Givner, David A., 194 Glanvill, Joseph, 67, 74, 76

Index Glat, Mark, 228, 229 God, abuse of words threatens religion, 212--13 all ideas in, 110 conventionally described, 181 day of judgement, 232 Descartes on, 109 divine language, 103, 177 divine teleology, 69, 186, 192, 193, 214, 239, 278--9, 281, 290, 295 gulf between sign and signified, 164 oaths, 287 obligation to him, 244, 278--9, 297 see also Adam; Biblical exegesis; heaven and hell gold, 100, 125, 195, 197, 207, 223, 263, 282, 289 Goldie, Mark, 191, 213, 258 Golinski, Jan V., 98, 124 Grafton, Anthony, 13, 42 grammar, 41--63 attempts to tie verba to res, 42, 47--51 character of the discipline, 55 circularity, 45, 48 focus on verba not res, 8, 42--3, 49, 63, 154 operations of the mind, 53--5 propaedeutic role, 41 underpinned by universal and rational order, 56--9 words contingent on use, culture and time, 43, 59--63 words reflect mind, 53--6 words reflect world, 52 Grassi, Ernesto, 82 Gray, Hanna H., 81 Greenblatt, Stephen, 174 Grice, H. P., 14 Grotius, Hugo, 215 Guyer, Paul, 196 Haakonssen, Knud, 151, 179 habit, 230, 269, 284, 287, 299 Hacking, Ian, 3, 111, 144, 190, 212, 219 Halldenius, Lena, 292 Hammacher, Klaus, 23 Hammond, Nicholas, 146, 216 Hampsher-Monk, Iain, 283 Harris, Ian, 192, 193, 245 Harrison, Helen L., 289 Harrison, Ross, 291, 292 Hartlib, Samuel, 51, 61 Hausman, David B., and Alan, 108 heaven and hell, 193, 273, 282, 287 hedonism, 230, 297 Heinrichs, T. A., 126

Index Hellenistic approach to signs, 3, 21 see also Epicureanism Herbert of Cherbury, Edward, Lord, 135 Hermetic tradition, 96 hieroglyphs, 96 Higgins-Biddle, John C., 260 Hight, Marc A., 196 Hill, Christopher, 149 history, time and language, 59, 130, 132, 141, 144, 150, 216, 228--9, see also words Hobbes, Thomas, abuse of words, 179 attack on Descartes’ visual metaphor, 166 commonwealth, 291 conventional descriptions of God, 181--2 deceptive power of words, 177--8 definition of ‘res’, 107 Enthusiasm, 271 gold, 157, 289 human nature, 285 importance of sensation, 75 insignificant words, 164 language based on trust, 167 lies, 170 logical composition, 20 metaphor, 78 mnemonic and communicative functions of words, 161--2, 251 monstrous births, 204 moral science, 244 names, 157 passions, 231 semantic individualism, 137--43 semantic universality, 202 sensibility of words, 15--16 social contract, 291 social passions, 175 speech and reason, 18 state of nature, 283 syllogisms, 21 truth only an attribute of language, 111 verbal perspicuity, 71 victorious aim of rhetoric, 82 words alone universal, 128, 186, 202 words as arbitrary signs, 87, 113, 134 words distinct from ideas, 31 words learnt before ideas, 172--3, 251 words signify ideas not things, 28, 126--8, 187 Hoffheimer, Michael H., 260 Holdsworth, Richard, 16, 28, 35, 41, 64, 70, 161 Hollis, Martin, 295 Holmes, Leigh H., 221 Holmes, Stephen, 293 Homer, 77 Hont, Istvan, 294

353

Hooke, Robert, 247 Hoole, Charles, 43, 44, 46, 50, 51 Horace, 77 Hoskins, John, 67, 78, 79, 85, 86 Howell, A. C., 68, 98 Howell, Wilbur, 14, 19, 25, 84 Huizinga, Johan, 94 humanism, 13, 26, 37, 59, 68, 69, 70, 112, 130, 179 Hundert, E. J., 294, 299, 303 Hunter, Ian, 91, 144 Hutton, Sarah, 135 idealism, 195 ideas, actively, voluntarily composed, 203, 220--9, 235 caused by but do not resemble things, 107, 110, 115--28, 120, 125, 126, 193--5, 197 clear and distinct, 109, 147, 158, 159, 200, 246, 281 complex, 198--209, 221--9, 243, see also mixed modes; substances divergent, 9, 39, 80, 133, 144, 220--9, see also semantic instability natural signs of things, 193 only particular, 127--8, 142, 186 Platonic, 96 private, insensible, ephemeral, obscure, 9, 15, 45, 69--70, 84, 144, 155--7, 160--6, 232, 239, 240--57, 281, 287 relations, 222 resemble things, 27, 28, 92, 93, 95, 96, 99, 193, 194, 195--6 sensible and autonomous, 51, 76--8, 157--60, 242--8, 246, 252 shared, 134--5, 137, 220, 295--6 simple conception, 19, 30, 31, 54, 94, 104, 106, 121, 136, 189, 200, 203, 221, 252, 256 see also mind identity, 144, 232, see also self Iliffe, Rob, 166 individualism/holism--collectivism, 294--5, 297, 303 innate ideas, 188, 226, 231, 245, 267, 299, see also maxims interest, 226, 230, 231, 249, 260, 270, 284, 286, 299 intersubjectivity, 146, 271, 302 Israel, Jonathan, 170, 191 Jackson, B. Darrell, 21, 155 James, Susan, 83, 118, 148, 174, 270 Jardine, Lisa, 13, 32, 42, 100 je ne sais quoi, 118, 200 Jephtha, 283

