Locke and Language

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L O C K E , L A N G U A G E A N D EA R L Y - M O D E R N
PHILOSOPHY
In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah

Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in early-
modern philosophy, and presents a groundbreaking analysis of John
Locke’s critique of words. By examining a broad sweep of pedagogical
and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century,
Dr Dawson explains why language caused anxiety in writers such as
Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Nicole, Spinoza,
Pufendorf, Boyle, Malebranche and Locke. Locke, Language and Early-
Modern Philosophy demonstrates that new developments in philosophy, in
conjunction with weaknesses in linguistic theory, resulted in serious
concerns about the capacity of words to refer to the world, the stability of
meaning, and the duplicitous power of words themselves. Dr Dawson
shows that language so fixated all manner of early-modern authors
because it was seen as an obstacle to knowledge and society. She thereby
uncovers a novel story about the problem of language in philosophy, and
in the process reshapes our understanding of early-modern beliefs about
nature, epistemology, morality and politics.
hannah dawson is Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University

of Edinburgh.
I D E A S I N CO N T E X T 7 6
Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy

IDEAS IN C ONTE XT
Edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully
The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual

traditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and
vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the
alternatives available within the contemporary frameworks of ideas and
institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions,
and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new
picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts.
By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of
the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen
to dissolve.
The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation.
A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume.
LOCKE, LANGUAGE AND
EARLY-MODERN PHILOSOPHY
HANNAH DAWSON
University of Edinburgh
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521852715
© Hannah Dawson 2007
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format 2007
ISBN-13 978-0-511-28894-4 eBook (EBL)

ISBN-10 0-511-28894-8 eBook (EBL)
ISBN-13 978-0-521-85271-5 hardback

ISBN-10 0-521-85271-4 hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
for Joy Denyer
Contents
Acknowledgements page x
Notes on the text xii
Introduction 1
part i language in the trivium 11

1 Language in logic 13
2 Language in grammar 41
3 Language in rhetoric 64
part ii philosophical developments of the

problem of language 89
4 The relationships between language, mind and word 91
5 Semantic instability: a containable threat 129
6 Under cover of sensible and powerful words 154
part iii locke on language 183

7 Words signify ideas alone 185
8 Semantic instability: an inherent imperfection 210
9 A life of their own 239
10 Locke in the face of language 277
Bibliography 305
Index 349
ix
Acknowledgements
A number of friends and institutions have helped me write this book and
it is an enormous pleasure to acknowledge them here. In the first place,
I am indebted to the British Academy Arts and Humanities Research
Board for funding the PhD out of which the book arises, and to Christ’s
College, Cambridge, for the sunlit home in which I wrote much of the
thesis. I am also indebted to Queens’ College, Cambridge, for the junior
research fellowship, the top-floor rooms and the stimulating interdisci-
plinary culture which facilitated the conversion of thesis to book. I thank
the librarians of the British Library, of Cambridge University Library and
of Duke Humfrey’s Library, for their good humour and professionalism.
In the production of this book, Cambridge University Press has been
brilliant. The reports by their anonymous readers were exceptionally
useful, and I have done my best to incorporate their suggestions. Åsa
Söderman has been a wonderful copy-editor, at once sensitive and astute.
Jackie Warren has been both tolerant and helpful. And as for Richard
Fisher, it has been a pure delight to get to know at first hand his legendary
unfailing cheer and consummate efficiency. His patience and compassion
have gone beyond the call of duty and I am forever obliged to him.
In ways that are too various to enumerate here, but that involve
kindness, conversation, criticism, books, bibliographies and laughter, I
am hugely grateful to the following scholars: John Allison, Terence Ball,
Richard Bourke, Brendan Bradshaw, Leo Cadogan, Daniel Carey, Janet
Coleman, David Cram, Emma Gilby, Angus Gowland, Mark Goldie,
Lilja Gretarsdottir, Lena Halldenius, James Harris, Ross Harrison, Susan
James, Natalie Kaoukji, Sachiko Kusukawa, Cees Leijenhorst, Rhodri
Lewis, Ian Maclean, Noel Malcolm, Ian Mcbride, Murray Milgate, Craig
Muldrew, Jim Murphy, Eric Nelson, Ian Patterson, William Poole,
Richard Rex, John Rogers, Sami Savonius, Richard Scholar, David
Sedley, Sandy Stewart and Richard Yeo.
x
Acknowledgements xi
I am especially grateful to Annabel Brett, who introduced me to the
rewards of intellectual history, whose perception and support over the
years have awed and nourished me, and whose answers to my questions
never fail to the hit the mark. I would also like to single out John Dunn,
who continues to bring Locke into focus for me. I owe serious debts to
those generous citizens who took time to read parts, or even all, of the
book, and whose incisive comments enabled me both to clarify my
arguments and to avoid some (doubtless not all) embarrassment: Stefan
Collini, Sandra Dawson, Vlad Eatwell, Rebecca Langlands, Richard
Serjeantson and Tristram Stuart.
Michael Moriarty and Jim Tully examined my PhD, and I cannot
thank them enough for their scrupulous observations, their transforma-
tive enthusiasm and, most of all, the imagination they brought to bear on
my work, opening my eyes to its wider implications and setting me on a
new path.
It is difficult to find words adequate to express my greatest debt. With
generosity, readiness and heart-warming optimism, Quentin Skinner has
scrutinised every draft of every chapter of this book, attending to both the
particular and the general, wielding all the time his erudition and acuity.
There is something magical about his power as a teacher: his clarity is
infectious, his counsel is liberating, and his confidence brings one closer
to being worthy of it.
While one of the joys of academic existence is that colleagues are also
friends and that the grim line between work and life is at best non-
existent, I want to end by thanking all those comrades from a slightly
distinct sphere without whose sociability and tomfoolery I would have
struggled to discern the point of anything. I thank in particular Vlad
Eatwell, Henry, Sandra, Rebecca and Tom Dawson, and finally my
grandma, Joy Denyer, to whom I dedicate this book with all my love.
Queens’ College, Cambridge
Notes on the text
references
I use the author-date system to refer to both primary and secondary
materials. In the case of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, I
also give the book, chapter and section references, in that order, to
provide a clearer sense of where we are in the work. In facsimile editions
of works where the editor’s pagination differs from the original, I cite the
original pagination. In the case of Locke’s manuscripts, where his own
pagination goes awry and the editors have added consistent numbering, I
cite the editors’ pagination first, followed by Locke’s in brackets.
transcription
While, in the main, I preserve the spelling and punctuation of the texts
cited in the bibliographies, I sometimes disrupt it in order to smooth out
my prose. For example, I modernise early-modern orthographical
traditions, such as the use of the long ‘s’. Very rarely, in order to
integrate quotations into my sentences, I make a grammatical alteration
to a word, for example ‘defrauded’ becomes ‘defrauds’. I thin out the
profusion of capital letters and italics in early-modern works.
translation
When quoting from texts written in languages other than English, I use
the translations cited. Where none are available or appropriate, I make
my own. Where I disagree with the translation, or do not think it
captures the force of the original, I supply the original words, sometimes
suggesting an alternative translation.
xii
Introduction
Language was a problem for early-modern philosophers. Not only were a

remarkable number of works devoted to the subject, but it intruded upon
texts about nature, morality and politics. At a time when both the por-
trayal of reality and our access to that reality were being challenged, and
when religious and political conflicts proliferated, language came to seem
dangerously unhinged. It was supposed to reach out to the world and to
mediate between men, but instead it barred the way.1 As perceptions of
the natural and cultural worlds mutated and splintered, it was feared that
language no longer mapped them. Yet language was not silent. Covering
over the cracks in the semantic edifice, it told its own duplicitous story. It
seemed to have a power of its own. Unfettered in practice by the forces
that ought to have constrained it, it tore at knowledge and at the com-
munity. So pressing was the unease about language that when John Locke
came to write his great work on human understanding, he felt impelled to
include an entire book on words. This inclusion is even more surprising
when one considers that the Essay concerning Human Understanding
(1689) is recognisably a work of logic.2 Logics old and new had, in the
main, treated ideas and words simultaneously, and even interchangeably,
explaining how these simple units were gradually compounded by the
mind in a process that culminated in chains of reasoning. Locke repeats
this traditional trajectory from ideas to knowledge, but inserts a distinct
treatment of words, therein delivering the most sustained, devastating and
acute critique of language that his age produced. The aim of the present
study is to show why he came to make this insertion and, more generally,
1
Early-modern philosophers generally speak of ‘men’, rather than ‘men and women’. In order to
avoid anachronism or exculpation, I tend to maintain this usage.
2
Locke effectively names it as such at its end (Locke 1975, p. 720 (iv.xxi.4)). It becomes clear that it
was perceived as a logic by himself and contemporaries in his Correspondence (Locke 1976–89, iv,
pp. 479 and 601–2; v, p. 351). See also Buickerood 1985, pp. 157–9, and Schuurman 2004, p. 2.
1
2 Locke, language and early-modern philosophy
why language came to be the object of such general disquiet among early-
modern philosophers.
More precisely, this book does four things. First, it analyses the the-
ories of language that were bequeathed to early-modern philosophers in
obscure as well as canonical texts. Second, it uncovers the linguistic
concerns and ambitions that these theories, in conjunction with certain
epistemological and practical developments, provoked in philosophers.
Third, with the framework of early-modern philosophy of language in
place, it considers Locke’s intervention. It identifies the arguments that he
was repudiating and amplifying, as well as those that he simply reiterated.
Against the background of everyday assumptions, negative reactions and
creative developments, the innovative force of Locke’s polemic is thrown
into relief. The book ends with an assessment of the ramifications of
Locke’s philosophy of language for his epistemological and political
projects.
While commentators have produced important work on Locke’s phi-
losophy of language, they have often done so from a contemporary
perspective, evaluating his answers to questions that preoccupy philoso-
phers now. The principal debate has revolved around Locke’s funda-
mental linguistic thesis that words signify ideas.3 His critics retort that
meanings cannot consist of private ideas. If they did, people would be
able neither to communicate nor to refer to external things. His defenders
exculpate him from the crime, variously arguing that he did not make
such an obvious mistake. However, Locke could not have seen the ori-
ginal privacy of meaning as a mistake. It was obvious to him that meaning
was primarily private. The entire point of words was to publicise ideas
that would otherwise be hidden. This was a truism that Locke accepted
without question and that made sense as part of a network of beliefs
about God, man and the world. An understanding of Locke’s intellectual
environment makes it clear that he was not interested in proving that
words signify ideas; this was an uncontested fact. Moreover, by estab-
lishing what was taken for granted, one can unearth what Locke was
saying that was new, and therefore the points he was actually trying to
make. It turns out that Locke was in fact concerned to expose the
desperate consequences that follow from the commonplace that
words signify ideas. Ironically, these consequences touch on precisely the
pitfalls of which commentators have declared him naively ignorant. That
is to say, he worries that, given that words signify ideas, they are removed
3
For references to this debate see fn. 44, p. 219, chapter 8, below.
Introduction 3
from the world and obstruct communication. Situating Locke’s ideas in
their context, therefore, captures his concerns rather than our own. We
believe that, given that we communicate, meaning must be publicly
accessible, and so we trawl the objective world and linguistic use for this
elusive entity. We search for an exit from Locke’s ideational theory of
meaning. But reading him in the light of our opinions erases his. We
come at meaning from the opposite direction. Whereas we see meaning as
working – with ease, it is sometimes said – from the outside in, for Locke it
works – with difficulty – from the inside out.
More generally, Locke’s linguistic theory has been flaunted and attacked
as the exemplar of a representational model of language, whereby words
stand in a representative relation to ideas and (perhaps, in some ways) to
things. This ‘Lockean’ approach has been contrasted with the various non-
representational accounts that have flourished in the twentieth century.
However, it turns out that, long before the howls began, Locke himself
struggled with and owned up to the failings in the only linguistic para-
digm that was avaliable to him. His immanent critique is testament not
only to his acuity, but also to his intellectual courage and integrity.4
There are some commentators who have taken a historical approach to
Locke’s philosophy of language, and to early-modern philosophy of
language as a whole. However, historians tend to present Locke as
ushering in a strikingly new way of words rather than developing old ones
in a complex performance of debt and denial.5 More generally, scholarly
attention has focused on the outstanding contributions to linguistic
theory in the period, on the abundance of literature that explicitly and
entirely pertained to language.6 In addition to these strange and mighty
ships, I explore the waters that kept them afloat and the undercurrents
4
I am indebted to Jim Tully for making this clear to me.
5
For interpretations of Locke’s novelty, see Cohen 1997, p. xxiv; Formigari 1998, p. 13; Padley 1985
and 1988, i, p. 352. Important exceptions to this discontinuous approach include Hacking (1975b)
and Ashworth (1981), both of whom locate Locke in certain linguistic traditions. Ayers (1991) is a
masterpiece that straddles philosophical and historical approaches to Locke’s epistemology and,
within this, his philosophy of language. Ott (2004, pp. 13–21) brilliantly identifies the Hellenistic
semiotic tradition to which Locke is indebted. He also evaluates Locke’s position from a
contemporary perspective, and defends it against the attacks of Berkeley, Mill, Frege, Wittgenstein,
Quine and Putnam. For my response to this book see Dawson 2004.
6
References to this literature occur throughout the book. Among the significant contributions to the
study of early-modern philosophy of language are: Aarsleff 1982; Bono 1995; Cave 1979; Chomsky
1966; Cohen 1977; Coudert 1978 and 1991; Demonet 1992; Elsky 1989; Fish 1971a and 1972;
Formigari 1988 and 1993; Foucault 1970; Hacking 1975b; Katz 1981; Kessler and Maclean 2002;
Knowlson 1975; Land 1986; Maclean 1992 and 2002; Markley 1993; Padley 1976, 1985 and 1988;
Rossi 2000; Salmon 1972, 1988 and 1996; Slaughter 1982; Stillman 1995; Struever 1995; Skinner
1996; Vickers 1985; Waswo 1987.
that affected their course. Taking account of the fluid, international
republic of letters that connected philosophers across borders through
migration and the circulation of correspondence, manuscripts and books,
I cover English and European authors, especially French ones. As well as
making significant additions to the subject of language, the French turn
out to be particularly resonant with Locke. And, in addition to texts from
the early-modern period, I study those from antiquity and the intervening
years whose traces are so vivid in early-modern writing.
Within this frame, I look at two kinds of source that have not received
much attention from students of early-modern language movements. To
recover quotidian assumptions about language, I turn to the textbooks
that taught the three arts of language – grammar, logic and rhetoric. The
trivium formed the bedrock of every gentle education. It embodied the
received wisdom about the nature of words that philosophers would have
learnt at school and university, and that they went on to rehearse,
embellish and unpick. In order to uncover these reactions, I then turn to a
wide range of books that are primarily occupied with subjects other than
language, such as metaphysics, commonwealths and Scripture, but that
nevertheless record the irresistible pressure of linguistic concern. I look,
for example, at Descartes’ Le monde (written 1629–33; published 1664),
Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) and Pufendorf ’s De iure
naturae et gentium (1672). In this small sample, the menace of language
worms its way into discussions of light, republics and law. I investigate
this kind of ubiquitous linguistic interference. Accordingly, when I come
to Locke, I look not only at book iii of his Essay – the book that is entitled
‘of words’ and is so well known to historians of linguistics – but also at
those parts of the Essay that are apparently not concerned with language,
as well as the vast extent of his published and unpublished oeuvre. This
use of all manner of philosophical texts delivers a more richly shaded,
generally darker, picture of early-modern philosophy of language than
that painted by those books which enthusiastically advertise their interest
in language. In addition, these comments about language that spilled so
plentifully and so anxiously on to the pages of early-modern philosophy
tell us something that might otherwise be missed about the intimate
relationship that was conceived between language and philosophy. One
cannot grasp the full extent of contemporary linguistic concerns when
they are abstracted from philosophy. Indeed, it seems to me that early-
modern philosophers were not so much concerned about language per se,
except insofar as it obstructed philosophy and the better life that
philosophy would bring.
Introduction 5
This brings me to the distinctive thrust of this book: that the early-
modern preoccupation with language originates from deep fears about
the corruptible nature of words themselves – about their fragile relation to
the concepts and things to which they were supposed to be fixed, and
about their extraordinary power to disrupt truth and society. On the
whole, commentators have tended to elucidate how language was con-
ceived to work by Locke and his predecessors. We are told, for example,
how Jacob Boehme believed that there was a divine natursprache that
inherently contains knowledge of nature, or how John Wilkins believed
that language can map the world essentially, albeit conventionally, or how
Locke believed that words signify ideas. This may all be so, but it fails to
register the anxiety that characterises so much early-modern treatment
of language, that fuels so many of the reformatory plans with which we
are familiar, and that pushes the subject into philosophy at large. By
projecting on to early-modern linguistic thought our mission to discover
how language works, we are easily blinded to the overriding source of its
urgent energy: alarm that language did not work as it should. As estab-
lished perceptions of man’s relations to the world and to his fellows were
questioned, so too were the aptness, the stability and the strength of
language. Language was both the agent of provocation and the victim of
these unsettled perceptions. It was this complicated interaction of beliefs
about the internal constitution of language and of changing philosophical
positions that made language come to seem so threatening to natural,
moral and political philosophers and to so encroach upon their writing.
This book examines this volatile interaction. It tells a story about the
problem of language in philosophy.
In studying a wide range of texts, I want not only to achieve a fuller
image of early-modern philosophy of language, but also to penetrate the
early-modern usage which is foreign to us now. By moving back and forth
between a wealth of texts, it gradually becomes possible differentially to
decode the (unstable) meanings of key terms. From our point of view, the
most vexed and important of these involve those entities that words are
said to ‘signify’: ‘meaning’, ‘signification’, ‘sense’, ‘thing’ or ‘res’. By
enveloping oneself in the cultural lexicon of early-modern speakers, one
can begin to see things in their terms. One begins to shake off the modern
presumption that meaning is in certain ways a function of the interplay of
signs, that language and meaning are somehow made of the same stuff, or
draw breath from the same source. One begins to internalise the radical
disjunction between sign and signified which is axiomatic for early-
modern thinkers and key to understanding their linguistic solicitude.
However, I am not simply concerned to give an impressionistic account
of early-modern philosophy of language, one that juxtaposes an array of
resemblances and aporias. I am also interested in recovering a history of
the debate, in the strings of actions and reactions that constitute a
dynamic conversation. Rather than merely unlocking what various writers
thought that words meant, I track a narrative of the shifting semantic
ground. I probe the responses of philosophers to what they read in the
trivium, the quarrels and bequests that related these philosophers and the
rejoinder that Locke gave to this debate.
In establishing these associations, I note some of the connections that
we know existed between authors, particularly in the case of Locke, whose
manuscripts and library afford us access to his literary interests. However,
the marks that writers leave on each other do not originate simply from
the reading of books. In the self-consciously friendly and dialogical
community of seventeenth-century philosophers, ideas were shared and
developed off the page.7 Indeed, Locke is keen to tell us that the seed of
his Essay was produced when ‘five or six friends meeting at my chamber’
were overwhelmed by the difficulties of philosophical inquiry.8 The trade
in ideas was particularly active in a culture that positively encouraged
gentlemen to copy wise dicta into their notebooks and to pepper their
speech with them. The high value set on commonplaces promoted an
intense and elusive exchange of identical beliefs. Moreover, just as lan-
guage is overwhelmingly communal, so too are beliefs. Invented in the
interstices between speakers, they are circulated, reinforced and contested.
They make up that symbolic web which gives us voice. I take it, then, that
one does not need explicit allusions or proven familiarity to justify
relating texts to one other. The fact that Locke may well not have read,
for example, Thomas Spencer’s Art of Logick, Delivered in the Precepts of
Aristotle and Ramus (1628) does not mean that he was not familiar with
the ideas represented there. Spencer declared that ‘by institution . . . the
signification of words followes the intent of the speaker, and not other-
wise’.9 It strikes me as legitimate to say that Locke was ‘repeating’ this
view when he wrote: ‘that then which words are the marks of, are the ideas
of the speaker: nor can any one apply them, as marks, immediately to any
thing else, but the ideas, that he himself hath’.10 This is not to say that
individuals are drowned by the discourses in which they move. They can
7
See Shapin and Shaffer 1985; Shapin 1994; Walmsley 1993.
8
Locke 1975, p. 7 (Epistle to the Reader). 9 Spencer 1970, p. 154.
10
Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.2).
Introduction 7
modify, challenge and invert the conceptual resources they are given.
Indeed, it is crucial to my analysis that authors can act, particularly when I
come to Locke’s shocking interruption. Treading a path, then, between
intertextuality and authority, this book follows the ideas that led
philosophers to fear language.
Part i examines the mainstream beliefs about language that are
imparted in the trivium. It is important to note that early-modrn phi-
losophy of language is fundamentally a philosophy of words. While today
we might focus more on sentences, and while concatenations of words
were explored by early-modern writers, their primary unit of analysis was
words, which were believed to signify something outside themselves.
More particularly therefore, early-modern philosophy of language might
often be characterised as a philosophy of names, whereby sounds are
considered to be applied to, or to name, something extra-linguistic, such
as a pelican, an emotion or a mental action such as negation. Drawing on
and reinforcing this tradition, all three sister arts depict words as signs
that, by convention – or semantic contract, as I shall call it – have one
proper meaning. Meanings are thoughts that in turn, if one is talking
about the external world, hook on to things. Following Aristotle, the
mainspring of early-modern linguistic theory, these three units – words,
thoughts and things – are presented as operating in harmonious and
univocal synchrony. Indeed, they are so tightly joined that the spaces
dividing them seem to disappear. Words are taken so straightforwardly to
represent their meanings that they stand confidently alone, what they
actually signify remaining concealed or unconsidered. Often, thoughts are
subsumed by things, mental mediation eclipsed by a seemingly perfect
realism. However, under the gaze of external critical eyes and the pressure
of internal dissent, various aspects of the tripartite union threaten to
unravel.
I identify three concerns that are thus provoked and in part ii I follow
the ways in which various philosophers address them. The first is about
the relationship between language and the world. The fear is that words
might not correspond to things as they really are, but pervert them
instead. The new philosophers choke on the Aristotelian linguistic-
ontological paradigm they had been fed by logicians. While some, par-
ticularly the Cartesians, replace it with equally ambitious accounts, others
stress the unstoppable breach between words and the world. The second
concern is about semantic instability, whereby the conventions that
connect words to meanings are insecure, and whereby one word might
have a plurality of meanings. Logical fallacies and, more dangerously,
rhetoric had advertised and warmly embraced the ambiguous possibilities
inherent in language. Reflecting on these, philosophers warn of the perils
of free-floating words, particularly in the moral sphere. The third concern
is that words might usurp the theoretically sovereign place of thoughts
and things, and come to dominate the relationship. This danger had been
both inadvertently broadcast by grammarians, who focused on the body
rather than the soul of words, and shamelessly celebrated by rhetoricians,
who taught the sweet and irresistible power of words. As a result of their
supremacy, words might in fact stand for nothing at all. Moreover, they
might belie the truth and write the natural and moral worlds in their own
deceitful, but opaque, image.
When Locke urged his readers, then, to consider well ‘the errors and
obscurity, the mistakes and confusion, that is spread in the world by an ill
use of words’, he was picking up a well-established refrain of early-
modern philosophers.11 Part iii investigates his intervention in their dis-
cussion. While keeping in mind the different circumstances and purposes
that inform each of his different writings, I pursue the comments about
language that run throughout them. Locke deepens each of his pre-
decessors’ concerns, and, generally speaking, where they had often blamed
speakers for the imperfection of words, Locke blamed words themselves,
as well as their (un)knowing users. Provoked by overambitious and
treacherous talk, influenced by critics of linguistic abuse, and thinking
through revolutionary scientific and political developments, Locke makes
his landmark case against language. In the context of the first concern that
I have identified, he declares that we cannot know things in themselves,
but only insofar as they affect our senses. Our talk about the external
world is therefore bound to signify ideas alone (or rather, ideas and the
fruits of our rational labour on them), and these bear no resemblance to
the world. While this is basically a repetition of new (rationalist-)
empiricist claims, Locke elaborately consolidates it through the filter of
his distinctive epistemology. He also extracts the specifically linguistic
implications of anti-Aristotelian mechanism from the epistemological
ones with which they had generally been run together, and thereby gives
them an original prominence and particularity. The second concern,
about semantic instability, had not been nearly so developed by Locke’s
predecessors. The ambiguous use of words had generally been char-
acterised as a clearly identifiable, preventable misdemeanour. The breach
of linguistic conventions had been conceived as avoidable, as caused by
11
Locke 1975, pp. 509–10 (iii.xi.4).
Introduction 9
the deliberate malice of men who wanted to subvert truth, justice and
peace. Locke’s reply was that people inevitably, innocently and most of
the time, mean different things by the same words, particularly moral
ones. They therefore do not communicate about matters of the utmost
importance. The application of his theory of ideas to language leads him
to conclude that we actively construct the complex meanings of the great
majority of our words. They are therefore bound to differ from person to
person in accordance with differences of experience and belief. This calls
into question the very existence of common use. Locke firms up the third
concern by systematically laying out the sensible autonomy of words and
their great allure to our sensuous minds. In themselves, words are sounds
and squiggles that enter and fix in our minds with far more ease than their
ephemeral and complicated meanings. Words therefore dominate in
cognition as well as in communication. Their palpable and singular
presence conceals the unreal and multiple nature of meaning, with the
result that people mistakenly imagine that their words are a mirror both
of reality and of other people’s minds. Moreover, people often speak
words that they either do not understand or that have no meaning to
speak of. Locke fears that the impressive façade of words fills our heads
and tells its own tales. While our semantic handiwork is fissile and full of
holes, our words instruct us otherwise. His treatment of language is a plea
for us to realise the limitations and imperfections of the meanings of our
words and their intractable presence in private and interpersonal
experience.
I conclude by asking how Locke’s critique of language might cause us
to re-read the theorist of human understanding and of politics with
whom we are perhaps more familiar. The answer is potentially devas-
tating. Locke’s fears about the embodied power of language threaten to
dim the light of knowledge. By infecting men with erroneous and empty
discourse and by encouraging them to pretend to a greater intelligence
than they can ever have, language threatens both the judgement that
establishes political legitimacy and the precious policy of toleration.
Moreover, Locke’s apprehension about the loose ties that bind words to
ideas challenges both the trust and the unity that gives life to civil society.
Locke’s pessimistic account of language turns out to subvert, if not
obviate, crucial ambitions of his philosophy.
part 1
Language in the trivium
chap te r 1
Language in logic
Of the three arts of language, logic offers the most fundamental analysis
of the subject. It deals most directly with meaning, that is, with the
concepts and the things that words represent. It is for this reason that,
while grammar comes first in the trivium, I begin with the second sister
and her revelation of the heart of language.
Logic is an instrument for sound reasoning, and is often presented as
yielding truth. At the end of the seventeenth century, the discipline is still
firmly shaped by the Aristotelian Organon, but it is not a monolith.1 Its
scholastic constitution, having been variously contested by humanist
authors, is further developed by new philosophers from Bacon to Locke,
whose Essay is an important contribution to the field.2 I have called upon
1
Aristotle’s Organon includes Categories, De interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics
and Sophistici Elenchi. This sketches what became the tripartite journey from terms to propositions
to reasoning (demonstrative, probabilistic and fallacious) that shapes early modern logics.
2
The concepts of ‘humanism’ and ‘scholasticism’ are to a great extent confused and modern
fabrications, and often cannot be pulled apart, each drawing on identical or interwoven classical
sources, and engaging in often indistinguishable practices. Insofar as one can discern a division of
interests, these coincided peacefully in a unified curriculum. Having said that, these labels are useful
shorthand for particular outlooks. I take ‘humanism’ to champion the studia humanitatis
(grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy) and to be often concerned with textual
criticism, temporality, probabilism, arguments in utramque partem (on both sides of a question)
and the citizen orator. ‘Scholasticism’ is perhaps an even more problematic and all-encompassing
term, denoting simply the culture of the ‘schools’ or universities. In addition though, I think of
scholastics as having a particular preoccupation with logic, and especially with Aristotle and his
tradition. Moreover, while early-modern Aristotelianism was plural, porous and vital, it is
important to note the polemical, contemporary caricature of the ‘schoolman’ as enslaved to
authority, splitting hairs and spinning webs of insignificant words. On humanism and the
Renaissance as worthwhile categories see Kristeller 1979a and Skinner 2002b, pp. 1–3. On the close
relationship of humanism to scholasticism see Kristeller 1979b; for a more antagonistic
characterisation see Grafton and Jardine 1986, pp. xiii–xiv. On early-modern Aristotelianisms see
Blackwell and Kusukawa 1999 and Mercer 1993.
See Marenbon (1991) and Spade (1998) on late-medieval logic; Ashworth (1974) on logic in the
fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Ashworth (1988) on ‘traditional’ logic in the
Renaissance; Jardine (1988) on humanist transformations and logic’s ‘hybridisation’ (p. 174); Ong
(1958) on the pedagogically motivated Agricolan–Ramist movement which reified the logical
ontology; Rossi (2000) on the Neo-Platonist, especially Lullist, conversion of logic into an
13
the disparate voices in this parade to retrieve basic and commonplace
assumptions about language and meaning.
words as signs
Words are universally characterised as signs. The Manuductio ad logicam
(1614) by Philippe du Trieu, a Jesuit scholastic logic that Locke
both possessed and recommended to his students at Christ Church,
defines speech (oratio) as significant sound (vox significativa).3 A word is
said to signify its ‘signification’ or ‘meaning’. These two terms are used
interchangeably in early-modern English. For example, in his Essay towards
a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), John Wilkins
translates ‘meaning’, or that ‘which is intended by any . . . sound or char-
acter’, as ‘sense, signification’.4 I generally use these terms in the same way.5
‘Signify’ is a rich term that is roughly equivalent to ‘indicate’ or ‘make
known’.6 In his Ars logica (1632), John of St. Thomas makes more explicit
the integral role that the human mind plays in signification, defining a
encyclopaedic key to the world; Malherbe (1990) on Bacon’s critique of logic; Nuchelmans (1998a,
1998b and 1998c) on seventeenth-century logic; Schurmann (2000), Easton (1997) and Buickerood
(1985) on ‘new’ developments and Locke’s place within them. Howell, W. (1971, pp. 6–7) asserts
that logic was transformed in an ‘intellectual revolution’ whose ‘hero’ was Locke.
3
Du Trieu 1826, p. 89. See Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 252; Ashworth 1981, p. 304.
4
For further examples, see Wilson 1553, fo. 8v: ‘ ‘‘nobles’’ signifie not onely the peers of a realme, but
also thei are the good yelowe nobles in a mans purse . . . every one of these woordes have a double
meanyng’ (my emphasis); Blount 1969, sig. P1r: ‘Entendment . . . signifies in our common law so
much as the true meaning or signification of a word’; Kersey 1969, sig. R2v: ‘To mean’ is
interpreted as ‘to purpose, to understand, or to signify’, and ‘signification’ translates as ‘meaning’;
the title of John Cowell’s legal dictionary, which Locke both possessed and recommended for a
gentleman’s reading (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 117; Locke 1997, p. 379) reads: The Interpreter or
Book containing the Signification of Words, wherein is set forth the true meaning of all . . . ; Locke 1975,
p. 422 (iii.iv.6): ‘the meaning of any term is then shewed, or the word is defined when by other
words, the idea it is made the sign of, and annexed to in the mind of the speaker, is as it were
represented, or set before the view of another; and thus its signification ascertained’; cf. p. 480 (iii.
ix.9). See Ashworth (1981, pp. 309–11) on the difference between early-modern ‘signification’ and
our sense of ‘meaning’; contrast Losonsky (1994, pp. 127–30), who argues for ‘some minimal, pre-
theoretical conception of meaning’ (p. 130) that, like water (p. 129), existed then as now, and was
the object of Locke’s linguistic theory. Ott (2004, p. 28) makes an illuminating contribution to this
debate, inviting us to think of ‘to mean’ as we do when we say that ‘puddles mean rain’. This makes
sense of the claim that ‘words mean ideas’. It was Grice (1957) who brought attention to this
‘natural’ (as opposed to ‘nonnatural’) kind of meaning.
5
Accordingly, I also use ‘semantic’ to capture this broad, early-modern conception of ‘meaning’ or
‘signification’, which shifts, as we shall see, between concepts, things or both. Occasionally,
I import the modern categories of sense and reference to elucidate my argument.
6
See Ott (2004, pp. 13–21) on the ‘indicative’ tradition; Ashworth (1974, pp. 39–41, and 1984,
pp. 60–2) on the ‘making known’ tradition.
Language in logic 15
sign as ‘that which represents something other than itself to a knowing
power’.7 He goes on to explain that there are two types of sign. Formal
signs signify immediately and of themselves, and include concepts whose
very nature is to represent things. Then there are instrumental signs.
These do not intrinsically signify and are themselves distinct objects of
sensation.8 Words fall into this category. While different philosophers
had proposed different and incommensurable typologies of signs over the
years, all agree that verbal signs are quintessentially sensible (audible or
visible) and signify something absolutely distinct from themselves.
Augustine advertises the sensible aspect of words. He defines a sign, of
which a word is a species, as, in a respectful quotation of John of
St. Thomas, ‘something which, besides the impression that it conveys to
the sense, makes something come into cognition’.9 The Port-Royal’s
enormously influential La logique, ou, l’art de penser (1662) by Antoine
Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, owned and applauded by Locke, repeats
Augustine’s claim that ‘for an uttered or written sound to signify is
nothing other than to prompt an idea connected to this sound in the
mind by striking our ears or eyes’.10 Words must be sensible to manifest
things that would otherwise be hidden. Thomas Hobbes gives a
strong account of the intrinsic sensibility of words. In addition to
requiring sensible signs to communicate insensible things, he says that we
need them to remember, and even to think. In his Computatio sive logica
(1655), better known as De corpore, he distinguishes two functions of
language. One is the familiar, communicative one. The other is mne-
monic. It involves notae, or ‘sensible things employed by our own deci-
sion, so that at the sensation of these things, thoughts can be recalled to
the mind, similar to those thoughts for the sake of which they were
7
John of St. Thomas 1985, p. 116. See Murphy (1994) for an account of John of St. Thomas’
semiotics; Murphy (1991) for a criticism of John’s division between natural and habituated
signification. Deely (1985) argues that John of St. Thomas is part of a ‘radical . . . semiotic
enterprise’ in which Locke is also involved (p. 514).
8
See also MS. Stowe 990, fo. 162r on the distinction between formal and instrumental signs.
9
John of St. Thomas 1985, p. 116. Ott (2004, p. 14) argues for an opposition between the ‘indicative’
Augustinian tradition and the ‘expressing’ or ‘making known’ scholastic tradition that Ashworth
describes. However, while these traditions did have rival understandings of non-verbal signs, they
broadly agreed on the nature of words. For example, John of St. Thomas (1985, p. 27), a scholastic
supposedly at the heart of Ott’s opposing camp, agreed that linguistic signs are instrumental. A
similar debate over the essence of a sign is conducted in the Coimbra commentaries on Aristotle, a
text which, as E. J. Ashworth shows, was recommended for young scholars by Thomas Barlow,
librarian of the Bodleian in 1652–60, in a list which Locke copied into his commonplace book
(Collegium Conimbricense 1610, pp. 292–4). Cf. Ashworth 1981, p. 304.
10
Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 75; MS. Locke f. 3, p. 52; Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 66.
summoned’.11 In private thought, then, as well as in public speech, the
sensibility of words might be crucial.
Another definitive characteristic of language is its conventionality.
While a few early-modern writers loudly and mysteriously disagree on
this point, most concur that the connection between words and meanings
is arbitrary, purely contingent on human will, and agreed on by men
through a semantic contract.12 In his popular Institutionum logicarum
(1626) (top of the list of logics that Richard Holdsworth recommends to
Cambridge undergraduates towards the middle of the seventeenth cen-
tury), Franco Burgersdijk defines speech (interpretatio) as ‘a symbol made
from articulate sound, signifying a concept of the mind by institution’.13
Lurking within the logicians’ conventionalist thesis is the possibility of
instability and opacity. Reading against the grain of their frequent plea to
speak ‘properly’, that is, in accordance with common use, we are alerted
to the fact that sign and signified might come apart at will. The Port-
Royalists urge that ‘we should accommodate ourselves to usage as much
as possible’. They are upset by ‘chemists’ who ‘enjoy changing the names
of most of the things they talk about’.14 Unless we speak ‘properly’,
declares Burgersdijk, our words cannot be ‘perspicuous’.15 Only con-
vention can make sounds transparent signs. Words are inherently opaque,
and just as men join them to meanings, so might they separate them. The
Coimbra commentary on Aristotle’s Dialectic (2nd edition 1610) brings
out the ineliminable dualism of sign and signified. It distinguishes
between the verbs ‘signify’ and ‘represent’. A representative is something
that ‘makes the thing present’, whereas a sign causes something other than
itself to come to mind.16 The radical division, only bridgeable by
breakable convention, between meanings and intrinsically meaningless
words was to seem to some a fragile base for communication.
I now turn to the question of what words signify. Broadly speaking,
logicians give two (sometimes overlapping) answers. The first posits a binary
relationship between word and meaning, between sign and signification. The
11
Hobbes 1981, p. 12.
12
Many commentators argue that the belief in (the possibility of ) naturally significant words was
widespread. See, for example, Cope 1999, p. 57: ‘it must be realized that in Locke’s time, most
people believed in natural connections between words and things’. See also Aarsleff 1982, pp. 42–83,
and 1999; Bono 1995; Coudert 1978 and 1991; Foucault 1970. In contrast, Demonet (1992)
demonstrates convincingly the overwhelming early-modern consensus, following Aristotle, that
words are connected to their meanings arbitrarily.
13
Holdsworth 1961, p. 634; Burgersdijk 1634, p. 142: ‘symbolum ex articulata voce factum, animi
conceptus ex instituto significans’.
14
Arnauld and Nicole 1996, pp. 64; 65. 15 Burgersdijk 1634, p. 142.
16
Collegium Conimbricense 1610, pp. 295–7.
terms verba and res are widely used to characterise this bisection.17
Burgersdijk puts an Aristotelian spin on the duality, stating that, if ‘man’
were defined materially it would be ‘one syllable’, if formally, it would be
‘animal’.18 The second answer to the question of what words signify is a
triptych. In his hugely influential Systema logicae (1600), Bartholomaeus
Keckermann declares that ‘a word is the sign of a thing and a concept’.19
In Samuel Smith’s Aditus ad logicam (1613), a textbook that Locke
recommended to his students, a word is defined as ‘a sign of a thing and a
concept’.20 In his Institutio logicae (1687), a textbook that Locke pos-
sessed, John Wallis writes that ‘speeches or words (either spoken or
written) are names of things, and signs (or indications) of thoughts, or
concepts of the mind’.21 As I shall show, logicians are generally com-
mitted to this tripartite paradigm, believing that words hook on to the
mind and the world, and that these three elements somehow parallel
each other. However, running uneasily and ubiquitously alongside this
considered commitment, are simpler, careless stories. Logicians reg-
ularly switch between the two- and three- part accounts of language.
Keckermann, for example, whom we saw voicing the linguistic triptych,
also saw double, dividing words into two aspects: ‘material’ (sound or
image) and ‘formal’ (signification).22 In this way, concept and thing
become confused under the umbrella of res, and one of them tends to
disappear. Most often, it is the mental component that is forgotten,
words seeming to reach directly out to the world. Language seems to
melt into reality as even the distinction between verba and res blurs, the
one standing confidently for the other. The three elements dissolve into
each other on the pages of the logics, as though there were no question
of the plenitude of the letter. In the course of this book I shall unpack
the unities that are conjured out of these semantic elisions.
language reflects the mind

I turn first to the conceptual plain of signification. Logicians
portray language as the mirror of (ideally rational) thought. Indeed, at
times ratio runs together with oratio to the extent that they become
17
For example, Clauberg 1658, sig. *4v. 18 Burgersdijk 1634, pp. 159–60.
19
Keckermann 1600, sig. A4v: ‘vox est signum rei & conceptum’.
20
Schuurman 2000, p. 53; Smith, Samuel 1656, p. 4: ‘vox est signum rei et conceptuum’.
21
Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 262; Wallis 1687, p. 1: ‘voces seu verba (sive scripta sive prolata,) sunt
Rerum Nomina, Signaque (seu indicia) cogitatuum, sive conceptuum mentis’.
22
Keckermann 1600, sig. A5r.
indistinguishable.23 This equivalence has its roots in the Greek word logos
which, as well as giving its name to the discipline, balances between
‘reason and speech’, collapsing the two into each other.24 As Hobbes says,
‘the Greeks have but one word . . . for both Speech and Reason’.25 In his
Introduction to the Art of Logick (1671), John Newton elaborates on the
Greek derivation of the name of the art. Logos ‘signifieth speech, and
according to Aristotle, speech is twofold, internal, and external. Internal
speech he calleth that which is conceived in the mind: and he calleth
external which is expressed by words.’26 Echoing Plato, Pierre Gassendi
explains in his Institutio logica (the first part of his Syntagma philosophi-
cum, 1658), that ‘logic . . . takes its name from the Greek word logos which
means speech, since thinking is nothing else but an inner conversation
which the mind holds with itself ’.27
In his Summa totius logicae Ockham had given a seminal account of the
isomorphism between mental, spoken and written language:
Language is threefold: written, spoken and conceptual. The last named exists
only in the intellect. Correspondingly the term is threefold, viz. the written,
the spoken and the conceptual term. A written term is part of a proposition
written on some material, and is or can be seen with the bodily eye. A spoken
term is part of a proposition uttered with the mouth and able to be heard with
the bodily ear. A conceptual term is a mental content or impression which
naturally possesses signification or consignification, and which is suited to
be part of a mental proposition and to stand for (supponere) that which it
signifies.28
The oratio mentalis is simply publicised by an external version of itself.
Wallis echoes the parallel relationship between mental and verbal discourse
when he characterises them as ‘internal’ and ‘external’ forms of the same
thing.29 Thought is therefore discursive, identical in form, though not
matter, to language. Robert Sanderson refers not so much to a relation of
identity as of manifestation or translation. His Logicae artis compendium
(1618) is an exemplar of the seventeenth-century ‘systematic’ movement
23
Hobbes (1969, p. 23) plays with the rhyme to jibe at insignificant speakers, such as beggars reciting
the paternoster, for whom ‘ratio, now, is but oratio’. Although the two words are not
etymologically related, early-modern philosophers mine the apparent continuity.
24 25
Wallis 1687, p. 1: ‘vox & Rationem significat & Orationem’. Hobbes 1996, p. 29.
26
Newton 1671, p. 2.
27
Gassendi 1981, p. 80. Cf. Plato (1928, p. 179): thought is ‘the talk which the soul has with itself ’.
28
Ockham 1990, p. 47. Panaccio (1999b, p. 14) asserts that Ockham accomplished ‘une révolution
théoretique majeure extrêmement influente, par la mise au point précisément de ce concept
d’oratio mentalis’.
29
Wallis 1687, p. 1. On mental language, see Ashworth 1974, p. 42; Ashworth 1982; Ashworth 1984,
pp. 58–60; Spade 1980.
that amalgamates scholasticism and Ramism.30 It was published at least ten
times in the course of the century and is described by one commentator as
the ‘most influential textbook of the seventeenth century’.31 Locke not only
owned a copy but recommended the text to his students, although he
would later, when his disdain for the logicians’ pretensions to describe the
world had firmly crystallised, attack Sanderson, along with Burgersdijk, as
the representatives of that ‘whole tribe of logicians’ who talked emptily.32
According to Sanderson, the ‘objects’ of logic are primarily the human
mind (mens humana), and secondarily speech (oratio), which expresses the
thoughts of the mind (sensa mentis).33 Burgersdijk sums up the coordina-
tion between speech and thought in the Synopsis of his Institutionum. Logic
‘signifies at once reason and speech. For logic directs the rational faculty, or
concepts of our mind, and teaches them to translate into apt speech.’34
The mental-linguistic parallelism is developed into a narrative in three
parts. Derived from Aristotle, it is represented here by the Coimbra
commentary: ‘first it is right to define, what is a name, and a verb, then
what is a negation, what an affirmation, what a proposition, and then
what is discourse’.35 As Peter Berault’s Logic or the Key of Sciences (1690)
puts it more succinctly: ‘the first part makes mention of the terms; the
second of the proposition; and the third of the argumentation’. This trinity
reflects three ‘actions of our spirit’: ‘to conceive, to judge, and to
reason’.36 Speech and thought appear like synchronised swimmers.
The basic dance goes as follows. At the first stage, the mind is almost
passive and the concepts simple. While philosophers tell various complex
stories about how the mind comes to have universal concepts, in the logics
they generally appear fully formed, as singular and automatic.37 As Aristotle
writes, ‘a noun or a verb by itself much resembles a concept or thought,
which is neither combined nor disjoined’.38 Gassendi, the ‘empiricist’,
30
Howell (1961, p. 299) describes Sanderson as the ‘chief English Systematic’; cf. Nuchelmans 1998a,
p. 104. On the systematic movement see Howell 1961, pp. 282–317.
31
Feingold 1997, p. 297.
32
Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 225; Ashworth 1981, p. 304; Locke 1706b, p. 192.
33
Sanderson 1985, pp. 1–2.
34
Burgersdijk 1668, p. 1: ‘tum rationem tum orationem significat. Logica enim dirigit intellectus
nostri rationem, sive conceptus, eosque docet apta oratione interpretari’.
35
Collegium Conimbricense 1610, p. 291: ‘Primo definire oportet, quidnam sit nomen, & quid
verbum, deinde quid negatio, quid affirmatio, quid Enuntiatio, quid denique oratio sit.’
36
Berault 1690, p. 6.
37
See Spruit (1994 and 1995) for a compendious survey of the ways in which the mind was thought to
obtain the ‘intelligible species’ or essence of a thing from antiquity to the seventeenth century.
38
Aristotle 1938b, p. 117; ‘resembles’ here does not indicate any natural connection between sign and
signification. Charles (1994) argues that Aristotle has an account of the meaning of names which is
midway between Frege and direct reference theory.
calls the first cognitive procedure ‘imagination’.39 The Cartesian Port-
Royalists call it ‘conception’, producing ideas, not ‘images painted in the
fantasy’.40 As late as 1732, an account of ‘dialectica universa’ from Douay,
lays down the first operation of the mind as ‘apprehension’ or ‘a simple
perception’.41
While logicians traditionally and overwhelmingly deal with language
and thought as two sides of the same coin, they sometimes conduct a
discussion specifically about terms, often at the end of their first sec-
tions.42 It should be noted immediately that Locke’s book iii, which
bridges his discussion of ideas in books i and ii and their agreement/
disagreement in book iv, bears the traces of this traditional logical
structure, while at the same time challenging it. It should also be noted
that while traditional logicians sometimes identify discrepancies between
terms and concepts, these are presented as limited and manageable, and,
more generally, the specific discussions of terms only elaborate more
deeply on the parallelism between terms and concepts which permeates
the discipline. Logicians (Locke included) distinguish between, for
example, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, ‘connotative’ and
‘absolute’, and univocal and equivocal terms – distinctions that Locke will
transform and sometimes collapse almost out of all recognition.43 Perhaps
the most important division at this point in the present study is betwen
categorematic and syncategorematic terms. The former signify the objects
of thought, such as ‘homo, animal’, and the latter the actions that the
mind performs on them, such as ‘ut, omnis, nullus’, and most crucially
‘est’ – the copula that relates simple terms to each other in a proposition
at the second stage of logic.44
Aristotle characterises the second mental-linguistic action as compo-
sition/separation and affirmation/denial. Both these characterisations are
taken up by seventeenth-century philosophers. Du Trieu defines a
proposition as a judgement, ‘when something is affirmed or denied of
something else’.45 Sanderson defines it compositionally.46 Hobbes goes so
39
Gassendi 1981, p. 80. See Osler (2002, p. 84) on Gassendi’s ‘empirical approach to the world’ in his
logic.
40
Arnauld and Nicole 1996, pp. 23; 26. 41 MS. Stowe 990, fo. 162r.
42
See, for example, Burgersdijk 1668, pp. 18–20; Du Trieu 1826, pp. 6–20.
43
Du Trieu 1826, p. 8 (De Termino Simplici et Complexo); p. 10 (De Termino Concreto et Abstracto);
p. 12 (De Termino Connotativo et Absoluto); p. 16 (De Termino Univoca et Aequivoca). See also
Burgersdijk 1668, p. 19; Locke 1975, pp. 420–75 (iii.iv–viii).
44
Du Trieu 1826, pp. 6–7. See Nuchelmans 1998a, pp. 107–8.
45
Du Trieu 1826, p. 2: ‘propositio . . . est alicuius de aliquo affirmativa negative oratio: ut, homo est
animal ’.
46
Sanderson 1985, p. 3.
far as to call his work: Computatio sive logica.47 Gassendi and the
Port-Royalists fuse the two accounts.48 In language, this is expressed by
the copulative verb ‘is’ and makes propositions.49 The final mental action
is an inference, whereby less known propositions are derived from better
known ones, most perfectly conducted by the syllogism. Although the
syllogism comes under attack from Bacon, Descartes and Locke, it
remains remarkably robust as the accepted means of watertight reasoning,
drawing the support, in their logics at least, of Gassendi, Hobbes and the
Port-Royalists.50 Thomas Wilson’s Rule of Reason (1551) describes it as the
‘perfect argument’.51 Du Trieu actually calls his third tract De syllogismo.52
While the precise movements of these mental acrobatics are disputed, it is
agreed that the linguistic procession maps a mental course.
There is a compelling body of commentary that argues that in the course
of the seventeenth century logic was transformed from a discursive and
artificial discipline to one with an epistemological and natural focus, turning
from language to psychology. This new logic has been called natural or
facultative logic, or the logic of ideas. Based on the informal, native
workings of the mind, it was designed both to emulate them and to train
them towards truth and clarity.53 While logics had always been divided
47
For Hobbes reason is reckoning, the adding and subtracting of terms. He gives the example of
seeing something far off, and thinking body, then observing the thing move and thinking animate,
then hearing it speak and thinking rational. These single concepts ‘are composed into one
name . . . man’ (Hobbes 1981, pp. 3–4).
48
Gassendi 1981, p. 81; Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 23. The word ‘judgement’ was often used to
name a much larger part of the logical enterprise as a result of the Ramist division of logic into
two parts: invention and judgement. As Wilson (1553, fo. 2r) explains, inventio finds out the
‘matter’, whereas ‘framying of thinges aptly together, and knittyng woordes for the purpose
accordyngly . . . in Latine is called Iudicium’.
49
Aristotle 1938b, p. 121.
50
Bacon (1996b, pp. 221–2) rejects it only for natural philosophy (Locke owned The Advancement of
Learning (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 78)), Descartes (1985a, pp. 36–7) and Locke (1975, pp. 670–81
(iv.xvii.4–8)) for all reasoning.
51
Running together formal and mental elements, he calls it ‘an absolute gatheryng, or resonyng,
whereby the last sentence whiche we woulde prove, is confirmed by other propositions and
sentences more universal, and better nowen then the thing whiche is proved’ (Wilson 1553, fo. 23r).
52
He goes on to explain the three parts of a syllogism in temporal terms, calling them the ‘Antecedens,
Consequens, Nova illationis’ (Du Trieu 1826, p. 120). Hobbes uses the same temporal language to
describe scientific deduction (Hobbes 1981, p. 12). Early-modern discussions of inferential signs
emerge out of antique (especially Epicurean) treatment of the subject, on which see Allen 2001;
Jackson 1972, p. 115; Long and Sedley 1987, pp. 90–7; Markus 1996, p. 72. Ott (2004, pp. 7–33) argues
that this is the tradition in which we should read Locke’s use of ‘signification’.
53
Schuurman (2004) is the most recent work to make the case for a ‘new logic (of ideas)’, by contrast
with ‘the old (Aristotelian)’ (p. 3). Schuurman identifies three elements that define the new logic:
ideas, human faculties and method. For a longer engagement with his important book, see
Dawson 2005b. Buickerood (1985) traces the rise of ‘facultative’ logic, fully realised in Locke’s Essay
which compiled ‘a natural history of the understanding’ (p. 157) whose goal was ‘to formulate the
according to the operations of the mind, these divisions had arguably played
a purely superficial and structural role. For example, while Wallis divides his
logic into the three ‘operations of the intellect’, these simply head a tradi-
tional division of the three parts of logic: ‘de vocibus’, ‘de propositione’ and ‘de
argumentatione’. Wallis never ‘scrutinizes’ the operations themselves, as
Locke is to do.54 This refigurative movement can be traced from Bacon’s
Novum organum (1620) which, as its title suggests, is a replacement of
Aristotelian logic,55 through Gassendi’s ars bene cogitandi and Descartes’
Regulae ad directionem Ingenii (written c. 1628) and his Discours de la
méthode pour bien conduire sa raison (1637), with the latter’s emphasis on
clear and distinct ideas and on a natural, non-syllogistic method, to the
offerings of Clauberg, Arnauld and Nicole, Spinoza, Malebranche and
finally Locke,56 who inveighs against the suffocating artificiality of the
syllogism and recommends instead ‘native rustick Reason’.57
Logic attains an increasingly holistic and normative agenda. Logicians
expand their domain, now embracing the influence of passion and edu-
cation on cognition. Logic becomes therapy for the mind, steering it away
from error towards intellectual illumination. Gassendi says that logic
should be an instrument to stop the mind from straying, ‘just as the
carpenter provides himself with a ruler’.58 The Port-Royal Logique has
the ambition of ‘educating our judgement and making it as precise as
possible’.59 Spinoza and Locke are concerned with the ethics of the
understanding, its ‘emendation’ and the correction of its ‘conduct’.60
principles of the habituated regulation of the mind in the apprehension of things, and the
acquisition of knowledge and properly grounded opinion’ (p. 176). Cf. Land (1986, p. 7) on
the shift from a formal to a psychological pursuit; Gaukroger (1989, p. 3) on the shift from a
‘discursive to a facultative conception of inference’; Michael (1997) on the move to epistemology.
Nuchelmans (1998c, pp. 132–3) explains that formal logic was increasingly questioned in the
seventeenth century. Passmore (1953) highlights Descartes’ opposition to formal logic. Thomas
(1967, p. 534) describes formal logic from the mid-fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth as
‘sterile’. See also Easton 1997, p. i; Schuurman 2000, pp. 62–3.
54
Buickerood 1985, p. 160.
55
Among the nineteen works Locke owned by Bacon, there are two editions of Novum organum
(Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 78). At the beginning of the Conduct of the Understanding (written
1697), Locke justifies his own revision of the logic whose ‘rules have served the learned world these
two or three thousand years’, by appealing to ‘Verulam’s Authority’ who attacked and replaced it
in his ‘Novum Organum concerning Logick’ (Locke 1993, p. 4).
56
Schuurman (2000 and 2004) highlights Descartes as the radical innovator and Locke’s Essay as ‘the
most outspoken specimen of the new logic’ (2004, p. 2). Michael (1997) stresses the primary
importance of Gassendi, and then the Port-Royalists in effecting the revolution in logic. See
Palmer (1997) on Descartes’ Regulae as an early-modern logic.
57
Locke 1975, p. 679 (iv.xvii.6); cf., more generally, Locke 1975, pp. 668–88 (iv.xvii).
58
Gassendi 1981, p. 80. 59 Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 5.
60
See Spinoza 1985 (Tractatus de intellectus emendatione (1677)) and Locke 1993 (Of the Conduct of the
Understanding) – a chapter intended for but never included in the Essay. Cf. De Dijn (1989) on
Malebranche’s De la recherche de la vérité (1674–5) is a manual on error
and how to avoid it.61 Indeed, Locke’s book on language, or rather on the
impediment of language, aimed at banishing the cognitive faults induced
by language, itself grows out, in part, of the increased attention being
paid to the identification and purgation of error. In his Logica vetus et
nova (1654), the scholastic-Cartesian occasionalist Johann Clauberg cap-
tures the new spirit. In Baconian fashion, he writes that ‘the origins and
causes of the errors and imperfections of the human mind must be
investigated’. Logic is the ‘medicine’ of the mind and will lead it away
from such errors.62
However, it would be wrong to over-segregate the old from the new.
While the concern was magnified in kind and scope, logicians had always
been concerned with error, often devoting a fourth part of their books to
a discussion of fallacious reasoning. Moreover, while the desire was
doubtless reformulated, logics had always had ethical aspirations. For
example, in his Aristotelian–Ramist Art of Logick, Thomas Spencer sees
his art as ‘healing the wound we received in our reason by Adams fall’.63
While there was undoubtedly a revision of logic that kept time with the
new way of ideas, commentators underplay both the importance of the
mental component in traditional logic and the persistent inclusion of
language in the new logic. While the Port-Royalists and Gassendi might
advertise their contributions as arts of thinking, they still organise them
broadly around terms, propositions and discourse, maintaining the old
sense of an identity between language and thought. The revolution
should not be overstated therefore. The ‘new’ logic did not deal ‘with
‘‘concepts’’ rather than terms’,64 but continued, perhaps with even greater
Spinoza’s vision of logic as purifying the intellect and Passmore (1986) on Locke on the ‘ethics of
belief ’.
61
Schuurman (2000, pp. 75–7) sees Malebranche’s Recherche as an important contributor to the
Cartesian logic of ideas in its focus on mental errors, and as an important influence on Locke,
especially his Conduct, a manual for the ‘prevention and cure of errors that are relevant for Locke’s
logic of ideas’ (p. 96). Cf. Schuurman 2004, pp. 44–50.
62
Clauberg 1658, p. 1: ‘errorum & imperfectionum humanae mentis in rebus cognoscendis originem
& causas investigandas esse’; p. 34. Locke had a copy of this in his library (Harrison and Laslett
1965, p. 109). On Clauberg’s reconciliation of scholasticism and Cartesianism see Bardout 2002.
On Clauberg’s medicinal logic, see Hammacher 1981.
63
Spencer 1970, sig. A3r.
64
Easton 1997, p. i. While Descartes and Spinoza do vociferously banish language from reasoning,
and are suspicious of its surreptitious and misleading interventions, as I shall show in chapter 6
(e.g. Descartes 1984a, p. 21, and Descartes 1985e, pp. 220–1; Spinoza 1994, p. 64), they do assume,
in the context of their words, the continuity between language and thought which is so
characteristic of the ‘old’ logic. While these texts are not squarely in the logical genre, the citations
bear on the practice of thinking well.
unreflectiveness than before, to elide the difference. It is this continuing
amalgamation that will provoke Locke so urgently.
I end this section by giving an impression of the fusion of language and
thought that persists in seventeenth-century logic. In his translation of
Peter Du Moulin’s The Elements of Logick (1624), Nathanael De-Lawne
announces that the subject of the first book is ‘simple notions’. However,
when he comes to define them he does so in linguistic terms, positing
with breath-taking confidence a direct correlation between word-units
and notion-units. ‘Simple Notions are such, as are expressed by one word
onely; As horse, man, whiteness.’65 When he comes to define a proposition
he moves seamlessly between the linguistic and the mental. ‘Enunciation
is a speech, wherein something is affirmed or denied. Every enunciation
consists of two words at the least, which the logicians call termes’.66
While Gassendi is generally careful to talk about ideas rather than terms
in the first section of his Institutio logica, he returns to labyrinthine verbal
analysis when he addresses propositions and syllogisms. ‘Every proposi-
tion is generally affirmative or negative, and affirmation and negation
take place through the inclusion of the verb ‘‘is’’ or, with the addition of
the negative particle, ‘‘is not’’.’ He then backtracks from his original
silence on terms by telling us that ‘what precedes the verb is called the
subject, being that which is made the foundation, like ‘Socrates’ and
‘Justice’ . . . and what follows the verb is called the attribute or pre-
dicate’.67
One unique, self-reflexive voice of concern about the confusion
between language and thought which doubtless rings in Locke’s ears
comes from the Port-Royalists.68 However, even they proceed from an
initially self-consciously ideas-focused analysis to a linguistic one when
they come to propositions and reasoning. They thereby threaten to erase
their innovative caesura between mental and ideational discourse, pub-
licising an ambition and a failure of ambition which were to inspire and
provoke Locke respectively and in equal measure.
language reflects the world

