§ 16. This subject of classification is so important to students that it may be worth while to make a few remarks upon it. The only thoroughly consistent people are the people of fiction. We can know all about _them_. Directly we understand their central thought or peculiarity we may be sure that everything they say and do will be strictly in accordance with it, will indeed be explainable by it. To take a bald and simple instance, directly we know that Mrs. Jellaby in _Bleak House_ is absorbed by her interest in an African Mission, we know all that is to be known about her; and everything she does or omits to do has some reference to Borrioboola Ghar. But in real life not only are people much less easily understood, but when we actually have seized their main idea or peculiarity or interest we must not expect to find them always consistent: and they will say and do much which if not inconsistent with the main idea or peculiarity or interest has at least no connection with it. Suppose, _e.g._, you can make out with some certainty that Locke belonged to the developing school, you must not expect him to pay little heed to instruction as such. Again, suppose you find that his philosophy was utilitarian; you must not suppose that in everything he says he will be thinking of utility. Now the historian is tempted to treat real men and women as the writer of fiction treats his puppets. Having fastened, quite correctly let us suppose, on their main peculiarity he considers it necessary to square everything with his theory of them, and whatever will not fall in with it he, if he is unscrupulous, misrepresents, or if he is scrupulous, suppresses. Again, we are too apt to read into words meanings derived from controversies unknown at the time when the words were uttered. This is a well-known fact in the history of religious thought. We must always consider not merely the words used but the time when they were used. What a man might say quite naturally and orthodoxly at one period would be sufficient to convict him of sympathizing with some terrible heresy if uttered half a century later. We find something like this in the history of education. If anyone nowadays speaks of the pleasure with which as a young man he read Tacitus, he is understood to mean that he is opposed to the introduction of “modern studies” into the school-room. If on the other hand he extols botany, or regrets that he never learned chemistry, this is taken for an assault on classical instruction. But, of course, no such inference could be drawn if we went back to a time when the antithesis between classics and natural science had not been accentuated. In many other instances we have to be on our guard against forcing into language meaning which belongs rather to a later date. § 17. With these cautions in mind let us see how far Locke may be said (1) to be a trainer, and (2) how far a utilitarian.