354

Index

John of St Thomas, 14, 27--8 Johnson, Francis R., 49 Jolley, Nicholas, 110, 219, 256, 264 Jones, Bassett, 52, 56, 57 Jones, Richard Foster, 66, 74, 97 Jonson, Ben, 44, 58, 63 Kahn, Victoria, 80 Katz, David S., 3, 96, 154 Keckermann, Bartholomaeus, 17, 25, 31 Kelly, Donald R., 150 Kendall, Willmoore, 294 Kenyon, J. P., 300 Kersey, John, 14, 158 Kessler, Eckhard, 3, 93 King, William, 213 Kinney, Arthur F., 78 Kircher, Athanasius, 103 Kirwan, Christopher, 155 Klein, Lawrence E., 294 knowledge, 9, 106, 188, 189, 200, 278--85 cannot exceed ideas, 189, 278 certain knowledge of self and God, 192, 244, 282 civil/moral science, 138, 139, 227 of morality, 138, 192, 225, 243, 244, 278, 284 of nature, 24--35, 91--128, 193, 196, 199, 278, 279--80 see also experience; Locke; maker’s knowledge; morality; nature; sight; words Knowlson, James, 3, 104 Kramer, Matthew H., 294 Kraye, Jill, 121, 135, 179, 225 Kremer, Elmar J., 110 Kretzmann, Norman, 196, 219 Kripke, Saul, 206 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 13, 42, 64 Kroll, Richard W. F., 98, 154 Kusukawa, Sachiko, 13 labour: necessary and desirable, 99, 146, 162, 165, 235, 271, 301 Lamy, Bernard, 52--3, 67, 68, 71--2, 75, 79, 82, 85, 112, 135, 152, 180 Lancelot, Claude, 58 Land, Stephen K., 3, 22, 161, 196, 219 Landesman, Charles, 196, 219 Lane, A., 52, 53, 57 language, see words Larmore, Charles, 91, 109, 110, 113, 118 Laski, Harold J., 294, 303 Latin, 49--50, 58 law, 138, 152--3, 177, 212 civil, 272

conventional, 226, 272--3 Locke’s three laws, 272, 300 natural, 142, 147, 192, 225, 230, 244--5, 249, 267, 272, 282--3, 286, 297, see also morality of propriety, 234, 235 see also common use; semantic contract Law, Jules David, 247 Lear, Jonathan, 30, 94 Le Clerc, Jean, 36 Le Doeff, Michele, 99 legal exegesis, 133, 141, 214 Leijenhorst, C., 28, 126, 165 Lennon, Thomas M., 92, 118, 176, 186, 194, 196 Levi, A. H. T., 91 Lewis, Mark, 46, 48--9, 50, 58, 60, 106 Ley, John, 36 liberalism, 303 Licensing Act, 215 lies, 81, 166--70, 180, 257, 288 Lightfoot, John, 216 Lily, William, 56, see also Royal Grammar, The Limborch, Phillip van, 217, 238, 246, 265 Lively, Jack, 292 Livy, 65 Lloyd Thomas, D. A., 293 Locke, John, characteristically ambivalent, a problematiser, 237, 242, 277--8, 283, 284, 290, 293, 303--4 constitutive and deceptive power of words, 9, 170, 239--76 exemplary speaker, 239 inclusion of Book III in Essay, 1, 20, 23, 24, 226, 255, 275 individual, emphasis on, 188, 210, 219 individualism/holism--collectivism: false dichotomies, 290--8 innocence of corrupt speakers, 9, 223, 269, 276 innovator, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 24, 92, 210--38, 240, 255 knowledge and language, 9, 185, 188, 241, 243, 255, 278--85 language does not map nature, 30, 185--209, see also nature language and society, 9, 278, 280--303 maxims and innate principles, 37, 109, 110 metaphor as the origin of language, 73, 220 moral science, 179, 192, 225, 227, 244, 248, 281, see also knowledge; morality on rhetoric, 65, 67, 211, 234, 259 private language, 2--3, 120, 219--20, 224 proper conduct of the understanding, 22, 192, 277, 278--9, 281 purposes of the Essay, 190--7, 229, 231, 238, 279, 281, 301--2

Index reasoning from experience, 118, 188, 192, 194 semantic instability, 8--9, 210--38, 290--3 semantic universality, 131, 214, 219 supposition, 29, 263--4 syllogisms, 21, 22 texts owned by Locke, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 28, 36, 41, 44, 46, 49, 51, 52, 58, 65, 66, 68, 73, 76, 80, 82, 84, 85, 102, 103, 110, 111, 117, 125, 135, 136, 149, 151, 158, 163, 179, 191, 194, 196, 225, 231 traditional theorist of language, 6, 186--7 the self, 229--33, see also identity; interest; law; morality; passions; reputation; self; vanity words signify ideas alone, 8, 28, 49, 185--209, 219, 276, 279 Lodwick, Francis, 47, 105, 134 logic, 13--40, 42 ambiguous words, 7, 37--9, 140 character of the discipline, 13, 19--25, 231, 247, 255--6 circularity, 32, 115, 117, 119, 122 deference to authority, 37 elision of differences between words, concepts and things, 17, 23, 29, 31, 154 in grammar, 53 internal weaknesses, 35--9 Locke’s Essay as a logic, 1--2, 13, 20, 22, 255--7, 275, 301 simple concepts, 19--20, 30, 203 predicaments and predicables, 32--4, 35 sophistry, 26, 36, 37 three operations of the mind, 13, 19--21, 55, 187, 256 truth in, 30, 32, 34, 35, 203 Pascal on, 145 verbal not real, 32, 36--7 words--world parallelism, 7, 24--35, 91, 93 Long, A. A., 21 Longinus, 74 Losonsky, Michael, 14, 196, 219, 264, 270 Louis XIV, 266 Lowe, E. J., 219 Lukes, Stephen, 293 Lullism, 103 Lycan, William G., 219 Maat, Jaap, 105, 107 McCanles, Michael, 99, 132 McCraken, Charles, 108 Mackie, J. L., 196, 206 McLaverty, James, 229 Maclean, Ian, 3, 101, 111, 114, 152, 158 McMullin, Ernan, 124 McNally, David, 294 Macpherson, C. B., 294

