riarchal dignity of Locke's
mind. Father of psychology, father of the criticism of knowledge, father
of theoretical liberalism, god-father at least of the American political
system, of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedia, at home he was the ancestor of
that whole school of polite moderate opinion which can unite liberal
Christianity with mechanical science and with psychological idealism. He
was invincibly rooted in a prudential morality, in a rationalised
Protestantism, in respect for liberty and law: above all he was deeply
convinced, as he puts it, "that the handsome conveniences of life are
better than nasty penury". Locke still speaks, or spoke until lately,
through many a modern mind, when this mind was most sincere; and two
hundred years before Queen Victoria he was a Victorian in essence.

A chief element in this modernness of Locke was something that had hardly
appeared before in pure philosophy, although common in religion: I mean,
the tendency to deny one's own presuppositions--not by accident or
inadvertently, but proudly and with an air of triumph. Presuppositions are
imposed on all of us by life itself: for instance the presupposition that
life is to continue, and that it is worth living. Belief is born on the
wing and awakes to many tacit commitments. Afterwards, in reflection, we
may wonder at finding these presuppositions on our hands and, being
ignorant of the natural causes which have imposed them on the animal mind,
we may be offended at them. Their arbitrary and dogmatic character will
tempt us to condemn them, and to take for granted that the analysis which
undermines them is justified, and will prove fruitful. But this critical
assurance in its turn seems to rely on a dubious presupposition, namely,
that human opinion must always evolve in a single line, dialectically,
providentially, and irresistibly. It is at least conceivable that the
opposite should sometimes be the case. Some of the primitive
presuppositions of human reason might have been correct and inevitable,
whilst the tendency to deny them might have sprung from a plausible
misunderstanding, or the exaggeration of a half-truth: so that the
critical opinion itself, after destroying the spontaneous assumptions on
which it rested, might be incapable of subsisting.

In Locke the central presuppositions, which he embraced heartily and
without question, were those of common sense. He adopted what he calls a
"plain, historical method", fit, in his