HABIT AND NATURE IN THE EDUCATION

The first sections of the Education deal primarily with the instruction of the body, marking Locke's first engagement with the place of nature in human development. In these sections, Locke suggests that the child can be made maximally flexible by habitual exposure to discomfort: “Our bodies will endure anything, that from the beginning they are accustomed to” (STCE, 5). Children are to go out with wet feet in winter, subsist on the plainest food—bread and water gruel (and very little of it at that)—and to have no regular mealtimes (STCE, 8, 13–6). While this regimen may seem to aim at accustoming a child to pain and discomfort, Locke recommends two other forms of physical habituation in these sections that would enhance the child's comfort—a regular sleeping schedule and regular bowel movements to prevent constipation (STCE, 21–3). What all these varied recommendations have in common is that they run contrary to the habits a child naturally develops if left to its own devices to pursue pleasures and avoid pains.

Children naturally seek warmth and dryness, tasty and ample food, and they habituate themselves to enjoying them. To counteract this, Locke directs parents to pre-empt and break habits that form from these natural pleasures. By contrast, bowel movements and bedtimes are things that children do not naturally make habitual on their own. They prefer to remain awake for “the unhealthy and unsafe hours of debauchery, which are those of the evenings” and, “being usually intent on their play and very heedless of anything else, often let pass those motions of nature, when she calls them but gently” (STCE, 21, 27). When it comes to useful but unpleasant activities that children naturally avoid, Locke demands that parents regularize “motions that were not perfectly voluntary,” as he tactfully describes them (STCE, 24). Where habit insinuates itself naturally, Locke directs parents to break it, but where it does not, he enjoins them to introduce it. In both cases, this sort of calculated habit opposes what the child desires. Locke's habituation is actually counterhabituation, because uninstructed nature instills its own habits.

What is striking about Locke's habituation is that he does not ask parents to inculcate any particular opinion or lifelong behavior in children by means of habit. Rather than being habituated into a specific profession, political conviction, or doctrinal confession, Locke's pupil is offered the rudiments of a wide range of ideas, opinions, and occupations. He is taught skills otherwise beneath his class like carpentry and gardening, and others like bookkeeping and law that are more suitable for gentlemen (STCE, 187, 202–5, 210–1). He also, and perhaps more surprisingly, comes away with few particular political opinions. The Education itself is silent on contemporary political polemics, recommending only that the child be made familiar with ancient literature, ancient and modern natural law, and English law. Locke elsewhere recommends political texts, but in a letter to a 36-year-old man rather than a child. There, he includes his own Two Treatises, along with Greek and Roman philosophers, modern natural lawyers, Whig histories, and the sermons of tolerationist clergymen (Locke Reference Locke and Axtell1968, 397–404). This reading list is broadly Whiggish and unlikely to turn out a patriarchal absolutist or a Jacobite, but it inculcates no more specific political doctrine, no consistent account of state origins, the best regime, or the ends of politics. This is a notable contrast to Hobbes's recommendation that students absorb primarily the principles of his Leviathan, a strategy that is perhaps closer to an indoctrinating education than Locke's suggestions (Hobbes Reference Hobbes and Curley1994; 31.41).

Even in religion, Locke skirts doctrine. He recommends that the child be taught a simple axiom about God's existence and power:

To ensure that this teaching directs the child towards Christianity, Locke adds that the pupil “should learn perfectly by heart. . .the Lord's prayer, the creed, and ten commandments,” but he should not be asked to read the Bible itself or any theology, which will only confuse him (STCE, 157). We could object that failing to habituate a child to religious practice and doctrine early on is itself a way of inculcating indifference or even irreligion, but Locke's caution with respect to religion arises from his effort to balance the necessity against the danger of habituation precisely to “prevent the undue connexion of ideas in the minds of young people” (ECHU, 2.33.10).