355

McRae, Robert, 91, 187 maker’s knowledge, 137, 244 Malebranche, Nicholas, 22, 110, 121, 163--4, 175, 191, 232 Malherbe, Michel, 14, 100 Mandelbrote, Scott, 81, 99, 149, 218 Marenbon, John, 13, 29, 34, 37 Marin, Louis, 144 Markley, Robert, 3, 99, 165 Markus, R. A., 21, 155, 227 Marshall, John, 118, 146, 151, 179, 191, 248, 259, 270 Martinich, A. P., 219 mathematics/geometry, 137, 248--9, 250 maxims, 37, 188, 270 common notions, 109, 147 first truths, 120 innate truths, 135 meaning, see signification Mehta, Uday Singh, 299 Melanchthon, Philip, 72, 77, 79 Melzer, Sara E., 146, 165 memory, 15, 61, 66, 160--2, 232, 247, 250, 251, 301 Menn, Stephen, 69 mental reservation, 168 mentalism, see words Mercer, Christina, 13, 96 Michael, Frederick S., 22 Miel, Jan, 54 Mill, John Stuart, 3 Miller, Alexander, 149, 150, 219, 221 Milton, J. R., 118, 120, 187, 194 Milton, John, 46, 48, 49, 59, 102 mind, active: possibly erroneous/divergent, 221, 235 discursive thought, 18, 128, 161--3, 239--40, 247, 251, 276 distorts nature, 30, 34, 91, 93, 94--5, 97, 112, 115, 185, 209 divergent minds, 133, 142, 145, 219, 302 generic minds, 129, 134--5, 188, 210, 219 mirrored by language, 17--24, 53--6, 68, 187 sensuous, 51, 74, 160, 250 see also ideas Mitchell, Linda C., 42 mixed modes, 113, 222, 282 arbitrary, 224 clear and distinct, 243--6 customary and convenient, 227--9 divergent, 224--9, 290 incarnated by language, 251, 266, 284 insignificant names of, 252 obscure, 248--50, 251, 252 see also ideas; non-natural entities Modrak, Deborah K., 27 Molyneux, William, 36, 213, 214, 219, 248, 254

356

Index

monarchy, absolute, 230 money, 286, 288--9 money and language, 71, 157, 234, 289 Monfasani, John, 66, 70, 82, 98, 114 monstrous births, 97, 116, 119, 128, 204, 222 Montaigne, Michel de, 48, 61, 81, 116--17, 131--2, 134, 142, 144, 164, 166, 204, 210, 212, 231 moral linguistic contract, 167, 257, 277, 287, 300 morality constituted by language, 179--82, 265--7, 284 free-floating words, 85--7, 142 invented by men, 137--8, 225--7, 282, 284 knowledge of, 192, 248, 278, 281--5 made by God, 226 merely conventional, 147, 226, 227, 244, 260, 284, 298 obscure, 248--50, 283--4 partiality, 142, 148, 229--33, 297 a relation, 222 relation of true to merely conventional morality, 226, 267, 297 relation to interest, 226, 297 relativism, 225, 260, 299 semantic fixity, clarity and accessibility, 138--9, 158, 162, 243, 244--6, 281--3, 284 semantic instability, 130, 138, 142--3, 146--7, 148, 225--7, 229 threatened by language, 85, 130, 138, 179--80, 250, 265--6 Moriarty, Michael, 108, 144, 169, 176, 294 Muldrew, Craig, 289 Murphy, James Bernard, 15 Murphy, James J., 64, 66 Nadler, Stephen, 110, 191 naked truth, 109, 159 names, 7, 51, 157, 187, 256 nature Aristotelian ontology, 30--5, 92--6 constituted and betrayed by language, 1, 9, 176--9, 197, 209, 263--5, 280--1 identical with mind, 94, 95, 98 limits and shapes language, 206--7, 224, 265 linguistic, 101, 103 mirrored by language, 7, 24--35, 52, 92--111, 121, 124 not mapped by mind and language, 7, 8, 34, 97, 104, 112--28, 176--9, 186--209, 275, 279--80 see also reality Neoplatonism, 96 Nerney, Gayne, 142, 175 new philosophy, 34, 35, 91, 97--128, 136, 186, 193, see also relevant authors natural light, 67, 109, 162, 166 Newton, Isaac, 105, 217

