A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumesRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Free thought -- History
Indeed, the theism of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding
undermined even his Unitarian Scripturalism, inasmuch as it denies,
albeit confusedly, that revelation can ever override reason. In
one passage he declares that "reason is natural revelation," while
"revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries
communicated by God immediately, which reason vouchsafes the truth
of." [475] This compromise appears to be borrowed from Spinoza,
who had put it with similar vagueness in his great Tractatus, [476]
of which pre-eminent work Locke cannot have been ignorant, though he
protested himself little read in the works of Hobbes and Spinoza,
"those justly decried names." [477] The Tractatus being translated
into English in the same year with the publication of the Essay, its
influence would concur with Locke's in a widened circle of readers;
and the substantially naturalistic doctrine of both books inevitably
promoted the deistic movement. We have Locke's own avowal that he
had many doubts as to the Biblical narratives; [478] and he never
attempts to remove the doubts of others. Since, however, his doctrine
provided a sphere for revelation on the territory of ignorance, giving
it prerogative where its assertions were outside knowledge, it counted
substantially for Unitarianism insofar as it did not lead to deism.
See the Essay, bk. iv, ch. xviii. Locke's treatment of revelation
may be said to be the last and most attenuated form of the
doctrine of "two-fold truth." On his principle, any proposition
in a professed revelation that was not provable or disprovable by
reason and knowledge must pass as true. His final position, that
"whatever is divine revelation ought to overrule all our opinions"
(bk. iv, ch. xviii, § 10), is tolerably elastic, inasmuch as he
really reserves the question of the actuality of revelation. Thus
he evades the central issue. Naturally he was by critical
foreigners classed as a deist. Cp. Gostwick, German Culture and
Christianity, 1882, p. 36. The German historian Tennemann sums up
that Clarke wrote his apologetic works because "the consequences
of the empiricism of Locke had become so decidedly favourable to
the cause of atheism, skepticism, materialism, and irreligion"
(Manual of the Hist. of Philos. Eng. tr. Bohn ed. § 349).
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