their existence and quality to the living organism with its moral bias,
and that at the same time they should be addressed to the external objects
which entice that organism or threaten it.

All ambitions must be defeated when they ask for the impossible. The
ambition to know is not an exception; and certainly our perceptions cannot
tell us how the world would look if nobody saw it, or how valuable it
would be if nobody cared for it. But our perceptions, as Locke again said,
are sufficient for our welfare and appropriate to our condition. They are
not only a wonderful entertainment in themselves, but apart from their
sensuous and grammatical quality, by their distribution and method of
variation, they may inform us most exactly about the order and mechanism
of nature. We see in the science of today how completely the most accurate
knowledge--proved to be accurate by its application in the arts--may shed
every pictorial element, and the whole language of experience, to become a
pure method of calculation and control. And by a pleasant compensation,
our aesthetic life may become freer, more self-sufficing, more humbly
happy in itself: and without trespassing in any way beyond the modesty of
nature, we may consent to be like little children, chirping our human
note; since the life of reason in us may well become science in its
validity, whilst remaining poetry in its texture.

I think, then, that by a slight re-arrangement of Locke's pronouncements
in natural philosophy, they could be made inwardly consistent, and still
faithful to the first presuppositions of common sense, although certainly
far more chastened and sceptical than impulsive opinion is likely to be
in the first instance.

There were other presuppositions in the philosophy of Locke besides his
fundamental naturalism; and in his private mind probably the most