Newton, John, 18 Nicole, Pierre, 15, 117, 134, 163, 169, 174, 175--6, 214, 228, see also Port-Royal Nidditch, Peter H., 192 nominalism/realism, 34, 94--5, 202, 221 non-natural entities, 30, 113, see also mixed modes Norman, Buford, 144 Nuchelmans, Gabriel, 14, 19, 20, 22, 25, 32 Nuovo, Victor, 259 Oakley, Francis, 244 oaths, 170, 287, 292 Ockham, William of, 18, 27, 29, 34, 95 Olivecrona, Karl, 286 Ong, Walter, 13, 32, 34, 36, 42, 82, 154 original sin, 259, 270 Osler, Margaret J., 20, 118 Ott, Walter, 3, 14, 15, 21, 187, 196, 197, 219, 221 Ovid, 113 Oxford, 25 Christ Church, 14, 245 Padley, G. A., 3, 42, 50, 54, 55, 92, 110, 191 Panaccio, Claude, 27, 53, 54 paper credit, 288 paradiastole, see rhetoric Parish, Richard, 54, 118 Park, Katherine, 93 Parkin, Jon, 245 particles, 187, 256 Pascal, Blaise, 117, 143--7, 162, 165, 168--9, 172, 175--6, 210, 235 passions, 65, 83, 138, 142, 143, 147, 148, 230, 231, 249, 260, 299, 304 social, 174--6, 268, 272--4, 298, 303 Passmore, J. A., 22, 23, 270 Paul, St, 216, 231 Paxman, David B., 227 Peacham, Henry, 69, 73, 75, 77, 78, 86, 220 Perez-Ramos, Antonio, 244 Perkins, William, 174 Peter of Spain, 29, 30, 35, 37 Phemister, Pauline, 28, 95 Philipps, Jenkin, 47, 49, 52, 56, 60 Phillips, Edward, 93, 157, 158 pictorial dictionary, 51, 156, 247 Pinborg, Jan, 28, 29, 38, 54 pineapple, 221, 241, 295 plain speech, 65, 66--7, 70--4 Plato, 18, 82, 93, 96--7, 120, 171, 197, 204--5, 228 Cratylus, 102 Plutarch, 134 Pocock, J. G. A., 138, 229 political judgement, 9, 230, 260, 277, 282, 283, 284, 285, 293, 303, 304

Index political legitimacy, 282, 292 Poole, Joshua, 68 Poole, William, 99 Popkin, Richard H., 91, 149 Porphyry, 32, 106, 204 Port-Royal additional signification, 180 advertised focus on ideas not words, 23 ambiguous words, 38--9, 130 Aristotle’s categories, 35, 178 Cartesian substances, 30 common use, 16 confusion of language and thought, 24 dualism of sign and signified, 43 education, 22 elision of difference between words and thoughts, 110 ideas not images, 20 language signifies thought, 47, 54--5, 57 meaning of words contingent on use, 60, 63 probable reasoning, 26 real definitions, 33 reform of logic, 22 relationship between written and spoken word, 46 scepticism, 117 second operation of the mind, 20 self-deception, 169 semantic individualism, 39 semantic universality, 137, 165 sensible words, 15, 156 sophisms of authority, 269 syllogisms, 21 truth, 128 verbal circularity, 32 Preston, John, 54 primary/secondary qualities, 124, 125, 194 Prinz, Jesse J., 196 private language problem, 2--3, 219, 224 probability, 26, 37, 124, 144, 190, 192, 225, 279 hypotheses, 124, 186, 194 property, 213, 285 Protagoras, 115, 127, 143 Pufendorf, Samuel, 4, 87, 113, 151--3, 155, 157, 162, 168, 174, 180, 225, 235 Putnam, Hilary, 3 Puttenham, George, 71, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79, 86 Quine, Willard, 3 Quintilian, 59, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 77, 81--2, 84, 85, 86, 161, 289 Ramism, 19, 21, 25, 26, 34, 66, 154 Ramus, Petrus, 19, 66, 84, 106

357

rationalism, 8, 92, 160, 186 use of intellect not sense, 108 Ray, John, 107 reality, formal/objective, 108, see also nature Reedy, Gerard S. J., 149, 180 Reeve, Andrew, 292 reflection, 189 reform, 5, 22, 48, 49--51, 102--7, 199, 238, 271--2, 275, 299--303 relativism, 39, 115, 130, 225, 260, 299 religious/political unrest, 168, 170, 171, 190, 213, 258 representation, 16, 77 reputation, made by our words, 42, 64, 82, 176, 274 our greatest care, 175, 273, 284 resurrection, 224, 232 revolution, 282, 285, 288 rhetoric, 26, 42 ambiguous words, 7 can be used for honest or evil ends, 82 character of the discipline, 64--7 dispositio, 66 elocutio, 64, 65--6, 72--4, 78--81, 211, 287 free-floating words, 138 in utramque partem, 13, 82, 117 inventio, 66 memoria, 66, 160 moves the emotions, 65, 83--4 paradiastole, 85, 138, 143, 148, 174, 179, 234, 265 plainness, 66--7, 70--4 power of words themselves, 8, 74--6 pronuntiatio, 66 relation to wisdom and goodness, 81 semantic obscurity, 73--4 superfluity of words, 68 to be avoided, 99, 211, 259 ut pictura poesis, 77, 160 victory rather than truth, 65, 81--7, 154 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 70, 71, 77, 86 Rice, Lee C., 148 Richetti, John J., 262 rights, 141, 148, 167, 173, 213, 230, 259, 266, 270, 280, 286, 287, 304 Robotham, John, 48, 56, 62 Rogers, G. A. J., 91, 191, 192, 197, 244 Romanowski, Sylvie, 110 Ronberg, Gert, 132 Rorty, Richard, 91, 196 Roseman, Phillip W., 101 Ross, George MacDonald, 111, 140 Rossi, Paolo, 3, 13, 25, 98, 103, 161 Royal Grammar, The, 41, 44, 45, 49, 52, 53, 56, 58, 60