The danger of early exposure to theology is that children's “yet tender minds should receive early impressions of goblins, spectres, and apparitions” (STCE, 191). Once such fears are inspired in a child, they initiate a chain of habitual associations among spirits, the dark, and danger that harden into phobias that are nearly impossible to extirpate, even for those who eventually come to understand, as most people do, that there are no goblins lying in wait for them at night (STCE, 138, 191). Becoming a basket-case driven by occult fears is also a kind of habit, but the kind that Locke wants to avoid precisely because it is particular and concrete—it is based on a false chain of mental associations that prevents men from thinking clearly and associating ideas logically (ECHU, 2.33.7–10). At the same time, Locke worries that without any introduction to the ideas of God and salvation, children will reflexively lapse into materialism, “because matter being a thing that all our senses are constantly conversant with, it is so apt to possess the mind, and exclude all other beings but matter” (STCE, 191). This “prejudice. . .often leaves no room for the admittance of spirits, or the allowing any such things as immaterial beings. . .when yet it is evident, that by mere matter and motion, none of the great phænomena of nature can be resolved” (STCE, 191). If teaching a child religion in too much detail forms the foundation for his future fear of the dark, or if on the other hand teaching him too little turns him into an unthinking materialist, then he has been habituated in exactly the way that Locke's education tries to avoid.

This seems paradoxical however: habituation is the basic method underlying Lockean education, yet its product is not habituated to do or believe anything in particular. He is taught to be flexible, civil, and accommodating of others, but few ways of life or opinions are foreclosed for him. This is because Locke does not enjoin habituation in the straightforward sense of inculcating fixed conduct for life. It is far from his aim to raise a man who never stays up past dark or enjoys wine or company. The habits he prescribes for children are to be practiced only during childhood; it is their intellectual residue that he hopes will remain with the adult.

The principle governing early habituation is that every habit, whether it counters a natural desire or a natural aversion, contributes to the development of the child's capacity for “self-denial,” which Locke describes as itself a “habit” that is “contrary to unguided nature” but is “the true foundation of future ability and happiness. . .to be wrought into the mind, as early as may be, even from the first dawnings of any knowledge or apprehension in children” (STCE, 45, 33; see also 36, 38, 75; Neill Reference Neill1989, 235). Self-denial is not inculcated for its own sake, or for the neo-Stoic goal of minimizing desires, but because the experience of having his desires denied is foundationally educative for the child: it teaches him to distinguish between his desire and his will by showing him that none of his spontaneous desires are strictly necessary, at least not in the sense of requiring immediate gratification. Locke's detailed regimen for regulating bowel movements, bizarre as it may seem, underscores just how important it is not to assume the necessity of even our most basic physical desires since even these may be amenable to control by the will (e.g., STCE, 18, 33, 107). Locke does not deny that natural necessity exists, “but yet, the more children can be inured to hardships of this kind, by a wise care to make them stronger in body and mind, the better it will be for them. . . . Parents being but too apt of themselves to incline, more than they should, to the softer side” (STCE, 107).

The child who is permitted to follow his earliest and apparently most “natural” desires and aversions misses precisely this experience of feeling his will as a faculty separable from his desire, and so risks mistaking every mere desire for a natural necessity. It is not the behavioral effect of early habituation that Locke is after but rather its intellectual effect. The experience of habituation acquaints us with the possible strength of our wills and the lack of necessity in our desires. The child's spontaneous nature is not especially bestial or in need of suppression (STCE, 63, 107). But spontaneous development usually fails to disclose to us certain equally natural but higher possibilities in ourselves—particularly the capacity of our wills to suppress our desires—while the experience of being habituated and forced to cross our desires reveals them. One error of the Foucauldian reading is that it presumes that the spontaneous nature of a child is free, and that habituation is “denaturing” (Mehta Reference Mehta1992, 161–4). But Locke thinks that habits that obstruct our liberty creep in as much from spontaneous nature as from conventional sources, and that such habits make our desires appear to us as compulsions more effectively than do the conventional habits that our parents try to instill in us, or that we try to instill in ourselves. Natural habits slip in unnoticed, whereas learning conventional habits is always a painful process.

AUTHORITY AND REBELLION IN THE EDUCATION

The basic experience of dissonance between will and desire forces children to wonder what they should desire, and it is this puzzle that motivates the development of reason. At first, such dissonance requires straightforward imposition by parents to demonstrate that desires can be crossed. But as children age, Locke encourages parents to relax their “absolute” authority into “friendship.” The early imposition of parental authority is required to make flexibility possible in the child but the gradual relaxation of this authority is as necessary as its initial imposition. This is because the primary threat to the will in later childhood is no longer natural inclination mistaken for necessity, but “the law of fashion and reputation” by which “the greatest part” of mankind “govern themselves chiefly, if not solely. . .and so they do that, which keeps them in Reputation with their Company, little regard the Laws of God, or the Magistrate” (ECHU, 2.28.12).