All logicians agree that words refer to things in some, albeit highly inter-
pretative, way. They also agree that there must be some mental component
to linguistic reference. Moreover, despite the new philosophical inroads,
65
Du Moulin 1624, p. 2. 66 Du Moulin 1624, p. 106. 67 Gassendi 1981, p. 102.
68
Arnauld and Nicole 1996, pp. 58–60. For a discussion of their critique see pp. 38–9 below.
the Aristotelian classification of the world proves remarkably tenacious,
continuing to capture the imaginations of logicians of all persuasions.
While the balance between inquirer and object had always been dis-
puted, logical language is commonly seen as comprehending the world as
well as charting the sound operation of the mind. Ontological considerations
appear in tandem with epistemological ones. When the Thomists say that
logic deals with entia rationis, they mean things as conceived by the mind.69
Wallis declares that the objects of logic are ‘all things (either real or ima-
gined)’ about which we can talk or reason.70 Sanderson describes logic as
‘an instrumental art, directing our mind in the understanding of all intel-
ligible things’.71 Its end is the knowledge of ‘things (rerum)’.72 Burgersdijk,
repeating Keckermann, casts logic as ‘directing the mind to the under-
standing of things’.73 While res and ‘things’ are ambiguous terms, tottering
between the conceptual and the real, this ambiguity only follows from the
supposed conformity of the two planes. Logicians certainly have the world
in mind. Keckermann makes clear the real scope of logic. While it guides
our mind, it does not do so ‘absolutely, but in relation to things’. Language
is reflective ‘of things themselves in nature’.74 Language is supposed to
deliver the nature of things, or rather, the nature of things as they are
conceived, although few logicians advertise or dwell on the difference.
The perceived correspondence between language and things is further
brought out in the goal of truth, which runs centrally through the twists and
turns of the logical tradition. It is the case that as the new philosophies of the
seventeenth century dismantled the Aristotelian ontology that had
informed logic, the discipline was still heavily Aristotelian and therefore
shifted its focus from substance to form, from truth to thinking well.75
69
Nuchelmans 1998a, p. 106. 70 Wallis 1687, p. 1: ‘Resomnes; (sive Reales, sive Imaginariae)’.
71
Sanderson 1985, p. 1: ‘ars instrumentalis, dirigens mentem nostram in cognitionem omnium
intelligibilium’.
72
Sanderson 1985, p. 1.
73
Burgersdijk 1668, p. 1: ‘dirigens intellectum in cognitione rerum’. Cf. Keckermann 1600, sig. A1r:
‘Logica est ars dirigendi mentem in cognitione rerum’.
74
Keckermann 1600, sigs. A1v-2r: ‘non absolute: sed in relatione ad res’; sig. A3v: ‘rerum ipsarum in
natura’.
75
See Feingold (1997, pp. 275–305) on the way in which logic had a purely ‘utilitarian’ role in the
University of Oxford in the seventeenth century, and Schuurman (2000, pp. 52–3) on how logic
came to be regarded less as the path to truth and more as a propadeutic for thinking well. For
alternative viewpoints see: Easton (1997, p. ii) on the lack of ‘clear boundary lines separating logic
from epistemology or metaphysics in the early modern period’; Rossi (1968, p. 8) on a move,
through Ramism, from logic as the art of discussion to logic as the instrument for natural research.
On the earlier commitment to truth see, for example, Howell, W. (1961, p. 3) on ‘Renaissance
logic’ as concerned primarily ‘to achieve a valid verbalization of reality’, and Ashworth (1974, p. 27)
on post-medieval logic as more ‘philosophical’ than ‘formal’.
However, many of those logics that did absorb the new philosophy
remained committed to the goal of truth, albeit in a different guise. More
generally, textbooks continued to peddle truth as their aim. The logical
emphasis on veracity had also been challenged by humanists, who attended
not so much to truth, as to probability, rhetoric and topical reasoning, and
preferred the title ‘dialectic’. Wilson, for example, defines ‘logique’ as ‘an arte
to reason probably, on both partes’. He analyses non-demonstrative argu-
ments, including ‘enthymema’, ‘induction’, ‘example’ and ‘sorites’. How-
ever, humanists did not jettison the goal of truth.76 The very same Wilson also
declares that logic ‘settes foorth the trueth’.77 Bacon provides another
example of how humanists continue to pursue truth, albeit refracted through
a new lens. He extracts induction from the lesser forms of argument, redefines
it and puts it on a veridical pedestal in the field of natural philosophy.78
Moreover, scholastic logicians had always discussed dialectical or probable
knowledge.79 By the seventeenth century, the two traditions were fused in the
mainstream logics. Burgersdijk regards ‘logic’ and ‘dialectic’ as inter-
changeable and covers ‘imperfect’ forms of argument, in addition to the
syllogism.80 While Gassendi and Port-Royal include an analysis of probable
reasoning, they also remain devoted to the search for truth. The Port-Roy-
alists explain that logic enables one to ‘discern’ ‘the true and the false’.81
Gassendi says that logic ought to make thought ‘free from error’, and thereby
‘attain the mark at which it aims, that is, truth itself’.82
At the beginning of De interpretatione Aristotle had explained how
words bridge on to the world by means of the mind:
Words spoken are symbols or signs of affections or impressions of the soul; written
words are the signs of words spoken. As writing, so also is speech not the same for
76
Wilson 1553, fos. 1v; 31r–34v. See Jardine (1988, p. 197) on the humanist introduction of ‘ad hoc and
occasional arguments’ to the Organon.
77
Wilson 1553, fos. 1v; 2v.
78
He writes about ‘the induction which the logicians speak of’, and condemns it as ‘utterly vicious
and incompetent’, on the grounds that ‘to conclude upon an enumerations of particulars without
instance contradictory is no conclusion, but a conjecture’ (Bacon 1996b, p. 221).
79
The final sections of logics usually dealt with topics or ‘the seat[s] of an argument’ (Sanderson 1985,
p. 183), which are often divided into three (demonstrative, dialectical and sophistic) from which three
types of argument and knowledge (certain, probable and sophistical) are drawn respectively. E.g. Du
Trieu (1826, p. 157) discusses ‘demonstrative’ and ‘dialectical’, ‘litigious’ arguments; cf. Burgersdijk
1668, pp. 34–40; Gassendi 1981, pp. 144–55. These sections also often include or precede a discussion
of method, the influential offspring of humanist, especially Ramist, reform. Even Descartes, who
shuns formal logic, retains the notion of method, and writes his own Discours de la méthode.
Sanderson, Gassendi and the Port-Royalists all include a section on method.
80
Burgersdijk 1634, pp. 2–3; Burgersdijk (1668, p. 33) enumerates inductio, enthymema, exemplum,
syllogismus hypotheticus, syllogismus disjuctivus, dilemma and sorites.
81
Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 5. 82 Gassendi 1981, p. 80.
all races of men. But the mental affections themselves, of which these words are
primarily signs, are the same for the whole of mankind, as are also the objects of
which those affections are representations or likenesses, images, copies.83
This gobbet is the foundation of early-modern philosophy of language,
containing three claims that become, in the main, axiomatic. First,
Aristotle lays down the rarely contested law that words are conventional.
Second, he declares that while words, because they are purely conven-
tional, differ between people, the concepts (like the things) they signify
are the same for all men. We will hear these two claims being repeated, if
sometimes tested, throughout this book. Now I look at the third maxim
that Aristotle dictates: words signify concepts which, in turn, signify and
resemble objects.84 While his followers debate heatedly about the matter,
they agree that concepts are integral to the signification of things.
Moreover, they tend to present these concepts not as obstacles, but as
straightforward ways of knowing those things.
Ockham asserts that words are imposed on both things and concepts:
‘words are applied to the very same things which are signified by mental
concepts’.85 John of St. Thomas asks ‘whether vocal expressions primarily
signify concepts or things?’ His answer begins with a statement on which
he believes there to be general agreement: ‘we suppose as granted by all
that vocal expressions signify formal concepts as much as objective ones,
since this is clearly established by the philosopher’. He argues that because
words signify both things and concepts ‘by the same imposition’, they
signify them ‘by one single signification’.86 The Coimbra commentary
provides an extensive gloss on De interpretatione I. It lays out three posi-
tions. The first, ‘Scotist’, position holds that ‘words are substituted for
concepts . . . but they do not signify them’; when words are used, it is
‘things’ which are ‘revealed’. The second, ‘Boethian’, position maintains
that ‘only concepts are signified by words’. The third and favoured posi-
tion steers a middle course – ‘words signify both concepts and things
themselves’.87 However, the discussion is not yet closed. The next question
83
Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. Demonet (1992, p. 88) describes these lines of Aristotle as ‘le catéchisme de la
théorie du langage à la Renaissance’. Modrak (2001) argues for the modernity and defensibility of
Aristotle’s theory of meaning.
84
Panaccio 1999a, p. 398.
85
Ockham 1990, p. 48: ‘voces imponuntur ad significandum illa eadem, quae per conceptus mentis
significatur’.
86
John of St. Thomas 1985, pp. 344; 345.
87
Collegium Conimbricense 1610, p. 305: ‘voces substitui quidem pro conceptibus intellectus, sed
eos non significare . . . quia vocibus utimur, ut ostendamus rem, quam mente apprehendimus’;
p. 306: ‘vocibus solos conceptus significari’; ‘voces tum conceptus, tum res ipsas significare’.
is whether words immediately signify concepts or things. Like John of
St. Thomas, the commentary decides that both concepts and things are
signified immediately. Burgersdijk argues that words signify concepts
primarily and things secondarily.88 After much convolution in his dis-
putations on Aristotle’s Organon, the Jesuit Martin Smiglecius, recom-
mended to students by both Holdsworth and Locke, asserts the opposite.89
Hobbes responds to this debate by declaring that they are all talking
rubbish. Words can only ever signify concepts:
Since, as has been defined, names ordered in speech are signs of conceptions, it is
obvious that they are not signs of things themselves; for in what sense can the
sound of this spoken word ‘‘stone’’ be understood to be a sign of a stone, other
than that whoever might have heard this vocal sound will gather that the speaker
has thought of a stone? Therefore the dispute over whether names signify matter,
form, or a composite of them and other disputes of this kind are characteristic of
erring metaphysicians who do not understand the words about which they are
arguing.90
Hobbes is truistically reminding his readers that a speaker can only express
the contents of his mind, and he cannot have stones in there.91 He is also
probably making a polemical point against Aristotle, who had postulated
that when a man thinks of a stone, while ‘the stone does not exist in the soul’,
the ‘form of the stone’ does, thereby almost identifying concept and thing.92
As if responding to Hobbes’ rude ejection of stones from speech,
John Sergeant, critic of Locke – the next staunch defender of purely
ideational signification – declares that when we judge that ‘a stone is hard,
we do not intend to affirm that the likeness or idea of a stone is hard, but
the very stone itself’. His logic, The Method to Science (1696), attests to the
continuing belief that, by means of ‘notions’ or ‘meanings’, we ‘discourse
of the very thing it self, and of its very nature’.93
88
Burgersdijk 1634, p. 141.
89
Holdsworth 1961, p. 635; Ashworth 1981, p. 304; Smiglecius 1618, p. 5. On this debate see Ashworth
1981; 1984, pp. 62–4, and 1987. Pinborg (1984b) explains how this debate intersects with the
nominalist/realist debate.
90
Hobbes 1981, p. 15. Martinich’s translation of ‘quo sensu enim intelligi potest sonum hujus vocis
lapis esse signum lapidis’ reads ‘for in what sense can the sound of the vocal sound ‘‘stone’’ be
understood to be a sign of a stone’. Sorell (1999) argues that Hobbes moved from being anti-
Aristotelian to ‘simply unAristotelian’ (p. 364); cf. Leijenhorst (2002a) on the Aristotelian
framework of Hobbes’ mechanical philosophy.
91
However, even Hobbes includes things (loosely) in language to the extent that they cause ideas (e.g.
Hobbes 1996, p. 13).
92
Aristotle 1935, p. 181.
93
Sergeant 1696, pp. 2; 3; 2. Locke’s copy of this edition was given to him by the author (Harrison
and Laslett 1965, p. 230). Phemister (1993) asserts a continuity between Locke and Sergeant over
experience and demonstration which is severed by Locke’s refusal ‘to countenance demonstration
in natural science’ (p. 249).
Notwithstanding their general commitment to mentalism, there are
three ways in which logicians contemplate an unmediated relationship
between words and things. First, they refer back to a remark Aristotle had
made in his Sophistici Elenchis that contradicted his more vociferous
commitment to mentalism. ‘For’, he writes, ‘not being able to point to
the things themselves that we reason about, we use names instead of the
realities as their symbols.’94
The second intimation of a direct link between language and the world
appears in the theory of supposition. Late-medieval Terminists were
concerned with what we might now call the reference of a term, and how it
might be ‘restricted’ or ‘ampliated’.95 ‘Appellation’ is the most restricted
form of reference. Peter of Spain defines it as ‘the acceptance of a term for
an existent thing’. Therefore ‘chimera’ has no appellation.96 ‘Supposition’
is the more general word used for thinking about a term’s reference, and is
determined by its sentential context. Peter defines supposition as ‘the
acceptance of a substantial term for something’.97 Ockham explains that
‘ ‘‘supposition’’ means taking the position, as it were, of something else’.98
Du Trieu’s inclusion of a treatment of supposition in his logic adumbrates
the perseverance of the theory in the seventeenth century.99 ‘Supposition’
is a technical term whose sense we have lost, but an awareness of its
provenance will illuminate Locke’s critique of language. The theory of
supposition indicates that the possibility of reference to things outside the
mind is built firmly into early-modern philosophy of language. When a
word is ‘supposed’ to be a thing, it literally stands in its place.100
The third incursion into the mentalism that characteristically under-
scores linguistic theory is more subtle. While it is agreed that words
signify concepts as well as things, this dual signification is often hidden,
the relation between the two elements unflagged and unexplored, one
subsumed by the other, reducing language to a bipartite association
between words and ‘things’. While these ‘things’ sporadically appear
under the heading of conceptions, they soon loose their mental identity,
as men and dogs appear laughing and barking on the pages. It is the
nature of these (concept-)things to which I now turn.
94
Aristotle 1987, p. 3. See Sedley 1996.
95
For helpful summaries see Marenbon 1991, pp. 43–7, and Ashworth 1974, pp. 77–92.
96
Peter of Spain 1990, p. 175. See Ashworth (1974, p. 92) on appellation as the denotation of some
existent object.
97
Peter of Spain 1990, p. 69. 98 Ockham 1990, p. 64. 99 Du Trieu 1826, p. 107.
100
On signification, supposition, sense and reference see De Rijk 1989a; De Rijk 1989b; Henry 1981;
Pinborg 1984a; Spade 1998, pp. 412–15.
What is this world that is grasped by language in logic? We might expect
the ontologies embedded in seventeenth-century logic to reflect the
contested natural philosophy of the period. Given that some logicians are
also principal players in the new philosophy, we might imagine any
uniform characterisation of ‘the world according to logical language’ to
be entirely redundant. But in fact, with the exceptions of Descartes and
Bacon, even the ‘newest’ of logicians subscribe, superficially at least and
with perplexing consistency, to a well-worn Aristotelian map of the world.
We ought to remember this when we come to the denunciation by Locke
and others of the way that people take words for things and, more
particularly, logical classifications for reality. Their ferocity seems less
strange in the face of an apparently strong, inflexible and unproblematised
verbal–real caricature which was imprinted in young minds.101
The map of the world usually consists of natural ‘substances’, such as
‘horse, man, tree’, although some logicians include non-natural entities, or
‘accidents’ as they are sometimes called, such as ‘justice, beauty’.102 As I
have already indicated, despite the more complicated accounts given by
the philosophers to whom logicians are indebted (or whom they are)
about the construction of universals, these concepts–things seem in (and
out of) the logics to be almost passively and simply conceived, and
therefore common to all people. Aristotle had used ‘man’ as an example of
just such a concept that is neither combined nor disjoined and therefore
incapable of truth or falsity.103 ‘Man’ appears ubiquitously in logics, as the
paradigm ‘simple’.104 Cartesians recast simple concepts in accordance with
their epistemology. The Port-Royalists’ are ‘thinking . . . judging, rea-
soning . . . being, existence, duration, order, and number’. They declare
that we have ‘very clear ideas’ of thinking and extended substance.105
While Aristotle, and then Aquinas, explains how we actively abstract from
particulars before we cognise the universal, and while Descartes describes
how we perceive clear and distinct ideas by scraping away sensible ones,
these processes, particularly the Thomist–Aristotelian one, at least as
they appear in the logics, seem to be effortless. Or rather, the effort is
rarely promulgated, the simple conceptions of essentially simple things
101
Lear (1988, p. 229) explains how Aristotle laid bare the ‘broad structure of reality’: ‘at the apex
were essences and the predications which expressed them’.
102
Du Moulin 1624, pp. 3; 4. I include Du Moulin’s examples of moral simplicity because Locke will
inveigh against the non-judgemental simplicity of ideas of mixed modes as well as substances (his
development of the accident/substance distinction).
103
Aristotle 1938b, p. 117. 104 E.g. Du Trieu 1826, p. 9. Cf. Peter of Spain 1990, p. 69.
105
Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 49. See Clarke (1981, pp. 27–8) on Descartes’ substitution of intuitius
for the ignorance of the dialectians.
confidently paraded, and a tight link between concept and thing main-
tained. The important thing to note, that will leave Locke open-mouthed,
is the advertised simplicity of big concepts–things, especially substances
like ‘horse’, that, having nothing affirmed or denied of them, are therefore
relatively untouched by human intervention and shared by all. In this
initial conception there is no combination or judgement, only a direct and
(relatively) inactive reception of things. Burgersdijk explains that a ‘simple
theme’ is one that is ‘apprehended without complex thought, without
affirmation or negation; such as Socrates, disputat, respublica’.106 The
possibility of truth and falsity only enters at the second, propositional stage
of thinking, when simple things are affirmed or denied of each other. The
Coimbra commentary defines a proposition as ‘a speech which signifies
truth or falsity’.107 Whatever the more philosophical logicians scruple to
tell us about the activity of abstraction which delivers universal concepts, it
is only when we do things with these concepts that the mind is presented as
taking full control – before this, the objects of thought are given more than
made. Logicians therefore make ambitious claims for the scope of their
substantial terms whose meanings are simple and indisputable, having
been acted upon barely visibily by the mind.
Moreover, logicians give the impression that verbal simplicity and
universality corresponds with conceptual–ontological simplicity and uni-
versality. Single words seem to stand for single concepts–things.
Keckermann declares that ‘a simple thing is that which is expressed with
one word, like man’.108 For Sanderson, a ‘simple conception’ finds
expression in ‘simple terms’.109 Wallis announces that ‘simple terms’ sig-
nify ‘simple apprehensions’.110 Logicians are aware that there is not
necessarily a numerical correspondence between word and meaning.
Hobbes explains ‘that a name is not to be taken in philosophy as it is in
grammar’; ‘ ‘‘sentient animate body’’ is one name for philosophers because
[it applies] to one thing, to each and every animal, while for grammarians
it is three names’.111 But the Hobbesian warning is not much broadcast.
Verbal units give the lie to equally unitary meanings.
It is the presumption of passively received, simple and universal
(concepts of ) substances, particularly as trumpeted by Aristotelians and
Cartesians, and fostered by simple words, that Locke will deconstruct.
106
Burgersdijk 1668, p. 1. Cf. Gassendi 1981, p. 80.
107
Collegium Conimbricense 1610, p. 329: ‘enuntiatio est oratio significans verum, vel falsum’.
108
Keckermann 1600, sig. A4r: ‘res simplex est, quae unica voce exprimitur, ut homo’.
109
Sanderson 1985, pp. 2–3. 110 Wallis 1687, p. 22.
111
Hobbes 1981, p. 21. Cf. Burgersdijk 1668, p. 1. See Tachau (1987) on complexe significabile.
These simple elements slot neatly into the grand and comprehensive
taxonomy of the world that logicians confidently proffer. They take
Aristotle’s ten categories or predicaments (substance, quantity, quality,
relation, place, time, action, passion, posture, state), and the five universals
or predicables (genus, species, difference, property, accident) that Porphyry
had systematised in his Isagoge (an introduction to Aristotle’s Categories),
as crucial for ‘true’ and ‘proper’ reasoning. Wilson writes that ‘a pre-
dicament is . . . a rehearsyng what wordes maie be truly ioined together, or
els a settyng foorth of the nature of every thing and also shewyng what maie
be truly spoken, and what no’.112 The realist (in both senses) appearance of
the linguistic taxonomy is unmistakable. Res and verba are enveloped by
the title ‘predicable’.
According to Burgersdijk, predicables ‘are truly, properly, naturally,
and immediately affirmed of many’.113 However, this referential ambition
might implode under a critical gaze, as it seems that predicables are
constituted intertextually, in reference to each other. The ‘genus’ is ‘that
which is predicated of many different species’, and ‘species’ ‘that which is
gathered under the genus’.114 Terms like ‘man’ or ‘animal’ do not have
fixed places in the anatomy; their status is determined by context. For
example, ‘animal’ would be the genus with respect to ‘man’, but the
‘species’ with respect to ‘animate’. The Port-Royal Logique is explicit
about this: ‘the same idea can be a genus with respect to the ideas to
which it extends, and a species when compared to another, more general
idea’.115 Du Trieu inadvertently reveals the pre-determined circularity of
the deductive process in two disparate examples of supposedly demon-
strative inferences: ‘man is an animal, man is sensitive’ and ‘every man
is sensitive, therefore every man is an animal ’.116 Textbook accounts of
universals invoke a hermetically sealed map, whose marks only signify
differentially, not transcendentally.
112
Wilson 1553, fo. 7v (my emphasis). Cf. Nuchelmans (1998a, pp. 111–12) on how it was thought that
the categories ought to be an ‘inventory of things in the world’. Jardine (1974, p. 19) argues that
sixteenth-century dialectical handbooks saw linguistic structures as mapping ontological ones. See
Ong (1958, p. 70) on the impression, inherent in the long-standing logical framework, that words
stand for things.
113
Burgersdijk 1668, p. 7: ‘quae de pluribus vere, proprie, naturaliter, atque immediate affimantur’.
Cf. Du Trieu 1826, p. 30; Sanderson 1985, p. 4.
114
Burgersdijk 1668, p. 8: ‘genus est, quod de pluribus specie differentibus praedicatur . . . species est,
que collocatur sub genere’.
115
Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 41.
116
Du Trieu 1826, p. 121: ‘Bona est, cuius consequens legitime infertur ex ante cedente: ut, Homo est
animal, homo est sensitivus’; p. 120: ‘argumentatio est oratio, in qua unum ex alio colligitur; ut,
Omnis homo est sensitivus, ergo omnis homo est animal ’.
Even so, embedded in the watertight classificatory map are preten-
sions to an essentialist ontology which is exacting, real and intelligi-
ble.117 Wallis tells us that the first three predicables (genus, species,
difference) are ‘essential’ to the subject, whereas the last two (property
and accident) are merely ‘accidental’ to it.118 The rigid strength of
essentialism reveals itself in elaborations of difference – the quality
which essentially distinguishes between things. There are three accep-
tations of the word ‘difference’, says Sanderson. The first and vulgar one
differentiates something from another on the basis of ‘accidental’ and
‘separable’ difference, such as ‘Socrates standing’ from ‘Plato sitting’.
The second and more proper means of differentiating things is by some
‘inseparable accident’, such as distinguishing Plato from Socrates on the
basis of their different noses. The third and most proper means of
differentiation is on the grounds of an ‘essential’ difference, the like of
which divides rational Socrates from irrational Bucephalus.119 Arnauld
and Nicole write that ‘real definitions’ identify ‘the nature of a thing by
its essential attributes, of which the common one is called the genus,
and the proper one the difference. Thus a human being is defined as a
rational animal, the mind as a substance that thinks, the body as an
extended substance.’120 Cartesianism is thus woven into the traditional
logical fabric, simultaneously subverting and revitalising the genre. In
contrast to essential differences, properties and accidents are inessential.
Properties, such as ‘being capable of laughter’ or ‘two-footed’, are
‘necessary’ with respect to ‘man’ but not ‘essential’. Accidents are even
further from the heart of substances. Du Trieu defines an accident as
‘that which is present or absent without the corruption of the sub-
ject . . . such as white, with respect to a wall’. He goes on to explain that
accidents are either ‘separable’, such as ‘sleep, with respect to men’, or
‘inseparable’, such as ‘white’, with respect to swans, thereby depicting
sensible qualities as discrete entities in a way that will upset the new
philosophers.121 Wallis says that while a property of something is not
‘essential’ to it, it is ‘necessarily conjoined’ to it, as ‘capable of laughter’
is in the case of ‘man’. Some accidents, none of which are ‘necessary’ to
the subject, are ‘separable’ from the subject, such as ‘white’ in the case
117
See Dean 1998 on essentialism and method. Cf. Friedman 1999.
118
Wallis 1687, p. 16. 119 Sanderson 1985, p. 12. 120 Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 126.
121
Du Trieu 1826, p. 48: ‘quod adest atque abest sine subjecti corruptione . . . ut, album, respectu
parietis’; p. 49.
of ‘wool’ and ‘paper’, while some are ‘inseparable’, such as ‘heat’ in the
case of ‘fire’ and ‘blackness’ in the case of ‘raven’.122
Real truth and falsity are determined by predicables and categories with
stipulative assurance. For example, Burgersdijk explains an essentially
true proposition as one in which ‘either the genus is predicated of the
species; as, Man is an animal, or the difference is predicated of the species;
as, Man is rational.’ A merely necessarily true proposition is formed
when ‘the property is predicated of its subject’, as in ‘man is capable of
laughter’.123 This reified and precise linguistic web is said to copy the
world.
There had always been a debate, which intensifies again in the
seventeenth century, over whether and to what extent the linguistic tax-
onomy truly maps the divisions of nature. The old guard had never been
oblivious to the interpretative interface between words–concepts and the
world, as in the old nominalist/realist controversy. Sophisticated scho-
lastic logicians had always busied themselves with disputations about the
nature of their entia rationis, and how they grasped the world. Smiglecius
asks whether ‘an entity of reason consists in the impossible conjunction of
several things’, ‘whether an entity of reason is a concept or exists outside
the mind’, ‘or and in what way an entity of reason is made by the
intellect’.124 With the pressure of the scientific revolution and the
recrudescence of scepticism there is a general rejection of the intelligible
forms and sensible species of Aristotle’s world, and increasing doubt
about the mind’s capacity to penetrate the heart of matter.
Notwithstanding certain critical discriminations about the real/rational
divide and the growing sense that words are out of step with the world,
the logic textbooks – a fundamental repository of linguistic–ontological
wisdom – move seamlessly between a linguistic and an ontological
account. Students would be forgiven for thinking that they were reading a
straightforward definition of the world. For example, Du Trieu defines
the categories as ‘a series or order of terms’, and then goes on to talk
122
Wallis 1687, pp. 17; 20. Cf. Ong (1958) on the increasing reification, simplification and
dichotomisation of logical classifications as a result of Ramist reform.
123
Burgerskijk 1668, p. 22: ‘In quibus vel genus praedicatur de specie; ut, Homo est animal vel
differentia; ut, Homo est rationalis’; ‘In quibus proprietas praedicantur de subjecto suo . . . ut,
Homo est risibilis’.
124
Smiglecius 1618: ‘an ens rationis consistat in conjunctione impossibili plurium rerum’ (p. 9);
‘utrum ens rationis sit conceptus aut denominatio extrinseca’ (p. 17); ‘an quomodo ens rationis fiat
ab intellectu’ (p. 25). See Marenbon (2000a) on the debates over the linguistic/intellectual/real
content of the categories; Marenbon (2000b) on Abelard’s conception of the categories not as a
reflection of the ‘order of things, but merely a feature of how language signifies them’ (p. 57); De
Rijk (1989c) on Ockham’s emphasis on the manufactured nature of logical conceptual apparatus.
about their reality.125 Zachary Coke’s Art of Logick (1654) says unam-
biguously that ‘things themselves are placed in the predicaments . . .
conceits and names of things but secondarily, and so far forth as they
represent things’.126 The Port-Royalists reject Aristotle’s categories
because they ‘are viewed as based on reason and truth, when in fact they
are completely arbitrary, having no foundation but the imagination of
one man who had no authority to prescribe laws to others’. But their
proposed replacement categories (mind, body, measure, position, shape,
motion and rest) only prove the point that logical distinctions are con-
sidered to map the world. They condemn Aristotle’s categories because
they ‘accustom people to be satisfied with words’.127 One might counter
that they just substitute one empty linguistic structure for another.
cracks in the mirror

The new philosophical inroads into scholastic epistemology and ontology
that I shall explore in chapter 4 threaten to shatter the logicians’ linguistic
mirror of things. Beyond these external assaults there are internal weak-
nesses that, to a sensitive student of logic, might also pulverise the glass.
I identify three possible sites of discontent.
The first concerns the practice of logic. In tandem with textbooks,
students learnt the art of logic by means of, and with the ultimate aim of,
disputation, an activity that, it was complained, elevated victory above
truth, thereby robbing speech of veracity. Disputation played a vital part
in a student’s education, as Holdsworth makes clear in his detailed advice
on the matter. What counts is having readily to hand the most popular
lines.128 In his textbook, Sanderson includes an appendix on ‘disputation’,
where he explains how the disputant might conquer his opponent.129 The
practice is quintessentially adversarial. The title of the discipline indicates
this, as Peter of Spain explains, ‘this art is called ‘dialectic’ from ‘dia’,
which means ‘two’ and ‘logos’, which means ‘discourse’ . . . suggesting the
discoursing . . . of a pair, an opponent and a respondent in disputing’.130
Although it is vociferously maintained that it will thrash out the truth,
many philosophers are concerned that victory has more to do with a sharp
tongue, and that therefore students are encouraged vainly to cultivate
their verbal weapons at the expense of truth, with the effect that its very
125
Du Trieu 1826, pp. 51–2. 126 Coke 1969, p. 19.
127
128
Holdsworth 1961, p. 636. 129 Sanderson 1985, pp. 40–66. 130
Peter of Spain 1990, p. 1.
existence comes to be doubted.131 Bacon describes the ‘point’ of syllogistic
logic as ‘to master an adversary in argument’. He characterises it as a purely
‘verbal’ exercise, sealed off from nature.132 His assertion is commonplace. In
his Academiarum examen (1654) John Webster says that at university he
learnt nothing except ‘artificially how to chide’.133 John Ley recounts, in his
Discourse of Disputations (1658), how the unsuspecting are ‘easily intangled’
in the ‘deceit’ and ‘subtilty’ of skilled disputants.134 Thomas White accuses
religious disputations, in his Controversy-Logicke (1659), of being not only
‘needeless, useless’, but also ‘dangerous’ because ‘tongue, and chance, do for
the most part beare a great sway, and have a maine stroake, and oftentimes,
to breake and disorder the better cause’.135 In his Logica, sive Ars ratiocinandi
(1692) (massively indebted to Locke’s Essay), Jean Le Clerc explains that
logic originated in the mouths of loquacious ancient fighters, and as a result
deals with words, not cogitations, teaching one to dispute on any subject
rather than investigate truth.136
Doctors of logic are themselves self-conscious about the tension
between truth and victory occasioned by the controversial setting to
which the subject is inextricably joined. De Lawne protests too much
against the accusation that logic teaches its students ‘to turne white into
black, and black into white, to serve their owne purposes, and to make
people beleeve what they list’.137 Du Moulin himself admits that in ‘bad
hands’ the art is transformed ‘into a faggot of dry thornes, which pricketh
on every side’.138 Wilson offers tactical tips for the battle, where the prize
is won by striking one’s opponent dumb by blinding them with ‘mocke
matier’. The logical treatment of sophistry is supposed to enable
upstanding students to evade sophists. However, it also darkly teaches,
or at least attests to the existence of, cynical fighters. Wilson draws a
colourful portrait of these swashbucklers:
It is a wonde to see the subtle brain, of many braggyng bodies with bold
countenaunce, beare an outward shadowe of wisdome havyng onely the maskyng
131
E.g. Wilson 1553, fo. 60v. See Ong (1971, p. 65) on the ‘omnipresence of the oratorical frame of
mind’, which led the learned to take ‘any side, perhaps, but some side certainly’. See also
Walmsley 1993.
132
Bacon 1857, iv, p. 411. 133 John Webster 1970, p. 92. 134 Ley 1658, p. 4.
135
White 1659, sig. A5v-A6r.
136
Le Clerc 1692, p. 2. Locke was given this edition by the author (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 111).
He notes that he received it in April 1692 (MS. Locke f. 10, p. 133). In a letter to Locke, Molyneux
criticises Le Clerc’s Logica, ‘in all which he has little extraordinary but what he borrows from you;
and in the alteration he gives them he robbs them of their native beautys’ (Locke 1976–1989, iv,
p. 601). Savonius (2002) explains Locke’s and Le Clerc’s closely related logical projects in terms of
cultural and political reform.
137
Du Moulin, sig. )( 3. 138 Du Moulin 1624, recto side of the leaf immediately preceding sig. A1.
visage, and lackyng the naturall face. Thei will stande stoutely in maintenaunce
of an untruthe, and with countenauce seme to share it: yea, and by their bolde
bearying it out, almost perswade the hearers, that they onely have the true part,
and the other are altogether deceived.139
In men battling to win the argument, language might well outwit the truth.
The second way logic threatens to detach verba from res is in its applause
for authority. Words accrue credibility by the external virtue of their
speaker rather than their internal sense. Most notoriously, scholastic
logicians defer consistently to Aristotle.140 In addition to submitting to the
words of particular authorities, students are advised on the high status of
authoritative statements more generally. These are drawn from topics or
loci and are to be used as proofs for demonstrative as well as probable
arguments.141 Logical ‘maxims’ are self-evident propositions which may be
used as certain premises. Peter of Spain educes from the topic of ‘defini-
tion’ the maxim that ‘anything predicated of a definition is predicated of
the thing defined’. This yields the certain argument that ‘a rational,
mortal, animal runs, so man runs’.142 As Gassendi says of maxims, ‘it is
sufficient only to grasp their meaning in order to give assent to them’.
Gassendi’s examples are of both a practical and a speculative nature: ‘the
whole is greater than any of its parts’; ‘God and Nature do nothing in
vain’; ‘no-one is able to hate the good as good, nor love evil as evil’.143 In a
way that would annoy Locke, these linguistic assertions are presented as
irresistible, perspicuous and often innate. They and the universals that are
their constituent parts are characteristically abstract and general, and are
often described as ‘better known’ (notiora) – which sounds counter-
intuitive to empiricists for whom particulars are better known.144
The final crack in the mirror of language is explicitly promulgated by
logicians. Their accounts of sophistry, with which they routinely con-
clude their books, reveal how univocity – the mainstay of both com-
munication and ratiocination – might shatter. Gassendi explains that
fallacious reasoning occurs when ‘there is present some ambiguity of word
or expression, and the sense of the word or expression is different in the
proposition from what it is in the assumption, so that it is not surprising
139
Wilson 1553, fo. 63r.
140
See, e.g., Descartes (1985c, p. 147) on scholastics being like ivy on Aristotle, the tree. Cf.
Marenbon 1991, p. 9.
141
See, e.g., Gassendi 1981, pp. 113–9; Sanderson 1985, pp. 183–211. As a result of the humanist reform
which bring rhetoric and logic closer together, ‘human authority’ or ‘testimony’ becomes a locus in
logic from where so-called ‘inartificial proofs’, or probable arguments, are drawn (e.g. in Gassendi
1981, p. 119, and Sanderson 1985, p. 208). See Serjeantson 1999.
142
Peter of Spain 1990, p. 52. 143 Gassendi 1981, pp. 113–14. 144 E.g. Peter of Spain 1990, p. 51.
that when both have been admitted as true an absurd conclusion follows’.
Sophists mine the multivocity of words, inducing absurd, but formally
sound conclusions. Gassendi takes the classic example of an ambiguous
word that can be used as the middle term to reason falsely. ‘A certain star
is Sirius; a dog is a barking animal . . . therefore, a certain star is a barking
animal.’145 In his Sophistici Elenchi, Aristotle refers to the success of
sophistic speech:
In reasoning, those who are unacquainted with the power of names are deceived
by paralogisms both when they are parties to the controversy and when they
form the audience. From this cause . . . there exist proofs and confutations that
are apparent but unreal.146
Aristotle’s audience, his critics as well as his supporters, all agree that
names have a ‘power’ that outstrips both truth and univocity.
As a rule, the logical treatment of ambiguity is firmly contained. It is an
avoidable and identifiable misuse of language. Semantic instability does
not escape from its demarcated area into language as a whole. Following
Aristotle’s piece of common sense, it is taken for granted that men share a
universal mental discourse, emanating as it does from one world.147
There are a few exceptions to this rule. At the thoughtful heart of
scholastic logic, writers wonder about the implications of the assumption
that words signify the speaker’s thoughts.148 Smiglecius asks whether ‘the
signification of a word ought to be taken from the concept of the
impositor, or from the concept of the hearer’. He concludes that
the signification of an utterance must come from impositors alone,
however imperfectly they understand the thing. His reason is that ‘words
are signs of concepts, and we express by our words, that which we conceive
in the mind’.149 It is not, then, at the margins, but at the centre of the
scholastic fortress, that it is mooted that the meanings of the same words
might be different in different people’s mouths. But these are murmurs
drowned out in the noisy, mainstream confidence in semantic uniformity.
There is one other lone, but powerful, voice that probes the fact of
semantic individualism, with extraordinarily sceptical results. Into the
145
Gassendi 1981, pp. 152; 153. Sanderson (1985, p. 215) gives the same example.
146
147
Pinborg 1984a, p. 254: ‘the fundamental dictum of medieval semantics that language (as
expression) imitates the conceptual contents which are common to all men’.
148
Ashworth 1974, p. 44. Cf. Ashworth 1981, pp. 317–18.
149
Smiglecius 1618, p. 12: ‘An vocis significatio sumi debeat ex conceptu imponentis, vel ex conceptu
audientis’; p. 14: ‘verba sunt signa conceptuum, & id verbis exprimimus, quod in mente
concepimus’.
very first section of their Logique, the one that deals with ideas, the Port-
Royalists insert a warning about words. They declare that although we
ought to reason solely with the significations of words, habit and necessity
force us to ‘pay more attention to the words than to the things’. The
problem is, they tell us, that words do not necessarily stand for the same
ideas for different people:
We should note that while people often have different ideas about the same
things, still they use the same words to express them. For example, a pagan
philosopher’s idea of virtue differs from a theologian’s idea, and yet each
expresses his idea by the same word, ‘virtue’.
Moreover, people in different ages have viewed the same things quite dif-
ferently, and yet they have always collected all these ideas under the same name.
This causes us to become easily confused when uttering a word or hearing it
uttered, since we take it sometimes for one idea, sometimes for another.
They go on to give the examples of ‘soul’ and ‘life’, crucial words that are
multiply (mis)understood.150 Their point is that cultural and temporal
relativism mean that different people understand different things by the
same word. Words have a history; they amass a cluster of diverse and
possibly contradictory meanings under the same nominal umbrella. The
Port-Royalists conclude that ‘every language is full of countless similar
words that share only the same sound, but are nevertheless signs of
completely different ideas’.151 This is the most radical and devastating
rejection of the twin traditional beliefs in univocal languages and an
eternal community of meaning. This critique is less a central tenet of the
Logique than a note of caution that has in its sights scholastic philosophy
rather than speakers in general. It does not deter the Port-Royalists from
keeping their assertive linguistic-ideational course. However, to pricked
ears it is a provocative deconstruction of the cavalier conjunction of res
and verba, an indication that language might not be a transparent win-
dow on to meaning.
While there are chinks in the logicians’ armour, however, the view of
language that they defend is robust. While words signify concepts, these
concepts are generally seen not to veil the world but to reveal it. So limpid
is the vision that concepts afford of things, that they seem to melt into
each other, and verba to map res in a perfect symmetry. The world that
language reveals is a stiffly classified, basically Aristotelian one: words
appear automatically and universally to signify simple essences of
150 151
Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 58. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 60.
substances such as ‘humanity’ in the case of ‘man’.152 As we shall see, this
account of language left a deep impression on its philosophical readers. At
times they reiterate and reinterpret its referential and essentialist ambi-
tions, while at others they turn against it, drawing on both the revisionary
intimations within logic and (often relatedly) on contemporaneous
assaults on scholasticism. Some suggest that language might be structured
less by the world and more by authority, by pedagogical and social
concerns, and, most importantly, by human subjectivity. Locke is the
most trenchant and relentless assailant. Indeed, insofar as his Essay is a
logic, it is exactly the tradition we have explored in this chapter which the
Essay is intended to dismantle. Locke assiduously undermines the
impression given in the logics that words stand for things. He also attacks
a connected assumption which is so accepted by logicians that it is rarely
broadcast: that words stand for the same things for different people. It is a
testament to the continuing power of scholastic logic at the end of the
seventeenth century that Locke exerts so much energy in indicting it.
152
Aquinas 1998, p. 31.
chapter 2
Language in grammar
If logic discloses the heart of language, then grammar supplies the body.
According to Lily’s Grammar, otherwise known as The Royal Grammar and
the predominant textbook in England throughout the seventeenth cen-
tury, the discipline teaches ‘the art of writing and speaking rightly’.1 As the
mainstay of early-modern education, it inculcates the quintessentially
human skill that distinguishes men from beasts, enabling them to flourish
in society. In his influential Minerva, sive De causis Latinae linguae (1587),
Franciscus Sanctius explains that grammar, ‘the art of speaking rightly’, is
the most basic of the three arts of language.2 Obadiah Walker’s Of Edu-
cation (1673) reiterates its propaedeutic role. Neither rhetoric nor logic,
that teach one, respectively, to speak ‘perspicuously, decently, and per-
suasively’, and ‘pertinently and rationally’, are to be learned before the
linguistic rudiments enshrined in grammar.3 Bacon records the essential, if
unglamorous, nature of the discipline; it is ‘the harbinger of other sciences;
an office not indeed very noble, yet very necessary’.4 In his Philosophia
rationalis (1638) Thomas Campanella calls it ‘an instrumental art’.5 Pupils
were expected to have mastered it at grammar school, and its preliminary
status is reflected in the fact that the subject did not officially appear
in the curricula of the Universities of either Oxford or Cambridge.6
Unofficially, however, undergraduates were encouraged to refresh their
memories; Holdsworth urgently declares that ‘grammers must not be
1
The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. B1r [p. 1]; Locke not only owned this edition (Harrison and Laslett
1965, p. 98) as well as three versions of Lily (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 175), but also represented
‘Lily’s Grammar’ as synonymous with ‘Grammar-Schools’ in his Thoughts concerning Education
(Locke 1989, p. 218). In his rendering of Lily, William Walker explains that ‘the Authority of this
Nation had upon mature deliberation established this to be the only grammar, that should be
learned in all the schools of England’ (Walker 1674, sig. A5r). For further evidence of its pre-
eminence see Lily 1664, sig. A3r.
2
Sanctius 1664, pp. 7–8; 9. Locke owned this edition, in addition to another copy of this text
(Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 225).
3
Walker 1970, pp. 107–10. Locke had this edition (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 262).
4
Bacon 1857, iv, p. 440. 5 Campanella 1638, p. 1: ‘ars instrumentalis’. 6 Feingold 1997, p. 243.
41
forgotten’.7 The art was indispensable in a world where a gentleman’s
status was partly measured by his linguistic virtuosity.8
While grammar purports to teach one to speak, however, it could be
judged to belie its name. According to early-modern linguistic theory,
speech is definitively significative, or else it is just noise. Verbal discourse
must be animated by semantic discourse. However, grammar focuses on
the semiotic as opposed to the semantic properties of language.9 The art
therefore threatens to impoverish its charge.
It is this elevation of the form over the content of language that
distinguishes the discipline from its sisters in the trivium. While logicians
and rhetoricians concentrate on what words signify, grammarians often
turn a blind eye to the signified, attending instead to the identification
and ordering of the signs themselves. This does not mean that they take
the semiotic side of language to be sufficient. Grammar is a preliminary
to its sister arts, and they elaborate on meaning. Nevertheless, grammar
divulges the radical dualism of res and verba that underpins early-modern
philosophy of language, and the possible independence and pre-eminence
of words alone.
In the course of the century several writers are concerned that students
are obsessed with the clothes (the words) rather than the body (the sig-
nification) of language, to use a common analogy. Grammar promotes
this disjunction between oratio and ratio, and the love affair with the
former that so disturbs contemporaries. This concern elicits various
attempts by philosophers in general and grammarians in particular to tie
verba to res. This chapter investigates how grammar exposes the inherent
meaninglessness of words per se and their simultaneously inherent vitality
7
Holdsworth 1961, p. 641.
8
On the overriding importance of becoming a master of words, and ultimately of rhetoric, see
Costello 1958; Grafton and Jardine 1986, p. 211; Kristeller 1979a; Ong 1971, pp. 113–41.
9
By stressing the grammarians’ consistent focus on the semiotic properties of language, I am
questioning Padley’s narrative which traces a move from ‘formal’ to ‘semantic’ grammar (Padley
1976, p. 74) in the period 1500–1700, and which constitutes the major contribution of secondary
literature on the subject. Padley (1976, p. 57) asserts the replacement of usage with ratio in the
humanist tradition. Padley 1985 and 1988, i, describes the ‘semasiological’ as opposed to ‘formal’
(p. 76) development of grammar. Padley 1985 and 1988, ii, which deals with ‘vernacular norms’
(p. 3) and ‘observational’ as opposed to ‘methodical’ grammar (p. 1), says of Lily that it is ‘a good
illustration of the general drift away from formal criteria in the direction of semantically based
ones’ (p. 233). While there was indeed a movement (which I shall trace) to inject matter into words,
this was coincident with a continuing emphasis on the signs themselves. See also Black 2001, who
explains that Italian renaissance Latin education was ‘overwhelmingly philological’ rather than
philosophical (p. 9). Mitchell (2001) argues that grammar was the site of controversies about
standardisation, pedagogy, writing instruction, universal language and social position in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.
Language in grammar 43
as pure signs. It then explores the disparate grammatical endeavours to
ground both individual words and linguistic structure as a whole in some
extra-linguistic, universal and fixed rationale. I end by analysing the view
that such projects are doomed to failure given the contingent, fluid and
divergent nature of human languages.
the concentration on verba not res

