. Those successes, too, had been won in the name
of 'liberty'--a vague if magical word which I shall not seek to define
at present. England, so sound Whigs at least sincerely believed, had
become great because it had adopted and carried out the true Whig
principles. The most intelligent Frenchmen of the coming generation
admitted the claim; they looked upon England as the land both of liberty
and philosophy, and tried to adopt for themselves the creed which had
led to such triumphant results. One great name may tell us sufficiently
what the principles were in the eyes of the cultivated classes, who
regarded themselves and their own opinions with that complacency in
which we are happily never deficient. Locke had laid down the
fundamental outlines of the creed, philosophical, religious, and
political, which was to dominate English thought for the next century.
Locke was one of the most honourable, candid, and amiable of men, if
metaphysicians have sometimes wondered at the success of his teaching.
He had not the logical thoroughness and consistency which marks a
Descartes or Spinoza, nor the singular subtlety which distinguishes
Berkeley and Hume; nor the eloquence and imaginative power which gave to
Bacon an authority greater than was due to his scientific requirements.
He was a thoroughly modest, prosaic, tentative, and sometimes clumsy
writer, who raises great questions without solving them or fully seeing
the consequences of his own position. Leaving any explanation of his
power to metaphysicians, I need only note the most conspicuous
condition. Locke ruled the thought of his own and the coming period
because he interpreted so completely the fundamental beliefs which had
been worked out at his time. He ruled, that is, by obeying. Locke
represents the very essence of the common sense of the intelligent
classes. I do not ask whether his simplicity covered really profound
thought or embodied superficial crudities; but it was most admirably
adapted to the society of which I have been speaking. The excellent
Addison, for example, who was no metaphysician, can adopt Locke when he
wishes to give a philosophical air to his amiable lectures upon arts and
morals. Locke's philosophy, that is, blends spontaneously with the
ordinary language of all educated men. To the historian of philosophy
the period is marked by the final disappearance of scholasticism. The
scholastic philosophy had of course been challenged generations before.