The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke. Man, Person, and Spirits in the Essay by John W. Yolton

Abstract

82 Ms. Greene’s valuable study thus appropriately complicates any simple narrative of the development of literary property distinct from censorship as a sudden and complete phase change ushered in by the lapse of licensing and the passage of the Statute of Anne. Furthermore , she confirms and reanimates Foucault ’s important insight that the modern author first emerged as the subject of punishment not entitlement. Thus the early part of her study traces the developing discourse of authorial liability in edicts, pamphlets, and prosecutions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Later, with the Statute of Anne, she suggests , authorial liability did not disappear but rather became intimately tied to authorial property. Such a link between liability and ownership was forcefully propounded by Defoe in the years between the lapse of licensing and the enactment of the literary property statute, but was parliament following Defoe’s prescription for reciprocal rights and responsibilities ? Ms. Greene does not explicitly address the question of whether the statute was intentionally designed as an instrument of discipline, but nothing in the text or the legislative history suggests that it was. Nonetheless, Ms. Greene does show that invoking the statute potentially exposed some authors to legal dangers. Part of the value of this timely study, then, is that it reminds us of the dark side of copyright that was implicit from the very beginning and that is still apparent today. To what degree does copyright today serve not to foster but to hinder what the Statute of Anne called the ‘‘encouragement of learning’’? Mark Rose University of California, Santa Barbara JOHN W. YOLTON. The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke. Man, Person, and Spirits in the Essay. Ithaca: Cornell, 2004. Pp. 180. £35. ‘‘Provocative’’ is one of the adjectives used by Vere Chappell in his commendatory blurb on this book’s cover. Undoubtedly all readers will be provoked to admiration by Mr. Yolton’s patient tracking and lucid exposition of such crucial , and slippery, terms as ‘‘man,’’ ‘‘self,’’ ‘‘person,’’ and ‘‘soul’’—the lastmentioned being especially difficult to elucidate and relate to the other three. Although the spotlight here falls upon Locke’s Essay, Mr. Yolton well understands how important it is to consider what Locke says in that work alongside what he says elsewhere: for example, in Some Thoughts concerning Education. This book will provoke thought. The following questions are among others raised in the first chapter alone: In having recourse to neurophysical explanation , did Locke intend to countenance epistemological reductionism? How far is it possible or useful to distinguish between ‘‘self’’ as referring to personal identity and ‘‘person’’ as bearing the moral connotation? How should we weigh what Locke says about the person ’s ‘‘essential constitution’’against his view that the person is constituted by character, the product of education? If the moral acts of man are directed by reason , what is there for the soul to do? As the work proceeds, there is more intellectual provocation as we are introduced not only to the social and physical environments that Locke thinks human beings occupy, but to the universe, the domain of God, angels and spirits, and the intellectual world. There are yet more questions: How may we form ideas of 83 spirits? What is the temporal and eternal place and function of the soul? Running throughout is Locke’s deep concern with the chain of being on the one hand and, on the other, with the goal of happiness in this life and the next—the latter in relation to morality and divine judgment. In several places Mr. Yolton provokes the reviewer’s responses. First, of Locke he declares that ‘‘his Christianity was minimalist (a belief in Jesus as the Messiah and a few other notions).’’ Certainly Locke, seeking common ground in sectarian times, regarded the specified doctrine as the minimum qualifying belief to entitle a person to the name ‘‘Christian’’; but he did not think that this was all that there was to be believed; and since he himself believed in a good deal more than this, ‘‘his Christianity’’ was more doctrinally robust than Mr. Yolton implies . Secondly, Mr. Yolton claims not to know whether Locke, given his aversion to enthusiasm, believed in legitimate...