Grammarians both propagate and reflect the view that words are signs
whose whole purpose is to signify something other than themselves. This
generates the paradigmatic duality of sign/signified which we met in the
previous chapter and which indicates the unreflective and latent fusion of
concepts and things on the semantic side of the duality. In the Gram-
matica speculativa by Thomas of Erfurt, a leading modistic medieval
grammar, a word (dictio) is ‘a significative expression (vox significativa)’.10
This description is echoed ubiquitously. In his Latine Grammar (1651),
Charles Hoole, described by John Twells as a ‘new’ grammarian, defines a
word as ‘a part of speech, which itself doth signifie something’.11 Of a
more traditional persuasion is John Stockwood, who declares in Certaine
Grammar Questions for the Exercise of Young Schollers in the Learning of the
Accidence (1590), that a word is ‘a voyce consisting of one sillable or more,
wherein is uttered so much as signifieth somewhat’.12
The persistent duo of sign and signified appears in various nominal
guises. In English, the significant other is called ‘signification’, ‘sense’,
‘meaning’ and, most often, ‘thing’.13 The duality is described differently,
depending on the particular philosophical persuasions of the grammarian.
In his De causis linguae Latinae (1540), Julius Caesar Scaliger exposes his
Aristotelian heritage by explaining that a vox has a ‘material’ and a
‘formal’ component, where ‘form’ denotes the essence, or anima, of a
thing. ‘‘Felix’’ is one ‘‘vox’’ if you look at it ‘materially’, but three if you
look at its ‘form’. That is to say, it has one phonetic existence, the word
‘felix’, and three semantic ones, its three possible genders.14 The Port-
Royal Grammaire (1660), on the other hand, reveals its Cartesian roots
when it distinguishes between the ‘material part’ of words (their ‘sound’)
10
Thomas of Erfurt 1972, p. 149. 11 Twells 1985, p. 153; Hoole 1969, p. 16.
12
Stockwood 1590, sig. A4v.
13
See, e.g., Stockwood (1590, sig. D2r) on ‘the signification of a word’; The True Method of Learning
the Latin Tongue by the English (1696, sig. A3r) differentiates between the ‘word itself ’ and the
‘sense of the word’; Bullokar 1980, p. 54: ‘signification or meaning of words’. Hoole (1969, p. 20)
says a noun ‘nameth a thing’.
14
Scaliger 1540, p. 145.
made by ‘men and parrots’ alike, and the ‘spiritual part’ (their
signification of ‘thoughts’), to which parrots are strangers.15
Sometimes grammars fuse the semiotic and semantic qualities of lan-
guage. The Royal Grammar rattles out the semantic refrain: ‘a noun is the
name of a thing’. It adds the formal proviso that a noun substantive
‘needs no other word to shew its signification’.16 The definition of a verb
is similarly mixed: ‘a Verb is a part of speech declined with mood and
tense, and betokeneth doing . . . or suffering’.17 The English Guide to the
Latin Tongue (1675) also displays this seamless movement between
semiotics and semantics, this time in the case of nouns: ‘A Noun is the
name of a thing . . . A noun substantive may have a, an, or the before it,
and cannot have the word thing immediately after it.’18 William Walker’s
reformed version of The Royal Grammar (1674) gives the impression that
language is constituted by a web of both phonetic and graphic signs, and
determined by extra-linguistic reference. He explains that one might know
the gender of words ‘by the nature of things’. However, having declared
that ‘birds, wild-beasts, and fishes generally are of the Epicene gender’, the
first exception to the rule turns out to be that ‘nouns ending in um . . . are
generally of the neuter gender’.19 Ben Jonson’s English Grammar (1640)
defines a word in general as ‘a part of speech, or note, whereby a thing is
knowne, or called: and consisteth of one, or more syllabes’.20
More often, however, this interplay between sign and sense is eclipsed
by an overwhelming focus on signs alone. Res melts away, leaving the
reader with a baffling maze of empty signifiers. Scaliger is explicit about
the strict exclusion of res from grammar. He explains that words can be
considered in terms of their ‘figure’, their ‘composition’ and their ‘truth’,
and that grammarians deal with the first two elements, while dialecticians
are concerned with truth, or words’ fit with the world.21 Sanctius char-
acterises oratio in terms of its phonetic elements rather than its intentional
content. It consists of voces that are made up of syllables, which are in
turn made up of letters, or individual sounds.22 This depiction of
grammar in particular, and language more generally, is reiterated by
Hoole: ‘Grammar hath its name from letters, which the Greeks call
grammata . . . for this art begins with letters, of which syllables are made;
15
Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, pp. 21–2.
16
The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. B2r [p. 3]; [p. 4]. Cf. The True Method 1696, p. 5.
17
The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. C8r [p. 31]. 18 The English Guide 1675, p. 3.
19
Walker 1674, pp. 25; 27.
20
Jonson 1640, p. 35. Locke owned Jonson’s Works (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 163).
21
Scaliger 1540, p. 2. 22 Sanctius 1664, p. 8.
and of syllables, words; and of words, a speech.’23 Language seems to spiral,
self-referentially, into itself, rather than reach out to people and their
world.
A circular and insulated picture of discourse is promoted through the
meta-verbal focus on parts of speech, and also through the emphasis on
making grammatical as opposed to real or rational sense. The Royal
Grammar declares that ‘syntax . . . teacheth how to join words rightly
together in sentences’, and defines a conjunction as ‘a part of speech
which joineth words and sentences together’.24 The True Method of
Learning the Latin Tongue (1696) explains that ‘a verb is a part of speech,
which joyns a noun to a noun, or a noun to an adjective’.25 Much
grammatical analysis of language therefore occurs at a purely surface level,
and makes sparse reference to the semantic components of speech.
The view of language as a tissue of insignificant signs, promoted, albeit
inadvertently, by the grammarians, is compounded by their emphasis on
the sensible aspect of words. At the base of early-modern philosophy of
language lies the principle that men cannot communicate their ideas
mind to mind and are therefore forced to use sensible entities – sounds
and marks – which can signify insensible ideas. Words are a sensible
conduit for intelligible matter, as George Dalgarno announces in his
Tables of the Universal Character (1657):
The soules of men, though of a spirituall and heavenly substance; yet in respect
of that neare and strict union betwixt them and their bodies which they are in
this state of mortality, are not able to act & exert their intellectuall faculties,
without the ministration of the corporeall organs of the inferiour faculties of the
senses; the chief servants the body does afford the soule, are the eare and the eye,
the one carrying in upon the understanding the species of things by the signes of
variously and artificially modulated sounds; the other from the like artificial
variation of figures.26
Grammarians devote a large amount of space to the audible and graphic
identity of words. Their discipline is divided into four parts, as enum-
erated in Twells’ Grammatica reformata (1683): ‘orthographia, prosodia,
etymologia, syntaxis’. Orthography ‘teaches the nature, affections or acci-
dents of letters’, and prosody, ‘the difference of the syllables’.27 The Royal
Grammar explains that ‘a letter is a mark of a simple sound’.28 In his
Pamphlet of Grammar (1586) William Bullokar praises the multiplicity of
23
Hoole 1969, p. 2. 24 The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. E8v [p. 64]; sig. E7v [p. 62].
25
The True Method 1696, p. 30.
26
Dalgarno 2001a, p. 90. Cf. Izzo (1982) on phonology and orthography in the sixteenth century.
27
Twells 1985, p. 158. 28 The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. B1r [p. 1].
sounds employed by the ‘sencibl’ English tongue.29 The Port-Royal
Grammaire initially concentrates not on ‘words, as significative; but only
of their nature and property as sounds’.30 Hoole describes a syllable as ‘a
taking letters together, and uttering them with one breath’.31 John Wallis
actually appends a Grammatico-Physical Treatise on Speech (or on the
formation of all speech sounds) to his Grammar of the English Language
(1653). In it he explains how to pronounce different letters.
This attention to the material, or sensible, aspects of discourse is also
apparent in their use of ‘signs’ to identify parts of speech. John Milton’s
Accedence (1669) advises that declined, as opposed to primitive, words ‘are
those which have diverse endings’.32 In his Short Institution of Grammar
(1674), Richard Busby explains that ‘a substantive is declined . . . with one
article; as hic pater a father’.33 In his Grammatica Anglo-Romana (1687),
Samuel Shaw explains how a noun’s case is unveiled by certain tell-tale
signs. ‘The particle of is a sign of a genitive case’, and ‘the particles to or for
put acquisitively, before a casual word, are signs of a dative case.’34 Mark
Lewis offers the most elaborate version of this teaching method. His
grammar is called An Essay to Facilitate the Education of Youth, by Bringing
Down the Rudiments of Grammar to the Sense of Seeing (1674).35 He
contends that children sense far better than they reason, and proposes
using their keen faculty of sight to pick out the grammatical status of
words. ‘We may know the parts of speech by sense.’ He begins with the
common advice that ‘all English words which have a, the, or an before
them, are nouns . . . This is obvious to sense.’ He then unfolds a further
plan: ‘the child may know the parts of speech by the character the words
are printed in’. By attributing to certain parts of speech certain fonts,
capitals, and other visible differentials, the student is enabled to discern
and remember which is which. Lewis proudly gives the following
example: ‘The Arch, spread over us, is the Heaven’.36
Grammarians abstract language by classifying words themselves with yet
more words. While words are always at one remove from what they signify,
grammarians hoist the speaker up to a second level, widening the distance
between sign and signified. John Brinsley’s Posing of the Parts (1617) reveals
29
Bullokar 1980, p. 52. 30 Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 5. 31 Hoole 1969, p. 14.
32
Milton 1971, p. 2.
33
Busby 1972, p. 3. Locke owned Graece Grammatices (1647) by Busby (Harrison and Laslett 1965,
p. 98).
34
Shaw 1969, pp. 36; 43.
35
Locke owned a copy of Lewis’ grammar (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 174). See also the full title of
another of Lewis’ works, Vestibulum (Lewis 1675c).
36
Lewis 1675b, sig. A1v [p. 2]; sig. A2v [p. 4].
the triple-tiered structure that is fostered by the grammarians. He says
that ‘a hand it self is not a noun: but the word signifying a hand is a
noun’.37 Stockwood paints a similarly rarefied picture of language. ‘The
thing itself which is called a booke is not a noun, but this woorde booke.’
The questioner in the dialogue asks ‘why doest thou put this difference
betwixte the thing and the name of the thing’? The respondent replies ‘for
that in grammar which teacheth the true order of speech, wee have to
consider nothing but the very woords that be spoken: so that things
which bee signified by these words perteyne nothing to grammar’.38
The ‘difference betwixte the thing and the name of the thing’ is further
exposed by the way in which the written word is considered a sign of the
spoken word. Writing is not one, but two, steps away from the world. This
traditional view has its roots in Aristotle’s seminal statement that ‘written
words are the signs of words spoken’.39 ‘Aristotle says rightly’, applauds
Bacon, that ‘words are the images of thoughts and letters are the images of
words’.40 The Port-Royal Grammaire reiterates the commonplace, ‘sounds
have been pitched upon by men to signify their thoughts, and . . . they have
likewise invented certain figures which should serve as signs of these
sounds’.41 Jenkin Philipps explains in his introduction to the grammatical
works of James Shirley (1726) that ‘letters and syllables’ are the ‘marks or
signs of the several sounds we make use of, to express our notions or Idea’s
to one another’.42 Words, which bear no resemblance to what they signify
in their pristine audible incarnation, are even more obscure in their written
form. The lines and curves on the page recede further from the world.
It is this wall of sound that divides (albeit conventional) script from
meaning, as well as people from each other, that the universal language
theorists want to pull down. Contrary to what is often supposed, they
generally reject not arbitrary signs per se, but simply the audible versions.
Following Bacon, they turn from ‘words’ to ‘real characters’, which, as
Francis Lodwick puts it, are ‘representations of things, and not of
sounds’.43
redressing the imbalance

The early-modern period resounds with complaints that words are vac-
uous and that they are loved and used at the expense, and to the exclu-
sion, of things. Some of the loudest cries come from within the
37
Brinsley 1677, p. 3. 38 Stockwood 1590, sig. B3r. 39 Aristotle 1938b, p. 115.
40
Bacon 1857, iv, p. 439. 41 Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 13. 42 Shirley 1971, p. i.
43
Bacon 1996b, p. 231; Lodwick 1972a, sig. A4r [p. 206]. Cf. Wilkins 1968, p. 21.
grammatical tradition itself, which is not homogenous, but internally
contested and negotiated. Certain reformers are disturbed by the way
their discipline encourages insignificant speech. They resist the purely
verbal characterisation of language, and urge that it be filled with sense.
Mark Lewis’ Apologie for a Grammar inveighs against ‘the greatest Rabby
with his millions of words without this knowledge [of ‘things’]’.44 In An
Appeale to Truth (1622), a vehement rant against traditional grammar as
both useless and obstructive, Joseph Webbe quotes one of the most
eloquent and harsh of his critical forbears:
Half our age, saith Montaigne, is consumed that way: we are kept foure or five
years in learning to understand bare words, and to join them into clauses; then,
as long in proportioning a great bodie extended into foure or five parts; and five
yeares more at least, ere we can succinctly knowe how to mingle, joyn, and
interlace them handsomely into a subtile fashion, and into one coherent orb.45
Montaigne here charges grammarians with religiously constructing a
beautiful but self-consuming verbal circle that has no passage to the
world. Not only are their words metaphysically vacuous, but also sprung
from a dead language, Latin.
John Milton’s re-definition of grammar reflects the concern to inject
sense into sound: ‘the art of right understanding, speaking, or writing
Latine’.46 His insertion of ‘understanding’ into the definition that tra-
ditionally includes only ‘speaking’ and ‘writing’ echoes a general plea to
adjoin mental to verbal discourse. John Dury, for example, of the Hartlib
circle, accuses traditional grammar of introducing students, ludicrously,
to ‘the materiall sense of words’ in advance of ‘the formall coherence of
things which their construction is to represent’.47 An Examen of the Way
of Teaching the Latine Tongue (1669) makes a similar protest, asserting
that standard Latin teaching stunts learning because ‘it hath needlessly
engag’d us to preferre the knowledg of words to that of things (which is a
great Evill)’.48 In his Apologie Lewis urgently indicates the hellish con-
sequences of embracing words and neglecting content. ‘All methods
ought to be so contrived to shorten Art in gathering words more timely to
relish things, that we may understand ourselves in affairs of our present
and everlasting concernment.’ Lewis paints a familiar portrait of gram-
matical training resulting in an empty-headed fool who speaks without
‘ideas of things in his mind’.49 John Robotham’s letter to the reader that
he prefixes to his edition of Comenius’ Janua linguarum reserata . . . The
44 45
Lewis 1675d, p. 36. Webbe 1967, p. 18. 46 Milton 1971, p. 1.
47 48
Dury 1970, p. 162. An Examen 1969, p. 16. 49 Lewis 1675d, pp. 31; 36.
Gate of Languages Unlocked (1631) likewise bemoans the way in which
traditional grammar propagates ‘a meer verbalist’, as opposed to ‘the
perfection of a realist’.50 He asserts that grammarians teach their students
insignificant words. ‘No marvell if it be so long before wee can reach the
pith of matter, when so much time is mis-spent in the bark of words’. He
delivers the following ‘generall maxime’ for a student: ‘that he learns no
more than hee understands; that the end of his pains is not words, but
matter’. The same principle is trumpeted in Comenius’ aptly named
textbook Orbis sensualium pictus (1658): ‘I say, and say it again aloud, that
this last is the foundation of all the rest: because we can neither act nor
speak wisely, unlesse we first rightly understand all things which are to be
done, and whereof, we are to speak.’51 The entreaty that one’s speech
must not outstretch one’s knowledge is so urgent (and is reiterated by
Locke with such force) because it is merely normative, not descriptive.
Reformers attempt to remedy the deficit of res by using the vernacular to
teach Latin.52 The Royal Grammar had traditionally taught Latin grammar
in Latin – a dead and foreign tongue, unintelligible to young English
pupils. In his grammar Shaw attacks ‘the multitude of grammars’ that use
Latin as the means as well as the end of grammatical training. He therefore
writes his in English, ‘so children might learn a language which they
know not, by one that they know’.53 In his Vestibulum technicum . . .
wherein, the Sense of Janua Linguarum Is Contained, Lewis too inveighs
against traditional grammar: ‘it is crime enough that it is in Latin’,54 while
Philipps comments on the futility of the work of reformers like Sanctius
and Scioppius whom we shall encounter below. Their endeavours are, he
claims, ‘of no use to children and beginners, because written in Latin; for
to teach Latin by Latin Rules is to explain one obscurity by another, and
therefore very ridiculous in it self ’.55 An Examen also complains about
using Latin to learn Latin. It suggests that students instead learn the rules
in their mother tongue.56 In the same vein, Milton proffers his Accedence as
an effective route to Latin grammar, in place of the standard and strange
one where pupils learn ‘first the Accedence, then the Grammar in Latin,
ere the Language of those Rules be understood’. His conversion of the
rules into English entails that ‘the long way is much abbreviated, and the
50
Comenius 1643, sig. c4r. Locke possessed three editions of Comenius’ text (Harrison and Laslett
1965, p. 114). Ianua is the name of the ‘fundamental Italian textbook of elementary education’ in
Latin in medieval and renaissance Italy (Black 2001, p. 7).
51
Comenius 1643, sig. c4r; sig. c6r; Comenius 1968, p. 90.
52
See Waswo (1999b) on the rise of the vernacular in the Renaissance; Johnson (1944) on the
neologising and latinising of English in the sixteenth century.
53
Shaw 1969, sig. A5r. 54 Lewis 1675c, p. 6. 55 Shirley 1971, p. iii. 56 An Examen 1969, p. 27.
labour of understanding much more easie’.57 Brinsley is in the vanguard of
reformers who convert Lily’s rules into English.58 He is motivated not only
to illuminate Latin, but also to enrich the pupils’ understanding of their
own tongue. He includes specifically English grammatical advice, such as
the tip that one can know a ‘noun adjective’, ‘if I may put this word thing
to it’.59 Wallis takes the revolutionary step of writing a specifically English
grammar – his Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae of 1653 (albeit written in
Latin!). Many grammars are, indeed, written in both Latin and English, to
shed light on the unknown through the known. For example, William
Clare organises his Compleat System of Grammar English and Latine (1690)
in two columns, English on the left and Latin on the right, whereas
Hoole’s Latine Grammar is advertised as a reformed version of Lily, and
consists of a facing page translation. In his Universal Character (1657),
Cave Beck recommends that his character be learned ‘in the nature of
Comenius’s Janua set forth with the vulgar language on one side, and
the character on the other’.60 In his version of Comenius’ Vestibulum
Novissimum Linguae Latinae (1647), J. Brookbank explains the merits of
learning Latin through English.61
In addition to the mainstream recourse to the vernacular to make
grammar and language more intelligible, there is a marginal, more radical
movement that emerges in the second half of the seventeenth century.
This movement rejects as too limited the reforms I have outlined because
they keep the discipline at the level of inherently unintelligible words.
According to these ‘new’ grammarians, words per se are opaque to chil-
dren. As arbitrary signs they tell us nothing about their meanings. At ‘the
Entrance’ to his Janua linguarum, Comenius asks the rhetorical question:
‘do not also the characters and draughts . . . of letters look like the
wonderfull strange sights to little children at the first shew’.62 This
revolutionary group of educationalists are thorough-going empiricists and
believe that children can only learn language though their senses. They
take their cue from the Aristotelian dictum that ‘there is nothing in the
understanding which was not first in the sense’.63 It is this belief that
motivates Lewis’ visual differentiation of the parts of speech. ‘Things
not brought down to childrens capacities by sense, are like confused
objects . . . Instruction of children ought to be . . . made so plain, that
57
Milton 1971, sig. A2r. 58 Padley 1985 and 1988, 1, p. 153. 59 Brinsley 1677, p. 4.
60
Beck 1657, sig. B1r. 61 Comenius 1647, sigs. A4r–A8r.
62
Comenius 1643, sig. D1r.
63
Comenius 1968, p. 90. On the history of this tag, see Cranefield 1970.
they may look on words as pictures. We ought to speak to children, as if
we painted our words, that they may see us speak.’64
While Lewis restricts his appeal to sense to the level of language,
members of the Hartlib circle extend it to meaning, thereby bypassing
intrinsically obscure words and making meaning itself intelligible. John
Dury proposes ostensive learning because children learn ‘single words
with the observation of the things themselves’.65 Comenius’ Orbis sen-
sualium pictus is the great example of this pedagogical endeavour. It
appears in English in 1659 as Visible World, or, A Picture and Nomen-
clature of All the Chief Things that Are in the World, and of Mens
Employment therein. Charles Hoole’s titular translation demonstrates the
supreme power accorded to sight. The book consists of pictures of
everything from the heavens, through nature, to the world of human
artifice. Each thing is marked by its name to make a truly ‘lively and vocal
alphabet’. As Comenius says, ‘pictures are the most intelligible books,
that children can look upon. They come closest to nature.’ As Hezekiah
Woodward explains, in his laudatory judgement on Comenius’ work, the
aim is to ‘make our words as legible to children as pictures are’. The
English introduction recommends that the words be further illuminated
by showing children the things themselves, in order to push the meanings
into the sensuous and impressionable mind. ‘And let the things named
be shewed, not only in the picture, but also in themselves, for example,
the parts of the body, clothes, books, the house, utensils, &c.’66 Words
appear as alien squiggles to children unless they are encountered in
conjunction with what they are instituted to signify.
grounding grammar
While grammars are notable for flagging up the semiotic side of language,
they also, to varying degrees, indicate what it might signify. Those of a
more ‘philosophical’ persuasion, perhaps trying to stem the semiotic flow,
devote whole treatises to the mental and real schemes that language maps.
As in linguistic theory more generally, grammarians present language
as predominantly made up of names – or nouns. According to Shirley,
64
Lewis 1675b, p. 2.
65
Dury 1970, p. 162. See Webster (1970) on the educational precepts of the Hartlib circle. See also
Privratska and Privratska 1994; Strasser 1994. Locke owned four works (on husbandry) by Hartlib
66
Comenius 1968, pp. 111; 105; 95.
they are among ‘the most essential parts of any language’.67 This
emphasis intimates two worlds, one of manufactured names and one of
extra-linguistic things, one straightforwardly and mimetically laid over
the other. Brinsley says that ‘a noun is the name of a thing that may be
seen, felt, heard, or understood’.68 In his satirical plays about grammar
and rhetoric, Words Made Visible (1679), Samuel Shaw comments on the
contemporary enthusiasm for naming; Sir John Oneme, representative of
knights, or nouns, replies to the charge that there are, dangerously, too
many of his class, with the following rhetorical question: ‘if his Majesty
will needs make a noun of every thing, that can be seen, felt, heard, or
understood, how should the kingdome choose but be full of knights?’69
The fact that language is riddled with ‘names’ indicates that it is primarily
considered as a reflection of something else.
It is possible to distinguish two kinds of source from which language is
said to stream: things in the world and concepts in the mind. As ever, the
two are often neither explicitly nor, perhaps, analytically held apart, but
often, bewilderingly, consume each other.
Like the logicians, grammarians present language as mirroring the
external world and employ the Aristotelian substance/accident dichot-
omy.70 Their division of nouns into substantives and adjectives is based
respectively on the distinction between ‘the thing itself’, and ‘the manner,
kind or quality’ of the thing.71 The ontologies that inform grammars vary
according to the specific philosophical persuasion of the grammarian.
Bassett Jones, in his Herm’aelogium (1659) asserts that there are three
word classes. These are noun, verb and adjective, and have their onto-
logical roots in ‘being’, ‘motion’ and ‘quality’.72 Philipps maintains that
there are four kinds of words: ‘substantive’, ‘adjective’, ‘verb’ and ‘par-
ticle’. This quartet is the mirror of the world: ‘whatever exists in the
whole universe, is either a thing or substance, or the manner or quality of a
thing; the action of a thing, or the manner or quality of that action’.73 In
L’art de parler (1676), Bernard Lamy draws a popular verbal trichotomy
of nouns/adjectives/articles which maps the basic real(–mental) logical
structure of subject/predicate/copula. Nouns signify ‘the substance’, such
as ‘earth’, adjectives its ‘manner’, such as ‘round’, while articles ‘mark the
references which things have among themselves’, such as ‘the earth is
round’.74
67
Shirley 1971, p. 5. 68 Brinsley 1677, p. 3. 69 Shaw 1972, p. 32.
70
E.g. Campanella 1638, p. 21. 71 The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. B2v.
72
Jones 1970, sig. A7v. 73 Shirley 1971, p. iv. Lane (1969, p. 19) had proposed the same quartet.
74
Lamy 1986, pp. 186; 187. Locke owned this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 169).
There is a simultaneous and complementary move among grammar-
ians to offer the mind as the source of universal grammatical structure.
While grammarians are often far from explicit about mental signification,
which hides under the general term ‘thing’, they do reiterate the
commonplace that words signify the thoughts of the speaker.
For example, John Stockwood explains that ‘speech . . . is a pronouncing
of words together, wherein every man and woman speaking to each other,
use to utter their myndes’.75 As Lamy puts it in his grammatical section,
‘the idea’s present to our mind . . . are the soul of our words’.76 The True
Method introduces its discussion of syntax with the following familiar
belief: ‘the words of humane speech are the marks by which we make our
thoughts known to others’.77
Beyond this general characterisation of speech as an expression of
thought, grammarians, resembling the logicians again, assert that the
structure of language is informed by mental operations. One class of
words that all grammarians agree signifies a certain kind of mental
activity is the interjection. It is, according to Twells, ‘a virtual sentence,
where the noun and the verb are contracted into an undigested word,
which word betokeneth some motion or affection of the mind’.78 The
Royal Grammar defines an interjection as ‘a word expressing some pas-
sion of the mind’.79 Bullokar offers the same definition and gives the
examples: ‘Sorrow: as, alas: how; Fear: as, oh: O-Lord; Wonder: as,
Whough: good-Lord ’.80
Grammar blurs completely with logic when grammarians attest to a
conformity between verbal and mental discourse. While we might think
this derives from logic, Lane argues in his Key to the Art of Letters (1700),
in defence of his use of logical terminology, that he is only returning it to
its original place. ‘I am perswaded that Aristotle borrowed them first from
Grammar, which was in being long before his Logic, which I think . . . to
be nothing else but Grammar . . . the Art of thinking and speaking are not
two, but one Art . . . speaking being nothing else but vocal thoughts, and
thoughts but silent speaking.’81
The synchronised acrobatics of logic animate grammar. Language
appears as made up of subjects and predicates, and the copula which
affirms or denies them of each other. The Grammatica speculativa
explains that parts of speech are compounded ‘for the purpose of
75
Stockwood 1590, sig. B2r. 76 Lamy 1986, p. 181. 77 The True Method 1696, p. 57.
78
Twells 1985, p. 160. 79 The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. E8r. 80 Bullokar 1980, p. 51.
81
Lane 1969, p. xvii. See Panaccio (1999a) on grammar and mental language.
expressing a compound concept of the mind’.82 Campanella claims that a
word (vocabula) signifies a simple mental concept, and that discourse
(oratio) manifests complex concepts of the soul.83 While we would expect
this kind of explanation from these two ‘philosophical’ sources, we also
find echoes in Bullokar’s Grammar. He divides conjunctions into
‘copulatives affirmatively, as and: also’, and ‘copulatives negatively, as
nor: neither: not yet’.84 According to The True Method, ‘a proposition is a
perfect sentence, or speech wherein something is affirmed, or denied of
another’. It goes on: a ‘substantive in the nominative case’ that ‘comes
before the principal verb’, ‘is called a subject’, and ‘all that follows it is
called the predicate’, while ‘the verb is the copula that joyns them
together’.85 Grammarians believe that every unit of language ought to
symbolise one unit of thought. Like logicians, they note that there may
not be a perfect symmetry. They exemplify their point with ellipsis, when
a word is omitted but a mental term understood.86 However, they claim
that language can always be filled out, or rationalised, to disclose an
exactly replicated mental configuration. The aim and the expectation is
that each word should signify a single thought – an assumption that Locke
will denounce as deeply misleading.
The Port-Royal Grammaire, adduced by Chomsky as the Cartesian
precursor to his own deep structure theory, is really only developing the
old grammatico-logical tradition that sees linguistic discourse as a copy of
mental discourse.87 The Grammaire begins by stating that ‘knowledge
of what passes in the mind, is necessary to comprehend the foundation of
grammar: and on this depends the diversity of words which compose
discourse’. It divides words into two basic classes, one signifying ‘the
objects’ and the other ‘the manner of our thoughts’. It explains that the
essence of a verb is ‘affirmation’. It maintains that there are three mental
operations: ‘perception’, ‘judgment’ and ‘reasoning’. These have their
82
Thomas of Erfurt 1972, p. 277. See Pinborg 1984a, p. 254. Cf. Preston (1997) on the modern
reception of the idea that there is a language of thought.
83
Campanella 1638, pp. 13; 15.
84
Bullokar 1980, p. 44. 85 The True Method 1696, p. 57. 86 E.g. Sanctius 1664, p. 66.
87
Chomsky 1966, pp. 31–54. See Padley (1976, pp. 1 and 12) on the Chomskianism of the
grammatical tradition dating back to Aristotle; Breva-Claramonte (1983) on the origins of Port-
Royal Chomskianism in Sanctius and his own roots in modistic grammar. See also Miel (1995) on
the Port-Royalists as Augustinian rather than Cartesian with their story about innate ideas and
fallen signs and the non-Chomskianism of Descartes who does not differentiate between deep and
surface structure, assuming that language is an accurate reflection of thought; Parish (1999, p. 479)
on the Port-Royalists’ ‘logical, analytical’ as opposed to ‘usage-based view of grammar which had
prevailed’; Panaccio (1999b, p. 13) on the ‘rapport’ between scholastic mental linguistics and
present-day cognitive science.
linguistic correspondents in, respectively, simple terms, propositions and
syllogisms.88 As we know, it is precisely this tripartite division that
underpins the tripartite organisation of logic.
While it might well be the case that logic and grammar became
increasingly psychological in the course of the century, on a trajectory
where Port-Royal is key and which culminates in some way in Locke, the
grammatical tradition as a whole had always been steeped in the logical-
mentalist characterisation of language.89 Moreover, it included things
squarely in the scope of language. The division between things and con-
cepts is an important early-modern analytical division, but over-empha-
sising it belies the general agreement that talk about the external world
involves three entities – words, concepts and things.90 This premise of
early-modern philosophy of language, laid down by De interpretatione,
overshadows discussions about the underlying rationale of language. The
Grammatica speculativa gives an elaborate description of the interplay
between the three modes: of being, understanding and signifying.91
Scaliger explains that words are signs of our ‘intellectual notions’, which
are in turn signs of ‘things’.92 The Port-Royal Grammaire, far from
denying the role of the external world in language, simply asserts that ‘the
objects of our thoughts are either things, as the earth, the sun, water, wood,
which are commonly called substances: or the manner of things, as to be
round, red, hard, learned, &c. which are called accidents’.93 And Wilkins,
a notoriously ‘thing’-obsessed linguist and therefore supposedly on ‘the
other side’, chimes in with the mentalist refrain. Language, and ‘names’ in
particular, he says, are the ‘external expression’ of ‘mental notions’ or
‘conceits’.94 Like all early-modern philosophers, grammarians maintain
that words hook on to both concepts and things, even if they vary in their
characterisation of the relationship between the three elements.
Having made that point, it is also important to note the way that
grammarians, like logicians, elide the difference between concept and
88
Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, pp. 21; 24; 97; 22–3; cf. the same claim in Lamy 1986, p. 187.
89
While Padley (1985 and 1988, i, p. 286 and 1976, p. 209) is right to argue against Chomsky that
Port-Royal has non-Cartesian antecedents, he misses the over-arching logical influence on
grammar, and the increasingly psychological emphasis of logic.
90
Padley (1985 and 1988, i) argues for a strict division of these two, claiming that in England,
universal (empirical) grammarians assumed that language was ‘the mirror of things’ (p. 325),
whereas on the Continent, especially in France, the rationalists proposed the mind as ‘the mirror
of thought’ (p. 271).
91
Thomas of Erfurt 1972, p. 143. 92 Scaliger 1540, p. 115. 93 Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 25.
94
Wilkins 1968, p. 20. See Padley (1985 and 1988, i, p. 369) on Wilkins as the acme of the word–thing
empiricist tradition and on the Port-Royalists’ ‘isomorphism of the linguistic structure and the
structure of thought’ (p. 296).
thing, subsuming both under the title res or ‘thing’, and betraying the
mentalism to which they are probably committed. The simple refrain that
‘a noun is the name of a thing’ hides the tripartite paradigm, and might
lead students to a simplified and perverted view of language’s relationship
with the world. In Robotham’s letter to the reader of Comenius’ Janua,
we see mentalism being obliterated by the weight of the world: the
expressed purpose of the book is to ‘imprint’ in the reader ‘the notion of
the thing’.95 But the text itself seems to name things directly. Likewise,
Philipps writes that the four word classes ‘are sufficient to express all the
ideas of things, and the judgements we make’. However, he also declares
that they correspond to ‘whatever exists in the whole universe’.96
An important consequence of the fact that language is taken to have
one natural mental–real foundation is that it is considered to be under-
pinned by a universal semantics. As Aristotle had postulated in De
interpretatione,97 the unity of the real and the mental arenas guarantees
one semantic bedrock that is unmoved by superficial linguistic variation.
Jones echoes the point. ‘As the reason is one’, he argues, ‘so is it obser-
vable, that the expression thereof in and by man is in all countries (qua
reason) the same.’98
rationalising and regularising grammar

There is a major debate among grammarians about whether their subject
is a contingent and vagrant product of usage, or whether it is under-
pinned by some universal and rational order, governed by universal laws.
While there are leading figures in both camps, both views sometimes
come through the same texts. The second view constitutes a rejection of
the irregular and use-based picture of grammar that dominates education
in England. Lily, the principal textbook, consists of an extensive plethora
of exceptions to rules and so undermines claims of regularity. It is riddled
with divisions, accidents and moods, and paints a messy and ungoverned
picture of speech.99
The great early-modern systematisers, or ‘philosophical projectours’ as
The Royal Grammar calls them, adopt the view of the medieval modistae,
that grammar is a science grounded on fixed and rational principles.100
95
Comenius 1643, sig. C5r. 96 Shirley 1971, p. iv.
97
Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. 98 Jones 1970, sigs. A5r-v.
99
For example, one edition of 1664 includes the ‘optative’ mood, which the rationalising Twells rejects
as being simply another description of the subjunctive (Lily 1664, sig. C2r; Twells 1985, p. 165).
100
The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. A5r; Thomas of Erfurt 1972, p. 135. See Sirridge 1995.
Scaliger endeavours to lay out the ‘communis ratio loquendi’.101 Sanctius
maintains that his grammar is gathered primarily from ‘reason’, and only
secondarily from ‘testimony and use’.102 This opinion finds ample sup-
port in the seventeenth century, most notably in the Port-Royal Gram-
maire generale et raisonée. It is a ‘work of reasoning’ that identifies the
‘nature’ of language. Rather than descriptions of grammatical precepts it
provides explanations – for instance, that cases originate from the need to
record relations between things, and that the genitive case signifies ‘the
relation of a thing, which in any manner whatsoever belongs to
another’.103 The popularity of the view that grammar has an underlying
rationale is also indicated in the full title of Jones’ Herm’aelogium, or, An
Essay at the Rationality of the Art of Speaking (1659). Explicitly following
the second of Bacon’s two injunctions that were to set the universal
language movement asail,104 Jones compiles a ‘philosophical grammar’
which sketches an ‘analogie between words and things, or reason’.105 Lane
reiterates this belief in a universal grammar that exists ‘according to the
unalterable rules of Right Reason, which are the same in all languages
how different soever they be’.106
Twells undertakes a sustained attack on the disordered jumble of Lily.
He prefaces his work by hallowing his rationalising forbears. He applauds
Sanctius’ ‘perfect system of the Latin Grammar’. Of Gaspar Scioppius’
Grammatica Philosophica (1628) he says that it was ‘founded on . . .
infallible unerring principles’. He dubs Gerhardus Joannes Vossius ‘this
wise architect’, who ‘had finished the beautiful structure’. His own
offering is a lean, regular text. For example, he denies that there are
irregular or defective nouns ‘in Nominum Natura’.107 Thomas Farnaby
writes a significantly entitled Systema grammaticum in 1641. He rationa-
lises grammatical anomalies, and ‘reduces’ the ‘heteroclite [defective]
nouns’ into their ‘several declensions’. For example ‘volo, nolo, malo, edo,
fero, are regulated to the third conjugation; and the anomala tenses of
them set in the margin’.108 He subsumes ‘possum’ under ‘sum’. These
101
Scaliger 1540, p. 136. 102 Sanctius 1664, p. 5.
103
Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, sig. A3v; sig. A4r; pp. 36; 39. Twells also provides reasons for
grammatical structure; e.g. he says of the neuter gender that ‘it was introduced . . . with very good
reason, both for variety and better distinction of words’ (Twells 1985, p. 160).
104
Bacon 1857, IV, p. 441; Bacon 1996b, p. 231. The first injunction was to inquire into notae rerum
other than words, particularly real characters (Bacon 1857, iv, pp. 439–40; Bacon 1996b, p. 231).
105
Jones 1970, sig. A6r. 106 Lane 1969, p. x.
107
Twells 1985, pp. 155; 157; 162. The full title of this work identifies this reformist, philosophical
tradition in grammar.
108
Farnaby 1969, sig. A4r.
schematisers appropriate the so-called ‘figurative’ or irregular aspects of
grammar, such as ellipsis and pleonasm, into their perfect systems.
Even outside the hard core of regularising grammarians, the discipline
as a whole had traditionally been dominated by the language of the law.
Even the irregular Royal Grammar employs this terminology: ‘The Rules
for the Verb and Adjective are called Concords, or rules of Agreement.
The Rules for the Case of the Substantive are called Rules of Govern-
ment’.109 The widespread view of grammar as bound by laws underpins
Shaw’s play. The cast includes King Syntaxis and his people, who per-
sonify the eight parts of speech. The entire plot is motivated by the King’s
fury at his subjects’ rebellious activity. While Shaw’s point is that lan-
guage is not obedient, his choice of the political analogy is instructive of
the depth of feeling that it should be.
The assumed regularity of language is also manifest in the belief in a
natural word order. According to Stockwood, the ‘nominative case’ ‘in the
naturall order of speeche commeth before the verbe’.110 In his Grammaticae
puerilis Lewis patriotically explains how in English ‘the words stand in a
natural order’. That is to say, ‘the substantive is the thing it self, and
beginneth the period; only the adjective the manner of the thing is unusually
put before it: the verb is the motion of the thing, and follows after it’.111
Lancelot and Arnauld refer to the ‘natural order’ of syntax.112 And Wilkins’
‘Natural Grammar’ follows ‘the natural sense and order of the words’.113
Here again, it is crucial to note the assumption of universality – in this
case grammatical – which underpins language. The assumption also
shines through the view that languages map each other and are made up
of interchangeable units. The action of translating from the vernacular
into Latin, and vice versa, is a fundamental exercise for pupils.114 Jonson
makes the following claim for his English Grammar: ‘we shew the copie of
it, and matchableness, with other tongues’.115 In his Additional Rules in the
Oxford Grammar (1680), Twells interlaces Latin and English versions. For
example, ‘vox generalis the general word dat legem imposes a gender positis
upon words contained infra se under it’.116
The belief that semantic and grammatical universality forms the
groundwork of languages is obviously entrenched in the universal
language movement. Wilkins styles his a ‘natural . . . philosophical,
109
The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. F1r. 110 Stockwood 1590, sig. C2r.
111
Lewis 1675a, sig. A1v (counting title page as A1r). Locke owned the 1670 edition of this text
112
Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 150. 113 Wilkins 1968, p. 355.
114
E.g. The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. a4r. 115 Jonson 1640, sig. E1r. 116 Twells 1680, p. 189.
rational, and universal’ grammar which belongs ‘to the philosophy of
letters and speech in general’.117 In his News to the Whole World, of the
Discovery of an Universal Character, and a New Rational Language (1658),
Dalgarno advertises that the ‘grammatical rules of this art . . . shall be
altogether grounded upon nature and reason, without any irregularities or
exceptions (which nature and reason abhors)’.118
a contingent circle
I now turn to the other extreme of the debate, to those who reject the
universality, rationality and naturalness of language and its grammar, and
paint instead an irregular, heterogeneous and mutable picture of them.
These historically-minded critics reflect, but with greater force, the use-
based orientation of the higgledy-piggledy Lily. Their pronouncements also
echo the humanist interest, exemplified by Valla, in practice, probabilism
and history.119 For these alternative grammarians, language is not a perfect
portrait of a fixed and ordered universe, but an evanescent product of diverse
and contingent human communication. At best, grammar is an imperfect
record of the way language works at a given moment. Born after the event, it
describes rather than creates the speech of a particular community. At worst,
grammar is an ill-fitting straightjacket into which speech is contorted. In its
tightly regular form the so-called art of speaking bears little resemblance to
living and idiosyncratic tongues. The grammarians’ subject matter wrig-
gles out of their chains. Language appears not to be underpinned by the
universal principles that are required of a science, or even an art.
Webbe, one of the loudest proponents of the customary nature of lan-
guage, adduces Quintilian for the view that grammar was not ‘sent from
heaven when men were first formed, to give lawes of speaking; but . . . it was
found out after they spake’.120 Even the great rationaliser Sanctius, quoting
Seneca, affirms that grammarians ‘are the custodians, not the authors of the
Latin tongue’.121 Even Wilkins, writing under the steam of the universal
language movement, asserts that ‘grammar, is of much later invention then
languages themselves, being adapted to what was already in being, rather
117
Wilkins 1968, p. 297. 118 Dalgarno 2001b, p. 110.
119
Cf. Shapiro (1991) on the continuing influence of humanism in the seventeenth century; Milton
(2000a) on the humanist enthronement of custom and authority, by contrast with the new
philosophers’ rejection of it. See also Simone (1998) on the tensions between use, reason and
nature in early-modern linguistics.
120
Webbe 1967, p. 23.
121
Sanctius 1664, p. 5: ‘grammatici enim, ut inquit Seneca, sermonis Latini custodes sunt, non
auctores’.
then the rule of making it so’.122 This derivative view of grammar does not
itself impugn its philosophical pretensions; language itself might be a
rational institution, from which a rational grammar might be extrapolated.
However, some grammarians propose that language itself is a contingent
and fluid fabrication, eluding law and reason.123 The Royal Grammar claims
that Sanctius and his disciples are living in a fantasy world, ‘and that [a]n
absolute universal alteration’ of the discipline that they ‘dream of, is alto-
gether impracticable’.124 Lewis draws our attention to the accidental and
fluctuating nature of his subject. He declares that ‘languages were made, and
daily suffer alterations, rather by chance, than any art or contrivance’.125 The
Port-Royalists have to admit that ‘custom and reason often differ’. For
example, prepositions disobey the rule of marking ‘one relation’ each, the
same preposition sometimes marking more than one.126 Philipps is forced to
admit that ‘all tongues had their birth among the ignorant people, and use
gave the stamp of authority to the most irregular expressions, and therefore
’twas not in the power of any mortal, however learn’d, to reduced them to
any rules without innumerable exceptions’.127 On this view, language has a
democratic authorship, and is therefore beset by foolish inconsistencies.
Shaw provides an amusing illustration of the view that language disobeys
the laws that grammarians seek to apply to it. His play vibrates with the
anger of King Syntaxis at his subjects’ endemic revolt. One of the judges,
Lego, recalls the first proud and devastating mutiny: ‘a general defection of
the eight parts of speech from the great King Syntaxis, which is to this day
known by the name of Confusion of Languages’. The nouns or knights are on
trial for their ‘Heteroclite’ brigade who vary their genders and declensions.
The verbs or nobles of the ‘defective’ variety face the charge of self-confessed
insubordination. The ‘impersonalls’ are impugned because they ‘refuse to
send out men into his majesties service’. The page of Lord Gymnasiarches,
Lord Lieutenant of the eight classes of the realm, rudely refers to the King as
he who ‘governs that ungovernable thing call’d the tongue of man’.128
As the full title suggests, Webbe’s Appeale to Truth, In the Controversie
betweene Art, and Use is devoted to the disjunction between the delightful
vagaries of the spoken word and the hopelessly regular art of grammar. He
accuses it of being an inherently ‘deceitful’ art because it teaches the
opposite of what it purports to do: ‘speaking rightly’. Grammarians do not
122
Wilkins 1968, p. 19; cf. Shirley (1971, p. i) for a reiteration of the point.
123
See Izzo (1982, p. 336) on the renaissance inheritance.
124
The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. A5r. 125 Lewis 1675b, sig. A1r.
126
Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, pp. 52; 86. 127 Shirley 1971, p. ii.
128
Shaw 1972, pp. 22; 32; 22; 23; 3.
live in the real world but speak a peculiar, albeit ‘proper’, language. ‘Wee
are bound rather to erre with the multitude, than to follow truth with two
or three.’ Grammar is based on ‘custome or authority’, not reason.129 To
support this claim, Webbe interlaces his statements with an impressive
array of authorities. He quotes Juan Luis Vives on ‘custome’ as ‘the Lady
and Mistresse of speaking’. He criticises grammarians for ‘polluting their
speech with foule enormities, whil’st they follow Art, which is not capable
of use, because use is various or changeable’. He relishes the derision of
‘Halvinus’, who writes that grammar is bound to fail due to the protean
nature of its object. To attain perfection it would need be ‘as often renewed
as new words are coined, or ould ones newly received’. Grammar would
need to keep up with languages’ ‘daily alteration’ if it were to have ‘any
certainty or perfection’. Moreoever, it is ‘impossible’ that it could be
‘universal’ or ‘perpetual’.130 Language is so inconstant and diverse that it
eludes codification for even a moment, let alone for all tongues at all times.
This view has revolutionary pedagogical consequences. If languages are
purely the products of popular use, if they are irreducible to fixed rules
and classifications, and if they have no rational core to penetrate, then
they can be learned only by observation and practice, not by grammar.
Hartlib asserts that the learning ‘of learned tongues’ is much hampered by
‘the Grammatical Tyranny of Teaching Tongues’.131 His friend Dury
claims that ‘the knowledge of tongues is the proper effect of the memory
and not of any reasoning ability, because they depend upon the obser-
vation only of that which is the constant custome of people’.132 In his
Dissertation on Reading the Classics (1713), Henry Felton recommends that
‘a Youth’ be ‘taught to know Grammar by Books, instead of Books by
Grammar’.133 Webbe contends that those who seek to learn a language by
‘learning or following grammar’ ‘labour in vaine’. Language is so riddled
with ‘irregularities’ and ‘new-found exceptions’, that we better learn
languages, as in other modes of behaviour, ‘by use & exercise, then by art,
or precept’. He goes on to say that ‘we beginne not by art, but by nature:
and proceed by use, custome, authoritie, and exercise govern’d by the
eare’.134 The famous instance of a child who learnt beautiful Latin
through experience is Montaigne. He is adduced by An Examen to prove
that ‘rules are needless’ for learning a language, and that ‘there is nothing
more natural, nor infallible’ than learning by ‘use and conversation’.135
129
Webbe 1967, pp. 32; 33; 36. 130 Webbe 1967, pp. 22–3; 20–1; 22. 131 Hartlib 1970, p. 194.
132
Dury 1970, p. 156. 133 Felton 1971, p. 53. 134 Webbe 1967, pp. 37; 12–13.
135
An Examen 1969, pp. 8; 7; 4.
This attitude is partly grounded in an externalist model of personal
construction. In his Compleat English Schoolmaster (1674), Elisha Coles
explains that, while children have little judgement, they are ‘capable
of imitation’.136 A new mind is a tabula rasa, inscribed by the chatter –
generally of women – which flutters about them. According to Webbe, the
Romans did not have their Lilys, but ‘were taught by use and custome, from
the mouthes of nurses and other women which had the keeping of them,
from their cradle, and not by Grammar, or Grammarians’.137 Obadiah
Walker repeats the commonplace: ‘the nurses forme the speech, the garbe,
and much of the sentiments of the child’.138 In A Childes Patrimony (1640)
Hezekiah Woodward urgently exhorts parents to ‘looke well with whom the
childe doth converse; there is a companion whose words fret like a gangrene,
and corrupt like a plague sore, which whom the childe receives an
impression quickly, which will not quickly out again . . . the breath of a
wicked companion is more contagious then is unholsome ayer’.139
The view that language is the product of experience and use, that it
does not originate in reason and the world, but mutates and diverges
threatens the efficacy of language as it was conceived in the early-modern
period. It implies that languages do not, as we have seen logicians and
grammarians assume, reflect one universal mental discourse. Instead,
languages appear as deeply, as well as superficially, incommensurable
with each other. Somewhat surprisingly, this culturally specific view
appears in Bacon’s plan for a ‘philosophical grammar’. By gathering the
best words from different peoples and discovering ‘the analogy between
words and things, or reason’, one might, in addition to repairing Babel,
reveal the particular and divergent ‘dispositions and manners of peoples
and nations’ by means of their diverse speech. Bacon takes an example
from a cheeky Cicero, who had remarked that ‘the Greeks had no word
to express the Latin ineptus; ‘‘because,’’ says he, ‘‘that vice was so familiar
among the Greeks that they did not perceive it in themselves’’ ’.140
Webbe reiterates the point with extra force, criticising translators of the
ancients for being insensitive to linguistic fragmentation and uniqueness:
‘Every tongue hath proper and peculiar words, which are neither
agreeable to other tongues, or lyable to translation.’ It is not only
national tongues that diverge, but also ‘sundry regions’, such as ‘Flanders,
Brabant, Holland, and Zeland’.141 Commenting on this problem, as
posed by Comenius’ Janua, Robotham explains how he got over the
136
Coles 1967, p. 103. 137 Webbe 1967, p. 26. 138 Walker 1970, p. 18.
139
Woodward 1640, p. 43. 140 Bacon 1857, iv, pp. 441–2. 141 Webbe 1967, pp. 34; 21.
impossibility of a straight translation. He ‘strives not to render the Latin
ad verbum . . . but truly to expresse the author’s meaning in such proper
words, and current phrases, as an English man will own’.142 The emer-
gence of vernaculars focuses attention on inter-linguistic distinctions. No
more the strange Latinate ‘English’ with its genders and suffixes. Jonson
champions the independence of his mother tongue; he explains how
English has a ninth part of speech – the articles – in addition to the Latin
eight.143 The Port-Royalists are forced to admit that not every gram-
matical element is shared by all languages. They also use the example of
articles which French has but Latin lacks.144
While grammarians themselves do not extrapolate them, the view that
languages are not intertranslatable has potentially devastating con-
sequences. If languages are not underpinned by a universal organisation,
and if linguistic signs are arbitrary, and therefore inherently opaque, then
language cannot be guaranteed to convey the thoughts of the speakers,
nor to describe the world. It is the commonality of deep semantic
structure, divergent superficies notwithstanding, that underpins both
communication and external reference.
Predominantly pedagogical concerns lead certain grammarians to two
connected philosophical conclusions. Frustrated with the ineffectiveness
of general rules to teach grammar and language, they turn to observation
and practice, and form the view that language is a contingent circle,
floating free of any rational or real base, and changing its consistency
from moment to moment. The second conclusion emerges out of the
desire to render Latin grammar intelligible by means of the vernacular, in
addition to wanting to teach the vernacular in its own right. This leads to
the realisation that Latin grammar is incommensurable with English, and
that particular languages do not mirror each other at a deep level. These
two conclusions, in conjunction with the grammarians’ strict division
between res and verba, and their focus on the formal and sensible,
opposed to the semantic aspect of words, threaten to present words as
profoundly and necessarily unintelligible, and as completely unhinged.
Language, as it is presented in grammar, juts out in two opposite

