Locke and the "Dissolution of the Ego"

Abstract

IT HAS been said that Addison, and the men of letters of the eighteenth century, Locke was 'the philosopher,' somewhat as Aristotle had been for the schoolmen.2 The duo of Newton and Locke always appears as the revolutionary heroes who dominate the beginnings of the modern age. Yet it has been the case with both that much of their influence on creative artists, as well as on ideas about art, remains obscure, for, like the larger part of an iceberg, it lies beneath the surface of things. In the present paper I shall try to suggest a few points of that influence, concentrating on the new model of the mind which emerges, by implication as well as explicitly, from Locke's writings on the mental processes. There will be no attempt to enter into the many and vexatious problems of technical philosophy and psychology, but rather to see the effects that Locke's epistemology produced on the common man's idea of himself and his fellows: that idea which, of necessity, most poets, novelists, and even critics were to use as the basis and much of the very material of their works. A reason for the actual effectiveness of Locke's system-its ability to win almost universal acceptance within a few years, as opposed to the enmity and uproar Hobbes stirred up-is the fact that, like the Glorious Revolution itself with which he had much to do, he compromised. He succeeded i producing a theory of the mind which retained what most men desired while it excluded, seemingly, what they feared. There were two extremes to be mediated. One was the familiar, crude mechanism represented by Hobbes. The philosopher of Malmesbury had made an overhasty attempt to explain all sensation, all dreams, all thought, in terms of purely material, physiological changes in the body, produced by particles of matter outside impinging on the matter of the organism. Connections of these impressions, produced in fortuitous sequences, give rise to all our notions of relations. According to his theory (to which he himself did not strictly adhere), there is nothing else: no separate soul, no living being at the heart of it all, aware of itself and of its awareness. It was all very material and mechanical and, the age rightly felt, false. This was an age of extremes in philosophy. The problem of bringing the mind into relation with a physical world was becoming steadily more acute. Some, like Descartes, resorted to the desperate expedient of a radical split between physical imagination and pure intellection; he could, he says, have only a confused idea as image of a chiliagon, for example, whereas his mental conception is clear and distinct: And thus I clearly recognize that I have need of a particular effort of mind in order to effect the act of imagination, such as I do not require to understand, and this particular effort of mind clearly manifests the difference which 1 This paper is part of a study of aspects of Locke's influence on theories of art and on writers in the eighteenth century.