reason, which is or which may become the current grammar of mankind. Of
philosophers who are orthodox in this sense, only the earliest or the most
powerful, an Aristotle or a Spinoza, need to be remembered, in that they
stamp their language and temper upon human reason itself. The rest of the
orthodox are justly lost in the crowd and relegated to the chorus. The
frailty of heretical philosophers is more conspicuous and interesting: it
makes up the _chronique scandaleuse_ of the mind, or the history of
philosophy. Locke belongs to both camps: he was restive in his orthodoxy
and timid in his heresies; and like so many other initiators of
revolutions, he would be dismayed at the result of his work. In intention
Locke occupied an almost normal philosophic position, rendered precarious
not by what was traditional in it, like the categories of substance and
power, but rather by certain incidental errors--notably by admitting an
experience independent of bodily life, yet compounded and evolving in a
mechanical fashion. But I do not find in him a prickly nest of obsolete
notions and contradictions from which, fledged at last, we have flown to
our present enlightenment. In his person, in his temper, in his
allegiances and hopes, he was the prototype of a race of philosophers
native and dominant among people of English speech, if not in academic
circles, at least in the national mind. If we make allowance for a greater
personal subtlety, and for the diffidence and perplexity inevitable in the
present moral anarchy of the world, we may find this same Lockian
eclecticism and prudence in the late Lord Balfour: and I have myself had
the advantage of being the pupil of a gifted successor and, in many ways,
emulator, of Locke, I mean William James. So great, at bottom, does their
spiritual kinship seem to me to be, that I can hardly conceive Locke
vividly without seeing him as a sort of William James of the seventeenth
century. And who of you has not known some other spontaneous, inquisitive,
unsettled genius, no less preoccupied with the marvellous intelligence of
some Brazilian parrot, than with the sad obstinacy of some Bishop of