directions. On the one hand, it appears, as it does in logic, full of sense
and a perfect mirror of one mind–world. On the other, it seems an
unanchored play of signs, blowing in the wind of contingent usage.
142
Comenius 1643, sig. C7v. 143
Jonson 1640, p. 56. 144
Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 50.
chapter 3
Language in rhetoric
Rhetoric is the final art of language. Having learnt to speak and reason,
students discover how to beautify their words and make them persuasive.
Only then are they fully equipped to take the stage as gentlemen.
Holdsworth explains the indispensability of ‘Oratory’, ‘without wch: all
the other learning though never so eminent is in a manner voide &
useless, without those you will be bafled in your disputes, disgraced, &
vilified in Publicke examinations, laught at in speeches, & Declama-
tions’.1 Succeeding her sister arts, rhetoric is the grand finale, by which
one learns how to express what one thinks clearly and convincingly. It is
therefore the art that deals most fully and explicitly with the human act of
speaking, with the production of impressive, sensible words and with the
audience.
While rhetorical presentation of language is rooted in standard lin-
guistic assumptions, it probes them and exposes points of vulnerability
that cause concern about language in general. For example, tropes expose
the fragility of the semantic contract that joins words to meanings; the
essence of a trope is that it pulls words apart from their designated
meanings, and applies them elsewhere. The deeply rhetorical culture in
which early-modern elites are entrenched unmasks language in a way that
simultaneously impresses and horrifies them.
What is early-modern rhetoric? Despite the proliferation of vernacular
treatises on rhetoric in the later sixteenth century and their continued
production throughout the seventeenth, it is still the ancients to whom
students are officially and enthusiastically guided. In the main, they are
1
Holdsworth 1961, p. 637. I shall use ‘oratory’ and ‘eloquence’ almost interchangeably with ‘rhetoric’,
although there are arguably important distinctions, ‘oratory’ emphasising speech (as opposed to
writing), and eloquence (especially in the seventeenth century) elocutio. On the continuing
centrality of rhetoric in the seventeenth century see Feingold 1997, p. 248; Murphy 1981, p. ix;
Murphy 1983; Skinner 1996; Vickers 1994. For summaries of the state of the subject at that time see
Abbott 1983; Conley 1990, chapter 6, Kristeller 1983.
64
Language in rhetoric 65
directed to models rather than explanations of eloquence,2 encouraged to
acquaint themselves with an eclectic choice of styles, although there is an
increasing predilection for the ‘plain style’ towards the end of the century.
Locke’s own advice on how to teach ‘the art of speaking well’ is that ‘we
are more apt to learn by example, than by direction’.3 He goes on to cite
Cicero, Terence, Virgil, Livy and Caesar, specifying the best editions.
However, in addition to these exemplars, Locke also recommends some
manuals. ‘If anyone hath a mind to consult the masters of speaking, and
writing’, Locke advises Cicero’s De oratore and Orator, and Quintilian’s
Institutio oratoria.4 This pair, in addition to the pseudo-Ciceronian
Rhetorica ad Herennium, are the ‘three principal authorities’ for (classical)
eloquence.5
The other great antique text is Aristotle’s Rhetoric. This differs from the
Roman texts in focusing on probable reasoning, rather than persuasion of
the audience by stylistic and emotional methods. Aristotle disapproves of
arguing by means which are extrinsic to the matter in dispute. His dry
enthymemes (probable syllogisms) are neither pugnacious nor seductive.
While Roman writers do deal with the discovery of arguments, it is only
part of the battery that enables the orator to win the war of words, and
becomes even less consequential in seventeenth-century rhetoric.6 Where
Aristotle’s text is crucial is in its extensive typology of the passions. It
proves so influential that even Locke directs budding gentlemen to it for
self-knowledge, and has a copy in his library.7 Intimate understanding of
the passions is of the utmost importance for the orator who wants his
audience to love his cause.
In the main, however, it is the ornate Roman art of persuasion that the
humanists recover. But by the end of the seventeenth century, the subject
is a conflicted shadow of its former self. It is possible to identify two
principal guises. In the first, the five classical parts of rhetoric are whittled
down to one: elocutio – the figures and tropes – which works wonderful
magic on an audience. This part was already central in the ad Herennium
and comes almost entirely to constitute the discipline.8 The main reason
2
Feingold’s treatment of rhetoric in Oxford in the seventeenth century focuses on the exemplarity
approach (Feingold 1997, pp. 249; 251).
3
Locke 1997, p. 351.
4
Locke 1997, p. 351. Locke owned De oratore (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 108).
5
Skinner 1996, p. 35.
6
This element (inventio) was inserted into logic in the sixteenth century. See Serjeantson (1999) on
the continuing importance of testimony and proof more generally in early-modern England.
7
Locke 1997, p. 354; Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 75. Cf. Green 1994.
8
See Skinner (1996, pp. 55–65) on the specialisation of rhetoric.
for this near-total eclipse of the remaining four parts of rhetoric is the
rhetoricisation of logic by Agricola, Ramus and Talon, whereby inventio
(discovery of arguments) and dispositio (judicial arrangement of argu-
ments) were moved from rhetoric into logic.9 Of the remaining elements,
memoria and pronuntiatio were sidelined by the printing revolution.10
Spoken oratory continued to be important in the pulpit and the assem-
bly, but is little considered in the textbooks.11 Dudley Fenner’s The Artes
of Logike and Retorike (1584), an example of vernacular Ramism, divides
‘Rhetorike’, ‘an arte of speaking finely’, into ‘Garnishing of speech, called
Eloquution’, and ‘Garnishing of the manner of utterance, called Pro-
nounciation’.12 The battle for prominence between pronuntiatio and
elocutio is dramatized in Shaw’s Words Made Visible, where the two
personae fight it out. Ellogus (elocution) wins such an unassailable victory
that the children of Eclogus (pronounciation), Voice and Gesture, are too
frightened even to take the field in defence. The great bulk of English
rhetorics concentrate almost exclusively on elocutio, as indicated by the
following titles: The Tropes and Figures of Scripture (Thomas Swynnerton,
c. 1537–8), A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (Richard Sherry, 1550), A
Declaration of all such Tropes, Figures, or Schemes (Angel Day, 1595), The
Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d, wherein above 130 the Tropes and Figures Are
Severally Derived from the Greek into English (John Smith, 1657), The
Treatise of the Figures (John Stockwood, 1674). William Dugard’s Rhetorices
elementa (printed nine times between 1640 and 1669), splits rhetoric into
‘elocutio’ and ‘pronunciatio’, and proceeds to discuss only the former.13
The second kind of eloquence that gains ground as the century pro-
gresses moves in an opposite direction. It rejects the technicality of elo-
cutio, with which rhetoric as a whole had become identifiable, and
redescribes the discipline as a natural, plain – albeit persuasive – art of
speaking.14 This simple characterisation had always underpinned the
discipline; Quintilian defines it as bene dicendi scientia.15 But while
9
See Monfasani (1988) on humanist treatment and transformation of rhetoric.
10
Memory was also increasingly regarded as an art in itself (see Skinner 1996, p. 58).
11
See Monfasani 1988, p. 205; Shuger 1993, p. 122. 12 Fenner 1584, sig. D1v.
13
Dugard 1972, p. 1. See Murphy (1981, p. 133) on the republication of this text 1640–69. Two
exceptions are Thomas Wilson’s vernacular exemplar of full-bodied classical eloquence in his Arte
of Rhetorique (1554), and Obadiah Walker’s Instructions concerning the Art of Oratory that hits the
presses as late as 1659.
14
See Jones (1951 and 1971) on anti-rhetorical speech; Patterson (1970, p. xiv) on the importance of
stylistic ‘decorum’ in the sixteenth century; Croll (1971) on the fluorescence of ‘attic prose’;
Gaukroger (2001, p. 126) on the Royal Society’s distinctive emphasis on plain, natural speech.
15
Quintilian 1920–22, I, p. 301. Locke had two copies of the Institutio (Harrison and Laslett 1965,
p. 217).
Quintilian had wavered between this innocent characterisation and the
darker vis persuadendi, the modern, self-consciously plain-speakers trum-
pet their departure from enchantment. One member of this movement is
Bernard Lamy, whose L’art de parler we have already met as a grammar,
so basic are its avowed aims. Like the new natural logicians, Lamy pri-
vileges the natural light – the irresistible darling of the new philosophy –
over the artificial precepts of the textbooks: ‘as to the ordering of words,
and the rules to be observed in ranging a discourse, Natural light directs
us so clearly, that no man can be ignorant’.16 ‘Having all of us one and the
same nature, (be the language that we speak what it will)’, he writes later,
‘we follow all those rules which we have shown to be natural, and
essential to the art of speaking’. The emphasis is on words that effectively
communicate reasoned matter rather than on an excessive play of words
that elicits certain emotions. Lamy even divides ‘the art of speaking’ from
‘the art of persuasion’, admitting that ‘both are comprehended under the
name of Rhetorick by several great Masters’. He distinguishes the two arts
on the following grounds: ‘every man who speaks well, has not the secret
of working upon the Affections, or working to his side, such as were
before of contrary opinion; and this is call’d to perswade’.17 Locke is
firmly in Lamy’s camp. For him the ‘art of speaking well, consists
chiefly in two things, viz. perspicuity and right reasoning’.18 Joseph
Glanvill is an alternative representative of the new rhetoric. In his Essay
concerning Preaching (1678) he continues to define the end of rhetoric as
‘to persuade men’.19 However, he says that this is to be achieved by plain-
speaking, which he defines in opposition to the flourishes of elocutio, and
thereby redescribes eloquence out of all recognition.
the core linguistic precepts of rhetoric:

significance and communication
Rhetoric embodies paradigmatic early-modern philosophy of language:
by convention, words signify concepts that in turn might signify things.
In his Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1599), John Hoskins explains that
‘the conceits of the mind are pictures of things and the tongue is inter-
preter of those pictures’.20 However, rhetoricians tend to conflate this
triptych into the duplicitous duality we have already seen reverberate
16 17 18
Lamy 1986, p. 198. Lamy 1986, pp. 202; 343. Locke 1997, p. 350.
19 20
Glanvill 1703, p. 23. Hoskins 1935, p. 2.
through the first two trivial disciplines.21 Quintilian writes that ‘every
speech . . . consists at once of that which is expressed and that which
expresses, that is to say of matter and words (rebus et verbis)’.22 In his Arte
of Rhetorique (1554) Wilson, who might be expected to steer away from
these indeterminate concept–object ‘things’, uses the catch-all semantic
term and explains that ‘apt words’ are those ‘that properly agree unto that
thyng, which thei signifie’.23 On the spectrum of res, from concepts to
things, where logicians, whose eyes are often turned toward nature,
appear to subsume concepts under ‘things’, rhetoricians, located firmly in
the human sphere, often emphasise the intentional rather than the
referential aspect of signification. Lamy declares that ‘discourse is the
image of the mind’.24
Rhetoric is accused of manufacturing a redundancy of words, a semantic
vacuum, or what Thomas Sprat calls ‘this superfluity of talking’.25 Bacon
has the imitative slaves of Ciceronian style in mind when he says that the
‘first distemper of learning’ is ‘when men study words and not matter’.26
Joshua Poole provides a wonderful example of this kind of verbal surfeit in
his Practical Rhetoric (1663). Although he claims that he imparts ‘plenty of
words and matter’,27 he glosses six sentences in the course of 202 pages, in a
cornucopian emulation of Erasmus. The first sentence – ‘love overcometh
all things’ – is followed by a flood of synonymous ones, such as ‘all things
are overcome by love’, ‘Venus’ Son overcomes all things’, and ‘Good God!
How do all things lye crouching at the feet of love!’28 Displays like this
elicit the cutting scorn of Shaw, who has Pronunciation say of Invention:
‘thou canst speak non-sense so ingeniously’. Later on, Trope describes
‘those babbling things call’d words’, adding that ‘we have made a wide
difference between words and things’.29
Aware of the charge of vacant words, and echoing a perennial concern
about language more generally, rhetoricians stress that res must fill verba.
21
See Howell, A. C. (1971) on the humanist understanding of res as ‘subject matter’ rather than
‘things’, as, he shows, the new scientists begin to understand it. Vickers 2002 brilliantly identifies
two ways of representing language in the Renaissance. He names as ‘rhetorical’ the duality of verba
and res (meaning or subject matter) and ‘linguistic’ the ultimately Aristotelian triad of word,
concept and thing. He argues, contra certain secondary commentators, that these two were quite
compatible and ran concurrently ‘for over two thousand years’ (p. 286).
22
Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 397. 23 Wilson 1560, fo. 84v. 24 Lamy 1986, p. 305.
25
Sprat 1959, p. 111. Locke owned this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 238).
26
Bacon 1996b, p. 139. See Vickers (2000) on how Bacon’s ‘first distemper’ is not directed against
humanism in general, but is an intervention ‘in a debate over imitatio carried out within
humanism’ (p. 141). Cf. Vickers (1968) on Bacon’s literary strategies; Vickers (1996) on Bacon’s
complex treatment of rhetoric; Briggs (1989) on Bacon’s conception of a rhetorical science which
persuades the truth out of nature; Steadman (1971) on Bacon’s self-heroising rhetorical strategies.
27
Poole 1972, sig. A6r. 28 Poole 1972, pp. 1; 2; 6. 29 Shaw 1972, pp. 105; 109.
Cicero declares that ‘a knowledge of very many matters must be grasped,
without which oratory is but an empty and ridiculous swirl of verbiage’.30 ‘I
would have the orator’, says Quintilian, ‘while careful in his choice of
words, be even more concerned about his subject matter’.31 Renaissance
rhetoricians also adopt this somewhat defensive stance. Erasmus has Bule-
phorus say: ‘let our first concern be for ideas, our second for words; and let
us fit words to things, and not the other way round . . . A speech will really
come alive if it is born in our hearts, not if it floats on our lips.’32 Erasmus is
employing a standard trope that characterises res as the soul of speech,
without which it dies. He echoes Augustine’s demand for the verbum cordis,
the internal word that animates, or gives meaning to the sounds we utter.
When Sherry urges that words be ‘apt’, he explains that this is less a quality
of words themselves than ‘the strength and power of the signification: &
must be considered not by hearyng, but understandyng’.33
The claim that res are essential to verba is matched by an equally firm
insistence that without verba, res are imprisoned and useless.34 Speech is
the escape from our solitary confinement. Through words and gesture we
open our minds and hearts to others.35 As Agricola says, ‘if speech is a sign
of the things which are contained in the mind of him who speaks, then it
follows that its proper task is to show and bestow these contents of
speech’.36 The proposition that language publicises the private contents of
the mind and that twentieth-century philosophy of language associates
with Locke, had been established for centuries. Indeed, in his Garden of
Eloquence (1577) Henry Peacham presages Locke when he inserts divine
teleology into language: the sine qua non of society. ‘The Lord God hath
ioyned to the mind of man speech, which he hath made the instrument of
our understanding, & key of conceptions, whereby we open the secreates
of our hartes, & declare our thoughts to other.’37 In De eloquentia sacra et
humana (1619), Nicholas Caussin explains that eloquent speech – ‘the
seed of heaven’ – implements mutual nurturing while the ‘mute herds’
30
Cicero 1942, i, p. 13. 31 Quintilian 1920–22, iii, p. 189. 32 Erasmus 2000, p. 73.
33
Sherry 1961, p. 20.
34
See Tuck (1998, p. 17) on the humanists’ view that ‘philosophy could not be understood nor taught
in isolation from rhetoric’; Menn (1998, p. 43) on the (Ciceronian) importance of yoking wisdom
to eloquence.
35
For example, Cicero (1942, ii, p. 177) singles out the eyes as having as many significationes as there
are emotions; Wilson 1560, fos. 112v–13r.
36
Agricola 1538, pp. 10–11: ‘Quod si est signum rerum, quas is qui dicit animo complectitur, oratio,
liquet hoc esse propriu opus ipsius, ut ostendat it atque orationis indulserit munus?’ See Rebhorn
(2000, p. 42) on the remarkable number of editions of this text that were published in the sixteenth
century (over 40 between 1515 and 1579).
37
Peacham 1971, sig. Aiir. Cf. Locke 1975, p. 402 (iii. i. 1–2).
remain atomised.38 Language enables individuals to enrich one another’s
lives in ways unavailable to beasts.39 Caussin is alluding to Cicero’s story
in his De inventione which describes the genesis of the peaceful civitas as
wrought by reason armed with rhetoric, transforming people ‘from wild
savages into kind and gentle folk’. Cicero’s influential point is that ‘a
mute and voiceless wisdom’ is powerless.40 This assessment of language as
indispensable in communication and transfigurative in effect reverberates
down the centuries.
Eloquence is described as language at its best, as making res perfectly
evident. The speaker’s words ought to be ‘plain’, to lead the audience
directly to the ideas of the speaker. Quintilian says that the ‘prime virtue’ of
speech is ‘clearness (perspicuitas)’.41 The etymology of Quintilian’s goal is
instructive; one ought to perceive the matter through the words with a quasi-
visual clarity. Aristotle had already laid down the law on the importance of
lucidity. A ‘chief merit’ of ‘style’ is ‘perspicuity’. ‘If [speech] does not make
the meaning clear, it will not perform its proper function.’42 According to
Cicero, the orator must speak ‘lucidly (plane)’.43 The ad Herennium insists
that topics must be expressed ‘with purity and perspicuity (pure et aperte)’.44
Here, the Latin suggests that language ought to open to reveal its intentional
contents. The early-modern rhetoricians vociferously encourage the pursuit
of plainness. This drive motivates John Bulwer’s Chironomia. or, The Art of
Manuall Rhetoricke (1644), which appeals to naturally expressive gesture.
Wilson instructs the orator to use ‘plain wordes’.45 Sherry says ‘the proper
use of speech is to utter the meaning of our mynde with as playne wordes as
may be.’46 In his Instructions concerning the Art of Oratory (1659) Walker
asserts that no matter what style you choose, ‘perspicuity’ or ‘to be
understood’ ought to be the orator’s top priority.47
There are two things that – contradictorily – make rhetorical speech
perfectly plain: common use and elocutio. Esteem for common use had
always been a hallmark of humanism, and rhetoricians advertise their
strict adherence to it.48 It is, after all, the only thing that makes words
38
Caussin 1630, p. 3: ‘semen coeli’; p. 4: ‘totum nostrum est; in huius laudis societatem non mutae
pecudes sese offerunt’. Holdsworth (1961, p. 644) says of this text that ‘no piece of scholarship is
more usefull, & necessarie’ to the study of oratory.
39
Cicero 1942, i, p. 25; Cf. Quintilian 1920–22, i, pp. 323–5.
40
Cicero 1976, p. 7. Cf. Wilson (1560, fos. Aviiv-viiiv) and Bacon (1858, pp. 721–2) for early-modern
repeats of the tale.
41
Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 131. See Vickers (1999, p. 41) on clarity as the prime virtue of language in
the Renaissance.
42
Aristotle 1926, p. 351. 43 Cicero 1942, ii, p. 31. 44 Rhetorica ad Herrenium 1954, p. 269.
45
Wilson 1560, fo. Aiv. 46 Sherry 1961, p. 13. 47 Walker 1682, p. 98.
48
See Monfasani (1999) on ‘consuetudo’ as the sole norm of language in the renaissance (p. 403).
publicly meaningful in the first place: words are connected to their
meanings by human ‘consent’, as Puttenham puts it in The Arte of English
Poesie (1589).49 Lamy declares that ‘custom is the master and soveraign
arbiter of all languages’.50 Sounds are meaningless unless their speakers and
hearers understand what they have been instituted to signify. By religiously
following the vagrant contracts of speech communities, rhetoricians ensure
that their words illuminate things as straightforwardly and immediately as
possible. The ad Herennium explains that language achieves ‘clarity
(explanatio)’ if it uses ‘current terms (usitatis verbis)’, which ‘are such as are
habitually used in everyday speech’.51 Hobbes, the author (?) of the Briefe of
the Art of Rhetorique (1637), explains that a word obtains ‘perspicuity’ if it is
‘proper’.52 Wilson is proud that ‘wee never affecte any straunge inkehorne
termes, but so speake as is commonly received’.53 Rhetoricians contrast
themselves with the unintelligible and sophistic dialecticians. They are men
of the world, citizens who speak properly. Using a common analogy
between money and language, Quintilian maintains that ‘usage . . . is the
surest pilot in speaking, and we should treat language as currency minted
with the public stamp’.54 Words should be rigidly fixed to their meanings,
just as coins must live up to their (face) values.
Congruent with the submission to propriety is anxiety about vulgarity.
‘Speech’, says Puttenham, ‘is fully fashioned to the common under-
standing’.55 The opinionated and ignorant majority literally make sense of
words. Language reflects the poor minds of its instigators. Quintilian
raises the alarm; if usage, he writes, ‘be defined merely as the practice of
the majority, we shall have a very dangerous rule affecting not merely
style but life as well’. ‘In speech we must not accept as a rule of language
words and phrases that have become a vicious habit with a number of
persons.’ He concludes by strictly defining usage ‘as the agreed practice of
educated men’.56 Early-modern rhetoricians inherit both Quintilian’s
unease and his solution. Lamy is troubled by the conflict between pro-
gressive wisdom and popular usage but he worms around the obligation
to propriety. He denies that raising ‘custom to the throne . . . of all
languages’ entails putting ‘the sceptre into the hands of the populace’ and
‘bad custom’. Instead, sovereign custom is that of ‘good speakers’.57 Elite
49
Puttenham 1589, p. 120. See Vickers (1988) on the continuity between rhetoric and poetry.
50
Lamy 1986, p. 203. 51 Rhetorica ad Herennium 1954, p. 271. Cf. Cicero 1942, i, p. 11.
52
Hobbes 1986, p. 108. While the Latin paraphrase of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is substantially Hobbes’
work, Karl Schuhmann has showed that the English translation is probably not. See Skinner
2002c, p. 4.
53
Wilson 1560, fo. 82v. 54 Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 113. 55 Puttenham 1589, p. 120.
56
Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 133 (my emphasis). 57 Lamy 1986, p. 204.
jargon has to be coined to denominate or communicate something pre-
cisely, and it is this that we must follow.58 Linguistic ‘propriety’ is
therefore learned, not rude.
However, this confident appeal to the consensus bonorum could be
perceived as an attempt to square the circle, shirking the consequences of
a fundamental principle of language – that words only come to mean
anything by common use, and individuals are therefore powerless against
the tide of popular linguistic legislation. Lamy realises this, despondently
ending his discussion of the forces that create language with an admission
(that in some ways Locke will repeat) that the masses have us by the nose.
We must ‘submit to the tyranny of custom’.59 This is an acute reflection
on the invincibly democratic nature of language.
The second element that endows rhetorical speech with peculiar clarity
is elocutio. This would seem to contradict everything I have just said
about the importance of common use: tropes explicitly break the con-
tracts that create meaning. In his Institutiones rhetoricae (1523)
Melanchthon explains that a trope is the ‘mutation’ of a word from its
‘proper to another signification’.60 Running roughshod over propriety,
rhetoricians professionally block the only gateway to communication,
maintaining that well-considered impropriety paradoxically makes the
matter more plain than ever. Lamy is aware of the contradiction. Hyper-
bolic statements such as ‘swifter than the wind’ are ‘in strictness . . . lyes,
but they are innocent lyes, and deceive no body: for no one but under-
stands what we mean’.61 Sherry repeats the counterintuitive thought that
‘to set out the matter more plainly we be compelled to speake otherwise
then after common facion’.62 Tropes make the speaker’s intention clearer
than if he had used the more conventional word. Metaphors exemplify
this. Aristotle declares that they ‘above all things’ give ‘perspicuity’.63
Cicero says they ‘better convey the whole meaning of the matter’.64 For
Quintilian, they add ‘to the copiousness of language’ because they aug-
ment the number of res.65 This conviction is picked up later. Smith, for
example, says that a metaphor ‘enriches our knowledge with two things at
58
E.g. Lamy 1986, pp. 203–4; Puttenham 1589, p. 121; Digby 1645, p. 7.
59
Lamy 1986, p. 207.
60
Melanchthon 1521, sig. Ciiir: ‘est autem tropus, verbi, seu sermonis in aliam significationem, a
propria muatio’. Vickers (1989, p. 283) explains how elocutio was regarded not as merely
ornamental, but as the means of perfect mental expression.
61
Lamy 1986, p. 218. 62 Sherry 1961, p. 13. 63 Aristotle 1926, p. 355.
64
Cicero 1942, ii, p. 125. 65 Quintilian 1920–22, iii, p. 303.
once, with the truth and a similitude’.66 The multiplying images feed off
each other in a productive symbiosis.
It is interesting to note here a related rhetorical reason to depart from
common use, because, despite Locke’s spitting rage at rhetoric, it is an
explanation he copies. Locke suggests that many thoughts are named
metaphorically, that is, by giving them existing names whose meanings
relate to the as yet unnamed thought.67 This is a view that Peacham
espouses (whom we have also seen presage Locke’s ascription of sociable
speech to God’s design). Peacham argues that tropical speech is some-
times a matter of ‘necessity’. The multiplicity of experience outstretches
language, so it has to double up, as it were, to communicate these
anonymous items. The first speakers are taken to have ‘borrowed’ names
from things that resemble the undenominated things, ‘that by translation
they might utter their minds largely, and set forth any matters with great
perspecuity and pleasauntnesse’.68 Sherry repeats that a speaker might,
out of ‘necessitie’, have to disobey propriety.69
The orator’s claim to extraordinary perspicuity, due, paradoxically, to
both common use and tropicality, attracts vehement repudiation. Just as
orators are attacked for verbosity, so are they accused of obscurity. This is
partly because everybody wants to appropriate the core values of sig-
nificance and perspicuity, and to attribute their binary opposites to
enemies, all of which they do, often, ironically, by means of eloquent
virtuosity.70 However, the argument against elocutio also has some
intrinsic merit. Far from being an honest means to semantic illumination,
it could instead be impugned for breaching the customary norms of
language and thereby jeopardising communication per se, let alone
extraordinary elucidation. It flies in the self-consciously open and frank
face of the new philosophers who tell it like it is.
Boyle articulates this opposition between perspicuity and elocutio. He
explains that ‘where our design is only to inform readers, not to delight or
persuade them, perspicuity’ should qualify our style rather than rhetorical
ornaments, which ‘darken . . . the subject’.71 In his Ecclesiastes (1675),
Wilkins’ injunctions for preaching reflect the new plainness. He says
that a phrase ‘must be plain and natural, not being darkened with the
66
Smith, John 1656, p. 10. 67 Locke 1975, pp. 403–4 (iii. i. 5). 68
Peacham 1971, sig. Biv.
69
Sherry 1961, p. 13. 70 Vickers 1985, p. 42 and Vickers 1987, p. 13.
71
Boyle 1661, p. 195. Locke had this edition of The Sceptical Chymist (Harrison and Laslett 1965,
p. 92).
affectation of scholastical harshness, or rhetorical flourishes’.72 Joseph
Glanvill epitomises the latest paradigm, advocating, in contrast to
‘affected Rhetorications’, ‘plain words’ and proclaiming (by means of the
quintessentially elocutionary practice of redescription) that ‘plainness is
for ever the best eloquence, and ’tis the most forcible’. He confides,
somewhat disingenuously, in his audience that ‘there is a bastard kind of
eloquence that is crept into the pulpit, which consists in affectations of
wit and finery, flourishing, metaphors, and cadencies’.73
sensible words
Rhetoricians make exceptionally conspicuous the view that words have to
be sensible to represent their absent contents. Their prime objective being
to transfer the speaker’s intention to the audience, they attend assiduously
to the interface between word and hearer. Theirs is the art of persuasion,
which penetrates the auditor’s mind and brings it round to sympathy
with the speaker’s cause. They seek the most successful ways of affecting
the auditor, and they light on sensation as a pre-eminent means. As
Puttenham remarks, the mind is ‘not available unlesse it be by sensible
approaches, whereof the audible is of greatest force for instruction or
discipline’.74 We have already met the Aristotelian dictum, reinvented by
the new empiricists, that the path towards understanding begins in sense
perception. In addition to explaining why words work at all, this insight
informs the rhetoricians’ more intense exploitation of the sensibility of
words. They orchestrate sounds and silences like a musical score, moving
the auditor where they will.
Rhetoricians make the most of, and thereby advertise, the palpable
nature of words. In his Traité du sublime (1674), Boileau’s rendition of
Longinus, we are exhorted to attend to the sound of our words. ‘For tho’
these sounds of themselves signifie nothing. Yet by the variations of the
tones, mutually striking against each other; and by the mixture of their
concords they often, as we experience, cause a wonderful transport and
rapture of the soul.’75 The ancients had emphasised the importance
of selecting the word that ‘sounds best’, as Quintilian puts it.76 The
72
Wilkins (1675), p. 199. Cf. Jones (1951) on the attack on pulpit eloquence; contrast (Vickers 1985,
p. 45) on the rhetorical tactics of the church (and the Royal Society (p. 63)) against non-
conformists (and occultists) and the myth of plainness the church created for itself.
73
Glanvill 1703, pp. 12; 25; 23. 74 Puttenham 1589, p. 164.
75
Boileau 1712, p. 78. In 1703 Locke recommends Boileau’s Du sublime for a gentleman’s study
(Locke 1997, p. 351).
76
Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 81.
ad Herennium dwells long on the most fitting tone of voice. This interest
in sound is recorded in onomatopoeia. In his Garden of Eloquence (1577)
Peacham defines this trope as ‘when we invent, devise, fayne, and make a
name, immitating the sound of that it signifyeth, as hurliburly’.77 It fuses
sound and sense into Edenic transparency. There are also figura dictionis,
described by Fenner as ‘speache . . . garnished by the pleasant and sweet
sound of words joyned together’.78 He focuses on the delightful sonority
that warms the auditor to what is said. Walker advocates a pleasurable
aural experience. ‘Words smooth and sweeter-sounded . . . are to be used
rather then rough and harsh’. He warns against ‘causing an ungratefull
sound’, depicting the auditor’s mind as something that needs ingratiating,
that might bar or admit.79 Puttenham discusses ‘auricular’ figures that
‘serve th’eare onely’, and can ‘ravish’ it; an example is ‘Aposiopesis’, or
‘the figure of silence’, where the speaker breaks off, communicating either
shame, fear, threat or ‘a moderation of anger’.80 Perhaps most desirable
are ‘sententious’ figures, which ‘ravish’ the ear as well as the mind.
In a virtuoso piece of word-play, Hobbes indicates the sensuous rap-
tures that poetry should induce. Bemoaning tired and hackneyed
‘metaphors and similitudes’, he explains that:
the Phrases of Poesy, as the ayres of musique with often hearing become insipide,
the reader having no more sense of their force, then our flesh is sensible of the
bones that susteine it. As the sense we have of bodies, consisteth in change and
variety of impression, so also does the sense of language in the variety and
changeable use of words.81
Exploiting the ambiguity of ‘sense’ which, in a verbal context, indicates
both meaning and sound, Hobbes insists that words, as well as meanings,
should be physically sensible. The importance of a full sensory rhetorical
experience is revealed by the comparisons of oratory with tasty food,
sweet smells, colours, flowers, spectacles, as well as rousing music. Cicero
says that a speech should be dressed or ornamented with ‘colour and
flavour’ and must neither satiate nor disgust.82
Lamy claims that we are more keenly moved by sense perception than
intellectual conception. In his discussion of proper word order, he
explains that the ‘ears do instruct us so sensibly what rules are to be
observed’. They pick up faults in sentential structure that our mind
77
Peacham 1971, sig. Ciiiir. 78 Fenner 1584, sig. D3r. 79 Walker 1682, pp. 25; 24.
80
Puttenham 1589, pp. 133; 139; 164. 81 Hobbes 1971b, p. 53. 82 Cicero 1942, ii, pp. 77–9.
misses. This is because ‘we are more disturbed at a thing ungrateful to our
sense, than to our reason’.83
Glanvill’s scorn and suspicion about aural experience provides an
important coda to this section. He rejects the sonorous barrage that
language can muster, accusing it of concealing ignorance. He describes
the captivated congregation who, on hearing ‘phantastical phrases’, ‘are
pleased with their sound’ but, like the preacher, have no idea what the
words mean.84 Rhetoricians expose both the sensibility of words and the
importance of sense perception in cognition, and thereby cause philo-
sophers to worry about the palpable and seductive nature of words in
their own meaningless right.
sensible ideas
The premium on sensation, in conjunction with the rhetoricians’ desire
for perfect communication, exposes broader contemporary anxieties
about the elusiveness and insensibility of meaning. Rhetoric demonstrates
the gulf that separates words and their absent meanings, as well as the
bridge over it. While sensible words transfix the auditor, alone they are
but sounds, signifying nothing. The orator must make the concepts that
are carried on the backs of words compelling. Ordinarily they are a light
cargo. They need weight in order to gain them long and deep admittance
to the auditor’s mind. The orator therefore turns again to the senses.
The great influence accorded to sense perception is mobilised to
give life and affect to concepts themselves, and thereby enhance
communication.
Commentators on biblical rhetoric stress the necessity of making verbal
content sensible, if it is to win minds. In The Interest of Reason in Religion,
with the Import & Use of Scripture-Metaphors (1675), the Independent
Robert Ferguson explains how ‘the clearest and most convincing Reasons’
are powerless without linguistic ‘attire & apparel’ which will bring them
‘as neer as may be to [the hearers’] sense’ and ‘impress and strike their
imagination’.85 Lamy explains that Scripture abounds with ‘metaphors
taken from sensible things’ because the weak, fallen mind struggles to
understand insensible abstractions, whereas it welcomes ‘easie’, ‘sensible
and pleasant’ comparisons.86
83
Lamy 1986, p. 209. 84 Glanvill 1703, p. 27.
85
Ferguson 1675, p. 361. Although Locke did not own this text, he possessed six pieces by the author
86
Lamy 1986, p. 222.
A passage to meaning is erected via the theory of representation,
whereby an absent thing is made present. According to Quintilian, this
can be done by picturing the thing with linguistic imagery, as well as
portraiture and sculpture. The technical term for the quality that makes
res present is "”
ﬁ "¶ﬁ, which Quintilian translates as evidentia. He says
that it should be wielded ‘when a truth requires not merely to be told, but
to some extent obtruded’.87 ‘Enargeia, evidence or perspicuitie’, says
Sherry, ‘is when a thynge is so described that it semeth to the reader or
hearer that he beholdeth it as it were in doyng’.88 The orator is urged to
personify abstract concepts, to pour blood into the veins of his characters.
Homer was the master of making inanimate things animate, and pro-
vided a model for early-modern writers.89 Walker explains how ‘grief’ can
be made plain by talking instead about ‘tears’.90 Peacham celebrates the
fact that by the use of figures, the orator ‘may set forth any matter with a
goodly perspicuitie, and paynt out any person, deede, or thing, so cun-
ninglye with these couloures, that it shall seeme rather a lyvely image
paynted in tables, then a reporte expressed with a tongue’.91
The preferred way of bringing the matter to life is by appealing to the
queen of the senses: sight. Cicero declares that while all metaphors that
appeal directly to the senses are effective, the best appeal to sight – the
‘keenest’ sense.92 According to Aristotle, the most perspicuous speech ‘sets
things before the eyes’.93 Horace reiterates the desire to make meaning
visible, summing it up with the tag ‘ut pictura poesis’ which guides sub-
sequent writers.94 The aim is to turn remote auditors into captivated
spectators.95 The ad Herennium states that a metaphor ‘is used for the
sake of creating a vivid mental picture (rei ante oculos)’.96 One truly
communicates by placing, as Melanchthon puts it, ‘the sentiment of
[one’s] mind in front of the others’ eyes’.97 The Art of Rhetorick, as to
Elocutio explains that metaphors ‘are to be so perspicuous, that the
similitude may appear as plain as the sun’.98 Walker repeats the point.
‘Metaphors . . . are similitudes contracted to a word; whereby we endea-
vour, not so much to render our conceits intelligible to the auditors
reason, as to paint them visible to his sense. For things of sense onely
illustrate; and amongst them, those of sight, most.’99 Boileau defines the
87
Quintilian 1920–22, iii, p. 245; ii, p. 85. See Rigolot 1999.
88
Sherry 1961, p. 66. 89 Aristotle 1926, p. 407. 90 Walker 1682, p. 25.
91
Peacham 1971, sig. Aiiir. 92 Cicero 1942, ii, p. 127. 93 Aristotle 1926, p. 405.
94
Braider 1999. 95 See Skinner (1996, pp. 182–8) on turning auditors into spectators.
96
Rhetorica ad Herennium 1954, p. 343. 97 Melanchthon 1999, p. 63.
98
The Art of Rhetorick 1706, p. 2. 99 Walker 1682, p. 55.
use of ‘images’, ‘pictures or fictions’, as ‘to paint things, and give the
reader a clear view of them’.100 Hobbes simply says that ‘a poet is a
painter’.101 The Art of Rhetorick describes the figure of hypotyposis ‘whereby
we express a matter so particularly, that it seems to be represented to the
very eye . . . where the whole image . . . is as it were painted out in
words’.102 The author calls this figure ‘the very consummation of all
rhetorick’. Evoking the full-bodied sensuous emotional experience that
the orator should effect, Sherry says of a good metaphor that ‘none
perswadeth more effecteouslye, none sheweth the thyng before oure eyes
more evidently, none moveth more mightily the affeccions, none maketh
the oracion more goodlye, pleasaunt, nor copious’.103
elocutio – breaking the contract

While the devices of elocutio are intended to clarify and beguile, they also,
as I have already begun to explain, publicise the ease with which the
semantic contract – those conventions that attach words to meanings and
the only proper source of verbal meaning – can be broken. Tropes are,
according to Smith, ‘words . . . used for elegancy in a changed signification;
or when a word is drawn from its proper and genuine signification to
another’.104 Peacham’s definition highlights the impropriety of tropes: ‘an
alteration of a worde or sentence, from the proper and natural signification,
to another not proper, but yet nye and likely’.105 Puttenham throws into
relief the inherent deviousness of tropical speech, calling ‘Metonimia’, ‘the
Misnamer’, and ‘Onomatopeia’, the ‘New namer’.106
Metaphor is queen of the tropes. Its specific definition is almost
interchangeable with that of its genus. Wilson describes it as ‘an alteration
of a worde, from the proper and naturalle meaning, to that whiche is not
proper, and yet agreeth there unto, by some lykenes that appeareth to be
in it’.107 As Ferguson puts it, ‘in metaphors one thing is put for
another’.108 And as Hobbes says, metaphors ‘openly professe deceipt’.109
The duplicitous potential in language is grossly magnified in another
trope, catachresis – usually translated as ‘abuse’. Puttenham describes it
as a ‘plaine abuse’.110 Hoskins says that this trope ‘is somewhat more
100
Boileau 1712, p. 40. 101 Hobbes 1844, p. vi. 102 The Art of Rhetorick 1706, pp. 51–2; 52.
103
Sherry 1961, p. 40.
104
Smith, John 1656, p. 2. Kinney (1986, p. 18) argues that sixteenth-century English humanists
presented language as ‘manipulable . . . relative, the act of formulating it creative’.
105
Peacham 1971, sig. Biv. 106 Puttenham 1589, pp. 150; 151. 107 Wilson 1560, fo. 88r.
108
Ferguson 1675, p. 305. 109 Hobbes 1996, p. 52. 110 Puttenham 1589, p. 150.
desperate than a metaphor. It is the expressing of one matter by the name
of another which is incompatible with it, and sometimes clean con-
trary’.111 In his Arts of Rhetorick (1634) John Barton writes of this ‘abuse’
that it is ‘very farre fetcht’, ‘an unusuall, strange, and streined metaphor,
not obvious and congruous’.112 Melanchthon’s example is calling some-
one who has killed his friend a ‘patricide’.113
Yet another trope that wears its hypocrisy on its sleeve is irony, that is,
‘when your words differ from your thoughts’.114 Smith says that the use of
this trope is ‘to dissemble in speaking . . . as if we should say black is
white. It is called the mocking trope, whereby in derision we speak
contrary to what we think or mean’.115 The Art of Rhetorick calls it ‘a
dissembling trope’.116
Rhetoricians are not only unembarrassed by, but positively applaud,
these manifestations of linguistic impropriety – an approach which seems
to some to be, by definition, indecorous. Shaw provides a burlesque
account of Trope’s enthusiasm for his own misdemeanours.117 Puttenham
happily outlines the ‘the darknesse and duplicitie of his [synechdoche’s]
sence’. He evokes the unselfconscious delight with which the rhetorical
tradition wallows in its linguistic transgressions. Figures are ‘in a sorte
abuses or rather trepasses in speech, because they passe the ordinary limits
of common utterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceive the eare and
also the minde, drawing it from plainnesse and simplicitie to a certaine
doubleness, whereby our talke is the more guileful & abusing’.118
If words are only connected to meanings by the semantic contract,
breaking that contract renders language strictly unintelligible. As Lamy
explains, while we might ‘call a Horse a Dog’, we cannot ‘take the one for
the other, without an intire confusion to the conversation of mankind’.119
The fragility of the semantic contract leads not only to the bounded
problem of improper speech, but also to unbounded semantic pro-
liferation and readerly authority. Rather than obediently switching
between fixed meanings, a dislocated word is autonomous. It can flit
anywhere. Or rather, once it leaves the speaker’s mouth, it becomes the
property of hearers. Relying on them for its application, its meaning can
multiply accordingly.120 The auditor’s freedom is exposed in discussions
of tropical speech. Hoskins explains how the mind naturally roams
111
Hoskins 1935, p. 11. 112 Barton 1634, sig. C1r [p. 19]; sig. C2r [p. 21].
113
Melanchthon 1521, sig. Civr. 114 Cicero 1942, I, p. 403. 115 Smith, John 1656, p. 45.
116
The Art of Rhetorick 1706, p. 9. 117 Shaw 1972, p. 114.
118
Puttenham 1589, pp. 163; 128. 119 Lamy 1986, p. 203.
120
Cf. Cave (1979) on the worry about linguistic proliferation in the Renaissance.
beyond its intended object, ‘like the eye, that cannot choose but view the
whole knot when it beholds but one flower in a garden of purpose’.121 In
his Academy of Eloquence (1654) Blount paints a rich picture of auditory
action when he elucidates the figure of ‘Intimation’. It ‘leaves the col-
lection of greatness to our understanding, but expressing some mark of it.
It exceeds speech in silence, and makes our meaning more intelligible by a
touch, then by direct treating . . . it doth not directly aggravate, but by
consequence or proportion, intimate more to your minde, then to your
ears’.122 Walker says that metaphors are most ‘significant’ when they
originate from familiar things which the hearer immediately understands
‘and applies them farther than the speaker’.123 The view that the hearer
might roam mentally beyond the knowledge and intention of the speaker
vexes the conditions of communication.124
Elocutionary biblical exegesis exemplifies the reader’s monopoly of
meaning. Swynnerton mocks the way in which exegetes decide to read the
text literally or not, simply as it suits them. ‘When it lyketh them, the
lettre kylleth, the Scripture is figurate . . . When it lyketh them, then the
lettre kylleth not, then the Scripture is not figurate.’125 He promises to
settle matters by ruling ‘when the lettre kylleth’, which he does in a way that
bears the mark of the Protestant reformation. Much later, when the gov-
ernment of England was thoroughly converted, Robert Ferguson defends
the non-conformists’ tropical reading of Scripture against Anglican attack.
He takes it as his duty to decode the word of God for ‘the defence and
vindication of the doctrines of the Gospel; many of which are undermined
under the pretence of renouncing luscious and fulsome metaphors’.126 ‘The
Bible’, he claims, ‘is replenished and adorned with all sort of figurative
expressions’ that he intends to resolve.127 He lays down the ‘rule’ that ‘we
impose not a proper sense where the words ought to be taken in a Tro-
pical’.128 He decides the divine ‘intention’.129 Meaning is delivered into the
hands of a self-appointed ‘Judicious Interpreter’.130 Needless to say,
interpreters abound and with wildly divergent results. Barton, Caussin,
121
Hoskins 1935, p. 8.
122
Blount 1971, pp. 20–1. Locke owned and extensively annotated Blount’s Censura Celebriorum
Authorum (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 88).
123
Walker 1682, p. 55 (my emphasis).
124
See Vickers (1999, pp. 10 and 53) on the integral inclusion of the reader/hearer in the rhetorician’s
sights. Kahn (1985) argues that rhetoric was definitively concerned with reader response (p. 19) and
explores how various renaissance authors harnessed the ‘active conception of reading’ to educate the
reader. Cf. Davidson (1965) on the centrality of the audience in seventeenth-century French
literature.
125
Swynnerton 1999, p. 99. 126 Ferguson 1675, p. 279. 127 Ferguson 1675, p. 281.
128
Ferguson 1675, p. 328. 129 Ferguson 1675, p. 331. 130 Ferguson 1675, p. 345.
Fenner, Ferguson, Smith and Wilkins, to name but a few, are some such
self-made hermeneuts. Wilkins sets himself up as a ‘rational’ expositor,
thereby authenticating himself, in a nice piece of self-description.131
Maintaining that ‘private interpretation’ must not be admitted to the
interpretative enterprise, he proceeds, all the same, to divide Scripture into
‘manifest, or cryptical’ parts that need identification and exposition.132
Smith explains that ‘the holy Scripture is not barren of, but abounds with
tropes and figures of all sorts’, and needs ‘the Spirit of the Lord’, as well as
the rules of rhetoric, for its true disclosure.133 He exemplifies his point with
a little sentence which had lacerated the Christian church. ‘This is my
body’ is to be understood ‘spiritually’, as opposed to ‘literally’, of course.
speak in g tru th, or winning belief u nder the