358

Index

Rudavsky, T. M., 99, 149 Rummel, Erika, 149 Rutherford, Donald, 98 Ryan, Alan, 170 Salmon, Vivian, 3, 98, 104, 177 Sanctius, Franciscus, 44, 49, 54, 57, 59, 60 Sanderson, Robert, 18--19, 20, 25, 26, 31, 32, 35, 37, 38 Savan, David, 164 Savonius, Sami, 36 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 43, 44, 55, 56 scepticism, 34, 91, 108, 110, 112, 114--28, 131, 186, 189, 190, 192, 195, 196, 280 Schaffer, Simon, 6, 136 Schmaltz, Ted M., 91, 108 Schmitt, C. B., 91 Scholar, Richard, 118 scholasticism, 13, 19, 35, 101, 165, 256 Schouls, Peter A., 272 Schuurman, Paul, 1, 14, 17, 21, 22, 23, 25, 194, 256 scientific revolution, the, 91, see also new philosophy Scioppius, Gaspar, 49, 57 Scott, Jonathan, 260 Sedley, David, 21, 29, 96 self Cartesian, 108, 109 divided, 170--1, 259 externalist model of construction, 62, 171, 231--8, 267--8, 269, 270, 298, 300, 302 fashioned by language, 174--6, 267, 298 focused on others, 230, 272--4, 284, 295, 303 fragmented, 133--4, 142--3, 144--5, 148, 152, 231--3, 249 intransigent, 272, 302 partial, 142, 148, 229, 230--1, 249 self-deception, 140, 169--70, 172, 260--2, 264, 269--71, 285, 288, 303, 304 self-love, 284, see also interest; passions; self; vanity semantic contract, 73, 155, 277, 287, 300 fragile, 64, 72, 78, 151--2, 211--14, 234, 287, 290 liberty to break it, 213, 227, 234 obliges, 235 secure, 71, 233--4 see also common use; words semantic individualism, 38, 136, 219, 223, 235, 238, 290--3 a source of hope, 298 Locke’s contradictory account, 237, 277, 296 semantic instability, 7, 8--9, 16, 62--3, 79, 86, 129--53, 138, 181, 210--38, 249, 257, 275, 290--3 and scepticism, 131

in grammar, 130 in logic, 37, 130, 211 intentional/inadvertent, 8, 129, 135--6, 139, 210, 213, 218, 223, 238, 290 ‘merely’ semantic, 136--7, 238 need for an arbitrator, 142 result of ineliminable liberty, 79, 142, 235 result of voluntary composition of ideas, 221, 235 in rhetoric, 130, 211 sense/reference/evaluation, 130--1, 147, 227 spirit/letter distinction, 141, 145, 152, 214 semantic universality, 27, 37, 38, 56, 58, 129, 130, 134--9, 137--9, 147--8, 210, 214, 217--18, 220 Seneca, 59 sensation, 93, 95, 104, 189 importance and power of, 50--1, 76--8, 159, 160, 162--3, 185, 240--57 misleading, 108, 109, 115, 116, 119, 121, 127, 159 source of all knowledge, 267 see also empiricism sense/reference distinction, 29, 130, 227 separation of powers, 274 Sergeant, John, 28, 95--6, 126, 196 Serjeantson, Richard, 37, 65, 113, 173 Sessions, W. A., 99 sexual metaphor for science, 99 Sextus Empiricus, 113--16, 131, 212, 228 Shanley, Mary Lyndon, 286 Shapin, Steven, 6, 91, 136, 137 Shapiro, Barbara, 59 Shaw, Samuel, 46, 49, 52, 58, 60, 66, 68, 79, 84--5, 174 Shell, Marc, 289 Sherry, Richard, 66, 69, 70, 72, 73, 77, 78, 86 Shirley, James, 47, 49, 51, 56, 60 Shuger, Debora, 66, 150 sight and knowledge, 51, 98, 104, 188, 247--8 and metaphor, 108, 109, 159--60, 163, 166, 246--7, 271 powerful, 46, 77--8, 99, 158--60, 161 signification, 5, 14, 21, 43, 130, 296 evaluative, 147, 152 formal signs, 15 hearer’s/reader’s meaning, 79, 132, 141, 145--6, 153, 215, 216, 219 inferential signs, 21, 118, 278 instrumental signs, 15 natural signs, 102, 103--4, 249 sensible and public, 157--60, 246 speaker’s meaning, 6, 28, 38, 53, 74, 188--9 see also words Simmonds, N. E., 179 Simmons, A. John, 294, 295