In order to protect children against early submission to fashion and custom, Locke encourages an intensely inward-oriented and even socially isolated family life grounded in mutual affection between parents and children. Such a family discourages the child from seeking esteem elsewhere and creates a family culture that stands in contrast to the fashions and customs of the broader society. When the child does eventually enter that society, the familial education he has received becomes another source of dissonance for him, demonstrating that there are alternatives to fashion and the prevailing opinions of society and forcing him to weigh their relative merits. Although Locke uses parental authority in childhood to counteract competing authorities first those of nature and then of fashion—that threaten to habituate the child, he also takes advantage of children's natural dislike of being ruled to soften parental authority from command into advice, producing an adult who orders his desires according to his own understanding.

That Locke expects children to rebel against their parents may come as a surprise after his strong statements about the “absolute” authority which parents are to wield, and the “fear and awe” in which children should hold them (STCE, 41–2). However, the passage continues: “Fear and awe ought to give you the first power over their minds, and love and friendship in riper years to hold it: for the time must come, when they will be past the rod and correction” (STCE, 42). Because Locke's aim is a strong will capable of suspending its desires, he is careful not to prescribe pedagogical measures that weaken the will, however useful such measures might be for promoting docility. He warns that frequent beatings, “chidings,” and humiliations will issue in “dejection,” a sense that one's will is entirely ineffectual in carrying out desires, and a subsequent loss of desire itself (STCE, 46–7). The dejected child may appear master of himself to adults, since “with his unnatural sobriety he may please silly people, who commend tame inactive children,” but this is because they mistake their desire that children be inactive for the child's own desire to be so (STCE, 51). Consequently, the task of parental authority in middle childhood is no longer to turn the will, or the child's conduct, against his desires, but to co-opt the most potent of his desires, his love of esteem, before anyone else can: “Esteem and disgrace are, of all others, the most powerful incentives to the mind. . .which I look on as the great secret of education” (STCE, 56).

The difficulty is that nearly anyone in a position to bestow esteem can exercise authority over a child, and “servants, and other ill-ordered children” pose a particularly “great danger” (STCE, 19, 59, 68–70, 76, 89, 107, 138). Their authority is either irresponsible or malicious: servants are not held to account for children's educations, and other children, lacking any understanding of their own, are simply vectors for the transmission of fashion. The danger of placing children under such conditions is so great that Locke warns against schools because the sheer preponderance of the young undermines adult authority and replaces it with the tyranny of other boys, whose “misbecoming and disingenuous ways of shifting in the world must be unlearned” (STCE, 70). To prevent a child's being misruled by such potential dispensers of esteem and disgrace, authority is to be exclusive to parents and extended only at their discretion to those deemed acceptable influences. Locke flatters parents by implying that they are better suited to govern their children than anyone else, but he does not assume that his readers will be more reasonable than servants or children, or less susceptible to the delusions of popular opinion. The demands of his education are themselves correctives for wayward parents.Footnote ³

It is necessary “to make [children] in love with the company of their parents,” but this requires that parents enjoy the company of their children, since if Locke's instructions are to be followed, parents will spend a great deal of time with them (STCE, 70). Everything in Locke's pedagogy, from his prohibition against swaddling, which immobilized infants precisely so that adults could ignore them, to his encouragement of home education and the employment of fathers as tutors, demands that parents attend more closely to their children than was expected and his readers would have desired. If the prevailing fashion was to be “indulgent and familiar [with children] when they are little, but severe to them, and [to] keep them at a distance, when they are grown up,” Locke reverses these imperatives, demanding early strictness and increasing warmth and familiarity as the child grows (STCE, 40–1).

The sheer amount of time that parents will have to spend with their children to the exclusion of most other company and the demands that Locke puts on parents to study their children's unique constitutions and adapt their childrearing to them inclines the family to form its own opinions and judgments against those of the society at large (STCE, 66). This ensures that education does not simply recapitulate prevailing fashions and customs. Ruth Grant points out that the experience of raising children according to Locke's pedagogy helps adults “develop the ability to resist, when necessary, this need for social approval which provides the foundational support for the dominion of custom or ‘fashion’” (2012, 614). Indeed, Locke recommends his book for parents “so irregularly bold, that they dare venture to consult their own reason, in the education of their children, rather than wholly to rely upon old custom” (STCE, 216).