cover of words
The intrinsic duplicity of the tropes might be considered characteristic of
rhetoric as a whole, and, in turn, of language in general. According to
Montaigne, rhetoricians practice the ‘art of lying and deception’. They
‘pride themselves on deceiving not our eyes but our judgement, bas-
tardising and corrupting things in their very essence’.134 Rhetoricians, for
their part, protest too much in denying the charge. The grand, sometimes
desperate claim is that the true orator is necessarily a wise and good
citizen. Quintilian is the most convinced exponent of this view: ‘No man
can speak well who is not good himself .’135 Cicero asserts that ‘it is from
knowledge that oratory must derive its beauty and fullness’.136 Eloquence
must be wise to deserve the name. However, they are led to admit that it
is in fact an art that can be used to good or evil, true or false, ends. And so
rhetoric begins its long slide from its bright beginning. Quintilian says
that like all great things – the medical profession, a sword, the sun –
oratory can harm, but this does not impugn its virtuous status.137 In De
elegantiae linguae Latinae (1471) Valla says that it is in the nature of arts
131
Wilkins 1675, sig. A5r. Cf. Hoopes (1962) and Mulligan (1984) on ‘right reason’ in religion; Smith
(1989) on the special access that radical English sects claimed they had to the spirit of the word;
Mandelbrote ((1994)) on biblical criticism at the end of the century; Young (1998, p. 1) on the
pathway to ‘reasoning to excess’ at the end of the eighteenth century and Locke’s central place in
the incarnation of this ‘knowing age’.
132
Wilkins 1675, p. 15. 133
Smith, John 1656, sig. A5r; sig. A5v. 134 Montaigne 1991, p. 341.
135
Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 315. See Struever (1993) on the healing, curative characterisation of
rhetoric.
136
Cicero 1942, i, p. 17. Cf. Gray (1963) on the ideal harmony between wisdom and style.
137
Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 321.
that ‘you can use them for good or evil’, and that it would be ridiculous
to condemn them on this ground.138 However, the inevitable consequence
of this concession is that rhetoric’s essence cannot lie in its commitment
to truth or goodness, but in its capacity to persuade. Quintilian’s faltering
claim that rhetoric ‘is realised in action, not in the result obtained’ seems
to be thrown out of court.139 It is in its winning guise that we meet
rhetoric in the early-modern period.
Students learn it by arguing in utramque partem, that is, on both sides
of the question.140 Aristotle, intimating a form of discursive ethics, is a
great proponent of the view that a dialectical struggle is the best way of
getting at the truth:
The orator should be able to prove opposites, as in logical arguments; not that
we should do both (for one ought not to persuade people to do what is wrong),
but that the real state of the case may not escape us, and that we ourselves may
be able to counteract false arguments, if another makes an unfair use of
them . . . that which is true and better is naturally always easier to prove and
more likely to persuade.141
Lamy echoes Aristotle’s optimism, arguing that the initial ‘love’ inspired by
‘a deceitful Orator’ soon turns to ‘hatred’ as the audience realises the cheat.142
However, the anti-Aristotelian claim that it is not the fact of the
matter, but the virtuosity of the speaker that persuades, proves more
compelling in the literature. At the beginning of Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates
proposes that rhetoric is concerned with the amoral manufacture of
opinion as opposed to knowledge. ‘Rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of
persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and
wrong.’143 In his Index rhetoricus (1625) Farnaby defines the end of
rhetoric as ‘to persuade’.144 Hobbes (?) polemically mistranslates Aris-
totle’s original definition of rhetoric as ‘that Faculty, by which wee
understand what will serve our turne, concerning any subject, to winne
beliefe in the hearer’.145 We are reminded of that crack in the linguistic
mirror occasioned by the practice of dialectical disputation. A culture that
138
Valla 1522, p. 313: ‘Quibus et bene uti posis et male’. Locke owned this text (Harrison and Laslett
1965, p. 256).
139
Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 337. Cf. Monfasani (1992) on the anti-Quintilian claim that the orator is
not necessarily a vir bonus.
140
See Coote (1665) for an example of a debate. Cf. Ong (1971) on the ‘ritual male combat centred
on disputation’ (p. 17), and on the ‘tyranny’ of oration (p. 53).
141
Aristotle 1926, pp. 11–13. Cf. Grassi (1980) on the supposed tension between rhetoric and
philosophy; Vickers (1982b) on this territorial dispute; Vickers (1983) on the power of the orator;
Trinkaus (1983) on humanism and truth.
142
Lamy 1986, p. 366. 143 Plato 1925, p. 287. 144 Farnaby 1970, p. 1 (working back from p. 9).
145
Hobbes 1986, p. 40.
positively encourages arguing pro and con and that values victory above all
else, not only dissolves faith in goodness and truth, but also exposes how
language can be detached from goodness and truth, and still win the day.
A good orator is irresistible. This is because he plays with his words on
his audience’s passions. And, as Aristotle admits, it is passion that moves
the mind. ‘The emotions are all those affections which cause men to
change their opinion in regard to their judgements, and are accompanied
by pleasure and pain.’146 Early-modern philosophers fervently and
increasingly agree that passion informs cognition,147 and it is this agree-
ment that turns Aristotle’s Rhetoric – a manual on the emotions and
therefore the key to an audience’s favour – into such an important book
for rhetoricians and philosophers alike.
Caussin declares that eloquence ‘can effectively seize and bind people’s
spirits’. In his De inventione dialectica (1515) Agricola writes of the power
by which ‘we either make faith in one who believes in us and lead him to
follow us as if freely, or we completely conquer one who does not believe
and drag him fighting against us’.148 Boileau also refers to the rhetorician’s
power of bending people’s wills. The ‘sublime’ is ‘something extraordinary
and marvellous that strikes us in a Discourse and makes it elevate, ravish
and transport us’.149 It has an ‘invincible force’. Resistance is futile. Wilson
makes the point that eloquence can change our hearts and minds. ‘Soche
force hathe the tongue and soche is the power of eloquence and reason,
that most men are forced even to yelde in that, whiche most standeth
againste their will.’150 This characterisation is generally represented
through metaphors of arms and battle. When Sarcasm, or barbed irony,
enters the stage in Shaw’s Words Made Visible, Pronounciation says to him,
‘you are an arm’d Figure, which is a thing strange to see. I thought my
brothers [Elocution] captains had conquer’d only by words.’ Sarcasm
replies, ‘So do I, Sir, but they are very sharp ones.’151
Rhetoric is of such unconquerable but indifferent strength that to teach
it to vicious men would be, as Cicero says, to ‘put weapons into the hands
of madmen’.152 The classic example of such a disaster is Catiline, the
146
147
On the different ways in which this is thought to be the case and on the overarching move away
from a conflictual to a determinist model of desire, see James 1997.
148
Caussin 1630, p. 5: ‘efficax capiendis illigandisque animis’. Agricola 1538, p. 12: ‘Fidem facimus, vel
credeti, et velut spote sequetem ducimus: vel pervincimus non credentem, atque repugnantem
trahimus’. See Vickers (1982a) on the practicalities of rhetoric and the increasing importance of
moving the passions.
149
Boileau 1712, p. 7. 150 Wilson 1560, fo. Aviir. 151 Shaw 1972, p. 172.
152
Cicero 1942, i, p. 45.
eloquent revolutionary. Thomas Blount recalls that ‘Pericles (the orator)
was no less a tyrant in Athens then Pysistratus’, and that Cyneas’ meta-
phorical arms proved more effective than the literal ‘sword of Pyrrhus’.153
In his De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum (1531), Agrippa rails against
the pernicious power of rhetoric that is so often employed in the service
of sedition. ‘For nothing is more dangerous to civic offices than this art,
from which descend prevaricators, dodgers, perverters of law, sycophants’,
who ‘usurp a certain kind of tyranny over the innocent’.154
Many rhetoricians defend the invincible quality of eloquence on the
grounds that it alone can lead the foolish and passionate herd to right-
eousness. Its crippling yoke is justified by a means–ends argument.155
Even Aristotle, who would rather ‘fight the case with facts alone’, sadly
admits that enchanting style and delivery have to be employed sometimes
‘owing to the corruption of the hearer’.156 Quintilian reiterates the claim
that the power of rhetoric is needed to persuade corrupt ears. ‘If, as is the
case, our hearers are fickle of mind, and truth is exposed to a host of
perils, we must call in art to aid us in the fight and employ such means as
will help our cause.’ Unenlightened judges ‘have to be tricked to prevent
them falling into error’. If they were philosophers, ‘there [would] be very
little scope for eloquence whose value will lie almost entirely in its power
to charm’.157 Although Ramus is disparaging about his refigured rhetoric,
he admits its instrumental role with an unsympathetic audience. ‘All
the tropes and figures of style and all the graces of delivery, which
constitute the entirety of true rhetoric . . . serve no other purpose than to
lead the troublesome and stubborn auditor’.158 Caussin defines the art as
establishing ‘a kind tyranny in the hearts of men’.159
It is by language that the orator exerts such a bewitching sovereignty
over his audience. Rhetoric reveals two terrific virtues of language: it is
possible to say anything, and saying it makes it so. As Invention says of
Pronunciation in Shaw’s play, ‘It’s dangerous disputing with a person
that can call a man out of his name, and yet make that to be his name
whatsoever he calls him.’160 It is in the nature of language – which relies
on sensible words to express insensible ideas – that the auditor cannot
153
Blount 1971, sig. A3v.
154
Agrippa 1568, p. 45: ‘Nam hoc artificio nihil periculosius civilis officiis, ab hoc praevaricatores,
tergiversatores, calumniatores, sycophante . . . ac in innocentes tyrannidem quanda sibi usurpant’.
Locke had this edition (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 69).
155
Howell (1961, p. 3) stresses the rhetoricians’ popular audience.
156
Aristotle 1926, p. 347. 157 Quintilian 1920–22, i, pp. 339; 337. 158 Ramus 2000, p. 159.
159
Caussin 1630, p. 459: ‘mitem . . . tyrannidem in pectoris hominum constituit’.
160
Shaw 1972, p. 105.
penetrate the linguistic front. He is completely at the mercy of the way
the orator chooses to represent things. Language’s extraordinary power
lies in its conjunction of seeming enlightenment and real opacity. The
orator’s tool seems to be like a window, but it is really a picture. The
audience thinks they are looking through the words to the truth, but in
fact they are viewing what the speaker has painted with his words, and are
impotent to do anything else.161
Rhetoric exposes the especially creative potency of opaque language in
the context of the moral world. It offers a number of techniques that (mis)
describe this worryingly pliable sphere, threatening to efface any intrinsic
qualities it might have. Shaw dramatises the constitutive consequences of
naming at pleasure. Trope’s son Metonymy rejoices in his own fixed name:
‘when all the rest of the world have no name, but what I please to give
them, is (as the imposition of names has always been accounted) no small
argument of my authority. I am the great Nomenclator of the world’.162
One very potent device is amplification, which ‘increases’ or ‘decreases’
matters through redescription. Paradiastole is a species of amplification. It
transforms the moral complexion of something or someone in accordance
with the orator’s design, usually turning vice into virtue. This is based on
Aristotle’s location of virtue on the golden mean between two vices.163 He
advises speakers to use paradiastole in the genus demonstrativum, that form
of oratory that praises or blames. ‘In each case we must adopt a term from
qualities closely connected, always in the more favorable sense; for
instance . . . the recklessly extravagant as liberal’.164 Quintilian exhorts the
161
See Blount (1971, sigs. A2v–A3v) on the indispensability and visibility of speech; Hoskins (1935,
p. 2) on the mutual dependence of res and verba. Cf. Cicero (1942, ii, p. 113) on the redundancy of
wisdom without eloquence. See also Cave (1979) on devious language; Krajewski (1992) on
Hermes’ tainted reputation. There seems to be a tension between the claims that a deceiver can
communicate unproblematically, and the view that in order to communicate the speaker has to
have thoughts corresponding to those he articulates. See, for example, Lamy 1986, p. 305: ‘A Good
Imagination contributes particularly to the clearness and facility of Discourse . . . A Man whose
Imagination is easy, represents to himself whatever he is to say: He sees clearly before the eyes of
his mind; so that expressing by his words, the things as present to him, his Discourse is clear, and
the things do range and take their places of themselves in his Discourse’; Felton 1971, p. 106: ‘if a
man hath not a clear perception of the matters he undertaketh to treat of be his style never so
plain as to the words he useth, it never can be clear’. An answer to this conundrum might lie in the
fact either that the orator must be persuaded of what he is saying or that while vivid thought is
necessary for exceptionally expressive speech, this is not the case for ordinary communication.
162
Shaw 1972, p. 114.
163
Aristotle 1980, p. 39. Locke owned the Ethicorum nicomachiorum (Harrison and Laslett 1965,
p. 75). See Skinner (1994) on moral ambiguity in Renaissance eloquence; Skinner (1996, pp. 133–
80) on rhetorical redescription and its dangers. See also Struever (1983) on the humanists’
contextualist constitution of virtue and vice.
164
orator to use the same strategy of linguistic metamorphosis. He explains
that ‘if the question turns on the nature of the act’, then ‘we must restate’
that act ‘in a different way, alleging other motives and another purpose
and putting a different complexion on the case’. We must resort to the
constitutive power of language, whereby a thing becomes what it is
named. ‘Some imputations we must mitigate by the use of other words,
luxury will be softened down into generosity, avarice into economy,
carelessness into simplicity.’165 Cicero chimes in: ‘on a charge of corrupt
practices, lavish generosity, can seldom be distinguished from profuse
bribery’.166 This device is embraced by early-modern rhetoricians. Peac-
ham explains that it enables us to ‘excuse our own vices, or other mens
whom we doe defend, by calling them vertues, as when we call him that is
craftye, wyse’.167 The Art of Rhetorick says that paradiastole ‘proves a thing
by its way of interpretation, or shewing the contrary’.168 Puttenham writes
that by its means ‘we make the best of a bad thing’.169 Hoskins asks with
breath-taking candour, ‘how can you commend a thing more acceptably
to our attention than by telling us it is extraordinary’?170 The opposite is
meiosis, by its which ‘you diminish and abbase a thing’.171 With a sha-
melessness that verges on the comic, Sherry explains that ‘increasyng or
diminishing’ is achieved ‘by chaungynge the worde of the thynge, when
in encreasynge we use a more cruell worde, and a softer in diminishynge,
as when we call an evyll man a thiefe, and saye he hath kylled us, when he
hath beaten us’.172 Language emerges as a creative as opposed to a servile
instrument. It forges the moral world, not the other way round. Its force
is further amplified because its hearers are often under the illusion that it
describes things as they are, not as its user wants them to be.
The uncertainty of definitions is another resource that rhetoricians
mine in order to bend the truth to their will. This is a locus communis
visited by rhetoricians for their artificial proofs ‘when the name by which
an act should be called is in controversy’.173 Quintilian explains that
‘though there may be no doubt as to a term, there is a question as to what
it includes’. He gives the following cases: ‘to use bad language to one’s
wife does not amount to cruelty’; ‘whether a man caught in a brothel with
another man’s wife is adultery’.174 By exploiting the fluidity of verbal
meaning, the orator softens or hardens his blows. Again, then, semantic
indeterminacy is flagged suggestively by rhetoricians.
165
Quintilian 1920–1922, ii, pp. 91; 91–2. 166 Cicero 1942, i, p. 275.
167
Peacham 1971, sig. Niiiiv. 168 The Art of Rhetorick 1706, p. 44. 169 Puttenham 1589, p. 154.
170
Hoskins 1935, p. 17. 171 Puttenham 1589, p. 154. 172 Sherry 1961, p. 70.
173
Rhetorica ad Herennium 1954, p. 39. 174 Quintilian 1920–22, iii, pp. 85; 87.
Rhetoric broadcasts the free-floating nature of language, the way in
which it can be applied as the speaker wills, not as the object dictates.
Although Bacon pleads that rhetoric only adorns goodness, evil being
immune to fine colours, at another point he admits that it ‘paint[s] and
disguise[s] the true appearance of things’. Indeed, he composes an entire
work, Of the Colours of Good and Evil, where he prescribes linguistic
devices which have the ‘power to alter the nature of the subject in
appearance’.175 Rhetoric also demonstrates the invisibility and invinci-
bility of linguistic perfidy, occasioned by the irrevocably opaque façade of
language. It enables things, in Pufendorf’s words, to be ‘painted with a
quite different face from what they truly bear’.176 And sometimes, pushes
Hobbes, the speakers themselves are taken in. ‘Eloquence’, he writes,
‘seemeth wisedome, both to themselves and others’.177 We learn the
‘truth’ about things according to the denominations given them. We are
subject to the sovereignty of this ‘beautiful deceit’, as Sprat calls rhetoric –
‘a thing fatal to peace and good manners’.178
175
Bacon 1996b, pp. 238; 218; 1996a, p. 97. 176 Pufendorf 1703, vii, p. 143.
177
Hobbes 1996, p. 72. 178 Sprat 1959, pp. 112; 111.
part i1
Philosophical developments of the problem
of language
chapter 4
The relationships between language,

mind and word
The mirror that language held up to the world, which we met in logic,
was in some ways shattered during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. As the regiments of the ‘scientific revolution’1 laid siege to the
forms and species of Aristotelian ontology, the old words and classifica-
tions no longer fitted the new world that was being discovered. Moreover,
with the reinvention of ancient scepticism and with epistemological
transformations more broadly, human experience, which had seemed to
deliver the world to men, came to be doubted as a reliable conduit. As the
unity of subject and object was threatened, so too was the derivative unity
between word and object. Appearance divided from reality and took
language with it.
However, this did not necessarily mean that a veil of ideas was draped
before us or that language fell away from reality.2 Resounding warnings
1
Shapin (1996) begins his book on the subject with a sentence that brilliantly captures the problems
but also the viability of the phrase: ‘there was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is
a book about it’ (p. 1). Dear (1988, p. 1) defends the use of this phrase and the changes it describes.
While Sorell (1993a) argues for a revision of the old story that modern science superseded
Aristotelian science (p. 1), he maintains that one ought to favour ‘a Schmittian tolerance’ of it. See
Schmitt (1973) on the continuity and diversity of Aristotelianism. Rogers (2000) defends a
characterisation of both ‘new’ science and epistemology. Tuck (1998, p. 19) emphasises that to study
philosophy in the European universities for most of the seventeenth century was to study to the
works of Aristotle. See also Dear 2001, Hunter 1989 and, for the relation of the new science to
society, Hunter 1981.
2
See Ayers 1998b. For alternative and opposing views, see Rorty (1980, p. 139) on the ‘veil-of-ideas’,
Yolton (1984 and 1987) on direct realism, and Yolton (1990) for his attack on Rorty. See also Rogers
(2000), who traces a story from realist science to the way of ideas with its ‘epistemic gap between
the knower and the known’ (p. 58) which threatens realism; Schmaltz (2002), who argues that the
cogito does not begin a path to Kant; McRae (1965) on ‘ideas’.
For a balanced and cautionary word about the extent to which ‘modern epistemology’ was
‘conceived in a crise Pyrrhonienne’, see Ayers 1998a, p. 1008. On the rediscovery of and responses to
ancient scepticism see Burke 2002, pp. 197–212; Floridi 2002; Larmore 1998; Levi 2000; Popkin
1979 and Popkin 1993; Schmitt 1983; Spolsky 2001; Tuck 1993. On the relationship between
language and scepticism see Marcondes 1998; and Southgate 1995 (in Blackloist thought).
91
were raised about the dangers of error and dogma, and many philoso-
phers, particularly those who set great store by the senses, did see a large
fraction of our thoughts and words reflect more on the human subject
than on the objective world. But they were not idealists. The vast majority
made tentative – or not so tentative – claims about how the mind, and
therefore language, could capture the world. And far from being pre-
occupied with Pyrrhonian incredulity, many, if they engaged with it at
all, used it as a foil, and confidently set about describing the world.
Sometimes in relation to these issues, several commentators who have
specifically addressed language in the early-modern period assert that
there were two rival and incompatible theories: a nomenclature of things
versus an expression of thought. Some commentators pit the two con-
temporaneously against each other in a battle between ‘empiricists’ and
‘rationalists’.3 Others see a dominant language of things, championed by
the new scientists and ultimately usurped by the language of thought
under the decisive captaincy of Locke.4 This chapter seeks to demonstrate
the pervasive inclusion of both thoughts and things in early-modern
theories of language, whilst exploring the differences, developments and
doubts therein.
the ancient marriage between word and essence

Let us remind ourselves of the foundation of early-modern philosophy of
language: the triad of word–concept–thing laid down by Aristotle. Words
are symbols of ‘mental affections’, which are themselves ‘representations,
or likenesses, images, copies’ of ‘objects’.5 In his Philosophical Essay for the
Reunion of Languages (1675), Pierre Besnier writes uncontroversially
that words are ‘the expressions of our thoughts, and our thoughts the
3
Padley (1985 and 1988, I) schematically pits an empiricist conception of language against a
rationalist one. Cf. Lennon (1993b), who argues that seventeenth-century philosophy was
dominated by a battle between the Cartesian, idealist, gods and Gassendist, materialist, giants, and
that Locke should be read primarily as a contributor to the latter cause. In a quite different way,
Ayers (1997, p. 4) locates Locke on the side of the empiricist giants. See Atherton (1999) on ‘the
empiricists’ (Locke, Berkeley, Hume). See also Ayers (1998a, pp. 1003–8 and pp. 1028–30, and Ayers
(1998c, p. 24) for a restrained and persuasive defence of the rationalist/empiricist distinction.
4
Formigari 1993, p. 13: ‘the way of ideas thus severs the univocal correspondence between language
and realia . . . language is no more conceived as a repertory of real definitions, a nomenclature of
created objects . . . it is seen as a body of historical and cultural choices in which empirical and
contingent factors play a decisive role’. Cohen (1977) traces a shift from language as a reflection of
nature to a reflection of the mind, in which Locke ‘reidentified’ words as ideas not things (p. xxiv).
Cf. Padley (1985 and 1988, i, p. 352) on Locke’s novel enclosure of language in its own autonomous
arena.
5
Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. Cf. Ebbesen 1981, pp. 141–3.
The relationships between language, mind and word 93
representations of objects’.6 However, just like the logicians, who care-
lessly confuse concept and thing, slipping one underneath the other,
effecting an invisible move between language and the world, Besnier
settles into the binary division. Using a common image of the duality, he
explains that the ‘signification’ is ‘the soul of the word, as the sound is its
body’.7 In his dictionary, the New World of English Words (1658), Edward
Phillips voices the dualist mentalité: ‘all learning in general, is chiefly
reducible into those two grand heads, Words and Things’.8 In addition to
these sleights of hand is the suggestion, implanted by the Terminists, that
words might stand directly for things. Fostered by a thorough logical
training, then, this twosome blooms (in)advertently in philosophy more
generally, albeit interspersed with circumspect observations about
interpretative, mental mediation.
Aristotle himself is far from cavalier about the developmental role of
the mind in linguistic reference. In Posterior Analytics he points out the
gulf between nature, which is essentially constituted by universals, and our
initial sense-perception of particulars. That which is ‘more knowable’ to
us is less known to nature.9 However, in the process of ‘experience’, or
many persisting sense-perceptions, the soul can bridge the gulf and
thereby ‘establish’ ‘the universal’, such as ‘man’, as opposed to Callias,
Plato or Socrates. The mind cognises ‘the One that corresponds to the
Many, the unity that is present in them all’.10 It is of these universals,
whose apprehension is necessary to reasoning, that the philosopher speaks.
Aristotle’s is an ambitious account of the mind’s capacity to know (and
name) the essences of things – or ‘substances’, as they are more properly
(and later, provocatively) called. Substances are totalities of matter and
‘form’ (the essence of a substance, such as rational animal in the case of
man). According to Aristotle, the mind becomes identical with these
forms, so that ‘in a sense’, he announces, ‘the soul is all the existing
universe’.11 He compares sensation – ‘the reception of the form of sensible
objects without the matter’ – to the way that ‘wax receives the impression
of the signet-ring without the iron or the gold’.12 Language can gorge on
6
Besnier 1971, p. 51. 7 Besnier 1971, p. 50. 8 Phillips 1969, sig. b3r.
9
Aristotle 1960, pp. 31–3. 10 Aristotle 1960, p. 259.
11
Aristotle 1935, pp. 179–81. Cf. Lear (1988, p. 229) on Aristotle: ‘the order of reality and the order of
one’s knowledge of reality would be one and the same’; and pp. 116–35 for a wonderful account of
the identity of subject and object in Aristotle. See Park (1988) for an appraisal of Aristotelian souls
and their relationship with nature. See also Park and Kessler (1988) on humanist modifications of
psychology.
12
this intimate union between mind and world, and build an uninterrupted
passage from words to things.
Essentialist verbal reference seems secure throughout Aristotle’s
Organon, where the reified and precise linguistic taxonomies of species and
genera, accidents and essences that we saw peddled by logicians map things
in the world.13 He slides between the linguistic and epistemological–
ontological planes with unbroken and unselfconscious ease. For example,
he asserts that ‘things are univocally named, when not only they bear the
same name but the name means the same in each case – has the same
definition corresponding. Thus a man and an ox are called ‘‘animals’’.
The name is the same in both cases; so also the statement of essence.’14 Aristotle
reiterates his commitment to linguistic–real continuity when he states that ‘the
truth of propositions consists in corresponding with the facts’.15
Before we turn from this mighty source to its streams we ought to
remind ourselves of the non-judgemental simplicity of the concepts
which words signify – a presumption the logicians repeat unflinchingly.
For Aristotle, concepts of substances are, like the words which signify
them, single units. We remember his statement that nouns are like
concepts, ‘neither combined nor disjoined’.16 ‘Man’, like ‘white’, has a
singular denotation; nothing is affirmed or denied of it and it is therefore
neither true nor false.17
Aristotle’s realism,18 along with his unitary representation of concepts–
things and their numerical fit with words dispatches a view of language
that penetrates almost effortlessly, directly, and without the possibility of
error, to the heart of things.
His scholastic successors hotly debate the extent to which the linguistic–
epistemological framework matches the world, although it is generally
agreed that a mental operation of abstraction derives the universal from
the particular. Towards one extreme are the ‘moderate realists’, or
Thomists.19 Aquinas had maintained that ‘something becomes actually
intelligible insofar as it is in some way abstracted from matter’.20 But
while concept and thing are thus distinct, the ‘essences’ or ‘natures’ of
13
E.g. Aristotle 1938b, pp. 153–5. Cf. Lear 1988, p. 267: ‘the reason that a linguistic predication, like
man is [a] rational animal is true is that a certain predication exists in reality’.
14
Aristotle 1938a, p. 13. 15 Aristotle 1938b, p. 139.
16
Aristotle 1938b, p. 117. 17 Aristotle 1938b, p. 117.
18
I use ‘realism’ quite generally, to indicate a linguistic–real correspondence, in addition and in
relation to the context of the nominalist/realist debate about universals.
19
I take this account of the debate from Bolton 1998a, pp. 178–9. Utz (1995) argues for the
importance of nominalism in late medieval texts, against Huizinga’s downplaying of it.
20
Aquinas 1998, p. 439.
things ‘exist in two ways . . . in one way in singular and in another way in
the soul’, that is in things and in the intellect, and can be signified by
words.21 By contrast, the ‘nominalists’ or Ockhamists deny any uni-
versality in things, restricting it to concepts and names. General concepts
or names hook on to things by virtue of their similarity to (rather than
identity with) them.
Francisco Suárez, the Counter-Reformation scholastic writing at the
turn of the sixteenth century, delivers a rich, robust synthesis of the
medieval positions. Denying ‘that the nature is universal in reality’, he
argues that a particular individual is ‘placed under the species according
to mental comparison or logical consideration’.22 However, the basis for
conceptual universality is real similarity between the forms of individuals.
Forms do exist in things, but they are particular to individuals.23 ‘A man
consists of a body as matter and of a rational soul as form. Therefore, this
soul is the substantial form.’24 When we think generally about things we
compare similar individuals and abstract from them. While individual
substances might not share the same substantial form, they each have one,
and these can be known and named. Moreover, they can be compared on
the basis of real similarity and considered as one species with one essence
that has been abstracted from reality. There may not be an idyllic identity
between reality and perception but there is a beam that girds them
together and it is based on essential resemblance. Language can look
through to the world.
If we look to the end of the seventeenth century we find an Aris-
totelianism – filtered by a corpuscularian Blackloism – in Sergeant’s
Method.25 ‘The impressions from objects that affect the senses, and by
them the soul, do carry the very nature of those objects along with them,
and imprint them in the soul.’26 The essences of things, ideas in God
before their creation, exist both corporeally and intellectually. The ‘verity’
21
Aquinas 1998, p. 463.
22
Suárez 1982, p. 33 (cf. ibid: ‘Every thing, insofar as it exists in reality, be singular and individual’);
p. 30.
23
Suárez 1982, p. 107: ‘the specific notion is said to be taken absolutely from form. [This is so]
because it [i.e. form] confers the last complement, and presupposes only matter as something
potential and indifferent’; p. 109: ‘form is more than anything else the principle of individuation’.
24
Suárez 1982, p. 182.
25
Phemister (1993, p. 249) presents Aristotle as Sergeant’s ‘master-builder’. Southgate (2000) depicts
Sergeant as following in the vehemently anti-sceptical, pro-demonstration footsteps of Thomas
White.
26
Sergeant 1696, p. 2. Southgate (2000, pp. 296–8) explains that according to Sergeant’s empiricism,
atomic ‘effluvia’ from objects are present in the brain; N.B. also pp. 300–2, White’s and Sergeant’s
concerns about language and the trustworthiness of common use which embodies the common
sense of the community.
of our mental-linguistic judgements is based in their literal ‘conformity’
with things.27 Sergeant reveals the persistence of the view that concepts
are isomorphic with things, and that therefore words, which signify
concepts, import the world.
While concepts resemble things in the Aristotelian story, words do not
resemble their cargo, as the multiplicity of tongues proves. As Aristotle
elaborates in De interpretatione, ‘a noun is a sound having meaning
established by convention alone’.28
However, the arbitrary relationship between res and verba did not go
uncontested. The recovery of Plato’s Cratylus, together with various
Adamite, Hermetic, Cabalistic, Hieroglyphic, Neoplatonic and Chinese
traditions, advertised the possibility of a natural link between word and
thing.29 Hermogenes explains Cratylus’ position. ‘Every thing has a right
name of its own, which comes by nature, and . . . a name is not whatever
people call a thing by agreement . . . but . . . there is a kind of inherent
correctness in names, which is the same for all men, both Greeks and
barbarians’.30 Each thing has an ‘ideal name’ that manifests its ‘essence’ or
‘class’.31 As with Aristotle, an essentialist classificatory framework
underpins Plato’s theory of language. But, unlike Aristotle’s forms, Plato’s
ideas exist eternally, prior to and separate from the particular ephemera of
the material world. His dramatis personae spend the long central section of
the dialogue probing various etymologies, whose component parts sum up
the nature of the things named.32 Having come to the obstacle that these
component parts must themselves have conventional roots, Cratylus goes
on to explore the sounds of syllables themselves. He muses on their
onomatopoeic potential, for example on the ‘smoothness, softness’ of the
lambda and the ‘speed’ of ‘rho’. ‘Representing by likeness’ makes words
perfectly transparent. They become inherently instructive; ‘he who knows
the names knows also the things named’.33 Knowledge of this ideal
language is equivalent to philosophical knowledge. To know the words is
to know the things.
27
Sergeant 1696, pp. 4; 3; 118. 28 Aristotle 1938b, pp. 115; 117.
29
Coudert (1978) explores early-modern natural language theories. Katz (1981) traces the search for
Adam’s language, particularly its connection with Hebrew (pp. 141–5). Vickers (1984, pp. 97–115)
discerns a difference between the new science and magic on the basis of their subscription to
conventional/natural languages respectively. Bianchi (2002) explores the Natursprache in Böhme
and Paracelsus. See also Mercer (2000) on humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany.
30
Plato 1939, p. 7. 31 Plato 1939, pp. 27; 41; 45.
32
See Williams (1994) on the dialogue’s powerfully anti-mimetic conclusions; Sedley (1998) on the
contemporary seriousness of the mimetic proposal; Borchardt (1995) on its place in the renaissance.
33
Plato 1939, pp. 171; 169; 175.
I end this section by pulling out two spanners that Socrates throws in
to the works of Cratylus’ Eden. The first questions the rigid reality of the
verbal scheme with an example that was to resonate down the centuries:
the ‘unnatural birth’ which suggests that language might not map the
world. Socrates asks ‘if any offspring that is not human should be born
from a human being, should that offspring be called a human being’?34
The second criticism ends the dialogue. Incredulous at Cratylus’ pro-
posal, Socrates posits the ultimate alterity and opacity of words. Having
indulged in the fantasy of etymological investigation, he raises the pro-
blem of infinite regress. The elements that make up the etymologies are
themselves opaque signs. Onomatopoeia is no real refuge, limited in its
referential scope and itself dependent on convention.35
The Aristotelian–Platonic traditions do not transmit an immaculately

realist conception of language. In various ways the mind intervenes and
modifies the world, generalising from the particular. The world may not
be exactly the ordered place we describe. But notwithstanding these
destabilising factors, language is fastened tightly to the essences of things,
albeit arbitrarily – although the mirage of a natural link shimmers
seductively and tenaciously.
realist, essentialist hangovers: bacon, universal

language and the recovery of eden
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the transformation of
the multi-faceted but broadly Aristotelian world-view that had captivated
European philosophers. This process was as evolutionary as it was revo-
lutionary and it took many forms – which divided the ‘revolutionaries’
from each other as much as they were divided from their common enemy.
But, very generally speaking, the new philosophers rejected intentional
species and substantial forms as chimerical and replaced them with matter
and motion. The paradigm shift from animism to mechanism had radical
consequences not only for the linguistic classifications that supposedly
mapped the world, but also for language’s capacity to reach out to it and
grasp its core.36 However, as testament to the continuing mentalité,
34
Plato 1939, pp. 41; 39. 35 Plato 1939, pp. 131; 173–5.
36
On the relationship between science and language see: Jones (1965 and 1971) for the traditional
view of seventeenth-century antipathy towards language and its perceived incompatibility with
science; Waswo (1999a) on the ‘deontologizing’ of language in the renaissance (p. 28) and its
‘reontologizing’ (p. 33) in the seventeenth century; Waswo (1987) puts a similar point another way,
many philosophers maintained an essentialist and realist portrait of
language.37
Bacon occupies a pivotal position in this story not only because he
balances between Aristotelianism and atomism but also because he,
seminally, moves language to the centre of the philosophical stage. For
him it is both a renovative tool for, and an intractable obstacle to
knowledge. I turn first to his optimistic characterisation.
With Aristotle and Adam ringing in his ears, Bacon envisages a mar-
riage between mind and world. The latter is not to be shrunk to the poor
confines of the former, but ‘the understanding is rather to be expanded
and widened to receive the image of the universe as it is found to be’.38 In
his poetic crescendo to The Great Instauration, Bacon mines more visual
metaphors to demonstrate his plan:
All depends on keeping the mind’s eye fixed on things themselves, so that their
images are received exactly as they are. For God forbid that we should give out a
dream of our imagination for a pattern of the world; but may He rather grant of
His grace that we may write a revelation or true vision of the footsteps and
imprint of the Creator upon created things.39
noting a shift from ‘relational’ to ‘referential’ semantics; Foucault (1970) traces a move from a
‘resemblance’ (chapter 2) to a ‘representational’ (chapter 3) episteme, whereby words come out of
the world and transparently map it; Fish (1972, p. 381) on the triumph of the plain style; Vickers
(1984) on the distinctive attitude of the new scientists towards language; Monfasani (1988, p. 211)
on the new scientists’ ‘challenge’ to classical rhetoric; Salmon (1972) ascribes the seventeenth-
century’s ‘profound dissatisfaction with language’ (p. v) to scientific transformations, in addition
to persecution-driven migration and the explosion of trade (p. 3); Croll (1966) on the ‘plain’ effects
of science on style. A.C. Howell (1971) argues that with the development of the new science, ‘res’
changed its meaning from ‘subject matter’ to ‘things’ in the seventeenth century; while this verdict
overlooks the unstinting mentalism of the period (and the referential ambitions of the years
preceding) there was definitely an explicit turn towards the (metaphorical!) book of nature, as
opposed to the books of the ancients. For a wide variety of revisionist accounts, see Blair 1999;
Davies 1987; Dear 1985; Golinski 1990a; Kroll 1991; Kroll 1992, pp. 16–24; Rutherford 1995;
Steadman 1984; Stillman 1995; Vickers 1985; Vickers 1987.
37
See Dear (1988, pp. 170–200) on the new, essentialist linguistic systems of the seventeenth century
which ‘proposed that essential natures could be known behind appearances and that individuals
could be grouped into species accordingly’ (p. 188); Bolton (1998a) on the replacement of
Aristotelian essentialism with alternative forms.
38
Bacon 1994c, p. 304. Cf. Bacon (1994a, p. 13) on the near passive reception of the rays of things by
the mirror of the mind: ‘I, on the other hand, have not taken my attention off them longer than
was needed for their image and rays to meet (as happens in the case of vision) with the result that
very little is left for the power and superiority of intelligence.’ See Briggs (1989 (e.g. p. viii)) on
Bacon’s restorative project; Rossi (1986, p. 9) on Bacon’s ‘cult of nature’ which would ‘reestablish
contact between man and reality’. Snider (1994) argues that Bacon legitimated his project by
appropriating the power of the origo.
39
Bacon 1994a, p. 30.
Bacon’s new logic prepares ‘the bridal chamber of the mind and the
universe’, whose progeny will be ‘help for mankind’. Echoing the
Aristotelian ambition to get closer to what is ‘more knowable to nature’,
his axioms will be ‘such as Nature would really recognize as better known
to herself, and which lie at the very marrow of things’. The aim is nothing
less than a restoration of the understanding to its ‘original condition, or at
least to improve that commerce between Mind and Things’.40 Since it was
the ‘greed’ for moral, not natural, knowledge that caused Adam’s Fall, we
can and may recover that ‘pure and spotless natural knowledge’ if we
labour at it, thanks to God’s curse/dispensation that ‘in the sweat of thy
face shalt thou eat thy bread’.41 The remembering of primordial knowl-
edge includes the restitution of a language that perfectly reflects things,
that gives ‘names to all things according to their kind’.42 Drawing on the
powerful figurative reserves of vision, sexual intercourse and the garden of
Eden, Bacon paints a beguiling portrait of the possible union between the
mind (and language) and the world.43
Ideally, words should simply transcribe things, adding no interpreta-
tion of their own.44 Bacon’s ambition to make experience ‘literate’ evokes
an unmediated intimacy between language and experience.45 When he
advises on appropriate style, he instructs us to ‘avoid’ the ‘treasury of
eloquence’, and instead ‘set forth’ everything ‘briefly and concisely’. Here
words are submissive and loyal representatives of things; they are logically
interchangeable. Natural philosophers are ‘faithful secretaries, who only
40
Bacon 1994a, pp. 24–5; 21; 3.
41
Bacon 1994a, p. 15; 1994b, p. 292. See Sessions (1996) on the centrality of discontinuity (temporal,
representational and epistemological) since the Fall and for the ‘syncopated therapy’ (p. 47) of
Bacon’s work. On the relation of God and Adam to language, see Readings (1985). See Markley
(1993) on the rupture between the ineffable and absolute word of God and fallen language, and
contemporary attempts to accommodate the two; Bono (1995) on the divergence between the
Word of God and the languages of man. See also Aarsleff 1999. On the importance of Adam and
his Fall for the seventeenth century more generally see Almond 1999. Harrison 2002 and Poole
2005. See Smith (1989, p. 341) on the sectarian attempt in the mid-seventeenth century to make
human language ‘embody the divine’. See, by contrast, De Grazia (1995) on the secularisation of
language in the seventeenth century; Hunter (2000) on the desacralisation of philosophy;
Rudavsky (2001) on Galileo’s and Spinoza’s secularisation of theology.
42
Bacon 1994a, p. 15.
43
See Bennett and Mandelbrote (1998) on biblical metaphorical resources; Le Doeuff (1990) on
Baconian science as gardening; Merchant (1980) on extinguishing and raping nature.
44
He says that natural history must be ‘free of anything philological’, by which he refers to the
philologus, the hermeneut (1994a, p. 6).
45
Bacon 1994b, p. 109. According to McCanles (1990), Bacon submits to the impracticable desire for
Derridean presence.
take hold of and write down the laws of Nature themselves and nothing
else’.46
What are these things that language is meant devotedly to reflect? If
Interpretatio naturae goes according to plan, they are ‘forms’, or ‘true
specific differences’.47 These are not Aristotle’s fictional and teleological
substantial forms, but the ‘laws’ by which qualities or ‘simple natures’,
‘such as heat, light, weight,’ are produced.48 Forms do not really exist as
such, ‘for nothing truly exists in Nature except separate bodies per-
forming separate pure actions, in conformity with a law’. These laws or
forms exist ‘in philosophy’. They are the true genera of Nature, ‘better
known (notior naturae)’ to her.49 While Bacon has exiled souls from the
world, it is still organised essentially (though Bacon’s essences refer to
qualities such as yellowness, rather than substances such as ‘gold’). And
these natural essences and the laws that govern them can be perfectly
known and named.
Bacon’s belief that qualities are constitutive of substances is an experi-
ential way of describing the world which we shall see running through to
Locke. Instead of having one substantial essence, substances are:
a troop or collection of simple natures; thus in gold the following occur together:
that which is yellow; that which is heavy, up to a certain weight; that which is
malleable or ductile, to a certain extent; that which is not volatile, and is not
consumed by fire; that which becomes fluid, to a certain degree; that which can
be separated and dissolved by certain means; and so on, through all the natures
that are united in gold. An axiom of this kind therefore derives the thing from
the forms of simple natures.50
Substances are ‘compound forms’, or ‘conjunctions of simple natures
occurring in the ordinary course of the world’.51 Knowledge of ‘the forms
of yellowness, weight, ductility, fixity, fluidity, solutions, and so on, and
the means of superinducing them’ would enable alchemy52. Moreover,
substances or ‘species’ can be named unproblematically because we have
clear(ish) notions of them53. While Bacon’s specific ambitions for
substantial knowledge are subsequently discarded, his description of
substances as collections of simple qualities or appearances impacts for-
cefully on subsequent philosophers.
46
Bacon 1994c, pp. 303; 312. Cf. Vickers (1991 and 2000) on Bacon’s accommodation with language.
47
Bacon 1994b, p. 133. See Jardine (1990) and Malherbe (1996) on Baconian method; Rossi (1996,
p. 29) on Bacon’s ‘via media inter experimentiam et dogmata’.
48
Bacon 1994b, p. 170. 49 Bacon 1994b, pp. 170; 135; 137.
50
Bacon 1994b, p. 137. 51 Bacon 1994b, p. 169. 52 Bacon 1994b, pp. 137–8.
53
Bacon 1994b, pp. 46–7; 65.
The depth of Bacon’s belief in the intimacy of language and the world
also appears in his representation of the world as linguistic. As letters are
‘the elements of all discourse’, forms are, like ‘letters of the alphabet’, the
elements of nature.54 Writing in the grip of what Foucault has sugges-
tively, if problematically, characterised as the Renaissance episteme, which
sees nature rife with signs and resemblances, Bacon urges us to read what
Descartes calls ‘the great book of the world’.55 When the natural historian
writes out the world, he is copying ‘the volume of the works of God,
and . . . another book of holy scripture’. He should therefore attend to
the task ‘with a most religious care’. When we interpret nature we are
reading ‘the ideas of the divine mind . . . the genuine signatures and
marks impressed on created things, as they are found to be’.56
Bacon therefore balances between penetrative–essentialist and
superficial–experiential accounts of knowledge and language, between a
language of nature and a mirage of dynamic experience.
In addition to transforming the building blocks of language from
substances, qualities and experience, Bacon stimulates a plethora of lin-
guistic projects.57 When he comes to the ‘organ of tradition’ of ‘rational
knowledge’ in his navigation through learning, he finds that it is ‘not
enquired, but deficient’. While the most familiar and fruitful organ is
‘speech or writing’, words are not the only means of communicating
thoughts. Before we look at the alternatives, let us note the square
inclusion of thoughts in Bacon’s linguistic theory. ‘Words are the images
of cogitations’, he declares, expressly quoting Aristotle.58 However, while
Bacon takes mentalism for granted, he does not keep it to the fore. He
entitles the section ‘De notis rerum ’, begins it ‘These Notes of
Cogitations’, and concludes it with a discussion of ‘notes of things’. This
brings out the familiar ambiguity of the Latin res and its English
translation – ‘thing’. These terms waver between external objects and
54
Bacon 1994a, p. 26. Cf. 1994b, p. 122 for another comparison of forms to ‘the letters of the
alphabet’.
55
Descartes 1985c, p. 115. Foucault 1970, chapter 2 (although at pp. 51–2 he locates Bacon in the
‘representational’ episteme of the seventeenth century). See Maclean (1998) for a stunning
engagement with Foucault; Reiss (1973) for a version of Foucault’s argument; Roseman (1999) for a
Foucaultian reading of scholasticism. See Geneva (1995) on the continuing ‘symbolic universe’
(p. 264) in the seventeenth century; Drake (1973) on Galileo’s attempt to move language closer to
nature; Maclean (1984 and 2002) on natural and bodily signs respectively; Westerhoff (2001) on
Baroque pansemioticism.
56
Bacon 1994c, p. 311; 1994b, p. 49; cf. 1994b, p. 126: ‘the Creator’s true stamp upon created things,
printed and defined on matter by true and precise lines’.
57
See Eco (1995) for an overview of the two thousand year old quest for the perfect language.
58
Bacon 1996b, pp. 231; 230.
internal thoughts and are often used to refer to both. This confusion signals
a general forgetfulness – or repression – by early-modern philosophers, of
the tripartite linguistic paradigm to which they subscribe.
There are two forms of notae rerum. One is ‘ex congruo’ and has ‘some
similitude or congruity with the notion’.59 While Bacon himself rejects
‘Plato’s’ proposals, these recall Cratylic, as well as Adamic, names.60
Bacon’s congruent names include ‘Hieroglyphs’, or Egyptian ideograms.
‘Gestures’ or ‘transitory Hieroglyphs’ are also ranked in the category of
natural signs. He exemplifies them with the story of Periander who
communicated his intention to restrain rebellious nobles by cutting off
the tops of the tallest flowers in his garden. The second form of notes are
established ‘ad placitum, having force only by contract or acceptation’.61
As well as words, these include ‘Real Characters’ which bypass (spoken)
words and represent ‘things and notions’ directly62. There must be as
many characters as there are ‘radical words’63. Chinese is Bacon’s example
of this kind of arbitrary script, unmediated by sound, which ‘can be read
off by each nation in their own language’ and which captures the fecund
imaginations of his successors.64 In 1669 John Webb, for example, writes
An Historical Essay Endeavouring a Probability that the Language of the
empire of China is the Primitive Language. Bacon’s brief exhortations are
the seeds of the universal or philosophical language projects that flourish
between his death and about 1680. In addition to facilitating international
communication, these projects aim to bring language closer to things.65
In addition to Babel, Adam towers over seventeenth-century writers. As
Milton ventriloquises for the first philosophical speaker:
I nam’d them, as they pass’d, and understood
Their nature, with such knowledge God endu’d
My sudden apprehension66
Early-modern philosophers, and the philosophical language theorists in
particular, yearn to recover this language that contained the nature of things.
59
Bacon 1857, iv, p. 440; 1996b, p. 231. See Aarsleff 1982, pp. 278–92, and Vickers 1984.
60
Bacon 1857, iv, p. 441.
61
Bacon 1996b, p. 231. See Ashworth (1990) on the relationship between emblems (natural signs) and
natural history; Bono (1999) on the eclipse of the emblematic world view; Russell (1999) on the
emblematic genre in the Renaissance.
62
Bacon 1857, iv, p. 439. 63 Bacon 1996b, p. 230.
64
Bacon 1857, iv, p. 439. See Mungello (1998) on European philosophical responses to China.
65
Bacon himself follows his discussion of notae rerum with a proposal for a ‘philosophical grammar’
that might provide ‘an antidote against the curse of the confusion of tongues’ (1957, iv, pp. 440–1),
a juxtaposition of themes that subsequent writers would fuse.
66
Milton 1989, pp. 184–5. Locke owned Paradise Lost (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 189).
Some take the high road of natural signs. In his China illustrata (1677)
Athanasius Kircher explains how, following the Egyptians, Chinese
writing is based ‘on pictures drawn from natural things’, such as ‘animals,
birds, reptiles, herbs’. ‘There are as many characters as there are concepts
which the mind wishes to express’.67 This comment reminds us that
despite all the talk about things in this movement, we are still firmly in a
mentalist frame. Kircher’s own Ars magna sciendi sive combinatoria (1669)
is a massive ‘key’ to all things, reminiscent of the Lullist, encyclopaedic
tradition.68 Its basic ‘elements’, out of which everything can be expressed
by means of their ‘combination’, are supposedly self-explanatory pictures,
such as õ and.69 Another remarkable exemplar of this tradition is
John Bulwer’s Chirologia, or, The Natural Language of the Hand, Com-
posed of the Speaking Motions, and Discoursing Gestures thereof (1644). This
applauds gesture which, being ‘purely naturall, not positive’ speaks louder
than words. This non-verbal form of communication is universally and
immediately intelligible. ‘Our pregnant minde’ is not nearly so well
delivered by the vocal ‘midwife’. Bulwer locates his project within the
twin religious contexts of Adam and Babel – whose falling self and
tumbling walls missed ‘this naturall language of the hand’.70
While the idyll of the divine tongue lies behind most reformatory
language schemes of the period, for some enthusiastic contemporaries it is
much more than a dream. Jacob Boehme was lucky enough to be blessed
with divine sight, ‘to see through the poisonful heart of the basilisk, and
see the day of restitution of all whatever Adam lost’71. His Signatura
rerum (1635) discloses ‘the language of nature’, the ‘essences and forms’ of
things72. His Clavis (1642) explains that those whom God has inspired
can read this ‘living outflowing word of God’.73 John Webster, an
admirer of the ‘divinely-inspired Teutonick’, echoes the desire for ‘the
true original tongue’. Nature is ‘so many significant and lively characters,
or hieroglyphicks of his invisible power, providence and divine wisdom’.
Webster’s is an essentialist world which we know via the senses.74 Feeling
67
Kircher 1987, pp. 217; 214; 214–15. Locke owned this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 166). See
Elsky 1989 and Singer 1995. Cornelius (1965) investigates the relationship between the imaginary
languages that are reported from imaginary voyages, and the scientific interest in rediscovering or
making a perfect or artificial language that represents reality.
68
See Rossi (2000) on this tradition. 69 Kircher 1669, sig. V2r [p. 155]; sig. Ss4v [p. 328].
70
Bulwer 1644, sig. B2r [p. 3]; sig. B2v [p. 4]; sig. B4r [p. 7].
71
Boehme 1912, p. 64. 72 Boehme 1912, p. 12.
73
Boehme 1647, p. 20. See Coudert (1991) on the search for the divine language in the century;
Thune (1948) for a study of the Behemenists and Philadelphians in England.
74
J. Webster 1970, pp. 90; 101; 103; 108.
keenly ‘the general blindness, and curse upon the sons of Adam’, he
vacillates between wanting a universal language of arbitrary symbols which
would ‘repair the ruines of Babell’, and ‘the paradisical language of the
out-flown word which Adam understood while he was unfaln in Eden’.75
Many of Bacon’s successors take his injunction to investigate notae
rerum as an order to make language mirror the corresponding orders of
thoughts and things. In doing so, they are like Janus, looking back to
Adam and forward to their new philosophical invention. They want to
wipe clean the old, erroneous slate, and forge a language that fits the new –
or not so new – world they are discovering in the scientific ferment of the
period. Comenius expresses frustration with unrealistic language in his Via
lucis (1668). ‘Words are attached to things without regard to the nature of
the things themselves.’76 In his Janua he declares, ‘without boasting’, that
‘I shew thee the whole world, and all the latin tongue’. In the thick of this
compendious volume, in the section on the body, the entry on the ‘eye’ is
instructive of the sense-based realism of the author. It is ‘a looking glasse,
receiving into it selfe the resemblances of things set before it’.77 The mind
is not an obstacle, or even a modifier of the world, but serves as a clear
channel to language, or, as he puts it in Via lucis, ‘a funnel through which
wisdom would flow’. The ‘course’ of the ‘universal language’ ought to be
‘parallel with the course of things’. There ought to be as many names as
there are things, and the words should be joined ‘with the utmost precision
as things are joined to each other’. Comenius even toys with the ‘har-
monious’ potential of this language; by ‘its very sounds it would express
the essential qualities and characteristics of things’.78
Cynical about the restoration of a naturally significant language of
nature, but sympathetic to the universalist and encyclopaedic cause, a
flurry of gentlemen build their own linguistic arks.79 While Seth Ward
lampoons Webster for his ‘hieroglypticall’ pretensions, he does not stint
from carving out a role for a ‘universall character’ in his riposte (Vindiciae
academiarum, 1654).80 Having thought he could devise symbols ‘for every
thing and notion’, but finding them too many, he alighted on the idea
of making symbols stand for ‘simple notions’ which could then be
75
J. Webster 1970, pp. 77; 106; 107; 109. 76 Comenius 1938, p. 185.
77
Comenius 1643, sig. D1v; sig. F3v. 78 Comenius 1938, pp. 186; 183; 186.
79
On the universal language movement, see Cram 1985; Clauss 1995; DeMott 1958; Knowlson 1975
and 1995; Stillman 1995. See Salmon (1972) on the movement in general and on Lodwick in
particular; Slaughter (1982) on the continuing essentialist taxonomic Aristotelianism of the
projects. Formigari (1988, p. 133) notes the continuity between mystical and universal language
theorists, both concerned for language to mirror reality.
80
Ward 1970, p. 214. On his debate with Webster see Debus 1968 and Debus 1970.
‘compounded’ and thereby ‘represent to the very eye all the elements of
their composition, & so deliver the natures of things’. This would be
‘reall learning’. Indeed, preens Ward, it ‘might not unjustly be termed a
naturall language’ because the word would reflect the composite nature of
the thing. Revealing the way in which the mind was considered little
obstruction to the world, as well as an integral part of language, Ward
rebuts Webster’s accusations of unreal academic speech with the
following rhetorical questions. ‘Was there ever, or can there be a dis-
putation about anything else but notions? Would he have them bring
forth bread and cheese and dispute de gustibus?’81
Lodwick enters the field energetically. The language described in Of an
Universall Reall Caracter (c. 1663) will, if underpinned by philosophical
insight, ‘much assist to the true knowledge of things’.82 In his Ground-
Work, or Foundation Laid, (or so intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect
Language (1652), it looks as though it is the old hylomorphic world that is
the basis for his language: he explains how proper names ought to be
gathered under their ‘species or individuums’, such as ‘man’ or ‘horse’.
He also reminds us that mentalism is compatible with realism. Speech, he
tells us, is the ‘expression of the minde or thoughts’.83 George Dalgarno, a
particularly sophisticated member of the movement, is predominantly
concerned that his universal language serve the cause of universal com-
munication more than the truth of things.84 However, an unmistakably
philosophical motivation still seeps into his plans. When he announces
them in his News to the Whole World, he declares that his language ‘shall
be more accommodated for an emphatick delivery of real truths’.85 In his
Ars signorum, vulgo character universalis et lingua philosophica (1661),
Dalgarno explains that in order to know what ‘signs’ are needed, it is first
necessary to examine ‘the nature of things themselves’, metaphysics and
logic paralleling grammar just as signs parallel signified.86 Again, although
language is being brought closer to nature thereby, the mind does not
disappear from the equation. It is the sounds that are eradicated, not
the ‘affections of the mind’.87 At about the same time (c. 1661) Isaac Newton
drafted Of an Universall Language. His was intended to be ‘deduced . . .
from ye natures of things themselves’.88 It begins with ‘an alphabeticall table
81
Ward 1970, pp. 215; 216; 235. 82 Lodwick 1972b, fo. 34v [p. 225].
83
Lodwick 1972a, sig. B2v [p. 211]; sig. A3r [p. 204]. 84 Cram and Maat 2001, pp. 22; 29.
85
Dalgarno 2001b, p. 110. 86 Dalgarno 2001c, p. 177.
87
Dalgarno 2001a, p. 90. See Cram and Maat (2001) for an incisive analysis of Dalgarno’s projects,
and particularly for his pragmatic (as opposed to realistic) approach to logico-linguistic schemes.
88
Newton 1957, p. 7. See Elliott 1957, pp. 1–7.
of all substances (as of Angell, House, Man, I, thou, hee,) or affections (as
glorious thing, beautiful thing, loving thing . . . )’. These ‘bare names of
things’, symbolically represented, are then related to each other in the same
way that the things themselves are related.89
John Wilkins’ Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical
Language (1668) is the most extravagant English contribution to the
movement. He emphasises the interdependence of language and true
knowledge. ‘The theory it self, upon which such a design were to be
founded, should be exactly suited to the nature of things.’ He lays out the
‘universal philosophy’, or ‘a just enumeration of all such things and
notions, to which names are to be assigned’. His ‘real character’ is the
‘shortest and plainest way for the attainment of real knowledge’.90 In a
way that is reminiscent of Porphyry’s tree, of mnemonic–encyclopaedic
arts, of Ramus’ dichotomous charts and Bacon’s tables of experience, he
carves the universe into its constituent parts. Dalgarno claimed that
Wilkins follows ‘that which is called new philosophy’, rejecting essenti-
alist definitions because ‘the formes of things, if there were any such, were
unknown to us’.91 Certainly, the tables themselves stray far beyond nat-
ure, classifying things as diverse and manufactured as ‘pickling’, ‘contract’
and ‘calumny’.92 The descriptions of substances in the tables consist of
superficial and practical details, such as ‘flint’, which Wilkins elucidates as
‘more knobbed and unequal; used for the striking of fire’.93 However, in
the preparatory material, he sounds far more committed to the essen-
tialised, knowable world of Aristotelian logicians. He has drawn up, he
tells us, ‘tables of substance, or the species of natural bodies, reduced
under their several heads’. Recalling the simple, almost passively received
concepts of the scholastics which are incapable of truth or falsity, he
explains that he has reduced ‘all simple things and notions’ into his
tables.94 Resurrecting those unitary apprehensions of substances that one
might expect him to leave for dead, he refers to ‘that conceit which men
have in their minds concerning a horse or tree’ which is ‘the notion or
mental image of that beast, or natural thing’.95 (Note, again, the Aris-
totelian mentalism that is not an object but a passage to reality.) When he
89
Newton 1957, pp. 7; 8.
90
Wilkins 1968, pp. 21; 20; sig. b1v. For an archival archaeology of the movement that produced
Wilkins’ Essay and of the work itself, see Lewis 2003. For various interpretations of Wilkins’
project see Aarsleff (1982, pp. 239–77) on its Adamic/conventional nature; Davies (1987) on
Wilkins’ purely figural map of things; Subbiondo (1992) for an appraisal of the context and
content of Wilkins’ Essay and his aim for an isomorphism between language and reality.
91
Dalgarno 2001d, pp. 367–8. 92 Wilkins 1968, pp. 261; 263; 273.
93
Wilkins 1968, p. 61. 94 Wilkins 1968, sig. b2v. 95 Wilkins 1968, p. 20.
comes to ‘natural grammar’, he declares that some of the radical words, or
‘integrals’, ‘signifie some entire thing or notion: whether the ens or thing
itself, or the essence: of a thing’.96 Regardless of the contradictory currents
that run through Wilkins’ Essay, pulling it now to reality and the
scholastic textbooks of his youth, now to appearance and the mechanised
vision of his peers, its ambition is clear and familiar: to map the world as
we know it.97 His characters are compounded in such a way that ‘we
should, by learning the character, and the names of things, be instructed
likewise in their natures’.98
All these writers are engaged in bringing language into congruence with
things. Sprat echoes this desire in his History of the Royal-Society (1667). He
wants a return to the time ‘when men deliver’d so many things, in almost
an equal number of words’.99 While this pervasive and polemical dualism
must not blind us either to the simultaneous mentalism of these most
‘thing’-focused of language theorists,100 or to the wide scope of the word
‘thing’, neither should we be deaf to the hushed elision of the difference
between concepts and things that gives the impression of an unmediated
language of things.101 The mind does not obviously distort the world for
any of these theorists, even if they differ about what kind of world it
represents. In the logics we saw a realist, essentialist view of language. We
see this duplicated by seventeenth-century philosophers of language who
also blithely propose a language that names things essentially.
realist, essentialist hangovers: rationalist

