Locke, who combined in a strange union strong religious faith with
philosophic unbelief, turned aside, as we have seen, from the
questions which had occupied his predecessors; knew little and cared
less about substance and accident, matter and spirit; but set
himself to investigate the nature of the organ itself by which truth
is apprehended. In this investigation he began by emptying the mind
of all native elements of knowledge. He repudiated any supposed
dowry of original truths or innate or connate ideas, and endeavored
to show how, by acting on the report of the senses and personal
experience, the understanding arrives at all the ideas of which
it is conscious. The mode of procedure in this case is empiricism;
the result with Locke was sensualism,--more fully developed by
Condillac, [18] in the next century. But the same method may lead, as
in the case of Berkeley, to immaterialism, falsely called idealism.
Or it may lead, as in the case of Helveticus, to materialism. Locke
himself would probably have landed in materialism, had he followed
freely the bent of his own thought, without the restraints of a
cautious temper, and respect for the common and traditional opinion
of his time. The "Essay" discovers an unmistakable leaning in that
direction; as where the author supposes, "We shall never be able to
know whether any mere material being thinks or no; it being impossible
for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation,
to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter
fitly disposed a power to perceive and think;... it being, in respect
of our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive
that God can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking,
than that he should superadd to it another substance with a faculty
of thinking, since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what
sort of substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power,