Moreover, children themselves will be partial authors of this family culture, in part because of the insular conditions in which they are brought up, but also because they are to engage in frequent conversation with their parents conducted as if between equals, with a father “advis[ing] only as a friend of more experience,” particularly about matters concerning family life like the management of the familial estate (STCE, 96–7). The obedience imposed in early childhood becomes the “reasoning with children” of middle childhood (STCE, 81). This admits the possibility of objection and compromise: “You must not expect his inclinations should be just as yours. . .youth must have some liberty, some outleaps” (STCE, 97). Consulting an older child in family questions “will not at all lessen your authority, but increase his love and esteem of you” (STCE, 97). All this in turn fosters a distinct family culture that diverges from the main currents of fashion and public opinion.

Nonetheless, the Education does not aim at a society of permanently isolated families living in eccentric worlds of their own, disconnected from broader civil society. Locke admits that even “the milder sort of government” which he enjoins on older children is likely to become ineffectual in adolescence, “that boiling boisterous part of life” when boys chafe under even the best parents’ rule, “think[ing] themselves too much men to be governed by others, and yet hav[ing] not prudence and experience enough to govern themselves” (STCE 43, 212). This is the point at which children become most susceptible to fashion because they are most skeptical of the familial judgments that had up to then shielded them.

To temper the ill effects of this stage, Locke advises delaying the customary period of travel until the age when “reason and foresight begin a little to take place” so that children are not exposed to “the greatest dangers of their whole life” abroad among strangers, but he nonetheless implies that even at home, adolescents may well choose “the temptations of [their] companions” over the judgments of their parents and tutors (STCE, 212).

It seems puzzling that for all his emphasis on familial authority, Locke would concede its unraveling in adolescence. But far from conceiving parental authority to be total or even very effective, Locke is realistic about the rebelliousness of children. He establishes authority early but acknowledges that there will come a point when the child will prefer his “companions” to his parents and that he must be permitted some “outleaps.” By keeping him out of school and away from the influence of servants and other adults however, Locke delays the child's exposure to fashion and custom, supplying him first with a family education that will be a source of dissonance when he does finally enter the broader society. Locke gives him some space during adolescence to diverge from his family so that by the time he reaches adulthood, he has both obeyed and resisted, and parental authority is far from absolute. The final element of education—travel—is to be delayed until he can undertake it alone, under the guidance of his own reason for the first time, which he puts into the service now of comparing not his family's customs to those of his countrymen, but his country's customs to those of foreigners. “Being thoroughly acquainted with the laws and fashions, the natural and moral advantages and defects of his own country, he has something to exchange with those abroad, from whose conversation he hoped to reap any knowledge” (STCE, 212).

At every stage of development, Lockean pedagogy inserts dissonance into the child's experience, obstructing conventional habituation and preserving the will's flexibility in the face of desires that threaten to solidify his conduct and beliefs before he has had a chance to weigh and reflect on them. In his first years, his parents “substitute” their wills for his and cross his inclinations. Then they make themselves sufficiently admirable to him that he prefers to do what will win their approbation instead of following the alluring example of servants and other children. In adolescence, the family's coercive power recedes while its opinions and customs stand as an alternative to the fashions of civil society. And finally, as he enters adulthood, he must confront the hallmark of skeptical argument—the diversity of customs—on his own. The arc of education is the move from being mastered by authority to partial self-mastery guided by the love of authority, to full control of the desires by one's own strengthened will. Familial authority is a necessary counterweight to the habits that arise from submitting to nature and fashion, and it must consciously preserve the child from easy acquiescence to those pleasures.

DESIRE AND WILL IN THE ESSAY

In order to understand the relationship between Locke's account of liberty and his pedagogical emphasis on experiencing a distinction between will and desire and choosing among competing desires, we must turn to his account of these faculties in the Essay. There, his definition of liberty is far more individuated, self-contained, and cognitive than the more well-known political definitions from the Two Treatises. Liberty in the Essay depends not directly on the rights or limits of the law, but on the will's “power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires”:

This conception of liberty relies on a stark distinction between the faculties of will and desire, but this distinction poses two difficulties. First, it is not logically demonstrable and was denied by the competing, Hobbesian account of the will. Second, it does not actually operate in most people, whose weak wills give way to their stronger desires. The process of education, which consists in forcing the child to “daily experiment in himself,” is central to demonstrating—experientially rather than logically—that these faculties really are distinct and that one may be strengthened to control the other. Absent the will's ability to suspend desires, an ability acquired by habituation, reason is impotent, and we submit to the desires inculcated in us by nature, fashion, and custom.