penetration
One might think that the Cartesians, distrusting the senses, would proffer
a severely curtailed account of referential language. However, their words
remain stringently connected to the world in two ways. First, in a move
central to the new philosophy, Descartes’ rejection of the Aristotelian
isomorphism between experience and reality is softened by his claim that
our sensations are caused by things even though they do not resemble
96
Wilkins 1968, p. 298.
97
See Cram and Maat (2001, pp. 26–9) on Wilkins’ complex approach to his Aristotelian heritage
and on his agreements and disputes with Dalgarno; Aarsleff (1982, pp. 262–4) on the failure of
Wilkins’ predetermined inventory to capture the variety of things, as evidenced by John Ray’s
complaints about the unnatural constraints of the botanical tables; DeMott (1957) on the
antipathy between natural science and the rigid universal language projects.
98
Wilkins 1968, p. 21. 99 Sprat 1959, p. 113. 100 E.g. Wilkins 1968, p. 20.
101
In a moment of reflection on the issue that is rare in early-modern texts, Hobbes (1981, p. 16) tells us
that a ‘thing’ or res is any ‘nominatum’, whether existent or purely thought.
them.102 Second, and with a confidence which rivals the Aristotelians,
Descartes, by substituting the eye of the mind for the real eye, makes
up for the poor representational content of our sensations and arrives at
real description. By overturning Aristotle’s dictum that all natural
knowledge must be derived from the senses, Descartes meets the sceptic
head-on.103 He puts the sceptic in checkmate by moving in the queenly
intellect, a faculty completely independent of the weak and fictionalising
senses: ‘even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty
of imagination but by the intellect alone’.104 Descartes’ confidence in the
power of the intellect should not lead us to ignore the obstructions that
he feels the sensations, images and passions of the body pose to that
power.105 One of the most treacherous of all sensible things is language.
In his second meditation, in trying to discover what this ‘I’ is that
necessarily exists, he gets tangled in the infinite regresses of scholastic
definitions, and moves deeper into the gloom, from ‘man’, to ‘rational’,
to ‘animal’. Only after wrenching himself out of this verbal hole and
proceeding to probe his extended ‘self’ does he come to what he truly is:
res cogitans.106 However, for the most part, the tug of the body is sup-
pressed – or repressed? – by the might of the intellect. Descartes emerges
as a striking realist. Objects that ‘formally’ exist in the world exist
‘objectively’ in the mind: ‘although the reality which I am considering in
my ideas is merely objective reality, I must not on that account suppose
that the same reality need not exist formally in the causes of my ideas, but
that it is enough for it to be present in them objectively’.107
102
Descartes 1984a, p. 55.
103
Descartes 1985c, p. 129. Descartes adds to the ancient sceptical challenge the possibility (which he
rejects) that there might not be a world outside at all and that it might all be a dream (1984a,
p. 15).
104
105
See Moriarty (2003) for a brilliant and complex account of how early-modern French thinkers –
Descartes, Pascal and Malebranche in particular – are suspicious of experience, with regard not
only to nature, but to morality and theology too. He gives the important caveat that while
Descartes does dismiss experience in some ways, he also reinstates our ‘ordinary, embodied way of
experiencing, coloured, however with a new understanding of its significance for us’ (p. 249).
106
Descartes 1984a, pp. 16–17.
107
Descartes 1984a, p. 29. Yolton (2000) argues that Descartes is a realist for whom objects become
known with ‘no ontic switch’ (p. 585). See Behan (2000) for a modified, historicised view which
locates Descartes in the context of scholastic formal signs; Ayers (1998b, p. 1066) on Descartes’ view
that objects such as the sun have ‘objective’ existence in the mind and ‘formal’ existence in the
world. Hausman and Hausman (1997) attribute to Descartes ‘intentional ideas’ (p. xiv), which
thereby (p. 26) escape the problem of representation. McCracken (1998) argues that while for
Descartes, sensation tells us nothing qualitative about body, it plays ‘an indispensable rôle in the
proof that bodies exist’ (p. 628). Schmaltz (1997) proposes that Descartes has a nativist account of
sensation which, motivated by his rejection of scholastic theory, is not as strange as it first appears.
Descartes gets the courage of his convictions from his belief that
‘everything that we clearly and distinctly understand is true’, a belief he
derives from the argument that God (who so exceeds Descartes that
Descartes could not have invented him) cannot deceive because this
would be to attribute to him an impossible imperfection.108 The irre-
sistibility of clear and distinct cognition is invoked to fill the gaps and
silence the questions in his demonstrations. In a somewhat circular move,
he even uses it to prove God’s existence.109 The ‘mental gaze’ delivers
essences that are ‘immutable and eternal, and not invented by me or
dependent on my mind’.110 We have clear and distinct ideas of the two
substances that exist (corporeal and intelligent) and of their essences.
‘Extension in length, breadth and depth constitutes the nature of cor-
poreal substance; and thought constitutes the nature of thinking sub-
stance.’ Mind and body are divided from each other by a ‘real
distinction’.111 Meditating towards the truth, Descartes leads us from his
room, with its hot fire that melts the wax, into his mind. Purely intel-
lectually, albeit struggling through sense and language, it grasps the
‘extension of the wax’, while the misleading, subjective images fall away.
His inconstant sense perceptions (the faint, sweet ‘taste of honey’, or the
fading ‘scent of the flowers from which it is gathered’, or ‘hard’ or ‘soft’
before and after heating) are not inherent to wax. Instead, its properties
are ‘extended, flexible and changeable’. The mind strips away sensation to
reveal true ideas. With steely precision, even violation, the infallible ‘I’
‘distinguish[es] the wax from its outward forms – take[s] the clothes off,
as it were, and consider[s] it naked’.112
Descartes submits that there are certain ‘eternal truths’ or ‘common
notions’, such as: ‘it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the
same time; what is done cannot be undone; he who thinks cannot but exist while
he thinks’.113 These are ‘speculative truths which are known solely by means
of the natural light’.114 These maxims (the like of which Locke will drown in
scorn) enable us to reason to deep truths about the world. For example:
we can . . . easily come to know a substance by one of its attributes, in virtue of
the common notion that nothingness possesses no attributes, that is to say, no
properties or qualities. Thus, if we perceive the presence of some attribute, we
108
Descartes 1984a, pp. 9; 43. See Larmore (1998, pp. 1171–3) on Descartes’ inference from certainty
to realist truth.
109
Descartes 1984a, p. 47. 110 Descartes 1984a, pp. 44–5. 111 Descartes 1985e, pp. 210; 213.
112
Descartes 1984a, pp. 21; 20–1; 22. 113 Descartes 1985e, p. 209.
114
can infer that there must also be present an existing thing or substance to which
it may be attributed.115
Descartes’ scepticism, his promulgated tentativeness, is a brash con-
trivance for a comprehensive account of the mechanistic truth about
things. He threatens to cut the world loose from our mind when he
repudiates the Aristotelian view that our perceptions somehow resemble
the things that cause them.116 But while this novel disjunction will pro-
ceed to make less self-assured philosophers question the referential
capacity of their words, it is no obstacle to Descartes.
Freed from the sceptic’s shackles, Descartes’ descendants devise simi-
larly essentialist and holistic dualist accounts of things. In De la recherche
de la verité (1674–5), the book which was to provoke from Locke an
excoriating review, Malebranche’s universals are eternal, immutable
entities, existing independently of human minds. They are in God, who is
‘the intelligible world, or the place of the spirits, as the material world is
the place of bodies’. We can understand these ideas by virtue of our soul’s
union with God.117 For Spinoza in his Ethics (1677), there is one sub-
stance with infinite attributes of which we know two – the material and
intellectual. They run in parallel with each other, as two aspects of the
same thing.118
This foray into Cartesian philosophy serves two functions in my
argument. The first is to counter the widespread assumption in the sec-
ondary literature that Cartesians considered language solely as the
expression of thought, and that this constituted a rival theory of lan-
guage.119 They did indeed, as we saw in the Grammaire and the Logique of
115
Descartes 1985e, p. 210. For another example see p. 288.
116
Descartes 1985b, p. 81. Della Rocca (2002) emphasises Descartes’ double commitment to certainty
and doubt. Romanowski (1973) gives a distinctive account of the tension between science and
discourse in Descartes. Jolley (1992, p. 417) describes Descartes’ pioneering and influential role in
demolishing Aristotelianism and replacing it with the mechanical worldview. Garber (2001)
emphasises the importance of Descartes’ physics in his wider project.
117
Malebranche 1694, i.iii, pp. 124; 121. Locke had this translation (Harrison and Laslett 1965,
pp. 182–3). See Larmore (1998, pp. 1174–5) on Malebranche’s concession to the sceptic that we
cannot demonstrate the existence of material objects (which does not deter his otherwise grand
and dogmatic claims for the truths of reason). On his fight with Arnauld over whether ideas are
objects or acts of perception see Yolton 1987, pp. 319–23. Kremer (1997) characterises Arnauld as a
representationalist, an interpretation for which he admits ‘there is little direct textual evidence’
(p. 77). Cf. Nadler (2000, pp. 4–5) on the anti-sceptical nature of Malebranche’s doctrine of
‘vision in God’.
118
Spinoza 1994, pp. 9; 33. See Aquila (1978) on the identity of thought and object in Spinoza. Locke
owned the Ethics in Spinoza’s Opera posthuma (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 238).
119
On its rival status see Cohen 1977, p. xxi, and Padley 1985 and 1988, i. Chomsky (1966) singles out
the Cartesians as presaging his own innatist, ‘deep structure’ linguistic theories. See Salmon (1972
pp. 12 and 34) on the Chomskianism of the universal language projects; Aarsleff (1982, pp. 101–19)
Port-Royal, give an elaborate account of the mental discourse that
informs the verbal. However, in so doing they were continuing an
immemorial logical tradition. Moreover, these manuals keep the world in
their sights, as we saw. The Cartesians do tend to collapse ‘things’ into
‘ideas’, rather than ‘ideas’ into ‘things’ (although they often subsume
them under the traditional and confused ‘choses’).120 Descartes explains
that we ‘use words, or put together other signs . . . in order to declare our
thoughts to others’.121 In his Philosophical Discourse concerning Speech,
conformable to Cartesian Principles (1668) Louis Gérauld de Cordemoy
declares that ‘to speak is in general nothing else, but to give signes of our
thoughts’.122 But to leave us in no doubt about Descartes’ simultaneous
commitment to linguistic reference and to give us a taste of things to
come – when the world really does fall away from language – let us look at
a testy interchange between him and Hobbes over the ‘truth’ delivered by
language. Hobbes objects that ‘the inferences in our reasoning tell us
nothing at all about the nature of things, but merely tell us about the
labels applied to them’.123 Descartes replies with uncontained derision
that:
when we reason, this is not a linking of names but of the things that are signified
by the names, and I am surprised that the opposite view should occur to any-
one . . . And surely on his account, when he concludes that the mind is a motion
he might just as well conclude that the earth is sky, or anything else he likes.124
The Cartesians, in conjunction with their exceptionally explicit
account of mentalism, had no qualms about the realist scope of their
words – which brings me to my second point. Their language is ambi-
tious, embracing the whole world and piercing its essence.
for a criticism of Chomsky; Bracken (1984, pp. 113–23) and Hacking (1988) for ripostes to Aarsleff’s
anti-Chomskianism. See Maclean (1999) for a comparison of Aristotelian and Cartesian mental
language; Hacking (1975b, p. 33) on mental discourse as the language that mattered generally to
philosophy in ‘the heyday of ideas’; Sorabji (1982) on the predominance of discursive thought in
ancient theories of cognition. On the priority of thought over language and its connection to
Cartesian dualism see Buroker 1997. Cottingham (1997) argues that ‘Descartes unequivocally
advanced the claim that there is no thought without language’ (p. 30), which thereby undermines
the notion of ‘Cartesian privacy’ (p. 32).
120
Descartes 1964–74, xi , p. 4: ‘vous sçavez bien que les paroles, n’ayant aucune ressemblance avec
les choses qu’elles signifient’.
121
Descartes 1985c, p. 140.
122
Cordemoy 1668, sig. A7v (following the second A4; verso side of British Library pagination p. 7).
Locke had a version of this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 116); cf. MS. Locke c. 25, fo. 26r
where Cordemoy’s name appears in Locke’s journal index for 1677.
123
Descartes 1984b, p. 125.
124
Descartes 1984b, pp. 125; 126. For a reading of Hobbes’ and Descartes’ contrasting views on the
relationship between language and consciousness see Ross 1988.
the human intervention
The dominant view that language represents the world that we have seen
promulgated by pedagogues and philosophers alike was undercut by a
radically different story which had also been passed down the centuries, to
be reinvented in the seventeenth century. According to this story, the
meaning of words is determined less by external reference than by human,
communal invention. There are two connected elements in this alter-
native approach to language. The first identifies linguistic origins in
mutable and unscientific common usage. The second is rooted in a
broadly defined scepticism and stresses the interpretative, subjective
content of our referential words. The first differs from the realist pro-
gramme in emphasis, rather than being theoretically incompatible with it,
whereas the second threatens to jettison the world altogether from the
language–mind–world equation.
We have already met the first element in the conflict between gram-
marians. The battle lines were drawn between use and the world as the
source of linguistic structure. The use-based proposal spills out of, as it
doubtless spills into, a more general belief in the cultural contingency of
language, loudly championed by renaissance humanists. In his attack on
the ‘pseudodialecticians’ (1519), Vives argues that it is wrong ‘to use a self-
invented speech instead of that which other men use’. In his sights are the
unintelligible liberties of the scholastics. ‘The people’ are the authors of
language to whom grammar, dialectic and rhetoric should pay lip ser-
vice.125 We remember Lamy bemoaning the irrevocably democratic
‘tyranny of custom’.126
Another facet of this theme is the stress on the deep arbitrariness of the
relation between words and things. Conventionalism is by no means
inconsistent with a realist view of language. Indeed, most realists sign up
to this position. However, they tend not to dwell on it, whereas those
writers who focus more on the human than the natural sphere highlight
the sovereign role of human will in the creation of meaning. In A Dis-
course of the Knowledg of Beasts (1657), Marin Cureau de la Chambre
explains that ‘speech is not a natural sign, but a sign of institution, which
hath no signification but that which is imposed on it by the agreement
and consent made amongst those which use it’. If speech is only the
arbitrary association of certain words with certain things, then we can
teach language to animals, as when we cojoin the sound ‘bread’ to the
125 126
Vives 1979, p. 55. Lamy 1986, p. 207.
thing we give to a hungry parrot.127 Hobbes voices the controversial
opinion that language always was arbitrary; even Adam’s language did not
naturally denote things. Ambivalent on the matter in Leviathan, Hobbes
initially declares that ‘the first author of speech was God himself, that
instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sight’.
However, he goes on to say that ‘the Scripture goeth no further in this
matter’ and muses that God’s initial and limited authorisation ‘was suffi-
cient to direct him to adde more names, as the experience and use of the
creatures should give him occasion’.128 In De homine Hobbes wages an all-
out assault on the theory of Edenic speech. Even ‘the first man, by his own
will imposed names on just a few animals’. ‘Speech could not have had a
natural origin except by the will of man himself.’ Having reminded his
readers of ‘the confusion of languages at Babel’, he ridicules as ‘childish’
those who say that ‘names have been imposed on single things according to
the nature of those things. For who could have it so when the nature of
things is everywhere the same while languages are diverse? And what
relationship hath a call (that is, a sound) with an animal (that is, a body)?’129
Pufendorf repeats Hobbes’ cynicism about Adamic speech. Although
one might find significant etymological roots in Adam’s words, those
‘primitives . . . signify merely at pleasure’. Pufendorf gives the following
example: ‘though Adam gave this reason for the name Eve, Because she was
the mother of all living; yet [that] the word Hava should import to live, is
absolutely owing to imposition’.130 This repudiation of the possibility of
natural language evokes an original and unbridgeable gap between lan-
guage and the world. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Felton
reiterates the Ovidian prospect of unstoppable linguistic mutation.
‘Languages, like our Bodies, are in a perpetual flux, and stand in need of
recruits to supply the place of those words that are continually falling off
thro’ disuse.’131
While linguistic conventionalism does not necessarily entail unrealistic
language, it could intimate it. Sextus Empiricus goes so far as to make the
link explicit in his influential Hypotyposes (translated into Latin by Henri
Etienne in 1562).132 By contrast with cultural concepts, natural science is
supposed to be ‘a thing that is firm and invariable’, being dependent on
external existences and independent of our wills. However, because ‘the
significance of names is based on convention and not on nature’, Sextus
127
Cureau de la Chambre 1657, pp. 266; 264–5. See Serjeantson (2001) on the signification of the
passions in animal speech in early-modern philosophy.
128
Hobbes 1996, p. 24. 129 Hobbes 1993, pp. 38; 39. 130 Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 276.
131
Felton 1971, p. 101. 132 Larmore 1998, p. 1145.
asks rhetorically, ‘how would it be possible for a science capable of
dividing a name into its significations to exist’? Logic cannot be ‘as some
imagine, a ‘‘science of things which signify and are signified’’ ’.133 Sextus
extends arbitrariness beyond the words and into their meanings.
The content of words about the world is a matter of convention, not
external reference. Sextus exemplifies language’s fluid foundation with
Anaxagoras’ provocative proof that ‘snow is white’: ‘snow is frozen water,
and water is black; therefore snow also is black’.134
According to this way of thinking about language, words seem cut
adrift from any real foundation, yoked instead to the ephemeral (mis)
understandings of human communities. It has been suggested that the
humanists’ elevation of use indicates the ‘deontologisation’ of language,
whereby meaning is determined by the relation of signs to each other,
rather than by reference out of the system of signs, to the signified. But
this is an anachronistic, Saussurean interpretation.135 In itself, the
emphasis on use as the maker of meaning does not jeopardise the capacity
of words to refer to the world, which, as we have seen in Aristotle and
beyond, they can do perfectly arbitrarily. However, while there is no
fundamental incongruity between usage and reference, the focus on the
former at the expense of the latter is an alternative focus. And it paints an
alternative portrait of language – one grounded more in its speakers than
in the things it is supposed to represent.
This is a picture that comes into sharp focus in the context of scepticism.
This second element in the alternative view of language is not uncon-
nected to the first, but is also bound up with the questioning, pro and con,
rhetorical humanistic culture. By ‘scepticism’ I refer not only to the
ripples of ancient theories that reached the sixteenth century, Academic as
well as Pyrrhonian, but also (and often relatedly) to doubts about the fit
between conventional (often Aristotelian) concepts–words and the world,
and, more generally, to fears about human weakness and fallibility. It is
crucial to note that this conglomeration of uncertainties nestles cheek by
jowl with the self-assurance of new philosophical developments. As we have
already begun to see, many of the new philosophers who raise questions
about the imagination of man and about the correspondence between
133
Sextus 1976, p. 291. 134 Sextus 1976, p. 23.
135
Waswo (1987) argues for a ‘relational’ semantics (p. 3) in the renaissance, a view he develops in
Waswo 1999a, where he maintains that the meaning of a word was constituted by use (p. 29). See
Monfasani (1989) for a critique of Waswo and an assertion of Valla’s (Waswo’s main example)
‘referential’ theory of meaning (p. 317); Maclean (1992, pp. 1–8) for balanced assessment of the issues.
language and the world propose realist schemes of their own with as much
conviction as they pull down the old ones. While ancient scepticism is
certainly not the central and exclusive motor of philosophical change, new
philosophers instead being concerned to discover and re-describe the world,
these assertive re-descriptions are not incompatible with a spectrum of
suspicions about the erring thinker/speaker. Indeed, they are bound tightly
together. I turn first to the extreme end of the spectrum – to the barrier that
sensation puts between language and the world.
Sextus explains that the Pyrrhonist draws no connection between
appearance and reality. He ‘announces his own impression in an
undogmatic way, without making any positive assertion regarding the
external realities’.136 The inconsistency of sense-impressions leads him to
conclude that they cannot tell anything of what they represent.
A jaundiced patient sees the world in yellow.137 If one presses one’s eyeball
(apparently), things seem ‘oblong and narrow’.138 While the Pyrrhonist
grants the fact of the appearance, he doubts its verisimilitude.139 He
remains firmly at the phenomenal level, the visceral presence of which is
beyond doubt, being the effect of ‘involuntary affections’.140 He shares
the relativism of Protagoras, who had affirmed that ‘man is the measure
of all things.’141 The question which haunts new philosophers and which
Sextus answers negatively is whether the qualities we perceive in objects
subsist in those objects. Divergent experience of things forces one to reject
the claim that ‘nature made the senses commensurate with the objects of
sense’.142 When the congruity between subject and object is shattered, so
too is the congruity between language and things.
While Sextus focuses on the epistemological problem rather than its
linguistic consequences, he does, in addition to the concerns about
linguistic conventionality, meditate on the opacity of logical definitions.
Even ‘so familiar an object’ as a man can only be understood by direct
experience, not by words. ‘If we propose to define absolutely all things, we
shall define nothing, because of the regress ad infinitum.’143 Of themselves,
words lead us no further than their sounds. Only experience can fill sounds
with sense and this is forever separated from reality. Words about things
can refer neither truly nor essentially to those things but merely record our
136
Sextus 1976, p. 11. See Bailey (2002) on how the Pyrrhonist can live with his denial of any
rationally justified belief.
137
Sextus 1976, p. 29. 138 Sextus 1976, p. 19. 139 Sextus 1976, p. 15. 140 Sextus 1976, p. 17.
141
Sextus 1976, p. 131. But the Pyrrhonist does not, like the Protagorean, assert dogmatically that
‘matter is in flux’ (Sextus 1976, p. 131).
142
Sextus 1976, p. 59. 143 Sextus 1976, pp. 289; 285.
unreliable and phenomenal perceptions of them. Moreover, the infinite
particularity of things slips out of the grasp of abstract language. Far from
mapping the world, our linguistic classification system, like our moral
system, is the victim of contingent and changeable convention and
experience.
‘There is a plague on man: his opinion that he knows something.’144
Montaigne reads Sextus with relish, declaring that, despite our claims to
quintessential knowledge,145 we know no more than our treacherous
senses tell us. They are ‘the beginning and the end of human knowledge’,
but they ‘change and corrupt’, rather than represent, external objects.146
Their fluctuating information makes them unreliable sources. Montaigne
repeats that what is seen by an eye now squeezed, now free, is different.
What seemed like a straight oar seems crooked in the water.147 In the face
of such permutation, sensations – our only guide to the world outside –
cannot be trusted to resemble their origins. We are estranged from the
world. ‘Nature is intended to exercise our ingenuity, like a painting veiled
in mists and obscured by an infinite variety of wrong lights.’148 Mon-
taigne depicts himself flailing in a sensuous maze from which he cannot
escape. ‘We are going round in circles . . . We retreat into infinity. Our
mental faculty of perception is never directly in touch with outside
objects – which are perceived via the senses, and the senses do not
embrace an outside object but only their own impressions of it.’149 We
cannot directly perceive things. Our perception is active, interpretative.
We cannot ‘receive anything without changing it’.150 ‘Things do not
lodge in us with their forms and essence; they do not come in by the force
of their own authority’, as is proved by our divergent reactions to
things.151 We are in a sense the authors of things.
Montaigne develops and innovates on the subject of language. Echoing
the scepticism about linguistic–real classification and drawing on the old
example of the monstrous birth that we met in Plato and that hounds
subsequent philosophers, Montaigne asserts that ‘what we call monsters are
not so’, but only genera ‘unknown to Man’.152 Our classifications of things
elude their divine organisation. Like Sextus, Montaigne lampoons the
144
Montaigne 1991, p. 543. 145 Montaigne 1991, p. 588. 146 Montaigne 1991, pp. 663; 667.
147
Montaigne 1991, pp. 675; 660. 148 Montaigne 1991, p. 602. 149 Montaigne 1991, p. 679.
150
Montaigne 1991, p. 634. 151 Montaigne 1991, p. 633.
152
Montaigne 1991, p. 808. See Cressy (2000, pp. 9–50) on early-modern responses to monstrous
births. See Thomas (1983) on the changing perceptions of the natural world in the early-modern
period that narrowed the perceived gap between men and animals.
supposed real definitions of the dialecticians. He rejects as purely verbal and
circular the ‘true’ propositions spun out of logical classifications:
‘A stone is a body.’ – But if you argue more closely: ‘And what is a body?’ –
‘Substance.’ – ‘And what is a substance?’ And so on; you will eventually corner
your opponent on the last page of his lexicon. We change one word for another,
often for one less known. I know what ‘man’ is better than I know what is
animal, mortal or reasonable. In order to satisfy one doubt they give me three; it
is a Hydra’s head.153
The rejection of the logicians’ world is not a marginal attack on a mar-
ginal language. It was in the logics that gentlemen learned the truth of
things. In pulling the ground from logical language, critics pulled the
ground from learned language about the world.
For Montaigne, words are doomed to miss the mark of the world, but
in disingenuous mouths they veer off more sharply, as in Anaxagoras’
proof that snow is black.154 Montaigne targets disputatious cunning for
removing language an unnecessary distance from things. The fruit of
arguing pro and contra ‘is the destruction and annihilation of the truth’.155
However, he is ambivalent about verbal juggling because he is also
sympathetic to its exposure of the insecure foundations of our knowledge
and speech. Although snow seems white, it may not be ‘truly so in
essence’.156 While he disdains the aggressive and falsifying verbosity that
moulds a gentleman, he also fears language and the world will be forever
divorced.
Pascal, Montaigne’s horrified but avid reader, draws on scepticism to
strip reason of its authority. Alluding to the gulf between perception and
reality, he says that ‘everything that cannot be understood does never-
theless not cease to exist’.157 His Port-Royal associate, Nicole, is also
conscious of our myopia in his Essais de morale. In the words of Locke, his
engrossed translator, he declares that ‘the sight of our minds and of our
bodies are much alike: both superficial, both bounded. Our eyes pierce
not into the inside of things: they stick at the surface.’ Moreover, ‘though
our knowledge be very little, our certainty is yet less’.158 The epistemo-
logical scepticism of these two Frenchmen feeds off their Augustinian
153
Montaigne 1991, p. 1213. 154 Sextus 1976, p. 23. 155 Montaigne 1991, p. 1048.
156
Montaigne 1991, p. 676; cf. p. 561 on the merits of arguing on both sides about snow being black.
157
Pascal 1995a, p. 79 (Pascal 1963, p. 530: ‘tout ce qui est incompréhensible ne laisse pas d’être’).
Locke owned two editions of the Pensées (Nouvelle éd. 1678 and Lyon 1675) (Harrison and Laslett
1965, p. 204).
158
Nicole 1828, pp. 60; 61.
desperation about the tight hold of original sin, and plunges us into the
dancing, dappled shade of a platonic cave.159
There are two further French philosophers whose engagement with
scepticism fuels and is fuelled by a sceptical attitude toward language.
The first is Pierre Gassendi. A ‘mitigated sceptic’, he steers a middle
course between scepticism and dogmatism in a way that proved popular
in England, notably with Locke.160 Gassendi finds his particular footing,
laid out in his Syntagma (1658), with Epicureanism. It leads him beyond
‘public knowledge’, or sensation, to ‘things hidden naturally or tem-
porarily’, but not to ‘totally hidden things since our ignorance of them is
invincible’.161 He takes sense perception as his certain starting point, those
‘appearances’ or ta phainomena that even Pyrrhonists accept, and takes
them as signs from which inferences can be drawn about the truth that
lies beneath them.162 In an empirico-rationalist narrative that echoes
Aristotle and prefigures Locke, Gassendi explains how we can reason from
sense experience.163 Words are essential in this tentative, intellectual
bridge between appearance and reality. They signify the je ne sais quoi.164
They serve as ‘substitutes’ for those things that ‘cannot be brought into
our presence or cannot appear before our eyes’.165 Words reach out to
things beyond our sensory ken, enriching and furthering our under-
standing of things at the same time that they mark our experiential limits.
Gassendi’s mitigated scepticism limits the scope of language, or rather,
it causes him severely to curtail the excesses of his (Aristotelian) linguistic
inheritance. He embarks on this demolition exercise in his earliest work,
Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624), a ground-clearing
159
Parish (1999, p. 484) comments on the Jansenist characterisation of language as fallen discourse.
Marshall (1994, p. xx) argues on the basis of Locke’s translation that he had not yet relinquished
his belief in original sin.
160
See Larmore (1998, p. 1158) on Gassendi’s engagement with scepticism more as a way of attacking
Aristotelianism than as a response to the ‘ ‘‘sceptical crisis’’ at the beginning of the seventeenth
century’, and on the Royal Society’s embracing of the hypothetical middle way. See James (1987)
on the mitigated scepticism of Mersenne and Gassendi. Lennon (1993b) argues that Locke’s whole
project should be seen as a contribution, under the overwhelming impact of Gassendi, towards
the materialist giants in their battle against the idealist gods (Cartesians). Ayers (1997, p. 4) puts
Locke in the empiricist tradition, particularly as articulated by Gassendi. Milton (2000c) argues
for Gassendi’s small influence on Locke.
161
Gassendi 1972b, pp. 326; 290.
162
Gassendi 1972b, p. 329; cf. p. 333. These signs are divided into ‘empirical’, where the signified is
‘hidden temporarily’, such as smoke in the case of fire, and ‘indicative’, where the signified is
always hidden but must exist for the sign to occur, such as sweat in the case of pores (p. 332).
163
Gassendi 1972b, p. 333: ‘all knowledge which we have in the mind has its beginning in the senses’.
See Osler (2000) on the tenacity of Aristotelian final causes in Gassendi’s natural philosophy.
164
For a dazzling exploration of the je ne sais quoi in early-modern writing, see Scholar 2005.
165
Gassendi 1972b, p. 329.
piece for the erection of a viable epistemological (and linguistic) project.
Caught up in youthful excitement about akatalepsia, he marvels at ‘how
great a gulf divides the Spirit of Nature from the human mind’,166 and
denies ‘that one can penetrate to the inner nature of things’.167 We cannot
know ‘anything in Aristotelian fashion’.168 Gassendi asks rhetorically how
Aristotle thinks the understanding can ‘peer into something’, when he
himself admits that ‘there is nothing in the understanding that has not
first been in the senses’.169 Our knowledge (and therefore our words)
cannot extend beyond the information we derive from our senses.
Gassendi despairs at the supposition of ‘souls’ in the world. ‘There are
even some who think that stones and metals are alive.’ He digresses at
painfully amusing length on what on earth the ‘form’ of a flea might
mean.170 Having asked belligerently what is ‘the nature of a horse’s soul’,
he seems to soften when he lands on ‘man’ whose ‘difference’, ‘at least’,
we know: ‘rationality’. But there follows a torrent of abuse. Having laid
bare our ignorance of the ‘differences’ of things, he rounds on the concept
of ‘rationality’, drowning it in a sea of questions about what it means, all
of which are unanswerable.171 The word ‘rational’ is perfectly obscure; its
explication would take so long ‘that a full day will not be enough . . . and
the light will fail you’. Definitions are not ‘clear and comprehensible’. He
gives the example of ‘motion’, which scholastics helpfully elucidate as ‘the
act of a being in potentiality insofar as it is in potentiality’. ‘Great god!’,
snorts Gassendi, ‘is there any stomach strong enough to digest that?’ The
words in the definition are all themselves in need of definition, ‘from
which will follow the need for giving more definitions ad infinitum’.172
The verbal pillars of Aristotelianism crumble into powder, their essenti-
alist scope an insignificant fantasy.
The gap between words and things affects not only Aristotle’s dis-
pensable ‘technical terms’ but also indispensable, everyday words. These
fall into two types. The first are the qualities of things. Using the sceptical
argument about divergent sense perception, Gassendi makes the standard
new philosophical claim that qualities are not in things, but in us.173
166
Gassendi 1972a, p. 19. 167 Gassendi 1972a, p. 105.
168
Gassendi 1972a, p. 104.
169
Gassendi 1972a, p. 70. 170 Gassendi 1972a, pp. 41; 97–9.
171
Gassendi 1972a, pp. 71; 72–3. 172 Gassendi 1972a, pp. 73; 74.
173
Gassendi 1972a, pp. 91–3. He probes the supposedly private, mental nature of meaning by
asserting that it is the public object which determines meaning, rather than the private sensation
of that object (p. 92): ‘For even if snow appears red to me, I will still call it white since all men are
in general agreement that the color of snow is to be called white; and although the rose may seem
white to me, I will still call it red since this rosy color is generally called red . . . it is necessary that
They are relative, not referential, images. The second type of problematic
ordinary words are universals.174 These are not misleading if understood
for what they are (purely conceptual or linguistic classifications) but they
are shot through with the scholastic misconception that they pick out real
categories of things. Gassendi declares that ‘these great universals are
nothing more than what the grammarians call common nouns, or ones
that can be applied to more than one object, for example ‘‘man’’ or
‘‘horse’’ ’.175 Every thing in the world is ‘unique’, only thoughts and
names are universal.176 Conceptual and linguistic unity is derived from
‘similarity’ between particulars.177 For example, the mind forms the
‘universal concept of a man from having seen Plato, Socrates, and others,
and has named them both with the same universal noun because of the
properties they share’.178 The mind generalises from particulars ‘either by
joining or by separating’.179 Although his own Logica appears to accept
our convenient classes of things, in his Exercitationes Gassendi tears up the
map of the world which allots things to their specific squares. He uses the
familiar example of ‘monster’ to expose the unnaturalness of the lines.
His is ‘that little one-legged girl whom we saw not so long ago in our
Provence’ and who makes a mockery of universal statements like ‘every
man is a biped’.180 These supposedly eternal ‘first truths’, the bedrock of
true ratiocination, are really contingent and liable to dissolve with con-
tradictory instances. Gassendi depicts nature as slipping out of any
inflexible classifications, the most rigid ones of which are the ten cate-
gories. ‘You must realize, my good man, that things themselves are not
contained by the categories, but only the concepts and names of things.’181
Gassendi pans out from the particularly absurd and ragged straitjacket of
the categories to linguistic–conceptual taxonomies in general, and
announces their inevitable disjunction from things.
Gassendi is keen to qualify his nominalism with the assurance that
universal words do, albeit in an abstracted sense, refer to particular things.
His nominalist break between concepts–words and things does not
entail ‘no reality beneath concepts or words’.182 Linguistic reference is
the term by which a certain thing is designated in a society be absolutely fixed even if it is possible
that various appearances are represented by the single term’. Locke repeats this claim at Locke
1975, p. 389 (ii.xxxii.15). For a discussion of this apparent contradiction in Locke’s linguistic
theory see footnote 55, p. 221, chapter 8 below.
174
See Milton (2000b) on the continuing centrality of the nominalist/realist divide in seventeenth-
century philosophy.
175
Gassendi 1972a, pp. 42–3. 176 Gassendi 1972b, p. 43. 177 Gassendi 1972b, p. 44.
178
Gassendi 1972b, p. 46. 179 Gassendi 1981, p. 86. 180 Gassendi 1972a, p. 78.
181
Gassendi 1972a, p. 57. 182 Gassendi 1972a, p. 46.
underpinned by a causal link between images and things themselves. An
image is ‘true’ when ‘the idea of the thing which we imagine conforms to
the thing itself ’. This might be the case with a four-footed, running
horse, but not with a winged, flying one.183 In his Logica he even goes so
far as to preserve conceptual simplicity for substantives, such as ‘man’.
In line with an unbroken logical tradition, ‘ ‘‘man’’ is simply conceived
without affirmation or denial’.184 While this commonplace may not be
representative of his more authentic views, Gassendi certainly has some
optimism about verbal reference – an optimism that reverberates in his
assertion that the world is made of atoms at the same time that he denies
substantial forms. Words may map the superficies of things (and even
scratch the surface through reason) in an interpretative rather than an
absolute sense, but they hold them truly and wholly, albeit loosely, all
the same.
Malebranche, the second French philosopher whose encounter with
scepticism and the new philosophy causes him to reflect cynically on
language, is of a more rationalist ilk. He too uses the sceptical grounds of
multifarious sense perception to dispute the Aristotelian inherence of
sensible qualities in things. ‘Salt that is savoury to the tongue is pricking
and smarting to a wound.’ Names of qualities are ‘equivocal’ because they
‘confound the modes of existence peculiar to bodies, with the
modifications of the soul’. For example, ‘when they say that fire is hot,
grass green, sugar sweet, they understand . . . that fire contains in it what
they feel when they warm themselves; that grass has painted upon it the
colours they see; that sugar is endued with that sweetness they taste when
they eat it’. This linguistic misunderstanding is embedded in the speech of
‘children, and the vulgar of men’.185 It is an intuitive error that is propa-
gated rather than purged by language – language that does not tell it like it
is, but only compounds, and even creates, our delusions about the world.
In English philosophy too, epistemological and linguistic scepticism
run together, generating and inflaming each other. While Bacon believes
in the possibility of the primordial threesome of words, notions and
things, he is haunted by the idols that menace the marriage. The most
ingrained of these, the ‘idols of the tribe’, concern the perceptual rela-
tionship between the mind and the world at a level where one might
imagine that nothing could go awry. But in fact, perceptions ‘are
183
Gassendi 1981, p. 84.
184
Gassendi 1981, p. 83. See Kraye (1999) on the stylistic effects of Epicureanism.
185
Malebranche 1694, ii.vi, p. 55.
reflections of man, not of the universe’. We project our desires and visions
on to things, instead of receiving them straight. ‘The human under-
standing is like an uneven mirror that cannot reflect truly the rays from
objects, but distorts and corrupts the nature of things by mingling its own
nature with it.’186 The ‘enchanted glass’ of the mind does not duplicate
things, but infuses them with its own self-gratificatory fantasies.187
This subjectivist, interpretative, creative account of the human
understanding is further infected by the ‘idols of the marketplace’ – words
that do not reflect things, but paint an unreal picture. Bacon is obsessed
by the way that language, particularly syllogistic language, affords ‘no
passage to Nature’.188 Born in the commerce of the common man, words
are ‘wrongly’ and ‘inappropriately’ applied. They therefore ‘do violence
to the understanding and throw everything into confusion’.189 There are
two types of idolatrous word. The first are ‘names of things that do not
exist’ or ‘names without [corresponding] things’, like ‘prime mover’,
‘planetary orbs’, ‘the element of fire’. While these can simply be rejected,
the second type is ‘obscure and deep-seated’ because it concerns everyday
and indispensable words whose foundations we do not question. They are
names of qualities like ‘moist’ – ‘which do exist but are muddled and
vague, and hastily and unjustly derived from things’.190
These misleading words are ‘inseparable from our nature and condition of
life’.191 They cannot be eradicated, only watched and circumnavigated, which
suggests the profound intractability of the problem. The meaning of words is
determined by incorrect notions. At the same time, the misleading words
force themselves upon our minds, a problem Bacon grapples with in his
explanation of how syllogistic logic allows ‘nature to slip from its grasp’.192
The syllogism consists of propositions, propositions of words, and words are
tokens and symbols of notions. If therefore the very notions of the mind (which
are, as it were, the soul of words, and the basis of the whole system and structure)
are badly and carelessly derived from things, and vague, inadequately defined
and circumscribed, in short, if they are defective in many ways, then everything
collapses.193
186
Bacon 1994b, p. 54; Solomon (1991) gives an unusual interpretation of the way in which Baconian
scientists are readers of nature. Wood (1991) argues that Locke was greatly influenced by Bacon.
187
Bacon 1996b, p. 227.
188
Bacon 1994a, pp. 19; 20. Cf. Bacon 1994b, p. 69: ‘in Aristotle’s Physics, you hear little but the
words of dialectic; and in his Metaphysics too, under a more imposing name’.
189
Bacon 1994b, p. 55. 190 Bacon 1994b, pp. 64–5. 191 Bacon 1996b, p. 228.
192
Bacon 1994a, p. 19.
193
Bacon 1994a, p. 20; cf. Bacon 1994b, p. 46: ‘the syllogism consists of propositions, propositions of
words, and words are tokens of notions. Therefore – and this is the heart of the matter – if the
Given the dependence of language on its epistemological base, words are