Index Simon, Richard, 150, 216 Simone, Raffaele, 59 sincerity, 260, 280 Skinner, Quentin, 3, 64, 65, 66, 77, 85, 127, 130, 138, 139, 147, 295 Slaughter, M. M., 3, 104 Smiglecius, Martinus, 28, 34, 38 Smith, John, 66, 72, 78, 79, 81 Smith, Nigel, 81, 99 Smith, Samuel, 17 Snider, Alvin, 98 social ‘contract’, 291--3 society, disturbed by language, 9, 83, 166, 173, 181, 212, 238, 277, 284--5, 287--8, 290--3, 303 made by language, 41, 69, 187, 287, 290, 291, 295--8 makes meaning, 290, 297 see also custom; words Socinianism, 151 Socrates, 82, 93 Soles, David E., 196 Solomon, Julie Robin, 122 Sommerville, Johann P., 168 Sorabji, Richard, 111 Sorell, Tom, 28, 91, 127 soul immaterial, 279 immortal, 193 South, Robert, 135, 157, 180--2 Southgate, B. C., 91, 95 Spade, Paul Vincent, 13, 18, 29 Spellman, W. M., 271 Spencer, Thomas, 6, 23 Spinoza, Benedict de, 4 arguments about words not things, 137 biblical hermeneutics, 147--51 censorship and free speech, 170--1, 174 clear and distinct ideas, 159--60, 256 ethics of understanding, 22 language as a source of error, 164 power of words, 178 reform of logic, 22 sensible and treacherous words, 156 social passions, 174 substance, 110 thought without language, 23 Sprat, Thomas, 68, 87, 107 Spruit, Leen, 19 Stanford, P. Kyle, 206 state of nature, 230, 249, 282, 283, 285--6 state of war, 148, 283 Steadman, John M., 68, 98 Stewart, M. A., 191 Stillingfleet, Edward, 198, 200, 201

359

Stillman, 3, 98, 104 Stockwood, John, 43, 47, 53, 58, 66 Strasser, Gerhard F., 51 Strauss, Leo, 149, 171, 294 Struever, Nancy, 3, 81, 85, 179 Suarez, Francisco, 95 Subbiondo, Joseph L., 106 substance /accident dichotomy, 52 Aristotelian, 30, 94, 105, 106, 197 Cartesian, 109, 110 complex ideas: could be false, 203 complex: made up of simple qualities sensations, 100, 106, 125, 200, 203, 222, 263 divergent ideas of, 222--4 ideas of substances: given by nature, 206--7, 222, 224, 237 ideas of substances: made by men, 125--6, 198--209 insignificant names of, 252 Locke’s deconstruction of, 31, 100, 198--209, 222--4 simple ideas: cannot be false, 19, 30, 106, 203 simply conceived even after Aristotle, 121, 200 unknown, 117, 198, 199--200, 207, 252, 261, 263, 279, 281 supposition, 29, 144, 263--4 Swynnerton, Thomas, 66, 80 Sydenham, Thomas, 124, 232, 247 syllogism, 21, 26, 36 tabula rasa, 62, 135, 229, 240, 267 Talon, Omar, 66 Tarcov, Nathan, 294, 303 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 228 Taylor, Charles, 293, 294, 299 Terence, 65 Terminism, 29, 263 textual exegesis, 132, 141, 148, 214--18, see also biblical exegesis; legal exegesis Thiel, Udo, 191, 232 Thomas, Ivo, 22 Thomas, Keith, 116 Thomas of Erfurt, 43, 54, 55, 56 Thomism, 25, 30, 94, 295 Thune, Nils, 103 Tipton, Ian, 195 toleration, 9, 190, 228, 230, 238, 258, 277, 279, 280, 287, 303 Towerson, Gabriel, 218 travel literature, 206, 227 trinity, the, 191, 232, 279 tripartite paradigm of word--concept--thing, see words

360

Index

trivium, the, 7, 13, 42, 129, 134, 199, 210, 275 bedrock of early-modern education, 4 Troyer, John, 206 True Method of Learning the Latin Tongue, The, 45, 54 trust, 9, 166, 167, 168, 234, 268--9, 277, 285--90, 303, 304 truth clear and distinct understanding, 109 disrupted by language, 5, 8, 35, 38, 61, 81--7, 109, 168, 169, 173, 179, 288 indeterminate, 146 Locke redraws line where truth/falsity begins, 203 love of, 270 manifest in language, 31, 34, 94, 105--7, 111 moral/logical truth, 167, 257 only an attribute of language, 128 simple concepts incapable of truth/falsity, 30, 94, 106, 203 see also lies; logic; maxims; nature Tuck, Richard, 69, 91, 127, 179, 191 Tuckness, Alex, 244, 248 Tully, James, 151, 192, 193, 227, 244, 259, 260, 270, 272, 293, 295, 299, 300, 303 Twells, John, 43, 45, 53, 56, 57, 58 Tyrrell, James, 232 understanding, the, see mind unitarianism, 259, 279 universal language, 50, 53, 58, 59, 102--7, 134 Locke’s ridicule of, 238 universals/particulars, 19, 30--1, 93, 95, 120, 202, see also abstraction; essences of substances Utz, Richard J., 94 Valla, Lorenzo, 59, 81, 114 vanity, 175, 176, 239, 258, 280, 284, 303 vernacular, the, 49--50 Vickers, Brian, 3, 64, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 80, 82, 96, 98, 100, 102, 154, 196, 212 Virgil, 65 Vives, Juan Luis, 61, 112 Vogt, Philip, 270 Von Leyden, W., 200, 245, 248 Vossius, Gerhardus Joannes, 57 Waldron, Jeremy, 193, 244, 294, 303 Walker, Obadiah, 41, 62, 66, 70, 75, 77, 80 Walker, William, 41, 44, 211, 247 Wallis, John, 17, 18, 22, 25, 31, 33, 46, 50, 257 Walmsley, Jonathan, 203 Walmsley, Peter, 6, 36, 136, 227 war, 138, 148