Locke's account is a challenge to Hobbes's will as “the last appetite, or aversion, immediately adhering to the action, or to the omission thereof” (Hobbes Reference Hobbes and Curley1994, 6.53; see also Casson Reference Casson2011, 162–5; Forde Reference Forde2013, 118–23). On this account, there is no more than a semantic distinction between will and desire, since will is only whichever desire immediately precedes action. Locke insists that will is not merely another term for desire, but the distinction between will and desire cannot be demonstrated, only experienced. Language fails to convey it, so the only way to ascertain it is to examine one's own mind:

“Reflecting on his own mind” is, as we have seen, precisely what Lockean habituation forces the child to do by pitting his desire against first the wills of his parents and then his own will (cf. ST, 58). Although in principle anyone can suspend and reflect on his desires, “we see men abandon themselves to the most brutish, vile, irrational, exorbitant actions, during the whole current of a wild or dissolute life without any check or the least appearance of any reflection,” and this is due to the omission of precisely the kind of education which Locke requires. Such dissolute men are those who

The power of the will to suspend and examine the desires must be demonstrated to the child early on if it is to be effective.

Desire itself, according to Hobbes, is endless, the result of the “general inclination of all mankind” towards “perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” (Reference Hobbes and Curley1994, 11.2). Locke advances a version of this Hobbesian premise in the Essay, where he defines desire as the “uneasiness of the Mind for want of some absent good,” which “determines the Will to the successive voluntary actions whereof the greatest part of our Lives is made up” (ECHU 2.21.31–3). Uneasiness is “the chief, if not only spur to human industry and action,” and so is like Hobbesian desire: perpetual and restless (ECHU, 2.20.6). Desire begins in the basic sensations of the body, our “ordinary necessities,” but the imagination extends it far beyond the satiation of an empty belly. Most of life's activity is driven by

All our activity is in the pursuit of some desire, but most of the desires we pursue are not natural but acquired—either from identifiable sources like the people who please us and whom we seek to please, but at least equally often from the more amorphous forces of custom or fashion. Although passions like love of honor are innate, the specific objects to which they attach are potentially limitless and depend for the most part on the custom of the country (Grant Reference Grant2012).

The difficulty with this account is, as Tully points out, its determinism (Reference Tully1993, 216–9). If we are constantly beset by desires which determine our conduct, and we cede to whichever causes the greatest immediate pain, then reflection is almost meaningless, since we can only reflect on which of our pains is most pressing and no further. The will is determined not by “the greater good in view; but some (and for the most part the most pressing) uneasiness a man is at present under” (ECHU, 2.21.31). To act according to custom or from a desire for affirmation is still to act voluntarily, but if the “law of fashion” is really the most powerful determinant of our conduct, and the anxiety of being out of step with our companions is the source of our most immediate pain, then our wills can only be directed at the alleviation of it (Grant Reference Grant2012, 610–6). This is hardly different from Hobbes's definition of the will as “the last appetite,” and it precludes us from carrying out any long-term endeavors. There are many “greater goods in view” that nevertheless pinch us less than the “present pains” of the body or of being out of favor with our companions, yet the pursuit of these greater goods (including knowledge and salvation) would seem to be foreclosed by this account of will and desire.

Locke is not a reductive hedonist, however, and insists that not all pleasures issue in happiness, and that we are capable of directing our conduct over the long term and pursuing distant goods determined by reason rather than habit, custom, or fashion (Casson Reference Casson2011, 169; Colman Reference Colman1983, 215–24; Forde Reference Forde2013, 120–2). Simply understanding a greater good is insufficient, as demonstrated by the example of the drunkard who understands perfectly well how drinking is ruining him. He sees that “his Health decays, his Estate wastes; Discredit and Diseases, and the want of all things, even of his beloved Drink, attends him in the course he follows” but “the habitual thirst after his Cups, at the usual time, drives him to the Tavern. . . . The greater good, though apprehended and acknowledged to be so, does not determine the will, until our desire, raised proportionably to it, makes us uneasy in the want of it” (ECHU, 2.21.35). At one point, Locke suggests that desire can be “raised proportionably” by means of straightforward conditioning: “It is in a man's power to change the pleasantness, and unpleasantness, that accompanies any sort of action” so that he may, by repetition, come to take pleasure in what he has judged good for himself and displeasure in what he determined to be bad (ECHU, 2.21.69). But Locke's sensitivity to the strength of individual dispositions casts doubt on his belief that a “relish” for anything could be conditioned into anyone, especially without his having “apprehended” the good of it himself (STCE, 66, 94).