only as true as the thoughts they represent. Although it is obvious that
thoughts mean everything to language, philosophers rarely refer to the
inextricability of thoughts and words, tending to think of them as easily
separable. Bacon’s deep insertion of language into epistemology and vice
versa is a key moment. We have to wait for Locke to unravel the
devastating consequences of this interdependence.
But it would be wrong to leave Bacon in such a cynical mood. His
promulgation of the epistemological–linguistic problem is part of its
exorcism, even if he indicates that it can never be entirely obliterated. He
resolutely repudiates the sceptic who throws up his hands in doubt and
indifference and preaches ‘Acatalepsy’. He stresses ‘again and again, that
the human senses and understanding, for all their weaknesses, must not
have their authority disparaged, but should rather be supported’.194 And
as we have seen, he thinks it is possible to write out experience in such a
way that the gap between words and things is snapped shut.
The new mechanists have come a long way from Bacon, opening up
that gap between words and things, with thoughts which bear little
relation to those things. Kenelm Digby typifies the transformation that
the way of ideas causes in linguistic theory. Having warned us in his Two
Treatises (1644) that it is ‘most dangerous’ when people ‘confound the
true and reall natures of things, with the conceptions they frame of them
in their own mind’, he lays out the implications for language in a way
that confirms his Aristotelian heritage while treading a road to Locke:
It is true words serve to express things; but if you observe the matter well, you will
perceive they do so, onely according to the pictures we make of them in our own
thoughts, and not according as the things are in their proper natures. Which is very
reasonable it should be so, since the soul, that giveth the names, hath nothing of the
things in her but these notions; and therefore cannot give other names but such as
must signifie the things by mediation of these notions.195
Digby’s account of the ineliminable and unrealistic mediation of notions
is superseded, however, by his ambitious account of knowledge. ‘Thus we
see knowledge hath no limits; nothing escaping the toyles of science; all
that ever was, that is, or can ever be, is by them circled in . . . in what an
immense ocean one may securely saile, by that never varying com-
passe’.196 While words might immediately and necessarily signify only
notions themselves are muddled and carelessly derived from things, the whole superstructure is
shaky’.
194
Bacon 1994b, pp. 76; 77. 195 Digby 1645, p. 2. 196 Digby 1645, p. 31.
notions, Digby does not approach Locke’s ‘vast ocean of being’ where one
‘can find no sure footing’.197
Robert Boyle goes a lot further in probing the interpretative, creative
character of the mind’s understanding of things, in a way that will deeply
impress Locke. However, he gives a confident, probable ‘hypothesis’ of
what the world is at base, or in essentia.198 It is made of catholic matter or,
to use his coinage, ‘insensible corpuscles’ organised by motion and their
interaction.199 He lays out this world-view in The Origin of Forms and
Qualities (1666), an expropriation of the Aristotelian world-view. ‘Forms’
are redescribed as ‘essential modifications’ of matter, that is, size, shape,
motion and ‘texture’ (the spatial arrangement of the corpuscles).200 These
‘primary qualities’ are in a sense the ‘real essences’ of things. We cannot
know them through our senses, but we can name them ex hypothesi.
However, while Boyle gives an essentialist, albeit probable, account of our
knowledge (and naming) of the imperceptible world, he gives a sceptical
one of our knowledge (and naming) of the perceptible world.
First, he dismisses beliefs that gain credence merely because they have
words to represent them. They are ‘grounded on such technical terms or
forms of speaking that suppose the truth of such opinions’. But phrases
such as ‘four elements’ or ‘substantial forms’ have no grounding ‘in rerum
natura’.201 Aristotelian definitions seem to be an emblem of the void at
the heart of the philosophical system out of which they are spun. ‘Quality
is that by which a thing is said to be qualis.’ This definition consumes itself,
unable to escape the verbal circle. The problem of definitional tautology
is not restricted to Aristotelian nonsense but affects language in general.
Words such as ‘saltness, sourness, green, blue’ cannot be understood
through a definition, but only by experience.202 It is not just that
language does not, but that it cannot, take us to the world.
Boyle reveals a rift between language–perception and the world.
Familiarly, he focuses on sensible qualities as the locus of this disjunction.
Like Locke’s other friend and mentor, the observational doctor Sydenham,
Boyle explains that the senses tell us nearly everything we know about
bodies but that, unfortunately, their missives are more imaginative than
197
Locke 1975, p. 47 (i.i.7).
198
See McMullin (1990) on Boyle’s and others’ reconceptualisations of the quality of knowledge.
199
Boyle 1979a, p. 69.
200
Boyle 1979a, pp. 69; 71. Locke owned The Origins of Forms and Qualities According to the
Corpuscular Philosophy (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 91). See Golinski 1990b.
201
Boyle 1979a, pp. 5; 6. 202 Boyle 1979a, pp. 29; 30.
real.203 We perceive and name ‘qualities’ as though they subsisted in the
things themselves, whereas in fact they are produced by our sense organs.
Ideas of things are caused by the ‘relation that happens to be betwixt
those primary accidents of the sensible object and the peculiar texture of
the organ it affects’.204 Primary qualities in the bodies themselves effect
radically different secondary qualities in us. The world is therefore
fundamentally not as we see and name it. The problem is that we suppose
the contrary. ‘We have been from our infancy apt to imagine that these
sensible qualities are real beings in the objects they denominate.’ But
there is nothing ‘real’ in the bodies except their corpuscular arrange-
ment.205 The Aristotelians speak as though there were ‘real qualities’,
such as ‘whiteness’ (the ‘simple natures’ that Bacon pursues).206 Boyle
exemplifies the subjective status of qualities with a pin that causes us pain
when it pricks. ‘There is no distinct quality in the pin answerable to what I
am apt to fancy pain to be.’ If there were no eyes, there would be no
colours.207 Another vivid example is of the sun, whose powers ‘harden clay,
and soften wax, and melt butter, and thaw ice . . . ’ yet are none of them
present in the sun, which consists only of ‘the brisk and confused local
motion of the minute parts of a body’.208 The world as we experience it is
more fabrication than real. We should not project it back out to nature.
Nor do substances escape Boyle’s contingent identification. They are
classified according to ‘convenience’ rather than any transcendental map.
Following Bacon and presaging Locke, a ‘species’ is only a particular
conglomeration of secondary qualities. He picks up a perennially fasci-
nating example: gold. All that we understand by this word is the
‘aggregate or convention of qualities’ we observe, for example, ‘very
malleable and ductile, fusible and yet fixed in the fire, and of a yellowish
colour’. To further distinguish it, say from brass, we add that it is
‘indissoluble in aqua fortis’. None of these qualities are ‘essential’ to a
body.209 All of them are accidental and subject to change, as, for example,
in the case of ‘white gold’, or rotting fruit.210 These variations do not
indicate the destruction of substantial forms but only an amendment of
the underlying material properties. ‘A pear grafted upon a thorn . . . will
bear good fruit’.211 The ‘tacit agreement’ of men carves up the world into
203
Sydenham 1696, sig. a5v: ‘it is plainly impossible that physicians should understand those causes
of diseases which have no manner of commerce with the senses’. Sydenham’s symptomatic,
superficial approach to bodies must have influenced Locke. Harrison and Laslett (1965, p. 242) list
eight works of Sydenham’s which Locke possessed, including two editions of Opera universa.
204
Boyle 1979a, p. 13. 205 Boyle 1979a, p. 31. 206 Boyle 1979a, pp. 15–16.
207
Boyle 1979a, p. 31. 208 Boyle 1979a, p. 27. 209 Boyle 1979a, pp. 38; 39.
210
Boyle 1979a, pp. 39; 52. 211 Boyle 1979a, p. 66.
‘species’.212 They agree what ‘concurrence of all those qualities’ are
‘necessary and sufficient’ to denominate the body.213 Our classifications
cannot capture the infinite variety of things. Following Lucretius, Boyle
thinks of the multiplicity of words that can be made out of twenty-four
letters and considers what untold myriad of corpuscular arrangements
there must be which deserve, but lack, ‘distinct appellations’. Things are
named for pragmatic rather than truly encyclopaedic purposes. So, we
differentiate between a ‘gold ring’ and a ‘wedge of gold’.214 There are no
known diagnostic criteria for ‘discriminating and limiting the species of
things’. Names tend to be taken for things, but really they indicate our
own interests and perceptions. Boyle warns us that specific distinctions
are ‘more arbitrary than we are wont to be aware of ’.215
But we are not making it up entirely. These conglomerations of qualities
are caused by particular arrangements of primary qualities which Boyle calls
‘essential forms’. Boyle’s words do, in the way that (according to Boyle)
Aristotle’s absolutely do not, follow things, albeit in a very free translation.216
I have left Hobbes to the end because he stands at perhaps the furthest
extreme of this debate. At first glance, he looks like other new philoso-
phers, declaring that words signify thoughts that in turn are caused, in a
link of non-resemblance, by things.217 However, there are three ways in
which Hobbes cuts away at the thread that joins words, thoughts and
things. The first and fundamental step he takes in removing speech from
the world is his bold and bald assertion that words signify conceptions,
not things. We heard this war cry in chapter 1. He responds to the
scholastic debate about whether words signify thoughts or things with the
apparent fact that when one speaks or hears the word ‘stone’ one can only
form a thought of a stone. A real stone does not enter one’s head, as we
saw Sergeant suggest.218 While he has the scholastics squarely in his sights,
Hobbes also targets his lazy contemporaries, who call with careless
abandon for the congruence of words and things.
The second way Hobbes drains words of their conventional plenitude
is by threatening to dissolve the link – and make imperceptible the
line – between the mind and the world. He presents an exceptionally
212
Boyle 1979a, p. 45.
213
Boyle 1979a, p. 52. 214 Boyle 1979a, p. 49. 215 Boyle 1979a, pp. 72; 71–2.
216
Boyle 1979a, p. 62; see p. 58 on Aristotelianism respecting ‘rather words than things’.
217
Hobbes 1996, pp. 13–14. See Leijenhorst (2002a, p. 221) on Hobbes’ retention of realism insofar as
ideas are ‘causally dependent on external bodies which act on us by means of local motion’.
218
Hobbes 1981, p. 15. See Leijenhorst (2002b) for the way in which Hobbes’ theory of language is
indebted to, as well as a revision of, late Aristotelianism. For a Wittgensteinian reading of Hobbes’
linguistic theory, see Heinrichs 1973.
subjective, sceptical account of our imaginative encounter with the
world. Recalling Protagoras’ dictum, he declares that ‘men measure, not
onely other men, but all other things, by themselves’.219 He goes
beyond the familiar contemporary assertion that the qualities we per-
ceive in things do not inhere in them, but in us.220 His style, as well as
his arguments, shroud us from the world behind a particularly thick veil
of obscure and uncertain ideas. Experience is like a dream, dis-
orientating and uncertain. Having asserted the unreality of our sense
experience, he concludes that ‘whatsoever accidents or qualities our
senses make us think there be in the world, they are not there, but are
seemings and apparitions only’. The reader is placed in a peculiar state
of dislocation, subject to ‘the great deception of sense’.221 When objects
are gone, their ‘phantasies’ remain, which we compound to create
‘fictions of the mind’.222 When we sleep we dream in images which ‘are
not obscure, but strong and clear, as in sense itself ’.223 Indeed, ‘a
dreame must needs be more cleare, in this silence of sense, than are our
waking thoughts . . . And because waking I often observe the absurdity of
dreames, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts; I
am well satisfied, that being awake, I know I dreame not; though when
I dreame, I think my selfe awake.’224 Hobbes’ point is driven home by
his wordplay and the reader is unsettled, the line between fiction and
reality eroded in the disconcerting poetry. He reaches a crescendo in his
story about the ‘difficult[y of] discerning of a mans dream, from his
waking thoughts’, when he introduces ‘visions’.225 These waking dreams
are often induced by fear of ‘fayries’, and spun in our minds by ‘crafty
ambitious persons’. They enthral ‘the simple people’ and threaten civil
obedience.226 Hobbes turns his sharp pen on these fantastic religious
insinuations in the final part of Leviathan, explaining away the presence
of demons by appealing to the excessive operations of the imagination.
‘It was hard for men to conceive of those Images in the Fancy, and in
the sense, otherwise, than of things really without us.’227
The final and most distinctive way that Hobbes muddies the linguistic
waters is his severance of language from the mind, as well as from things.
He rejects the view that language is a perfect reflection of thought.
According to him, the understanding is filled with particular and unique
219
Hobbes 1996, p. 15. 220 E.g. Hobbes 1969, p. 6; 1996, p. 14. 221 Hobbes 1969, pp. 7; 8.
222
Hobbes 1996, p. 16. 223 Hobbes 1969, p. 8. 224 Hobbes 1996, p. 17.
225
Hobbes 1996, p. 18. 226 Hobbes 1996, p. 19.
227
Hobbes 1996, p. 440. Flathman (1993) and Tuck (1988a) paint variously sceptical portraits of
Hobbes, in contrast to Sorell (1993b) and Skinner (1996, p. 9).
images, just as the world is filled with particular and unclassified things.
Only words are universal. ‘There being nothing in the world universall
but names; for the things named, are every one of them individuall and
singular.’ A general term does not signify a general or abstract idea. There
are no such things. Instead, a general term covers a host of particular ideas
of things on the basis of ‘similitude in some quality’.228 When we speak or
hear a general term, we bring to mind one particular. When Hobbes
declares, sounding very familiar, that ‘the generall use of speech, is to
transferre our mental discourse, into verbal’, he is not being strictly
frank.229 The process is not, as it is for his contemporaries, one of pure
translation, but one of radical development. Language is of a very dif-
ferent character from thoughts. From the mind’s point of view, as well as
the world’s, it does not ring true.
Hobbes exemplifies the necessary arbitrariness of our linguistic clas-
sification with the now familiar example of the monstrous birth. The
absence of natural right reason determines the need for an ‘arbitrator’,
the sovereign, to decide the content of natural terms: ‘Upon the occasion
of some strange and deformed birth, it shall not be decided by Aristotle,
or the philosophers, whether the same be a man or no, but by the
laws’.230
Although it may not have been Hobbes’ intention, he was perceived as
ripping language apart from things.231 He shocked his contemporaries
with the claim that ‘true and false are attributes of speech, not of
things’.232 This is because truth, like reason or science, concludes uni-
versally, and so can only deal in names, not thoughts and things, which
can only ever be particular. The Port-Royal Logique echoes Descartes’
outrage about this assertion.233 We remember that Hobbes objected to
Descartes that reasoning concerns names not things. ‘All we can infer’, he
elaborates, ‘is whether or not we are combining the names of things in
accordance with the arbitrary conventions which we have laid down in
respect of their meaning’.234 Half-purposefully, half-provocatively,
Hobbes strands the human speaker a long way from the world, unable to
arrive, imaginatively and creatively drawing his own conclusions.
228
231
On the need for ‘evidence’ in language see Hobbes 1969, p. 25.
232
Hobbes 1996, p. 27. 233 Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 27; Descartes 1984b, p. 126.
234
Hobbes 1996, p. 126.
c h ap t e r 5
Semantic instability: a containable threat
The confident assumption of semantic universality is implicit in early-

modern linguistic theory. Though philosophers rarely spell it out, it is
this that grounds their system of communication. They take it for
granted that there is one set of meanings that underlies all languages and
that, as a result, people can mean the same things and communicate
with each other. Semantic uniformity is inferred from the uniformity of
human understanding and the unity of the world.1 Philosophers take
their cue from that seminal passage in De interpretatione where Aristotle
declares that although languages diverge, the thoughts and, in turn, the
objects they signify ‘are the same for the whole of mankind’.2 In his
commentary on this passage, Aquinas reminds us of the reason why this
is so: ‘simple conceptions of the intellect’, such as the essence of ‘man’
(while they have been actively abstracted by men) have not been
‘composed’ or ‘divided’, are incapable of truth or falsity, and therefore
‘must be the same in all’.3 The impression of a common semantic
discourse is entrenched by the grammarians and logicians who talk
unconcernedly about that res which convention has assigned to a certain
verbum. A meaning is treated as though it were one unproblematic,
discrete object – indeed, we have seen how this characterisation teeters
on the brink between figural and real. The elision of the difference
between thought and thing only serves to deepen the coincident
impression that a meaning is a determinate, public entity upon which
people agree to impose a word.
However, the examination of the trivium revealed various points where
semantic universality comes under pressure, either because concerns are
raised internally, or because certain junctures appear vulnerable when
1
See Dawson (2003) on the various ways in which a common mental discourse was presented and
defended.
2
Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. 3 Aquinas 1998, p. 463.
129
subjected to external scrutiny, or, indeed, because writers, particularly
rhetoricians, actually celebrate semantic abundance. While the strong
current of the logico-grammatical tradition pushes forward a faith in a
universal semantic discourse, we have encountered some eddies that run
in a contrary direction.
Knowledge of ambiguous words and their use in fallacious arguments
had always been central to a gentleman’s training. But the logical problem
of ambiguity is neatly circumscribed and not considered to drain into
language as a whole, except, as we saw, by the Port-Royal Logique that
considers, albeit marginally, wide-ranging temporal and cultural semantic
relativism. A serious theoretical threat also comes from those grammar-
ians who postulate that languages are neither inter-translatable, nor
underpinned by one deep structure. Developing the humanist commit-
ment to language as contingent usage and Bacon’s interest in a culturally
relative semantics, historicist grammarians claim that language is not
rooted in reason and the world, but in diverse and mutating human
contexts, thereby jeopardising its univocity. Rhetoric further diffracts
language – particularly moral language – which is to be the major loca-
tion of philosophical anxiety about semantic instability. Rhetoricians
present words as loosely attached to meaning, to be applied variously and
wilfully. It is an exhibition of professional aplomb, in the use of figures,
to wrench words from their proper places. Moreover, in tropical speech it
is up to the audience to make up meaning. Informing all three arts is the
fundamental disunity between sign and signified; they are joined in a
purely arbitrary, and therefore potentially unstable, way.
Picking up these already unravelling threads, early-modern philoso-
phers begin to undo the story of semantic universalism. Broadly speaking,
they articulate two types of concern. The first is that people agree on the
meaning of a word, but disagree as to how it ought to be applied to the
world, as when forensic orators argue about whether an action is ‘mur-
der’, or if it is ‘liberal’ or ‘extravagant’. The second and more profound
way in which words are thought to become equivocal is when people
disagree about the meaning or definition of the word itself, as may be
the case with ‘freedom’ or ‘God’.4 However, writers do not consistently
hold these two concerns apart – in accordance with their habit of
coagulating concept and thing. Again, therefore, I subsume what we
would now distinguish as meaning and reference under the overarching
title of ‘meaning’, and call the whole issue one of ‘semantic’ instability,
4
See Skinner (2002a, pp. 161–2) on this distinction.
Semantic instability: a containable threat 131
although we ought to remember that this includes divergent applications,
as well as divergent definitions, of terms.
I ought also to stress that the polysemic potential of words was not
necessarily a cause of concern. This is, in part, because there might be said
to be two distinct and opposing aspects of polysemy. There is, on the one
hand, the manageable and even marvellous semantic cornucopia of poets,
rhetoricians and speakers at large, which positively enhances under-
standing and intersubjectivity. On the other, there is uncontrollable,
undetected, and often unintentional semantic instability which entren-
ches and engenders misunderstanding and isolation. Many who worry
about the second, negative aspect do not necessarily perceive any dis-
tinction between the two and attack rhetoricians for the dim effects of
playing with words. While it is in the main the downbeat voices that I
shall educe, some of them, such as Pufendorf ’s, are at times neutral, even
encouraging, about the fact that words might mean many things. They
indicate the other, optimistic side of the argument about the merits of
semantic multiplicity – a side which arguably increasingly lost (explicit)
favour in the seventeenth century.
With the exception of the poetic fraternity, who taxonomise semantic
plurality and maintain that it increases communication, the issue is not
addressed or questioned systematically until Locke, who argues that, on
the contrary, miscommunication ensues. Due to the overwhelming and
often unconscious subscription to basic semantic universality, reservations
about it only emerge sporadically in texts, whose disparate authors
therefore generate the structure of the present chapter.
scepticism and montaigne

The rediscovery of ancient scepticism is important not only for provoking
the perception of grave disjunctions between words and the world, but
also for questioning the capacity of words to signify univocally. Sextus
Empiricus had put his finger on a powerful reason why a particular class
of meanings might diverge. As opposed to ‘natural objects’, ‘conventional
objects have no existence’, and are therefore ‘easily liable to change and
variation’.5 In the same way that Locke will account for the diversity of
mixed modes, Sextus explains that it is because they ‘depend upon our-
selves’ that conventional objects alter and deviate. It is because we make
them up that non-natural ideas multiply between people.
5
Sextus 1976, p. 291.
Montaigne takes up the commanding fact of cultural diversity, and
thereby evokes the possibility of semantic diversity, especially with eva-
luative terms. Moral words are exposed as blowing in the wind of custom.
‘Nothing in all the world has greater variety than law and custom. What
is abominable in one place is laudable somewhere else.’ He mentions
infanticide and polygamy as instances of acceptable customs. Evaluative
consensus is also lacking in the attribution of ‘beauty’: ‘for a painter in the
Indies beauty is black and sunburnt, with thick swollen lips and broad flat
noses . . . In Peru, big ears are beautiful.’6 The perceptible world does not
contain its aesthetic and ethical status within it, but is vulnerable to
endless redescription. Unfortunately, semantic dissolution does not stop
within the same culture, but creeps there too by virtue of disagreement
between compatriots. Rather than interpreting the fall of Babel as indi-
cative simply of verbal diversity, Montaigne interprets it as signifying ‘the
infinite, endless altercation over discordant opinions and arguments
which accompanies the vain structures of human knowledge, enmeshing
them in confusion.’7
Semantic flexibility is further assured by the fluidity of language itself –
the exemplary creature, or victim, of custom. ‘It goes flowing through our
fingers every day, and during my lifetime half of it has changed. We say
that it is perfect now: each age says that of its own. I do not think it has
reached perfection while it is still running away and changing form.’8
There is another, more innovative and radical way in which Montaigne
lays waste the claim that words are windows with one view. He places
meaning in the hands of the audience, and so proffers endless semantic
proliferation.9 Once words leave the speaker he is no longer in control of
their content; they become free-floating signs for others to tie down as
they desire. In his Apologie de Raimond Sebond Montaigne presents texts
as blank tablets on which readers can write whatever they please. He
muses on the common experience ‘that once you start digging down into
a piece of writing there is simply no slant or meaning – straight, bitter,
sweet or bent – which the human mind cannot find there’. He exemplifies
his claim with reference to biblical hermeneutics, that promiscuous field
where interpreters do not translate, but generate, meaning. ‘Take that
clearest, purest and most perfect Word there can ever be: how much
6
Montaigne 1991, pp. 654–5; 537. 7 Montaigne 1991, p. 623. 8 Montaigne 1991, p. 1111.
9
See Cave (1979) for a suggestive interpretation of the generative and devious characterisation of
language in the French renaissance; Ronberg (1992) on the inconstancy of verbal meaning in
English renaissance literature; McCanles (1990) on the free play of the signifier in Bacon; Fish
(1971b and 1972) on the ‘self-consuming’ language of seventeenth-century literature.
falsehood and error have men made it give birth to! Is there any heresy
which has not discovered ample evidence for its foundation and con-
tinuance?’ Despite his striking depiction of semantic indeterminacy, he
does imply that there is one proper reading. It is the ‘founders of . . .
erroneous doctrines’ who misunderstand God’s word, and take refuge in
the one and only form of ‘proof’ available to them: ‘evidence based upon
exegesis of words’.10 Divergent exposition seems here to be a possible result
of ill will, not an inevitability.
However, Montaigne’s return to the subject in De l’expérience renews
his assault on the naı̈ve appeal to ‘the express words of the Bible’. They
‘cannot be serious’, he says of those who think they can end religious
quarrels with recourse to Scripture. The reader is no less a productive
agent than the writer. ‘Our minds do not find the field any less vast when
examining the meanings of others than when formulating our own.’ The
same goes for law. ‘There is as much scope and freedom in interpreting
laws as in making them.’11 ‘All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors
there is a dearth.’12
Not content with discrepancies between individuals, Montaigne bores
his dissecting gaze into individuals themselves. He opens up our mer-
curial nature in a way that leaves its mark on his successors and shakes the
early-modern presumption of semantic stability to near lifelessness.
‘Never did two men ever judge identically about anything’, declares
Montaigne, ‘and it is impossible to find two opinions which are exactly
alike, not only in different men but in the same man at different times’.13
The linguistic ramifications are almost audible: given that one says what
one thinks, semantic divergence will be equivalent to mental divergence.
Moreover, the meaning of my words will not only differ from my fel-
lows’, but also in me from moment to moment. This personal miscellany
looms large in the context of Montaigne’s shattered ‘self ’, whose shards
appear in his self-confessed act of literary self-constitution – ‘for it is my
10
Montaigne 1991, p. 661. Cf. Eden 1997; Jeanneret 1999.
11
Montaigne 1991, p. 1208. In a somewhat inscrutable passage, Montaigne refers to the active
participation of the audience in speech. ‘Words belong half to the speaker, half to the hearer. The
latter must prepare himself to receive them according to such motion as they acquire, just as among
those who play royal-tennis the one who receives the ball steps backwards or prepares himself,
depending on the movements of the server or the form of his stroke’ (p. 1235). The comparison
with tennis dashes the traditionally passive characterisation of the reader, and substitutes an
energetic, constructive and indispensable player. Cf. Bauschatz 1980; Cave 1982; O’Neill 1982.
12
Montaigne 1991, p. 1212.
13
Montaigne 1991, p. 1210 (1962, p. 1044: ‘jamais deux hommes ne jugerent pareillement de mesme
chose, et est impossible de voir deux opinions semblables exactement, non seulement en divers
hommes, mais en mesme homme à diverses heures’.)
own self that I am painting’ – in his broken and borrowed attempts.
‘I cannot remain fixed within my disposition and endowments.’14 He
quotes Plutarch approvingly: ‘I am not the same person when I am well:
being different, my opinions and ideas are different too.’15 Du repentir
begins in a flood of self-dissolution. ‘I am unable to stabilize my sub-
ject . . . I grasp it as it is now, at this moment when I am lingering over it.
I am not portraying being but becoming: not the passage from one age to
another . . . but from day to day, from minute to minute. I must adapt
this account of myself to the passing hour’. The only truth, the only
closure accessible to this sceptic is ‘Michel de Montaigne’, but it eludes
him.16 If a man’s centre cannot hold then neither can his words; meaning
slips out in all directions.
‘the argument is about words, not things’

Most seventeenth-century philosophers do not approach Montaigne’s
extreme scepticism about mental uniformity, but instead bear witness to
the generic ‘thoughts’ or res we encountered in the trivium. Semantic
universality is so axiomatic that it regularly forms a self-evident premise
for an argument. For example, Hobbes uses it to prove the arbitrary
connection between res and verba: given semantic universality, linguistic
universality would follow if there were natural connections between
words and meanings.17
The universal language movement, a principal goal of which is, as
Lodwick puts it, a ‘common writing’, is predicated on the belief in a
universal human mind (and world).18 Babel might be repaired or as
Bacon, the father of the movement, hopes, ‘the curse of the confusion of
tongues’ might be lifted, precisely because underneath the mess of
14
Montaigne 1991, pp. lix; 39. 15 Montaigne 1991, pp. 635–6.
16
Montaigne 1991, pp. 907–8. Cf. p. 634: ‘How our judgements vary! How frequently we change our
ideas! What I hold and believe today, I hold and believe with the totality of my belief. All my
faculties, all my resources hold tight to that opinion and vouch for it with all their might. It would
be impossible to me to embrace and maintain any truth more strongly. I am wholly for it, truly for
it. But – not once, not a hundred times, but every day – have I not embraced something else with
the same resources and under the same circumstances, only to be convinced later that it was
wrong?’
17
Hobbes 1993, p. 39. Demonet (1992, p. 286) gives this as ‘le principal argument aristotélicien contre
la naturalité des langues’. Cf. Descartes (1984b, p. 126) and Arnauld and Nicole (1996, p. 28), who
use the premise, contra Hobbes (as they understand him), to prove that reasoning does not depend
on names.
18
Lodwick 1969 (the title of the work is A Common Writing, whereby Two, although Not
Understanding One the Others Language, yet by the Helpe thereof, May Communicate their Minds
One to Another). Cf. Clauss 1995, p. 42.
languages, men share the same thoughts.19 Wilkins declares that ‘as men do
generally agree in the same principle of reason, so do they likewise agree in
the same internal notion or apprehension of things’.20 Dalgarno claims that
language conveys ‘the most intimate motions and conceptions of the soule,
by which all humane societies are united’.21 Besnier explains that, while in
their present form languages are subject to ‘the whisling oyishness of cus-
tome’, they can be united because they ‘are unquestionably founded on
reason’.22 In a letter to Mersenne, dated 20 November 1629, Descartes lays
out his ambitious manifesto for a universal language. It would be made of ‘all
the thoughts which can come into the human mind’.23
A common mental base also emerges in the prevalent beliefs in innate
ideas and maxims.24 Lamy lists ‘natural and original truths’ which are
‘fundamentally inherent in our natures’, such as ‘That we are to give every
man his due; That it is impossible for a thing to be and not to be at the same
time’.25 In his De veritate (1624) Herbert of Cherbury lays down ‘common
notions’ of sense (like the common idea of a rose) and also ‘principles’ that
are inscribed in every mind (like ‘nature does nothing in vain’).26 Robert
South mounts a similar attack on Aristotle’s ‘rasa tabula’. He declares that
there are certain ‘universal notions’ which are ‘ingenite, and imprinted by
the finger of nature’, such as ‘the whole is bigger than the part’. Like Lamy
and Herbert, he asserts that these principles are of a practical, as well as a
speculative nature, such as ‘that God is to be worshipped; that parents are
to be honoured, that a man’s word is to be kept’.27 In his Treatise con-
cerning Eternal and Immutable Morality Ralph Cudworth attests to ‘uni-
versal and immutable truths’, ‘ectypal signatures’ ‘printed’ in our minds.28
Within the broad, unquestioned framework of mental universality,
contemporaries explore moderate versions of semantic diversity. In their
desperation for perspicuous language, they express unease about equivocity.
Philosophers do not generally present the problem as endemic to language
but use it to attack their enemies. Boyle begins his Sceptical Chymist (1661)
19
Bacon 1857, iv, pp. 440–1. 20 Wilkins 1968, p. 20. 21 Dalgarno 2001a, p. 90.
22
Besnier 1971, p. 3. 23 Descartes 1981, p. 5.
24
See Yolton (1993, pp. 30–48) on the ‘firmness’ (p. 30) of the innatist tradition in English moral and
religious thought.
25
Lamy 1986, pp. 184–5. See Kraye (1998, p. 1303) on the Malebranchian moral truths known with
the same clear and distinct certainty as mathematical truths.
26
Herbert of Cherbury 1937, pp. 78; 132.
27
South 1823a, pp. 36; 39. Locke was given volume three of South’s Sermons by the author (Harrison
and Laslett 1965, p. 236).
28
Cudworth 1731, pp. 258; 251. See Kraye (1998, pp. 1290–2) on Cambridge Platonist morality, which
was against voluntarism and (therefore) ethical relativism; Hutton (1999) on the still strong hold of
Aristotelianism over Cudworth.
with an assault on the ‘obscure, ambiguous, and almost aenigmatical’
expressions of chemists.29 Bemoaning their ‘intolerable Ambiguity’, he feels
compelled ‘to take notice to you and complain of the unreasonable liberty
they give themselves of playing with names at pleasure’.30
Beyond accusing their opponents of outrageous linguistic licence,
philosophers intimate a more comprehensive problem, to which even the
best-willed speakers sometimes fall victim. Boyle returns to verbal mul-
tivocity in A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature
(1686). There he enumerates the meanings that cluster invisibly under the
name ‘nature’. He identifies eight ‘absolute acceptions’, but says that ‘it has
divers others’. He laments that ‘the very great ambiguity of this term, and
the promiscuous use men are wont to make of it’, causes unintelligible,
improper, and false speech. However, he proposes that the mists can be
dispersed if, when people speak a word, they ‘would add a word or two to
declare in what clear and determinate sense they use it’.31
Some perception of the problem of semantic individualism underpins
the century’s conciliatory refrain that the argument is not real but merely
verbal. Bacon explains that, due to the ontologically unsound foundations
of words, ‘great and solemn debates between learned men often end in
arguments over words and names’. He advocates the favourite remedy of
defining one’s terms.32 The thought is that different people have the same
basic ideas, but that they attach them differently to names, and that
therefore they would agree if they spelt out exactly what they meant. Boyle
declares that without definitions ‘wranglings about words and names will
be (if not continually multiplied) still kept on foot, as are wont to be
managed with much heat, though little use, and no necessity.’33 He repeats
the commonplace: ‘for aught I can perceive, the differences betwixt the
more sober men of both parties is more about words than things’.34
At a time when the explanatory ground was moving under their feet,
the newly collaborative philosophers of the seventeenth century use verbal
disagreement to pour oil on troubled waters. Descartes urges Regius to
tone down his impolitic attack on scholastics by conceding that their
disagreement is ‘merely verbal’.35 In his Regulae ad directionem ingenii he
refers to the ‘obscurity of language’, and the way in which ‘in the vast
29
Boyle 1661, sig. A3r. 30 Boyle 1661, p. 199.
31
Boyle 1979b, pp. 177; 178. Locke had this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 93).
32
Bacon 1994b, p. 64.
33
Boyle 1979b, p. 178.
34
Boyle 1744, p. 481. Locke had this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 93).
35
Descartes 1991, p. 206. On the self-fashioned, self-legitimating, open, public, consensual new
science, see Eamon 1990; Feingold 1991, p. 74; Shapin and Schaffer 1985, pp. 333–6. Walmsley
majority of issues about which the learned dispute, the problem is almost
always one of words’.36 Descartes’ placatory optimism extends to the
statement that ‘if philosophers always agreed about the meanings of
words, their controversies would almost all be at an end’.37 While we saw
the Port-Royal Logique explode the myth of semantic universalism at one
point, they generally ignore it as they progress through the well-worn
workings of ‘the mind’. They also fall into line by characterising inter-
personal disagreement as superficial and soluble. When people do not
bother to define their terms, ‘the majority of their disagreements are only
verbal.’38 ‘Nominal definitions’ offer a passage out of these ‘useless dis-
putes over words that one person understands one way and another in
another way, as so often happens even in ordinary speech’.39 Spinoza is
another citizen of the friendly republic of letters. He responds to
Tschirnhaus’ attempts to reconcile his (Spinoza’s) view of freedom with
Descartes’, by agreeing that it might indeed be the case that ‘although
they use the same words, are yet thinking of different things’.40 He
blames the wrangling so endemic to human interaction on careless
communication. If men bothered to listen and to ‘explain their own
mind’, their ‘vehement’ controversies would end, as they saw that ‘they
either have the same thoughts, or they are thinking of different things, so
that what they think are errors and absurdities in the other are not.’41
hobbes
Not one to soften his blows, Hobbes has strong, if not contradictory,
views on the matter. He maintains that every word – in the human
sciences, if not the natural ones – has only one proper meaning.42 He
(1993) describes the new scientists’ candid, collective ‘conversational rhetoric’ (p. 386). See Shapin
(1994) on the construction of the truth-telling gentleman scientist.
36
Descartes 1985a, p. 53. He continues: ‘there is no need, however, to have such a low opinion of
great minds as to think that they have a wrong conception of the things themselves when they fail
to explain them in terms which are quite appropriate’.
37
Descartes 1985a, p. 54. 38 Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 62.
39
Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 63. A nominal definition narrows down a word to one, clear
definition in accordance with the speaker’s desire.
40
Spinoza 1928, p. 294. He goes on to outline his determinism.
41
Spinoza 1994, p. 62. Cf. 1994, p. 61, on different understandings of ‘circle’.
42
Hobbes explains that natural knowledge can only be a posteriori because we do not know the
causes of the phenomenal effects. But, as with geometry, where ‘we ourselves draw the lines’ and
where the generation of figures ‘depends on our will’, we can have fully demonstrable a priori
knowledge of ‘politics and ethics . . . because we ourselves make the principles – that is, the causes
of justice (namely laws and covenants) – whereby it is known what justice and equity, and their
opposites injustice and inequity, are. For before covenants and laws were drawn up, neither justice
simultaneously offers a deeply subjective and divergent semantic theory,
thereby seeming to dissolve his rigid semantic universalism. The first,
dogmatic stance relates normatively to the artificial subject of the state, the
second to natural man, although even the might of the commonwealth
struggles to stem natural speech.
I turn first to Hobbes’ confident claims for monolithic word-meanings.
Reacting fiercely against the fluid morality embedded in the scientia civilis
of the rhetorical tradition and its fatal application in the English civil war
and regicide, he dictates an objective semantics.43 In his sights is the
Aristotelian continuum of virtue and vice, whereby good might be rede-
scribed as bad, by means of the rhetorical technique of paradiastole. ‘How
unconstantly names have been settled’, he complains, ‘and how subject
they are to equivocation, and how diversified by passion, (scarce two men
agreeing what is to be called good, and what evil: what liberality, what
prodigality; what valour, what temerity)’.44 He argues that his moral sci-
ence, deduced from the reflexively accessible warring, rational nature of
man, overthrows the evaluative paradigm whereby the human world is
subject to self-interested revisions. Erasing his own authorship, he proffers a
demonstrable theory of the virtues. He proves that which is conducive to
peace, ‘good’, and ought to be so called. According to the (Hobbesian) rule
of propriety, rebellion is necessarily unjust. Those who call it otherwise fall
into the unreasonable, slavish and passionate practice of the wilful mis-
application of words, naming ‘good and bad, according to their passions,
or according to the authorities’ they admire (like ‘Aristotle, Cicero,
Seneca’), rather than ‘their true and generally agreed-upon names’.45
Hobbes provides us with a reified map of axiomatic definitions. ‘All
these words, Hee that in his actions observeth the Lawes of his Country,
make but one Name, equivalent to this one word, Just.’46 It is the
overarching aim of A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the
Common Laws of England to establish dialectically that ‘it is not wisdom,
but authority that makes a law’.47 ‘Free’ means ‘free from being hindred
by opposition’, making a mockery of the ‘absurd’ phrases ‘free-will’ and
nor injustice, neither public good nor public evil, was natural amongst men any more than it was
among beasts’ (Hobbes 1993, pp. 41–3). This is an uneasy epistemological division which Locke is
to follow. It is uneasy in both authors because the adequate definitions in moral science still flow
from the nature of man.
43
See Skinner (1996) on Hobbes’ reformulation of scientia civilis as a demonstrable civil science; see
also Skinner 1991; Skinner 1993. Cf. Boonin-Vail 1994; Silver 1996.
44
47
Hobbes 1971a, p. 55. Cf. Cromartie (1995) on common law as the practical embodiment of natural
law; Pocock (1987) on the eternal/historical constitution.
‘free subject’.48 When Hobbes turns to Scriptural exegesis in the second
half of Leviathan, he inflexibly refers to the ‘proper’ senses of words. His
uncompromising materialism leads him to reject the use of ‘spirit’, in any
other than a metaphorical sense.49 Satan emerges as ‘an earthly enemy of
the church’, and hell as a miserable life on earth.50 While Hobbes’ use of
language differs wildly from his contemporaries’, particularly in the
sphere of biblical hermeneutics, he envisages a perfectly univocal lan-
guage. With the help of a metaphor (the professional agent of semantic
proliferation as it rips words from their proper meanings) he describes his
linguistic idyll. ‘The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but
by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity.’51
The common nature of man can ground mental–semantic uniformity. As
Hobbes says, ‘reason is no less of the nature of man than passion, and is the
same in all men, because all men agree in the will to be directed and governed
in the way to that which they desire to attain, namely their own good, which
is the work of reason’.52 By ‘reading himself’ and thereby discovering
‘man-kind’, he deduces an eternally and universally true civil science.53
This bold advertisement for semantic universalism turns out to be more
of a pipe dream than a realistic description of linguistic praxis. There is a
desperate quality to Hobbes’ Eden, as though he fears his words are
falling – as ever – on deaf ears. This undercurrent finds a torrent of
expression at other points in the oeuvre. I probe two areas of concern.
The first is a sense that in our everyday speech there is an inadvertent,
endemic semantic instability and miscommunication. Linguistic signs are
just one section of the disconcerting semiotic prospect that constitutes
our experience. Innumerable images – of bodies, events, demeanours – fly
at us, their significance unclear and often unknowable. Words are part of
this onslaught. Their strange phonetic qualities land upon our ears. They
gradually, uncertainly gain semantic content through repeated observa-
tion of their context. It is on the basis of uncertain conjecture that most
people learn what a sound means by noting when people call things ‘just
and unjust’, for example, and trying to establish a standard of uniform
reference.54
48
Hobbes 1996, p. 34. Cf. Skinner (1990) on the proper signification of liberty according to Hobbes.
49
52
Hobbes 1969, p. 75. Cf. 1996, p. 35: ‘For all men by nature reason alike, and well, when they have
good principles.’
53
Hobbes 1996, pp. 10; 11.
54
Hobbes 1969, pp. 16–17: ‘We cannot from experience conclude, that any thing is to be called just
or unjust, true or false, nor any proposition universal whatsoever, except it be from remembrance
of the use of names imposed arbitrarily by men. For example: to have heard a sentence given
Hobbesian semantic dissension goes far beyond the ‘equivocal names’
in sophisms.55 Opening up an endless panorama of possibility, he says
that ‘all the significations of almost all words, are either in themselves, or
in the metaphoricall use of them, ambiguous; and may be drawn in
argument, to make many senses’.56 In the Elements of Law (written 1640)
he radically multiplies the tidy, and faintly ridiculous, binary ambiguities
of words such as ‘dog’.57 Many words lack
constant signification, but bring to mind other thoughts than those for which
they were ordained . . . And there is scarce any word that is not made equivocal
by divers contextures of speech, or by diversity of pronunciation and gesture.
This equivocation of names maketh it difficult to recover those conceptions for
which the name was ordained; and that not only in the language of other men,
wherein we are to consider the drift, and occasion, and contexture of the speech,
as well as the words themselves; but also in our own discourse, which being
derived from the custom and common use of speech, representeth not unto us
our own conceptions.58
When words are animated in moving, feeling, alien individuals, they
become obscure to the listener. Their ‘true meaning’– the intention of the
speaker – is hidden from sight.59 And even in our own mouths, words are
not so much our own, as the product of communities to whose decisions
we have neither wholly nor consciously consented.
Hobbes elaborates on self-reflexive semantic obscurity in an abuse of
speech whereby ‘men register their thoughts wrong, by the inconstancy of
the signification of their words; by which they register for their concep-
tions, that which they never conceived; and so deceive themselves’.60
Unbeknown to us, our words belie their smooth surfaces, their meaning
diversifying and evaporating.
Hobbes repeats his concern over our quotidian mutual unintelligibility
when he discusses ancient texts. If word meaning is only just discernible
(in the like case the like sentence a thousand times) is not enough to conclude that the sentence is
just (though most men have no other means to conclude by); but it is necessary, for the drawing of
such conclusion, to trace and find out, by many experiences, what men do mean by calling things
just and unjust, and the like.’ It is worth noting that this, Hobbes’ experiential account of how
men learn the meanings of words according to common use, sits somewhat uneasily with his
scientific account of how individuals use their reason to deduce the definitions of words – a process
which often involves the rejection of common parlance. These tensions between communal and
individual use, and between uncertain conjecture and certain knowledge about meaning, simmer
beneath the surface of early-modern philosophy of language.
Ross (1987) asserts that Hobbes’ ‘ordinary language theory’ anticipates Wittgenstein’s approach
to linguistic usage (pp. 46; 48).
55
Hobbes 1981, p. 20. 56 Hobbes 1996, p. 194.
57
As we saw in chapter 1, ‘dog’ is a logicians’ example of ambiguity, meaning both a star and an animal.
58
Hobbes 1969, pp. 20–1. 59 Hobbes 1969, p. 21. 60 Hobbes 1996, p. 25.
through the careful inferences we draw in the living presence of speakers
on the basis of their actions and context, then the practice of reading the
classics becomes laughable:
Though words be the signs we have of one another’s opinions and intentions;
yet, because the equivocation of them is so frequent according to the diversity of
contexture, and of the company wherewith they go (which the presence of him
that speaketh, our sight of his actions, and conjecture of his intentions, must
help to discharge us of): it must be extreme hard to find out the opinions and
meanings of those men that are gone from us long ago, and have left us no other
signification thereof but their books; which cannot possibly be understood
without history enough to discover those aforementioned circumstances, and
also without great prudence to observe them.61
Hobbes intimates the way in which a speaker’s intention, which it is the job
of words to communicate, gets lost in the act of articulation, fading almost
entirely when the speaker is absent and all that remains is de-located text.
Far from being secured to words, meanings proliferate irretrievably.
Despite his own self-proclaimed hermeneutic virtuosity, Hobbes’
treatment of textual exegesis concedes some constructive role to the reader.
His vehement insistence on the sovereign’s right to interpret both law and
Scripture evokes the necessity of interpretation, and the multiple readings
inherent in texts.62 Of themselves, texts do not signify effectively, but
require further elucidation. ‘All Laws, written, and unwritten, have need of
Interpretation.’63 He depicts a great distance between the original inten-
tion of the writers of Scripture and the words themselves. ‘For it is not the
bare words, but the scope of the writer that giveth the true light, by which
any writing is to bee interpreted.’64 Hobbes’ use of the Pauline distinction
between the spirit and the letter of the law indicates that the letter of the law
does not communicate effectively but that its ‘spirit’, ‘intendment, or
meaning’ or ‘the sense of the legislator’ has to be eked out by an author-
itative reader.65 His concern about verbal promiscuity leads him to advocate
concise laws. ‘All words, are subject to ambiguity; and therefore multi-
plication of words in the body of the Law, is multiplication of ambiguity.’66
In a rare contemporary remark about the communication process
Hobbes refers to the way in which meaning is constructed differently in
speaker and hearer. His stringent nominalism leads him into a stunning
statement of interpersonal semantic incommensurability: ‘it is plain
61
Hobbes 1969, p. 68. 62 E.g. Hobbes 1996, p. 269. 63 Hobbes 1996, p. 190.
64 65
Hobbes 1996, p. 415 (cf. p. 425). Hobbes 1996, p. 190.
66
Hobbes 1996, p. 240. Cf. Locke 1975, p. 480 (iii.ix.9).
therefore, that there is nothing universal but names; which are therefore
also called indefinite; because we limit them not ourselves, but leave them
to be applied by the hearer.’67 Words are not ‘perspicuous’, to quote
Hobbes back at himself.68
His second concern about semantic instability is more specific and
relates to the indeterminate applications of evaluative terms. The protes-
tations which I recounted above about free-floating evaluative terms and
their misapplication sound strained when we consider his view that there is
no natural right reason, and therefore no univocal application of words, but
as many applications as there are different interpretations.69 People take
their passions ‘for right Reason’. This turns out to mean ‘no other mens
reason but their own.’70 While it is, as Hobbes pleads, demonstrable, the
law of nature has serious need of interpretation by the sovereign because it is
so divergently understood by those who are ‘blinded by self love, or some
other passion.’71 It is due to the deeply subjective, hedonistic use of lan-
guage that the sovereign and his laws can be the only measure of justice.
Only he can determine whether actions ‘be right or wrong, profitable or
unprofitable, virtuous or vicious; and by them the use and definition of all
names not agreed upon, and tending to controversy, shall be established.’72
Given that there are ‘so many men, so many opinions’, ‘a common stan-
dard for virtues and vices doth not appear except in civil life’.73
Hobbes’ semantic diversity has its roots in the heterogeneous view of
humanity that we met in Montaigne. ‘In the condition of meer Nature’:
Good and Evill, are names that signifie our Appetites, and Aversions; which in
different tempers, customes, and doctrines of men, are different: And divers
men, differ not onely in their Judgement, on the senses of what is pleasant, and
unpleasant to the tast, smell, hearing, touch, and sight; but also of what is
conformable, or disagreeable to Reason, in the actions of common life. Nay, the
same man, in divers times, differs from himselfe; and one time praiseth, that is,
calleth Good, what another time he dispraiseth, and calleth Evil.74
67
Hobbes 1969, p. 20. Cf. Nerney (1991, p. 75) on the continuity between natural linguistic
‘confusion’ and civil ‘understanding’.
68
Hobbes 1969, p. 36.
69
Remember the need for an ‘arbitrator’ to decide what is a ‘man’ or not (Hobbes 1996, pp. 32–3).
70
Hobbes 1996, p. 33. 71 Hobbes 1996, p. 191.
72
Hobbes 1969, p. 189. Cf. 1971a (p. 67) on the absence of ‘an universal reason agreed upon in any
nation, besides the reason of him that hath the sovereign power’.
73
Hobbes 1993, pp. 68–9.
74
Hobbes 1996, pp. 110–11. Cf. 1969, p. 29: ‘every man, for his own part, calleth that which pleaseth,
and is delightful to himself, good; and that evil which displeaseth him: insomuch that while
every man differeth from other in constitution, they differ also one from another concerning the
common distinction of good and evil’; 1993, p. 47: ‘since different men desire and shun different
things, there must needs be many things that are good to some and evil to others’.
Word meaning, comprising, as it does, the speaker’s ideas, is not only hostage
to individual speakers, but to the multiple moods of the same speaker.
We have already seen (in chapter 4) Hobbes draw on Protagoras’ claim,
that man is the measure of all things, to intimate the fantasies that
language estimates about the natural world.75 This ancient challenge also
echoes through Hobbes’ meditations on the way in which the use of
moral language says more about its users than its objects. He spells this
out in a fascinating passage in Leviathan:
The names of such things as affect us, that is, which please, and displease us,
because all men be not alike affected with the same thing, nor the same man at
all times, are in the common discourses of men, of inconstant signification. For
seeing all names are imposed to signifie our conceptions; and all our affections
are but conceptions; when we conceive the same things differently, we can hardly
avoyd different naming of them. For though the nature of that we conceive, be
the same; yet the diversity of our reception of it, in respect of different con-
stitutions of body, and prejudices of opinion, gives every thing a tincture of our
different passions. And therefore in reasoning, a man must take heed of words;
which besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, have a
signification also of the nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker; such as
are the names of virtues, and vices; for one man calleth wisdome, what another
calleth feare; and one cruelty, what another justice; one prodigality, what another
magnanimity; and one gravity, what another stupidity, &c. And therefore such
names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can Metaphors,
and Tropes of speech: but these are less dangerous, because they profess their
inconstancy; which the other do not.76
Using paradiastole, the favourite model for the indeterminacy and manipu-
lability of words, Hobbes explains how our passions dye our perceptions,
and therefore our descriptions, of things. There is no singular description of
the moral status of an action. There are only subjective interpretations.
While metaphors confess themselves to be sites of multiple signification,
evaluative language conceals a mass of referents, recording our peculiar
reception of the world. The res–verba connection dissolves; meaning loses its
objective status, and is incarnated only in the mouths and ears of individuals.
pascal
Riven by the indelible Fall, Pascal is extremely pessimistic about linguistic
homogeneity. In the following pensée he refers to the possibility of
semantic multiplication:
75 76
Hobbes 1996, p. 15. Hobbes 1996, p. 31.
We suppose (nous supposons) that everyone thinks of these things in the same
way. But the assumption is mere conjecture, since we have no proof. I am
aware that we use these words in the same situations, and that whenever two
men see an object move they both talk about that object in the same words,
both saying it has moved. From that identical set of words we draw the strong
impression of an identical set of ideas (d’une conformité d’idée). But that does
not absolutely convince us with ultimate conviction, although we could well
lay bets on it.77
Pascal illuminates an important element that lurks in early-modern
philosophy of language. Harnessing his own innovative development of
the concept of probability, he explains that we can never know for certain
that our identical words mean the same things for different people, given
the irrevocable invisibility of our thoughts.78 It becomes clear that he
doubts, despite our (misplaced) confidence to the contrary, that one
mental discourse underlies our uniform language. The odds are long.
This is particularly likely to be the case for Pascal given that he stands,
petrified, in the fragmented shadows of both the Augustinian and the
Montaignian selves.79 And he himself can be seen in Locke when he
(Pascal) writes ‘I feel that I might never have existed, since my self consists
in my thinking.’80 He exposes the fluid possibilities that follow from
identifying personal identity with consciousness. ‘Time heals pain and
quarrels, because we change: we are no longer the same person; neither
the offender nor the offended are the same. It is like a people whom we
have angered and have come back to see after two generations: they are
still French, but not the same.’81 In the following passage, Pascal evokes
the miscellany that makes up human ‘nature’:
Diversity is so great that all the tones of voice, ways of walking, coughing,
blowing one’s nose, sneezing (are different). We distinguish grapes from among
fruits, then from them muscat grapes, and then those from Condrieu, and then
77
Pascal 1995a, p. 35 (1963, p. 512). Pascal’s use of ‘suppose’ echoes the Terminists’ ‘supposition’
theory and presages Locke’s denunciation of the false ‘supposition’ of communication. Davidson
(1979) explores the ‘dynamic and paradoxical way’ (p. x) Pascal plays with the meanings of the
words which signify the means to an indubitable faith.
78
See Hacking (1975a) on the emergence of probability and Pascal’s crucial place in the story (p. 70).
Cf. Daston (1998) on the new probabilism in the seventeenth century.
79
See Hunter (2002, p. 105) on Pascal’s Augustinian sense that we are a paradox to ourselves.
80
Pascal 1995a, p. 44 (1963, p. 516: ‘je sens que je puis n’avoir point été, car le moi consiste dans ma
pensée’). Cf. Marin (1975) on fragmentation and meaning in Pascal; Norman (1973) on Pascal’s
resistance to Jesuit casuistry and his attempt to bridge the gap between language and thought with
a natural style. See Moriarty (2003) on the incursions into French solipsism and the supposedly
self-contained Cartesian ego, especially by Malebranche’s presentation of human relations as ‘so
many occasions of imaginative contagion’ (p. 250).
81
Pascal 1995a, p. 146.
those from Desargues, and then the particular graft. Is that all? Has it ever
produced two bunches the same? And has a bunch produced two grapes the
same? And so on. I have never judged something in exactly the same way. I
cannot judge a work while doing it: I have to do as painters do, and stand back,
but not too far. How far then? Guess.82
Pascal’s bewildering survey of grapes mirrors the diversity he identifies in
and between people. If our minds are inconsistent and elusive, then so too
are the contents of our words. Pascal explicitly links inter- and intra-
personal divergence to language in De l’art de persuader. He enumerates
two methods of persuasion, ‘one of convincing, the other of pleasing.’83
While he can deliver universal rules for the former, the latter would be
near-impossible, due to the ‘fickleness of our whims’.84 ‘The reason for
this extreme difficulty comes from the fact that the principles of pleasure
are not firm and steadfast. They are different for everyone, and vary in
each particular, with such diversity that there is no one more unlike
another than themselves at different periods’.85 Here again is that Mon-
taignian tag, hinting at the infinite and untold semantic shreds which are
pinned to words.
Pascal explains that meaning is not controlled by the author, but
created anew by individual readers. Often a brilliant author will have
delivered his rich mind to the world, only to have it poorly understood.
‘It is then that the difference between the same statement in several
mouths (bouches) is the most apparent.’86 He is concerned that his own
art of convincing will be treated as a mere reiteration of the rules of
reasoning long peddled in the schools, and in a rare moment of self-
defence he declares that ‘if they have penetrated the spirit of these rules,
and if the rules have made sufficient impression to take root and establish
themselves, these people will realize how great a difference there is
between what is said here, and what a few logicians have perhaps written
by chance somewhere or another in their works, which approximate to
it’.87 While Pascal does suppose that a careful reader who internalises the
82
Pascal 1995a, p. 115.
83
Pascal 1995b, p. 196 (1963, p. 356: ‘l’une de convaincre, l’autre d’agréer’).
84
Pascal 1995a, p. 117. See Davidson 1983.
85
Pascal 1995b, p. 196 (1963, p. 356: ‘ . . . ils sont divers en tous les hommes et variables dans chaque
particulier avec une telle diversité, qu’il n’y a point d’homme plus différent d’un autre que de soi-
même dans les divers temps’).
86
Pascal 1995b, p. 202 (1963, p. 358).
87
Pascal 1995b, p. 200 (1963, p. 357: ‘mais s’ils sont entrés dans l’esprit de ces règles, et qu’elles aient
assez fait d’impression pour s’y enraciner et s’y affermir, ils sentiront combien il y a de différence
entre ce qui est dit ici et ce que quelques logiciens en ont peut-être décrit d’approchant au hasard,
en quelques lieux de leurs ouvrages’).
words might arrive at the anticipated meeting of minds, he thinks that, of
itself and without inter-subjective labour, the text does not speak for itself,
but is open to divergent (re)construction. By the same token, a
thoughtless and accidental speaker can utter words whose significance is
gathered, or made, by an avid listener. ‘The same thoughts sometimes
develop quite differently in another than in their author: infertile in their
natural habitat, copious when transplanted.’88
Meaning seeps alarmingly out from under the solid unit of a word, in
innumerable and unpredictable directions. ‘From a distance a town is a
town, and countryside countryside, but as you get closer there are houses,
trees, tiles, leaves, grass, ants, ants’ legs, to infinity. They are all included in
the word ‘countryside’ (tout cela s’enveloppe sous le nom campagne).’89 A
seemingly circumscribed word admits endless content. There is apparently
no semantic closure.
What we think – and say – about the world depends on our self-
regarding viewpoint. Verbally echoing Hobbes’ insight, Pascal says that
our subjectivity colours our perception of the world, robbing it of any
fixed objectivity. ‘Instead of accepting (recevoir) the idea of these things
in their pure state, we tint (teignons) them with our qualities.’90
Perspective, rather than inherent value, determines meaning. ‘Those
who lead disordered lives say to those who lead ordered ones that it is
they who stray from nature, and believe themselves to follow it; like
those on board ship think people on shore are moving away. Language
is the same on all sides. We need a fixed point to judge it. The harbour
judges those on board ship. But where will we find a fixed harbour in
morals?’91 In the case of moral language, there seems to be no semantic
bedrock. Words are not anchored to things. Both seem to flow by,
eluding all fastening.
Again then, moral language emerges as the principal site for con-
temporary concern about semantic instability. Pascal bemoans the lack of
‘one indivisible point which is the right position’ to adopt when we judge
a painting. ‘But in truth and morality who will determine it?’ Evaluative
terminology escapes a secure mooring place, as Pascal intimates in a
88
Pascal 1995b, p. 202 (1963, p. 358: ‘les mêmes pensées poussent quelquefois tout autrement dans un
autre que dans leur auteur: infertiles dans leur champ naturel, abondantes étant transplantées’).
89
Pascal 1995a, pp. 25–6 (1963, p. 508). Cf. Melzer (1986) on the tensions between the prison house of
language, the hermeneutic circle, and extra-linguistic heartfelt truth in Pascal; Hammond (1994)
on Pascal’s near-abandonment of the belief in semantic closure.
90
Pascal 1995a, p. 72 (1963, p. 528). See Marshall (1994, p. 186) on Locke’s reading of the Pensées, and
its influence on his hedonistic psychology.
91
Pascal 1995a, p. 132.
small, oblique sentence: ‘He lives across the water.’ In another fragment
he expands this remark into an account of the variable application of
moral words. ‘ ‘‘Why are you killing me?’’ ‘‘Well, don’t you live over the
water? My good friend, if you lived on this side, I should be a murderer
and it would be wrong to kill you. But because you live on the other side
I am courageous, and it is right.’’ ’92 The migratory nature of words is
coupled with another feature of semantic instability. While parties agree
on the definition of a term, they differ on the evaluation they afford it,
disagreeing whether it is a virtue or a vice. ‘Larceny, incest, infanticide,
and parricide have all been accounted virtuous deeds’.93
Despairing at our corruption, Pascal sadly admits that, contingent and
divergent but seemingly natural, custom is the arbiter of good and bad. ‘No
doubt there are natural laws, but our fine reason having been corrupted, it
corrupted everything.’94 He mocks the division between universal, immu-
table nature and unpredictable, changeable convention, positing that ‘nat-
ure’ is itself a construct, our original state being irretrievable. ‘Custom is a
second nature which destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is custom
not natural? I am very much afraid that nature is itself only a first custom, just
as custom is a second nature.’95 Pascal successively undercuts the comforting
notion that there is equity beyond justice, nature beyond convention.
Instead there is only vogue. ‘Justice, like finery, is dictated by fashion’, and
the word applied now to this, now to that, devoid of any stable reference.96
spinoza and biblical hermeneutics

