nd of their smooth defenders; a love
of navigating alone and exploring for oneself even the coasts already well
charted by others. Here is romanticism united with a scientific conscience
and power of destructive analysis balanced by moral enthusiasm. Doubtless
Locke might have dug his foundations deeper and integrated his faith
better. His system was no metaphysical castle, no theological acropolis:
rather a homely ancestral manor house built in several styles of
architecture: a Tudor chapel, a Palladian front toward the new
geometrical garden, a Jacobean parlour for political consultation and
learned disputes, and even--since we are almost in the eighteenth
century--a Chinese cabinet full of curios. It was a habitable philosophy,
and not too inharmonious. There was no greater incongruity in its parts
than in the gentle variations of English weather or in the qualified moods
and insights of a civilised mind. Impoverished as we are, morally and
humanly, we can no longer live in such a rambling mansion. It has become a
national monument. On the days when it is open we revisit it with
admiration; and those chambers and garden walks re-echo to us the clear
dogmas and savoury diction of the sage--omnivorous, artless,
loquacious--whose dwelling it was.

[1] Paper read before the Royal Society of Literature on the occasion of
the Tercentenary of the birth of John Locke.

[2] See note I, p. 26.

[3] See note II, p. 29.

[4] See note III, p. 35.

[5] See note IV, p. 36.

[6] See note V, p. 37.

[7] See note VI, p. 39.

[8] See note VII, p. 43.

[9] See note VIII, p. 46.

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES

I

Page 3. _This airy monster, this half-natural changeling._

Monsters and changelings were pointed to by Locke with a certain
controversial relish: they proved that nature was not compressed or
compressible within Aristotelian genera and species, but was a free
mechanism subject to indefinite change. Mechanism in physics is favourable
to liberty in politics and morals: each creature has a right to be what it
spontaneously is, and not what some previous classification alleges that
it ought to have been. The Protestant and revolutionary independence of
Locke's mind here gives us a foretaste of Darwin and even of Nietzsche.
But Locke was moderate even in his radicalisms. A human nature totally
fluid would of itself have proved anarchical; but in order to stem that
natural anarchy it was fortunately possible to invo