There is another way to understand how education can orient our desires to better ends that does not point to conditioning. Tully (Reference Tully1993, 200) suggests that the aim of Locke's pedagogy is “to develop an educational practice that would form mental ‘inclinations’ or ‘relish’ to examine and assent in accordance with the probable proofs” (see also Grant Reference Grant1987, 44–8). This is the goal for adults, but it is too abstract for children, who are unlikely to desire or even understand rigorous probabilistic inquiry. What they can learn is to question their desires by crossing them, and through the “reasoning” of the Education, eventually to question their parents’ desires as well. They are, in short, to be made skeptical of themselves and eventually of the authorities and conventions around them. Skepticism in the form of doubt that my convictions are true because they are mine and an openness to correction is a more basic disposition than the more advanced practice of weighing all “probable proofs.”Footnote ⁴

Insofar as such a disposition becomes a regular mental practice for the child, we may call it a habit that supports reason, following Locke's warning that “habits [work] more constantly and with greater facility, than reason; which, when we have most need of it, is seldom fairly consulted, and more rarely obeyed” (STCE, 110). Nonetheless, it is an exceptional habit, one that wards off conventional habits and the kind of behavioral conditioning of which previous readers have accused Locke. The mature, impartial understanding which Locke exhorts readers to cultivate in the Essay and the Conduct is based on the extended cultivation of the skeptical disposition in which the Education culminates.

SKEPTICISM AND LIBERTY

Skepticism—more specifically, habitual skepticism—is the primary weapon that Locke offers against the power of habits that arise both from natural pleasures and pains, as well as from those forms of “fantastical uneasiness. . .which custom has made natural to us.” Such skepticism is, paradoxically, a habit of having no totally fixed habits, of being radically willing to admit error in oneself and deny authority to others, “to judge himself, and judge unbiasedly of all that he receives from others. . . . Reverence or prejudice must not be suffered to give beauty or deformity to any of their opinions” (CU, 3). Absent such a commitment, we contract our opinions from those whose approbation we desire and then hold fast to them, making it “a hard Matter, to persuade any one, that the Words which his Father or Schoolmaster, the Parson of the Parish, of such a Reverend Doctor used, signified nothing that really existed in Nature: Which, perhaps is none of the least Causes, that Men are so hardly drawn to quit their Mistakes” (ECHU, 3.10.16). Self-love leads to “obstinacy,” “stiffness of mind,” and “pride”—the most universal sort of mental error, and the one which Locke's education tries above all to pre-empt (STCE, 78–0; CU, 26, 34; ECHU, 3.11.5). A general skepticism towards the validity and goodness of our desires and opinions vitiates our self-regarding tendency to cling to our mistaken judgments in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence (ECHU, 4.16.3, 4.20.10).

The pedagogy of the Education trains the will to suspend its desires and invites the understanding to examine them. It inclines the mind towards habitual skepticism and modesty, flexibility and civility, but it cannot guarantee that its product will always judge well among the options, especially when it comes to the complex disputes in politics, religion, and science with which a well-educated adult will be faced. The inclusion of Grotius, Pufendorf, and English law into the curriculum of the Education introduces the child to the natural and civil law which are the prerequisites for Lockean citizenship, though we can only “presume” that he knows these laws by the age of majority (STCE, 185–6; ST, 59). But Locke's educational project does not end by satisfying the modest formal requirements of citizenship. A more expansive form of epistemic liberty is possible for those who apply the skepticism inculcated by the Education to the practices of logical association and probabilistic reasoning described in the Conduct and the Essay.