In the glare of Descartes’ example, Spinoza trusts in brilliant, adequate
ideas that reasonable men can share. The Ethics culminates in a celebration
of the possibility of human freedom, that is, of a full understanding of
ourselves as part of nature, and an escape from the bondage of the pas-
sions. Men differ from each other insofar as they are subject to their
particular affections.97 The more free (or rational) a person is, the more he
is like like-minded men. Such an intellectual community will share
‘common notions.’98 ‘There are certain ideas, or notions, common to all
92
Pascal 1995a, pp. 13; 21. Cf. p. 24: ‘can there be anything more ludicrous than a man having the
right to kill me because he lives over the water and his king has a quarrel with mine, even though I
have none with him?’
93
Pascal 1995a, p. 24. See Skinner (2002a, pp. 169–71) on the distinction between the evaluative
status and the definition of terms.
94
Pascal 1995a, p. 24.
95
Pascal 1995a, p. 39. Cf. p. 7: ‘True nature having been lost, everything becomes natural.’
96
Pascal 1995a, p. 25. 97 Spinoza 1994, p. 131. 98 Spinoza 1994, p. 57.
men. For . . . all bodies agree in certain things, which . . . must be per-
ceived adequately, or clearly and distinctly, by all’.99 In a moving letter to
Peter Balling, Spinoza also intimates an imaginative or affective (rather
than a rational) identity between people. ‘A father . . . so loves his son that
he and his beloved son are like one and the same being’.100
However, Spinoza is sceptical about the realisation of mental agree-
ment. This union is reserved for the brightest philosophers, while the
great majority of men suffer under the yoke of their passions and differ
accordingly. Spinoza explains that ‘each one has judged things
according to the disposition of his brain; or rather, has accepted
affections of the imagination as things’. He notes that this false sup-
position has caused ‘so many controversies’ and even ‘scepticism. For
although human bodies agree in many things, they still differ in very
many. And for that reason what seems good to one, seems bad to
another.’101 It is the way in which men are torn apart from each other by
the governing passions that motivates Spinoza’s political theory. Divi-
sion is natural. The state of war makes it necessary for people ‘to give up
their natural right and to make one another confident that they will do
nothing which could harm others.’102 This difference between men is
compounded by what is by now a familiar Montaignian thought about
the difference within the same man, and the fluidity of the self.
‘Sometimes a man undergoes such changes that I should hardly have
said he was the same man.’103
Spinoza recognises that the logical consequence of mental fragmenta-
tion is semantic fragmentation. The fact that ‘different men can be
affected differently by one and the same object’ causes them to judge
differently what is good and bad, which in turn is expressed in language,
so that ‘some call intrepid’ what others call ‘timid.’104 Paradiastole is
clearly in the back of Spinoza’s mind here, as he explains how our pas-
sions inform our description of the world, evoking an old image of words
whose meaning fluctuates in line with the feelings of the speaker.
As we have already seen, textual exegesis is also a locus of anxiety about
semantic instability and readerly authority. Spinoza’s revolutionary Scrip-
tural exegesis in the Tractatus theologico-politicus challenges the supposedly
99
Spinoza 1994, p. 54.
100
Spinoza 1928, p. 140. See Byrne (1994) on the loss of individuality in intuition, and the association
of suffering with individuality. James (1996) reveals ‘an ambivalence within the opposition
between rational similarity and passionate difference’ (p. 228). Cf. Rice (1990) on the preservation
of individualism in the Spinozist community.
101
Spinoza 1994, p. 30. 102 Spinoza 1994, p. 136. 103 Spinoza 1994, p. 138.
104
transparent univocity of words.105 At first inspection Spinoza seems to follow
the Protestant sola Scriptura principle which demonstrates great faith in the
window of the text itself. In his Institutiones christianae religionis Calvin had
attacked the Catholic Church for arrogating the determination of Scripture
to itself, ‘as if the eternall and inviolable truth of God did rest upon the
pleasure of men’.106 Against these ‘Babblers’, Calvin employs a visual analogy
to indicate the self-evident clarity of the Word. ‘Scripture sheweth in it selfe
no lesse apparent sense of her trueth, than white and blacke thinges doe of
their colour.’107 Contrary to other ‘giddie brained men’ who condemn the
Bible as ‘the dead and staying letter’ and appeal instead to immediate
revelation, Calvin asserts the spiritual plenitude of the letter itself.108
Spinoza seems to follow suit. ‘Our knowledge of Scripture must then
be looked for in Scripture only.’109 He appeals unconcernedly to the
‘signification of the words’ for the ‘true meaning’ of the text. He
announces that he has delivered the ‘sole true’ ‘method’ ‘for the complete
understanding of Scripture’.110 No additional interpretative lens – ‘a
supernatural faculty’, Reason or Authority – is needed to elicit the
meaning. ‘Every man’ can understand the divine message. ‘The precepts
of true piety’ are as clear as Euclid.111 ‘The whole duty is summed up in
love to one’s neighbour.’112 The words speak for themselves.
105
On Spinoza’s biblical hermeneutics see Strauss (1965): chapter 5 on Spinoza’s ‘Bible science’, p. 251
on the influence of Maimonides and pp. 192–3 on the Calvinism of Spinoza’s view of God’s word
in man’s heart; Popkin (1986 and 1996), who ascribes radical Protestant influences to Spinoza;
Curley (1994) for an objection to Popkin’s analysis, and an argument for the influence of
Cartesianism and Spinoza’s Jewish heritage; Lang (1989–90) on Spinoza’s ‘modernist turn’.
See also Rudavsky 2001; Walther 1994.
106
Calvin 1634, p. 19. Locke owned two copies of Institutio Christianae religionis (Harrison and
Laslett 1965, p. 99).
107
Calvin 1634, p. 20.
108
Calvin 1634, p. 29. Cf. Reedy (1985) on the contemporary Anglican movement that emphasised
the literal, plain and moral aspects of Scripture (pp. 15; 143).
109
Spinoza 1951, p. 100. Locke had this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 238). See Rummel (1995,
p. 195) on biblical interpretation and the humanists’ call ad fontes.
110
Spinoza 1951, pp. 101; 106; 108. Like nature, the proper interpretation of Scripture requires an
‘historical’ method – an historicist analysis of the language in which the Bible was written, and a
breakdown of the contents of each book (p. 101). Whether words are to be taken literally or
figuratively depends on their compatibility with the remainder of the text (a matter for the
reader’s decision). For example, Moses’ pronouncements that ‘God is a fire’ and ‘God is jealous’
‘must be taken metaphorically’ because ‘Moses says in several other passages that God has no
likeness to any visible thing’ (p. 102).
111
Spinoza 1951, pp. 114–19; 113. Cf. Evans (1992) on Scriptural/human authority; Hill (1993) on the
Bible in the seventeenth century; Mandelbrote (1994) on the exegetical crisis at the end of the
century; Brett (2000) on the rational scholastic response to the Protestant challenge; Weimann
(1996, p. 3) on the Bible as a battleground of authorisation; Miller 2001 on the widening scope of
biblical scholarship to include the Orient and its manifestation in the London Polyglot Bible.
112
Spinoza 1951, p. 183.
Or do they? While Spinoza never wavers from his belief that he has
correctly read the simple moral strictures which constitute the sole
meaning, or ratio, of the text, he simultaneously chips away at its clarity
qua text. He suggests that the same text is susceptible to a number of
readings, and also that it can mean different things for different authors,
and can only be decoded when we know its context:
It often happens that in different books we read histories in themselves similar,
but which we judge very differently, according to the opinions we have formed
of the authors . . . Thus it is evidently necessary to know something of the
authors of writings which are obscure or unintelligible, if we would interpret
their meaning; and for the same reason, in order to choose the proper reading
from among a great variety, we ought to have information as to the versions in
which the differences are found, as to the possibility of other readings having
been discovered by persons of greater authority.113
Words themselves are poor, indeterminate signs, and must be supplemented
by knowledge of their users in order to be understood. However, Spinoza’s
historicist hermeneutics are often redundant given the way that language
changes so completely over time.114 ‘A thorough knowledge of the Hebrew
language’ is impossible to obtain; there is ‘absolutely nothing in the way of
dictionary, grammar, or rhetoric’ to light the way. ‘The devouring tooth of
time has destroyed nearly all the phrases and turns of expression peculiar to the
Hebrews.’ Moreover, the words themselves are riddled with ambiguity, the
letters being indistinguishable from one another, conjunctions and adverbs
impossible to pin down, and vowels and punctuation absent.115 The text
becomes obscurer still when Spinoza avows that context (the author and ‘time
or occasion’ of writing), which is necessary for the recovery of meaning
(the ‘intended aim of the author’), is unrecoverable. The multifarious strands of
the Bible were written with particular purposes, now lost. Summing up the
difficulties, he admits ‘I do not hesitate to say that the true meaning of Scripture
is in many places inexplicable, or at best mere subject for guesswork.’116
Infuriated and inspired by Spinoza’s claim that Scripture is so much
the creation – or mutilation – of men that it lacks authority,117 Richard
Simon sets out to prove that the text is divinely inspired but in need of
113
Spinoza 1951, pp. 111–12. On subjective reading and the indeterminacy of meaning in the
renaissance Bible see Shuger 1994.
114
We saw in chapter 4 how an historicist understanding of language chips away at its status as a true
reflection of the natural world. Miller (2001, p. 462) explains how seventeenth-century antiquaries,
like the humanists before them, employed a thoroughly contextualist hermeneutic. Cf. Kelley
(1970) on the historicist sensibility in relation to language in the French renaissance.
115
Spinoza 1951, pp. 108–9. 116 Spinoza 1982, p. 112.
117
Simon 1682, sig. a2r. Locke had this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 233).
the extratextual interpretation of the Catholic Church, given the histor-
ical, human gap that divides us from it. In his Histoire critique du Vieux
Testament (1678) he ridicules the ‘Protestant’ and ‘Socinian’ faith in the
sufficiency of the text alone, by pointing to the diametrically opposite
readings these two groups educe. ‘Their principle is not so plain as they
imagine, since these conclusions are so different and the one absolutely
denies what the other affirms.’118 The ‘Letter’ is equivocal.119
pufendorf and legal hermeneutics

Pufendorf makes two substantial contributions to the sporadic and not
always consistent conversations I have been describing in this chapter. The
first stems from his exceptionally arbitrary characterisation of words – a
stance that we have seen sometimes related to semantic instability.
Although most early-modern philosophers believe that words gain meaning
by convention, they tend to reify and even naturalise these pairings once
invented. They appeal to ‘propriety’ as though it were some primordial
standard. As part of Pufendorf’s Hobbesian division of the world into
nature and artifice in his De iure naturae et gentium (1672), words are
located firmly in the latter camp. He rejects as ‘vain and absurd’ the
Cratylic-Adamic view that there is some ‘analogy’ between the name and
the nature it is supposed to represent. Even Adam’s ‘primitive’ words
‘signify merely at pleasure’. Pufendorf’s innovation is to elaborate on the
contractual character of language. As we shall see now and in the following
chapter, through his legal optic, he spells out the precarious implications of
this fact. ‘All signs except those which we call natural, denote some
determinate thing by virtue of human imposition, so this imposition is
attended with a certain agreement, consent, or compact ( pactum), tacit or
express.’120 And, as with all contracts, the participants are obliged to respect
the terms.
Pufendorf’s emphasis on the semantic contract illuminates its frailty,
given the sad and infamous ease with which men break their word(s). It is
neither clear nor tight, and so ushers in semantic instability. Although he
confidently alludes to ‘full propriety in popular use’, he says that people
118
Simon 1682, sig. b1r. See Marshall (1994, pp. 337–42) on Locke’s intensive reading of Simon and
other exegetes, especially Le Clerc’s Défens des sentimens.
119
Simon 1682, pp. 15; 7.
120
Pufendorf 1703, IV, pp. 276; 278. Locke owned seven works by Pufendorf, including two editions
of De iure naturae et gentium (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 215); he recommended this together
with De officio for a gentleman’s reading (Locke 1997, p. 377). On the importance of Pufendorf for
Locke, see Haakonssen 1998, p. 1345; Marshall 1994, passim; Tully 1980, pp. 30–2.
understand words to a ‘larger’ or ‘stricter’ extent.121 For a start, there is
regional variation. ‘It often happens that words of the same tongue have
in different places different significations.’122 He takes a step further when
he complains that ‘the way of the world is not to keep words strictly to
that sense which they did originally bear; for men change at pleasure the
things themselves, little regarding by what names they were first called.’123
‘Use’ might be ‘the judge, the law, and rule of speech’, but ultimately that
places the power of linguistic legislation in the mouths of diverse users.124
That words ‘derive all their force from publick imposition’125 is little
strength against uncheckable private appropriation.
The second way Pufendorf threatens verbal univocity is his theory that
there are meanings additional to and distinct from the literal senses of
words. Drawing on established divisions, he develops a theory of ‘con-
notation’ that supplements the strict ‘notation’ of words.126 The ‘addi-
tional signification’ is the expression of judgement, over and above the
propositional, or locutionary meaning. He uses the example of calling
someone a ‘liar’, whereby ‘I not only signify that his speech is disagreeable
to his thought, but farther denote (connoto), that he did this with an ill
intention, and an account of procuring my prejudice or hurt’. Sometimes
this illocutionary, evaluative signification is derived from the words
intrinsically, as in the case of calling someone an ‘impostor, or an ignor-
amus’. Sometimes it comes from ‘the tone of the voice . . . from the lines of
the face, from particular gestures, and other natural signs, which are wont
very considerably to alter, diminish, or increase the principal signification
of words’. (Again, an unmistakable allusion to paradiastole, the classic site
of semantic uncertainty.) The final cause of additional signification is the
use of figurative speech, which ‘very often denotes some passion in the
speaker; whereas a plain expression barely imports the thing asserted’.127
Pufendorf also voices the familiar division between the spirit and the
letter that is so central to renaissance hermeneutics. Lawyers commonly
distinguish between the mens legislatoris, the ratio legis, and the verba of
the text itself.128 When discussing legal interpretation, Pufendorf alludes
to the distance between the real and apparent senses of words. The ori-
ginal intention gets lost in the words. They are an imperfect medium, a
dark glass which denies the reader access to the mind of the author.
121
Pufendorf 1703, V, pp. 1–2. 122 Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 279. 123 Pufendorf 1703, V, p. 51.
124
Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 279. 125 Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 276.
126
Lamy (1986, p. 201) and Arnauld and Nicole (1996, p. 67) also refer to this semantic
supplementarity.
127
Pufendorf 1703, IV, pp. 279–280. 128 See Maclean 1992, p. 142.
Pufendorf suggests three places where we can find the real ‘design’ of
obscure words. These are ‘subject matter’, ‘effect’ and ‘circumstance’.
For example, ‘the effects and the consequence do very often point out the
genuine meaning of the words: For where words, if they be taken literally,
are like to bear none, or at least, a very absurd signification, to avoid such
an inconvenience we must a little deviate from the receiv’d sense of
them.’129 He follows Cicero’s hermeneutic stricture that ‘all laws . . .
ought to be referr’d to the benefit of the common-wealth, and ought to
be interpreted according to the publick advantage, not according to the
letter.’130 Repeating his juristic forbears, Pufendorf goes on to say that
‘that which helps us more in the discovery of the true meaning of the law,
is, the reason of it, or the cause which moved the legislator to enact it.
This ought not to be confounded with the mind of the law (mente legis);
for that is nothing but the genuine meaning of it (sententia legis genuine),
for the finding out of which, we call in the reason of it to our assistance.’131
The letter can only inadequately express the full intention of the leg-
islator because the finite generality of law must elude the infinite and
unforeseeable variety of particular cases. An interpreter is required to
judge when exceptions ought to be made to the letter, in order to fulfil
the spirit. To recover the meaning of the lawgiver, then, one must depart
from the words themselves. However, Pufendorf warns that ‘this liberty
must not be indulged too far’, that our contraventions of the civil law
must not be ‘repugnant to the law of God, or Nature.’132 Readers are
trapped between verbal obscurity and their own corrupting potential.
Good interpretation of texts is dependent on the moral, or rational,
qualities of the interpreter, who has to pick his way between the spirit and
the letter, both of which throng with candidates, and render risible
contemporary appeals for verbal transparency.
Meaning turns out to be located less in the words themselves than in
extraneous connotations on the one hand, and on the other a separate,
even contradictory mens, recoverable only by the just reader.
129
Pufendorf 1703, v, p. 54. 130 Pufendorf 1703, v, p. 55. 131 Pufendorf 1703, v, p. 56.
132
Pufendorf 1703, v, p. 62; see also pp. 58–9 on ‘enlargement’ and ‘restraint’, when an interpreter
ought to extrapolate from, or make exceptions to the words of the law.
chapter 6
Under cover of sensible and powerful words
The problems of semantic (un)reality and multiplicity become especially

serious when they are considered as being irrevocably hidden behind an
opaque front of language that has its own indomitable force. It is to the
presence and power of words themselves that I now turn.1
We have met these qualities before. While logicians confidently
merged terms, concepts and things, grammarians flaunt the independence
of words through their semiotic (as opposed to semantic) analysis of
language. The intricate play of detached signs lays bare the striking
autonomy and sensibility of words. Rhetoricians further emphasise the
signs themselves. They focus on the seductive sensibility of words, sug-
gesting ways in which their sounds might affect the audience favourably.
Far from worrying about these tools of the trade, they applaud their
exploitation, leaving it to nervous onlookers to probe the consequences.
Moreover, this beguiling sister, Dame Rhetoric, makes a profession out of
the potentially duplicitous power of words, winning the day by telling not
the truth, but the story she wants her listeners to believe. She thereby
exposes the invincible, opaque and creative force of words. These aspects
of language cause philosophers variously to think about its dangerous
potency.
1
Commentators whose work touches on the subject of this chapter include: Ong (1958) on Ramism
developing a quantified, spatialised and unitised approach to terms and things to the extent that
discrete terms seem to transmute into things (p. 90); 1971, pp. 162 and 167; Ong (1982) on the
technologising of words and their identity as and with things; Foucault (1970, pp. 17–45) on words
in the world; Cohen (1977, p. 25) on the mid-century ‘lexical’ as opposed to ‘syntactic’ approach to
language that presents words as objects; Katz (1981, p. 132) on the view that God created the world
through speech and the consequent search for that logos in the seventeenth century; Vickers (1984)
on the occultists’ confusion of words with things; Kroll (1991) on the publicity, palpability and
artificiality of language, and its deployment by the organs of power; Anderson (1996) on the
‘thingness’ of words (p. 2).
154
Under cover of sensible and powerful words 155
sensible words and (in)visible ideas
It is generally accepted that words function by being sensible marks of
insensible ideas. Their audible or visible status publicises otherwise pri-
vate ideas. Sounds and images are the sole means of transporting their
ideational cargo into the community. On the backs of palpable words,
ideas enter the mind through the great gate of the senses. By definition,
then, it is the sensible, rather than the semantic element of words that has
actual priority in the communication situation, even though it is logically
subordinate. And in themselves, sounds and scribbles are meaningless,
being completely arbitrary. Moreover, even if those sensible signals are
properly understood, that is, in accordance with the community’s
semantic contracts, they might contradict the thoughts of the speaker,
words telling their own sovereign story. The very dualism that underpins
the success of communication simultaneously plants the seeds of its
failure. Words are inherently insignificant images, but their impressive
sensibility belies their semantic opacity.
As we saw in chapter one, Augustine makes sensibility crucial to the
definition of a sign: ‘a sign is a thing which of itself makes some other
thing come to mind, besides the impression that it presents to the
senses’.2 Bacon elaborates that ‘whatsoever is capable of sufficient differ-
ences, and those perceptible by the sense, is in nature competent to express
cogitations’, gestural sign language being a visible signifier.3 In his perti-
nently entitled Mercury, or, the Secret and Swift Messenger, Shewing How a
Man May with Privacy and Speed Communicate his Thoughts to a Friend at
Any Distance, John Wilkins explains that while angels communicate
‘spiritually’ and ‘perfectly’, ‘men that have organicall bodyes, cannot
communicate their thoughts, [in] so easie and immediate a way. And
therefore have need of some corporeal instruments both for the receiving
and conveying of knowledge’.4 Pufendorf simply states that ‘a man cannot
tell another man’s will except from acts and signs apparent to his senses’.5
‘The condition of human nature’ makes the only communication route:
‘signs striking upon the senses (per signa in sensus incurrentia)’.6 The Latin
illuminates how it is the sensible feature of words that enables their
penetration of the mind, which is otherwise closed to the minds of others.
In themselves, sensible signs communicate nothing; they do so only by
2
Augustine 1997, p. 30. On Augustine’s theory of signs see Markus 1996, pp. 71–124; Jackson 1972.
Kirwan (1994, p. 211) accuses Augustine of being seduced by the ‘picture theory of reference’.
3
Bacon 1996b, p. 230. 4 Wilkins 1641, p. 2. 5 Pufendorf 1991, p. 108.
6
Pufendorf 1703, iv, p. 278.
having meaning projected on to them by convention. As the Port-Royal
Logique says, ‘the listeners must already view the sign as a sign, and . . . they
need to know what it is the sign of ’.7
Flowing from its body/mind dualism, the Cartesian tradition presents an
exceptionally strict disunity between the signifying word image and the
purely intellectual idea signified. Descartes comments that the sounds of
words ‘bear no resemblance’ to the ideas they cause in the mind.8 Spinoza
makes an absolute distinction between corporeal words and intellectual
ideas. He bemoans the fact that people confuse the two, thereby telling
themselves, because they can, that they have ‘free will’, when in fact they
have no adequate idea of what this phrase might mean. To dispel such
delusions Spinoza implores us to flee and attend to the ‘nature of thought,
which does not at all involve the concept of extension’ – the realm of
embodied words. An idea is ‘a mode of thinking’ and ‘consists neither in
the image of anything, nor in words. For the essence of words and of
images is constituted only by corporeal motions, which do not at all involve
the concept of thought.’9 The ‘principal end’ of Cordemoy’s explicitly
Cartesian Discourse concerning Speech is to reveal the ‘distinction’ between
thoughts and words.10 Thinking through the leap that so bothers rhetor-
icians, he is awe-struck by how men connect signs and ideas despite their
‘vast difference.’11 He refers to the ‘pains . . . which every one finds in
conversation’ that stem not from the difficulty ‘to comprehend what
another thinketh, but to extricate his thought from the signes or words.’12
The simultaneity of the theoretical gulf and the habitual intimacy between
words and thoughts is ‘admirable’ and ‘remarkable’.13 An exile in France,
Digby describes the process of ‘discoursing and expressing our thoughts to
one another by words’ as a ‘mysterie’.14
The estranged relationship between words and meanings is illustrated
by the metaphors used to characterise it. Blount declares that ‘speech is
the apparel of our thoughts’.15 Comenius compares the Latin and English
translations of the names of the pictures in his ‘dictionary’ of drawings to
‘a man clad in a double garment’.16 The clothes/body image intimates
the pure superficiality of words – as well as the possibility for incon-
gruous dress and disguise. Another common simile likens words to
money and meaning to value. In the words of Bacon, ‘words are the
7
Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 123. 8 Descartes 1985b, p. 81. 9 Spinoza 1994, p. 64.
10
Cordemoy 1668, p. 40. Cf. Cottingham 1992, p. 247, on language as a main argument for dualism.
11 12 13
Cordemoy 1668, p. 22. Cordemoy 1668, p. 90. Cordemoy 1668, pp. 22; 39.
14
Digby 1645, p. 2. 15 Blount 1969, sig. A5r. 16 Comenius 1968, p. 93.
tokens current and accepted for conceits, as moneys are for values,
and . . . it is fit men be not ignorant that moneys may be of another kind
than gold and silver’.17 The analogy itself, and Bacon’s reminder that
anything might be ascribed value, paper just as well as gold, points to the
arbitrariness of the connection between sign and signified. Moreover, the
satisfyingly tangible signs contrast with their insubstantial significations.
The sign appears as radically other from the signified. Sometimes the
simile draws on the anxiety that the face value of coins does not match
up to their real value, and thereby expresses concern about the nonsense
or impropriety of words. Hobbes uses the metaphor in this way, playing
on the fear of fool’s gold to evoke the worthlessness of words in a
semantic vacuum. ‘Words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by
them: but they are the money of fooles, that value them by the authority
of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other Doctor whatsoever,
if but a man.’18
The monetary metaphor is also used to suggest a reliabile and trans-
parent connection, even an identity, between sign and signified. This use
draws on the intimacy which both convention and the State’s stamp
establish between face and real value. Pufendorf proposes that words might
be as successfully and obviously fixed to their conventional meanings as
coins are to their conventional values. ‘He who will not comply with the
coin ordinarily current, but frames a new kind according to his own fancy,
and offers it in payment is manifestly out of his senses.’19 Phillips explains
how new coinages are legitimately introduced when ‘the learned do
acknowledge them to be good bullion stampt and well minted’.20
There are two further metaphors that describe the association between
words and meanings and that also paint a closer, more optimistic, picture of
the alliance. They embody meaning and confound the stark duality, thereby
redressing the improper and frightening imbalance between the practical
priority of words and the theoretical priority of meaning. The first occurs in a
cluster of verbs that imply that meanings are things, with palpable existences.
Scholastic terminology gives the image of words as ‘imposed’ on their
referents. Pufendorf explains that we have ‘fix’d (imposuerunt)’ words upon
things.21 Hobbes says that positive names are ‘put to mark somewhat which
is in nature or may be feigned by the mind of man’.22 We see this subtle
substantiation of ideas in South’s depiction of moral terms as being ‘applied’
17
Bacon 1996b, p. 231. Lavatori (1996) explores the metaphor in Rabelais.
18
Hobbes 1996, p. 29. 19 Pufendorf 1703, iv, p. 279. 20 Phillips 1969, sig. C5v.
21
Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 274 (1934, p. 310). 22 Hobbes 1996, p. 30.
to moral entities.23 Words also ‘carry’ things; Kersey’s Dictionary (1702)
elucidates ‘to signify’ as ‘to import’.24 Finally, words ‘contain’ meanings;
Justininan’s Digest uses ‘continere’ to describe the connection.25 Phillips takes
‘Explication’ as ‘an unfolding’.26 Henry Cockeram’s dictionary (1623)
charmingly defines an ‘expression’ as ‘a squeezing or pressing out’.27 All these
verbs quietly lend matter to meaning; there are objects for words to mark,
carry and contain.
The second, overlapping metaphor that goes against the grain of the
sensible word/insensible meaning dualism compares meanings to visible
entities that are manifested or illuminated by words. Transparent language
had always been the ideal. For example, renaissance legal theory had held
that the words of the law ought to make the legislator’s intention visible.28
Contemporary dictionaries teem with various renditions of this basic
figure. Phillips’ entry for ‘explanation’ reads ‘a making plain or manifest’.29
Self-consciously reflecting on lexicography, Kersey explains that his job is to
ensure that the words ‘are also illustrated with a clear and short exposition’.
When we come to his own entry for ‘To expose’, we find ‘shew, or lay
open’. We also discover: ‘To express, pourtray’, ‘To explain, or make plain;
clear, manifest, unfold, or declare’.30 John Bullokar’s English Expositour
(1616) provides: ‘Explicate. To unfold, open, or declare at large’, ‘Expose.
To set forth, to set to view’.31 And Coles’ English Dictionary (1676) offers
us: ‘Explanation, a making plain, clear or manifest’.32
The presentation of meanings as substantial, and particularly as visible,
is endemic to the spectacle of early-modern philosophy of language. It lies
behind the rhetorical pursuit of perspicuity, as well as the anti- or new
rhetorical advocacy of ‘plainness’. It is also (and interrelatedly) central to
the new philosophy, most obviously in the bandying about of ‘clear and
distinct’ ideas, to the extent that the metaphor is willed into becoming a
reality. The sensible priority of words is trampled by the march of
statements declaring the irresistible evidence of meaning, relegating words
to their proper, subservient place. Philosophers swap the material and
spiritual nature of words and meaning around, asserting the clarity of
meaning by contrast with the obscurity of words. They urge each other to
23
E.g. South 1823b, p. 111. 24 Kersey 1969, sig. Cc3v. 25 E.g. Digest 1985, iv, pp. 934 and 935.
26
Phillips 1969, sig. O4v. 27 Cockeram 1968, sig. E4r.
28
Maclean 1992, p. 96 explains how it was thought that signification ought ideally to be ‘as
unproblematic as visual representation’.
29
Phillips 1969, sig. O4v. 30 Kersey 1969, sig. A2r; sig. K1r.
31
Bullokar 1684, sig. D9v; sig. D10r.
32
Coles 1971, sig. N2r. Locke had this dictionary and included it in his reading list for gentlemen
(Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 113; Locke 1997, p. 379).
turn from the darkness of words to the brilliance of things, to the ‘simple
and naked truth’.33 Ironically however, meanings are pushed to promi-
nence by comparing them with visible objects, drawing on the potency of
sight in a move which recalls those of grammarians and orators. Angel
Day reminds us that we say ‘we see well, when we meane wee understand
well’.34 The albeit figurative recourse to vision in order to describe the
self-evidence of cognition evinces the ultimate sovereignty of sense per-
ception and begs the dark question of what lies behind the metaphor.
Famously undeterred, Descartes makes a permanent contribution here
with his indubitable, clear and distinct ideas. Somewhat paradoxically, he
uses the invincible clarity of ‘the noblest and most comprehensive of the
senses’ to elucidate the character of these ideas.35 Intellectual clarity
resembles the visual clarity we get when something ‘is present to the eye’s
gaze and stimulates it with a sufficient degree of strength and accessi-
bility’.36 He contrasts mental illumination with ‘the fluctuating testimony
of the senses or the deceptive judgement of the imagination as it botches
things together’. Intellection delivers truth. It is ‘easy’, whereas imagi-
nation (in which camp, words are located) is difficult.37 He takes a figure
of a thousand sides and declares that he understands it effortlessly,
whereas he cannot imagine (see an image of ) it. He can just about
imagine a pentagon, but only effortfully.38 Moreover, the word–image
might be perfectly translucent, dissolving itself as the mind grasps the idea
it signifies. Words are completely unlike their meanings, ‘yet they make
us think of these things, frequently even without our paying attention to
the sounds of the words, or to their syllables. Thus it may happen that we
hear an utterance whose meaning we understand perfectly well, but
afterwards we cannot say in what language it was spoken.’39
Spinoza reiterates Descartes’ confidence in irresistibly clear ideas, by
contrast with the erroneous fog of images in which words are key players.
The ‘light of reason’ as Spinoza calls it is counterpoised with the darkness
of language. Our clear and distinct understanding of God is ‘far more
excellent’ than any words could deliver.40 It is possible for words to be
windows to these luminous ideas, so long as one keeps one’s eye on the
latter. Spinoza declares that reading Euclid is like looking through glass,
and language no obstacle.41 Spinoza’s self-assured identification of clear
33
Webster, John 1970, p. 73.
34
Day 1595, p. 77. See Lyons (1989) on Descartes’ problematic metaphorical use of sight.
35
Descartes 1985d, p. 152. 36 Descartes 1985e, p. 207. 37 Descartes 1985a, p. 14.
38
Descartes 1984a, p. 51. 39 Descartes 1985b, p. 81. 40 Spinoza 1951, p. 14.
41
Spinoza 1951, p. 113.
meaning is coupled with a belief in the possibility of a language that
simply dishes up the iridescent, unimpeachable res.
The dream of visible meanings, of a literally perspicuous language, is
common to early-modern philosophers. However, many do not share the
Cartesian confidence in the clarity of purely intellectual ideas. Their
clarity, at least for the ‘rationalists’, is, after all, only a metaphor. Instead,
appealing (like the Cartesians) to the indispensable power of sense per-
ception in cognition, some writers argue that meanings must be rendered
literally sensible in order to transfix the mind. We have met these theorists
before. Some want to make meaningful the sensible signs themselves, as
in the Cratylic-Adamic tradition that enjoys a revival in the seventeenth
century and in John Bulwer’s natural language of gesture. Others
maintain that while fallen signs are doomed to opacity, meanings might
be made sensible. We saw this goal in rhetoric, which seeks to paint
pictures with words, and also in the educational movement which is
typified by Comenius’ Visible World. In their different ways, philosophers
want to reverse the sensible but meaningless priority of words, and to
overcome the elusive abstraction of meanings by imbuing them with the
superlative power of sense.
However, the widespread commitment to the power and necessity of

sense in cognition does not generally play into the hands of meaning, but
into the hands of words. Despite the visionary proposals to the contrary,
we are ordinarily left with sensible words and insensible meanings. Sense
rules and so, therefore, do our sensible words. Bacon explains that our
sensuous minds need ‘sensible and plausible elocution’ to moisten the
dryness of philosophical ideas. But he says that this hinders our scientific
understanding because it ‘quencheth the desire of further search, before
we come to a just period’. We are seduced by rhetorical verbosity. We
stop at pleasing, sensible words and do not probe the underlying matter.
Bacon likens those men who ‘study words and not matter’ to Pygmalion:
‘for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of
reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love
with a picture’.42
The power of sensible words is evinced in the various arts of memory.
Verbal sensibility is crucial not only for the initial apprehension of
ideas, but also for their retention. As one of the five parts of rhetoric,
memoria was based on the need for images to bring things back to mind.
42
Bacon 1996b, pp. 139–40.
Cicero elaborates a complex system of sensible loci and imagines in order
that an orator might remember his speech. One ought to visualise one’s
arguments because sight has the tightest grip on our minds. ‘Things not
seen and not lying in the field of visual discernment are earmarked by a
sort of outline and image and shape so that we keep hold of as it were by
an act of sight things that we can scarcely embrace by an act of thought.’43
Quintilian objects that Cicero’s method is too convoluted, but he too
reiterates the need for images – in this case, of the words themselves – for
effective retention. He recommends learning one’s speech from the page
rather than hearing someone saying it ‘because the perception of the eye is
quicker than that of the ear’.44 Augustine had remarked on how the
written word reifies fleeting orality.45 Bacon explains that a fundamental
part of his new method for interpreting nature is the written tabulation of
history. Not until experience has been laid before our eyes can it be
interpreted scientifically. Once the experiments have been completed, ‘the
understanding is still by no means capable of handling this material
offhand and from memory, any more than one should expect to be able
to manage and master from memory the computation of an astronomical
almanac . . . no adequate inquiry can be made without writing’.46 Dis-
cussing the art of memory, Bacon says that emblems work by reducing
‘conceits intellectual to images sensible, which strike the memory more’.47
Holdsworth consistently stresses the importance of actively creating and
using visual stimuli. Students ought to make marginal marks, organise
their commonplaces spatially, and take notes from books.48
We remember Hobbes’ strong claim. He asserts that sensible words are
necessary simply for thinking, as well as remembering. They are essential for
ratiocination, not only because they are universal, but also because – in their
spoken as well as written form – they enable us to remember ephemeral
ideas. Even if we were alone in the world, without needing sensible words
to communicate, we would still need them to register ‘the consequences of
our thoughts; which being apt to slip out of our memory, and put us to
new labour, may again be recalled, by such words as they were marked by’.49
‘So fluctuating and frail are the thoughts of men, and so fortuitous is the
43
Cicero 1942, i, p. 469. On the arts of memory see Yates 1966 and Coleman 1992. On the
relationships between memory, science and nature see Rossi 1991 and 2000; cf. DeMott (1957) on
the tension between mnemonics and science.
44
Quintilian 1920–22, iv, p. 231. 45 Augustine 1997, p. 32. See Ong 1982.
46
Bacon 1994b, p. 109. 47 Bacon 1996b, p. 230.
48
See, for example, Holdsworth 1961, pp. 635, 640, 624.
49
Hobbes 1996, p. 25; 1981, p. 11. See Land (1986, pp. 9–29) for an interpretation of Hobbes’
linguistic theory and the centrality of mnemonics therein.
recovery of them, that the most indubitable experiences can be lost to
anyone.’ In order to stop thoughts from ‘slipping away’, ‘some sensible
tokens are necessary, to which past thoughts can be reduced’.50 Hobbes
offers an exceptionally evanescent view of ideas and their unceasing flow,
and of the crucial role words play as rocks and dams. His is an extreme
testimonial to the indispensable role of sensible words in thought.
If we turn for a moment from the role of sense in the specific context of
language to the wider context of human nature, we find that there too it is
overwhelming, expressed in the general concern about the mind
becoming enslaved to the body. The power of the flesh is attributed to its
fundamental integration into human nature. Pufendorf says that,
although moral entities are not ‘ingraffed in the substance of things’, it is
useful to think of them as inherent in things because ‘our understandings
are so immersed in corporeal images, as to be hardly capable of appre-
hending such moral beings any otherwise than by their analogy to those
of nature’.51 Due to our moral corruption, short-sightedness, and laziness,
the body usurps the mind. Pascal declares that ‘concupiscence’ – or love
of feeling, or lust – has become man’s ‘second nature’.52 While writers do
not necessarily extrapolate the implications for language of this concern –
although many do – it seems fair to argue that if sense threatens to
overpower the mind, then it will do so in language, and we will be left at
the mercy of the glare of words.
While Descartes extols the power of the ‘natural light’ of the mind, he
is not immune to doubts that it might be extinguished by imagination.
His scepticism seeps out uncontrollably from his dogmatic text. Contrary
to his assured polemic, it requires great labour to stoke the fire of the
mind, and sense might easily snuff it out. When he ‘relaxes’, his ‘mental
vision is blinded by the images of things perceived by the senses’, and he
can no longer remember why God necessarily exists, as he had previously
deduced.53 Pascal dramatises the conflict. Imagination, ‘this proud,
powerful enemy of reason’, ‘has established a second nature in man’.54 It
blots out the intellect with alarming alacrity and dexterity. As Descartes
has to admit, this is particularly the case with word images, the instru-
ments of both our private and public reason:
Because of the use of language, we tie all our concepts to the words used to
express them; and when we store the concepts in our memory we always
50
Hobbes 1996, p. 12. 51 Pufendorf 1703, i, p. 3. 52 Pascal 1995a, p. 54.
53
54
Pascal 1995a, p. 17. Of course, Pascal is also the enemy of reason, which proud faculty he opposes
to the heart.
simultaneously store the corresponding words. Later on we find the words easier
to recall than the things; and because of this it is very seldom that our concept of
a thing is so distinct that we can separate it totally from our concept of the words
involved. The thoughts of almost all people are more concerned with words than
with things, and as a result people very often give their assent to words they do
not understand, thinking they once understood them, or that they got them
from others who did understand them correctly.55
The corporeal, memorable nature of language intertwines itself so deeply
in our thoughts, that it dominates, even constitutes them.
Nicole mourns our obsession with sense: the result of our Fall. The
mind is ‘reduced’ and ‘abased’ ‘by being shut up in a corrupted body’.56
He applies the terrible hierarchy of body over mind to the word–meaning
duality. Our memories, repositories of sensible images, store up words
with admirable aplomb, but we do not advance thence to ‘knowledge of
the things themselves’, but remain stuck with this ‘empty kind of learning
(cette sorte de science)’.57 (Locke, Nicole’s translator, adds the ‘empty’.)
Nicole bows to the rhetorical insight that to reach the hearer’s mind the
speaker has to employ particularly penetrative sensible tools. There must
be no ‘dryness in discourse’. Rather we ought to ‘smooth’ ‘the things we
deliver, with soft words, that may make them slide gently into the
mind’.58 We cannot escape our embodied corruption and must therefore
go with its flow to redeem ourselves.
Malebranche’s De la recherche features a sustained exposition of our
thraldom to the flesh. His goal is ‘to make the mind sensible of its slavery
and dependence on all sensible things’.59 The mind is suspended between
spirit and earth, being pulled down by the great weight of the body,
making ‘perpetual essays to fortify its union with sensible objects’.60 The
voice of the body ‘speaks lowder than God himself, but never speaks the
truth’.61 The mind incessantly moves away from the ‘presence of God, or
that Internal Light’, and is ‘dazzled’ by the body. ‘The eye of the soul has
great difficulty distinctly to perceive any truth whilst the eye of the body
is employ’d in the discovery.’62 Malebranche explicitly explores the
ramifications for language of the effective sovereignty of the real over the
metaphorical eye. Men attend more to corporeal words than to their
incorporeal signification, which they do not care to pursue. They would
55
Descartes 1985e, p. 220. 56 Nicole 1828, pp. 68–9.
57
Nicole 1828, p. 51 (1781, p. 25). In addition to translating Nicole’s Essais de morale, Locke owned
three copies of them (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 192).
58
Nicole 1828, p. 147. 59 Malebranche 1694, sig. b1r. 60 Malebranche 1694, sig. a2v.
61
Malebranche 1694, sig. b2r. 62 Malebranche 1694, sig. a2v.
rather ‘entertain their mind, with the noise and emptiness of words, than
with the solidity of things’. If one wants to communicate a truth one
must conjure with one’s most alluring sensible resources to secure its
entrance. ‘Having always a great attention to what comes in to her by
way of the sense’, the soul disregards ‘the reasons which she hears
alledg’d’, concentrating instead on the ‘sensible pleasure she receives from
the finely term’d periods, the conformity of the gestures to the words,
from the genteel mein of the face, from the air and the way and manner
of the speaker’. Our ‘eyes and . . . ears’, not reason, are the ‘judges
of truth’ ‘because men apply themselves merely to the sensible and
agreeable manners of men’.63 Superficial ploys affect the audience, not the
rational core.
Sensible words captivate us at the expense of insensible ideas. They
also positively interfere with reasoning, leading our minds astray.
Spinoza fiercely attacks sensible language as the source of error. In his
tripartite division of knowledge into imaginative, rational and intuitive,
he describes the first as created ‘from singular things which have been
represented to us through the senses in a way which is mutilated,
confused, and without order for the intellect’. He locates knowing
‘from signs’ in this first category, to which ‘pertain[s] all those ideas
which are inadequate and confused; and so . . . this knowledge is the
only cause of falsity’.64 This is a damning verdict on verbally trans-
mitted knowledge.
Language’s dark glass begets words which signify nothing – bodies
without a soul – and therefore an end to sense and communication. We
met this worry about the deprivation of res in the grammars and rhetorics.
Montaigne insists that it is ‘for words to serve’, and ‘things to dom-
inate’.65 But he attests to the possibility of the battle being lost in his
depiction of verbal circularity in logical discourse.66 He also describes the
(necessary) vacuity of our descriptions of God. ‘We confidently use words
like might, truth, justice. They are words signifying something great. But
what that ‘‘something’’ is we cannot see or conceive.’67 Early-modern
texts abound with accusations of insignificance, most frequently against
the scholastics whose mouthings are ridiculed as no more significant than
those of fish. Hobbes mocks them for their ‘visible species’ which they
grandly identify as the ‘cause of vision’ but which ‘in English’ turns out to
63
Malebranche 1694, i.i, p. 43. 64 Spinoza 1994, p. 57. See Savan 1973; Klijnsmit 1989.
65
Montaigne 1991, p. 193. 66 Montaigne 1991, p. 1213. 67 Montaigne 1991, p. 556. Cf. p. 591.
mean ‘a being seen’.68 Spinoza discredits the notion of ‘free will’ by
appealing to the meaninglessness of this phrase.69
Sensible words are often presented as an opaque veil that hides the face,
if such a thing exists at all. The depiction of language as an inscrutable
mask appears in the context of the Bible. At times, ‘no meaning at all’ can
be grasped, notes Augustine with relish, ‘so thick is the fog created by some
obscure phrases’.70 Pascal repeats Augustine’s representation of Scripture
as deliberately obscure, but decodable with humble interpretative labour,
readable by the virtuous. From our paradoxical nature emanates both an
inability to read the signs, and sporadic glimpses of the lovely countenance
of God. ‘If there were no obscurity, we would not feel our corruption. If
there were no light we could not hope for a remedy.’71 Scripture is a tight
weave of language that threatens to remove all chinks of light.
In the twin contexts of the sensible word/insensible meaning dualism
and of the power of sense perception to which all early-modern philo-
sophers subscribe, the semiotic as opposed to the semantic side of lan-
guage emerges as the dominating force in thought and communication. It
serves imperceptibly to cover, and thereby worsen, the problems of
unreal, multiplicitous and empty signification that I have explored.
Language is necessarily pre-eminent in communication, but it also holds
sway in private thought, where we prefer to think in words, deluding
ourselves about the perfection of the signification of our words. The
problem of verbal sovereignty is aggravated or minimised according to the
quality of meaning posited by different philosophers. However, even for
those who believe that words signify truly and universally, the fact
remains that words dominate, giving rise to a host of problems to which I
now turn.
Even the most optimistic speakers admit that language inherently
threatens to dissolve into sound alone. In practice, words fill our heads
and the air between us, as the Port-Royalists admit. ‘Our need to use
external signs to make ourselves understood causes us to connect our
ideas to words in such a way that we often pay more attention to the
words than to the things’.72 And in themselves words take us no further
than their sensible surface, given that they can only be defined with more
68
Hobbes 1996, p. 14. See Leijenhorst (2002b) on Hobbes on insignificant speech and scholasticism
as the source as well as the target of his philosophy of language.
69
Spinoza 1994, p. 53. 70 Augustine 1997, p. 32.
71
Pascal 1995a, p. 169. See Melzer (1986) on this ‘aporia’. Cf. Markley (1993) on crises of
representation in Newtonian England.
72
Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 58. They are repeating Descartes, e.g. Descartes 1985e, p. 220.
words ‘and so on to infinity’.73 Bacon had expressed the same concern
about the promiscuity of words. ‘Definitions themselves consist of words,
and words beget words’.74 Words form a self-consuming circle which it is
impossible to shirk.
Descartes’ bold response that we can break out of the verbal darkness
into the light of the mind sounds hollow when it is only by figurative
recourse to vision, queen of the senses, that the move out of sensible
language can be made. Hobbes makes this fatal assault in his Objections to
the Meditations. He contends that the ‘great light in the intellect’ is only
‘metaphorical, and so has no force in the argument’.75 He adds that any
obstinate, passionate bigot might appeal to the light, which in itself has
no claim on truth. It produces only strongly held opinions. Indeed, it is
only a verbal claim and it derives its resonance from the vivid power of
sight-centred words. Descartes replies dismissively that the metaphor is
used for its explanatory power and ‘as everyone knows, a ