We have seen how Locke refused toleration to atheists on the ground that their denial of a divine lawgiver and judge destroys the basis of morality. He did not, like Spinoza, believe that morality is of the nature of things. For him it is constituted by the will of God. Possibly, if pressed, he might have explained {70} that what atheism denies is not the rule of right, but the sanction of that rule, the fear of supernatural retribution. Yet being, like Spinoza and Leibniz, a determinist, he should have seen that a creator who sets in motion the train of causes and effects necessarily resulting in what we call good or bad human actions has the same responsibility for those actions as if he had committed them himself. To reward one of his passive agents and to punish another would be grossly unjust and at the same time perfectly useless. But how do we know that he will, on any theory of volition, reward the good and punish the bad? "Because we have his word for it." And how do we know that he will keep his word? "Because he is all-good." But that, on Locke's principles, is pure assumption; and God, being quite sure that _he_ has no retribution to fear, must be even more irresponsible than the atheist. The principle that nothing can come from nothing, so far from proving theism, leads logically either to pantheism or to a much more thorough monadism than the system of Leibniz. And, metaphysics apart, it conflicts with a leading doctrine of the essay--that is the fundamental distinction between the primary and the secondary qualities of matter. We think of bodies as in themselves extended, resisting and mobile, but not in themselves as coloured, sonorous, odorous, hot, cold, or sapid. They cause our special sensations, but cause them by an unknown power. Again we perceive--or think we perceive--both primary and secondary qualities in close union as properties of a single object, and this object in which they jointly inhere is called a substance. And to the question, What is substance? Locke admits that he has no answer except something we know not what. He has returned to the agnostic standpoint of the {71} Cyrenaic school. This something, for aught we know, might have created the world.