Ward, John, 168 Ward, Seth, 104--5 Waswo, Richard, 3, 49, 97, 114 Webb, John, 102 Webbe, Joseph, 48, 59, 60, 61, 62 Webster, Charles, 51 Webster, John, 36, 103 Weimann, Robert, 149 Westerhoff, Jan C., 101 White, Thomas, 36, 95 Wilkins, John, 5, 47, 55, 58, 59, 73, 81, 106--7, 135, 155, 201 will, 156, 165, 265, 273 William III, 258, 266 Williams, Bernard, 96 Wilson, Thomas, 14, 21, 26, 32, 36, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 78, 83 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 126, 140, 219, 276 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 300 Wood, Neal, 122, 294 Woodward, Hezekiah, 51, 62 words abstract terms, 20, 194, 256 abuses of, 78, 140, 167, 211--13, 234, 263, 264 as deeds, 173--4, 266 autonomy and power of words alone, 1, 5, 8, 9, 74--6, 81--7, 154--7, 160--82, 239--76 banish from thought, 156, 158, 243, 246 categorematic and syncategorematic terms, 20, 187, 256 circularity, 32, 45, 117, 164, 241--2, 254 communicative, 15, 37, 45, 69, 129, 141, 155, 186, 220, 221, 235, 251, 287, 295, 302 communicative: possibly not, 3, 9, 16, 73, 141, 221, 236, 249, 290, 295 concealing, self-reflective, inherently opaque, 16, 50, 76, 85, 97, 115, 122, 154, 155, 165, 176, 178, 212, 215, 234, 239, 241, 242, 249, 250, 257, 262, 277, 281, 284 concern about empty words, 48--51, 68, 177, 181, 239, 257 constitutive and deceptive power of, 1, 8, 9, 83, 84--7, 121, 154, 155, 166--82, 197, 209, 239--76, 277, 280--1, 284--5 constitutive of thought, 9, 16, 123, 161--6, 239, 241--2, 250--7, 260, 276, 281 contingent on use, culture and time, 43, 56, 59--63, 72, 112, 132, 140, 144, 177, 199, 216, 227--8, 265, 296, see also custom; cultural difference; history; time and language; semantic instability conventional, 7, 16, 27, 67, 96, 97, 102, 104, 112--14, 128, 151, 156, 285 dependent on trust, 166--8, 234, 287--8

Index detached, applicable at will, 36, 44--7, 63, 84, 87, 132, 212, 213--14, 219, 235, 287 differences between words/concepts/things: elison of, 17, 24, 25, 29, 31, 32, 43, 52, 55, 93, 102, 107, 126, 129, 156, 186, 197, 256, 257, 262, 275 different from concepts/things, 1, 20, 24, 255, 262, 275 dualist paradigm of sign--signified, 16--17, 29, 43--4, 47, 48, 52, 67, 93, 107, 130, 156, 157, 165, 185 gulf between sign and signified, 16, 42, 76, 130, 156, 159, 212, 213, 234, 241 insignificant, 8, 9, 45, 48--9, 119, 122, 164--5, 197, 241, 253--4, 264, 275 learnt before meanings, 253 mnemonic, 15, 106, 160--2, 251 natural connection to meaning, 16, 75, 96, 97, 102, 103--4, 160 origin of, 73, 220, 233 ought not to outstretch thought, 49, 191, 197, 279--80, 284 perspicuous, successfully significant, 70--4, 77, 139, 142, 143, 157--60, 249 and philosophy, 4--5, 24, 91, 129, 135--6, 160, 185--6, 189, 218, 240, 277--304 practically preeminent, 7, 8, 9, 42, 140, 155, 158, 163, 165--6, 186, 240, 241, 250--7, 275, 281, 284 problem of, 1--2, 4--5, 42, 64, 87, 130, 154, 197, 243, 257, 260--2, 275, 277, 298 quintessentially human, 41, 70, 186 relationship between written and spoken, 18, 47, 102, 105

361 res outstrip verba, 73, 104, 116, 199 secretly evaluative, 152, 180--1, 215, 266 seem natural, 268 sensible, public, and treacherous, 9, 18, 45--6, 64, 74--6, 108, 155--66, 172, 177, 239, 240--57, 262, 263, 275, 280, 285 signify ideas alone, 6, 8, 28, 49, 105, 123, 126, 185--209, 219, 276, 279 signify/stand for things directly, 27, 28, 29 signify ideas or things: false distinction, 27, 55, 92, 105, 106, 107, 110--11 simplicity and materiality belies signification, 31, 155, 177, 179, 197, 263, 264, 280--1 taken for things, 176, 263--5, 280--1 theoretically subservient, 99, 158, 255, 275, 276, 281 tripartite paradigm of word--concept--thing, 17, 24--5, 26--8, 48, 52, 55, 67, 92, 101, 185, 196 unintelligible without experience, 49, 51, 241, 296

Yates, Frances, 161 Yeo, Richard, 201 Yolton, John W., 108, 110, 135, 179, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 219, 225, 244, 245, 248, 260, 264 Young, B. W., 81 Yovel, Yirmiyahu, 170 Zagorin, Perez, 166 Zerilli, Linda, 211

