se, by
which, if we had it, we might know our souls as we know a triangle.[476]
Locke would have heartily disowned the conclusions of many who professed
themselves his true disciples, and of many others whose whole minds had
been trained and formed under the influences of his teaching, and who
insisted that they were but following up his arguments to their
legitimate consequences.[477] The general system was the same; but there
was nothing in common between the theology of Locke and Toland's
repudiation of whatever in religion transcended human reason, or
Bolingbroke's doubts as to the immortality of the soul, or the
pronounced materialism of Hartley and Condillac, or the blank negative
results at which Hume arrived.

But though Locke and multitudes of his admirers were profoundly
Christian in their belief, the whole drift of his thought tended to
bring prominently forward the purely practical side of religion and the
purely intellectual side of theology, and to throw into the background,
and reduce to its narrowest compass, the more entirely spiritual region
which marks the contact of the human with the Divine. Its uncertain
lights and shadows, its mysteries, obscurities, and difficulties, were
thoroughly distrusted by him. He did not--a religious mind like his
could not--deny the existence of those feelings and intuitions which,
from their excessive prominence in that school, may be classed under the
name of mystic. But he doubted their importance and dreaded their
exaggerations. Not only could they find no convenient place, scarcely
even a footing, in his philosophical system, but they were out of accord
with his own temperament and with the opinions, which he was so greatly
contributing to form, of the age in which he lived. They offended
against his love of clearness, his strong dislike of all obscurity, his
wish to see the chart of the human faculties mapped out and defined, his
desire to translate abstract ideas into the language of sound,
practical, ordinary sense, divested as far as could be of all that was
open to dispute, and of all that could in any way be accounted
visionary. His perpetual appeal lay to the common understanding, and he
regarded, therefore, with much suspicion, emotions which none could at
all times realise, and which to some minds were almost, or perhaps
entirely unknown. Lastly, his fervent love of liberty indisposed him to
admissions which might seem to countenance authority over the
con