The Conduct, though often read in conjunction with the Education, is in fact a guide for adult mental training (Schuurman Reference Schuurman2001). There, partiality or bias is the primary intellectual scourge of intelligent men, and its antidotes continue to be skepticism in thought and modesty in character. “The proudest esteemer of his own parts” must be shown the limits of his understanding so that he might attain “indifferency” with respect to truth (CU, 3, 11, 34). To avoid “stiffness of mind,” we must constantly engage in mental battle against calcification, exposing ourselves to novelty and variety:

Here again is the Lockean strategy of using habit to develop mental faculties capable of undermining habit. Study is not for the most part intended to result in what we would call expertise, but in mental agility (CU, 12). To the same end, Locke recommends seeking out variety in conversation, which the city offers to a greater degree than the country, and appropriates even the New Testament to support his skepticism: “Try all things, hold fast to that which is good” (CU, 3). In this, the Conduct’s emphasis on exposure to variety begins where the Education leaves off. The child's social life must be restricted to protect him from fashion, and he is consequently insulated from variety in people and opinions beyond that which he finds in his books. But the Education ends with travel, an undertaking that, in introducing the variety of customs and men, marks the beginning of adulthood.

The Conduct and Essay presume that their reader has left the isolation of childhood and must now constantly contend with the customs, popular opinions, and fashions of civil society. It has been suggested that Locke intended his educational writings to alter the intellectual conditions of society, just as he hoped his Two Treatises would usher in a new political regime (e.g, Button Reference Button2008, 169; Grant Reference Grant2012, 621–6; Savonius-Wroth Reference Savonius-Wroth2010, 140). While Locke clearly thought that the particular content of custom, public opinion, and our own desires could change, there is no evidence that he thought these influences could be extirpated or replaced by universal reasonableness (Dawson Reference Dawson2007, 298–304; Dunn Reference Dunn1989, 146). His epistemological works do not propose a general mental reform of society, but rather instruct the individual in the means to retain his intellectual independence within a society governed inevitably by custom and fashion, showing him how to understand these forces and use them to his advantage. “The law of fashion and reputation” is inescapable: all societies have been governed by this law and always will be. But as much as custom threatens to distort our understanding, it also maintains the social order necessary to advance knowledge.

The simultaneous potential of language to expand our understanding and to compromise it demonstrates how fundamentally dependent on opinion even the wisest men are. The purest instance of epistemic freedom comes in our intuition and definition of “simple ideas”—perceptions like hot, blue, or soft—which cannot be defined or perceived on another's behalf. But this freedom is minimal in practice: we would be limited to a paltry grasp of the world if we relied entirely on the simple ideas we received through our own senses. Since ideas are particular, each blade of grass would be a new and interesting species to us, but “it is beyond the power of human capacity to frame and retain distinct ideas of all the particular things we meet with,” so we must generalize and abstract, entangling ourselves in the distortions that acquiring a pre-existing language imposes (ECHU, 2.11.9, 3.3.2–3; see also Dawson Reference Dawson2007, 295–8).

By entering the world of complex ideas, we subject ourselves to the collective definitional authority of custom or opinion, but because this authority has no identifiable locus, no king to behead, and is instead established “by a secret and tacit consent” of all its subjects, we are complicit in our subjection in a manner not entirely unlike that of the Lockean citizen to his legislature (ECHU, 2.28.10). The parallel between political and epistemic autonomy in Locke can be pushed farther: just as benefits accrue to the individual from renouncing his “private judgment” to join civil society, the benefit to the individual understanding of giving up the impossibly daunting task of naming every impression one experiences and instead abiding by socially derived definitions is access to a vast trove of existing and potential knowledge about the world. Inquiring minds want to know, but they can only do so by cooperating with other inquiring minds. Yet the mind that is attached to a will that suspends its desires and an understanding that steps back and examines their judiciousness is also less susceptible to having its thoughts determined by the potentially stupefying effects of language (ECHU, 3.2.7). Suspension and examination preserves the basic freedom of intuiting and defining simple ideas within the coercive social sphere of language by preventing us from always substituting words for ideas, and thereby shielding us from the impositions of authorities who would have us believe and espouse things that we don't ourselves understand.