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

Edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully

1 Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy pb: 0 521 27330 7 2 J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century pb: 0 521 27660 8 3 M. M. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits Bernard Mandeville’s Social and Political Thought hb: 0 521 30036 3 4 Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe pb: 0 521 38666 7 5 David Summers, The Judgment of Sense Renaissance Nationalism and the Rise of Aesthetics pb: 0 521 38631 4 6 Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 pb: 0 521 38912 7 7 Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order pb: 0 521 89228 7 8 Lynn Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist Advocate of History in an Age of Science pb: 0 521 52239 0 9 Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe pb: 0 521 52020 7 10 Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology pb: 0 521 33810 7 11 Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell I. Hanson (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change pb: 0 521 35978 3 12 Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life pb: 0 521 39838 x

13 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession hb: 0 521 34328 3 pb: 0 521 35745 4 14 David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined Legal Theory in Eighteenth-century Britain hb: 0 521 24592 3 pb: 0 521 52854 2 15 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 pb: 0 521 45753 x 16 Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century pb: 0 521 38578 4 17 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance hb: 0 521 38014 6 pb: 0 521 38884 8 18 Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism pb: 0 521 43589 7 19 Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science pb: 0 521 42836 x 20 Klaus Christian Kohnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism German Academic Philosophy Between Idealism and Positivism hb: 0 521 37336 0 21 Ian Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance The Case of Law hb: 0 521 41546 2 22 Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600 hb: 0 521 41493 8 23 Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555–1590 hb: 0 521 39204 7 pb: 0 521 89163 9 24 Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain hb: 0 521 39242 x 25 James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts hb: 0 521 43060 7 pb: 0 521 43638 9 26 Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 pb: 0 521 43885 3 27 Richard R. Yeo, Defining Science William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain hb: 0 521 43182 4 pb: 0 521 54116 6 28 Martin Warnke, The Court Artist The Ancestry of the Modern Artist hb: 0 521 36375 6

29 Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain hb: 0 521 44259 1 30 Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury A Conceptual and Historical Investigation pb: 0 521 46691 1 31 E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s ‘Fable’ Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society hb: 0 521 46082 4 32 Julia Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker hb: 0 521 46125 1 33 Keith Tribe, Strategies of Economic Order German Economic Discourse, 1750–1950 hb: 0 521 46291 6 34 Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy The Case of Philip Melancthon hb: 0 521 47347 0 35 David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism hb: 0 521 55178 1 pb: 0 521 64648 0 36 Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 hb: 0 521 49695 0 37 Philip Ironside, The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell The Development of an Aristocratic Liberalism hb: 0 521 47383 7 38 Nancy Cartwright, Jordi Cat, Lola Fleck and Thomas E. Uebel, Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics hb: 0 521 45174 4 39 Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 pb: 0 521 55920 0 40 Jennifer Platt, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America hb: 0 521 44173 0 pb: 0 521 64649 9 41 Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain hb: 0 521 56060 8 42 G. E. R. Lloyd, Adversaries and Authorities Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science hb: 0 521 55331 8 pb: 0 521 55695 3 43 Rolf Lindner, The Reportage of Urban Culture Robert Park and the Chicago School hb: 0 521 44052 1

44 Annabel Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought hb: 0 521 56239 2 pb: 0 521 54340 1 45 Stewart J. Brown (ed.), William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire hb: 0 521 57083 2 46 Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 hb: 0 521 57004 2 47 David Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State hb: 0 521 55191 9 48 Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism hb: 0 521 59260 7 49 David Weinstein, Equal Freedom and Utility Herbert Spencer’s Liberal Utilitarianism hb: 0 521 62264 6 50 Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone (eds.), Pedagogy and Power Rhetorics of Classical Learning hb: 0 521 59435 9 51 Reviel Netz, The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics A Study in Cognitive History hb: 0 521 62279 4 pb: 0 521 54120 4 52 Mary Morgan and Margaret Morrison (eds), Models as Mediators hb: 0 521 65097 6 pb: 0 521 65571 4 53 Joel Michell, Measurement in Psychology A Critical History of a Methodological Concept hb: 0 521 62120 8 54 Richard A. Primus, The American Language of Rights hb: 0 521 65250 2 55 Robert Alun Jones, The development of Durkheim’s Social Realism hb: 0 521 65045 3 56 Anne McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585 hb: 0 521 65144 1 57 James Hankins (ed), Renaissance Civic Humanism Reappraisals and Reflections hb: 0 521 78090 x pb: 0 521 54807 1 58 T. J. Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment hb: 0 521 66193 5 59 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire hb: 0 521 59081 7 pb: 0 521 78978 8 60 Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany hb 0 521 79265 7

61 Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (eds.), The History of Political Thought in National Context hb: 0 521 78234 1 62 Ian Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance The Case of Learned Medicine hb: 0 521 80648 8 63 Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric Theory and Practice hb: 0 521 81292 5 64 Geoffrey Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China hb: 0 521 81542 8 pb: 0 521 89461 1 65 Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England Civility, Politeness and Honour hb 0 521 82062 6 66 Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment hb 0 521 82015 4 67 Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 hb 0 521 82225 4 68 Pierre Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith A Genealogy of Economic Science hb 0 521 83060 5 69 Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought hb 0 521 83545 3 70 Harro Ho¨pfl, Jesuit Political Thought The Society of Jesus and the State c.1540–1640 hb 0 521 83779 0 71 Mikael Hornqvist, Machiavelli and Empire hb 0 521 83945 9 72 David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England hb 0 521 84748 6 73 John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 hb 0 521 84787 7 74 Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond hb 0 521 84502 5 75 Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution in England Commonwealth, Common Law and Reformation hb 0 521 78269 4 76 Hannah Dawson, Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy hb 0 521 85271 4

Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (Ideas in Context)

Locke (Philosophers in Context)

Locke (Philosophers in Context)