Just as our renunciation of private judgment in political society nonetheless leaves us some liberty, so too does our entrance into a society governed by custom and opinion. The relationship between ideas and language is a dynamic one in which new ideas are always being defined and old ones redefined. It is in this process of originating and redefining especially mixed modes that the imagination is called upon to invent and associate without limit. This category of ideas is extremely broad, encompassing “the greatest part of the words made use of in divinity, ethicks, law, and politicks,” and so offers the most promising realm for invention and reconfiguration since these ideas uniquely lack sensual referents in nature (ECHU, 1.22.12; Dawson Reference Dawson2007, 225–6). Previous scholars have examined Locke's conception of liberty in light of his concern with the natural law, arguing that Lockean liberty consists ultimately in discovering and living by that law, which permits man's highest good, salvation (e.g., Button Reference Button2008, 139–50; Tully Reference Tully1993, 296–8). But this characterization overstates the extent to which Locke saw the world as a system of static moral precepts, and overlooks the importance for him of an open-ended realm of matters indifferent to salvation but amenable to human ingenuity, and even the mutability of the ways we learn the natural law. “Every one must not hope to be. . .the incomparable Mr. Newton,” but those who can ascend to that level may discover “new truths, before unknown to the world” (ECHU, Epistle, 4.7.11)

It is precisely in this realm of epistemic autonomy that it becomes clear why Locke's education demands such intense self-discipline: to persuade others of the reality and usefulness of one's new and redefined ideas by argumentation requires the sustained and laborious work of producing a true and compelling logical demonstration. One must engage without distraction or bias in a “chain of reasonings” on the model of mathematical proofs, a capacity acquired by “using the mind to a long train of consequences” (ECHU, 3.12.7–8, CU, 6–7). Such reasoning faces the possibility of error at every step, especially when it is not mathematics that is being reasoned about, but “divinity, ethicks, law, and politicks.” In these fields, truth is determined by the internal logical agreement of constituent simple ideas. Even the most strenuous application of the mind to these pursuits only results in attenuated progress:

All this is only the effort required to accept a probable opinion (Casson Reference Casson2011).

These dispiriting passages are part of Locke's rhetorical effort, particularly in Book IV of the Essay, to inculcate modesty by emphasizing the limits of human understanding and discouraging “the proudest esteemer of his own parts” from seeking glory in inquiry:

This modesty against the “presumption that nothing is beyond our comprehension” is the counterpart of skepticism about the tendency of our own opinions to be correct because they are ours (see also Forde Reference Forde2013, 45). It is cold water on the hopes of those who pursue inquiry for the sake of power, a motive which Locke frequently attributes to scholastics (e.g., ECHU, 1.4.24, 3.10.9; 2.29.12, 3.10.2, 5–13):

Locke's Foucauldian critics charge that these aspects of Locke's epistemology—the rigorously ordered associating that allows for the creation of new mixed modes—actually foreclose liberty because they narrow the imagination and proscribe spontaneous “individuality” by classing it as “madness” (Mehta Reference Mehta1992, 21–4). But Locke's difficulty with “mad” imaginings is that they are devoid of judgment and even volition, and so are by definition unfree. They cannot be redirected or even silenced, no less systematically conveyed to others. It is the individual capable of understanding complex ideas, redefining them where a new definition is more illuminating, and persuading others to accept his definitions who can recapture in society some of the freedom he ceded to it by adopting its language. Carrig notes this potential for recovering liberty through language when he remarks that, “he is most free who has the power. . .to arrange circumstances in such a way that others agree to his usage of terms,” but asserts that this itself subjugates those who accept his definitions (Reference Carrig2001, 71). Forde (Reference Forde2013, 89–90) goes even further, asserting that “Locke exhorts us to free ourselves from mental ‘enslavement’ to received ideas, but in reality he wishes only to make us his slaves.” But this charge overstates the extent of anyone's power to control the fate of his “terms” once they are in circulation.Footnote ⁵

Lockean education consequently points pupils to both negative and positive liberty. By inculcating a flexible will and a skeptical disposition, it promises to most pupils the freedom from being intellectually ruled by their own unconsidered passions and by others, and by extension, by fashion and custom. This is politically important because ideas, including the laws, cannot be fully understood second-hand, but must be intuited anew by each individual (ECHU, 4.18.3). Lockean education orients all pupils away from deferring to authority and towards independent reflection. In addition to this, for those who follow his epistemological writings as adults and train their minds to associate complex trains of ideas logically and rigorously, Lockean education also opens the possibility of a positive freedom to invent and discover. This liberty will only be of interest to a minority, the sort of man who “has a mind to carry his studies farther” and to “penetrate deeper. . .by his own genius and industry” into those subjects which the Education introduces, but it is nonetheless one at which Locke aims (STCE, 195, 94).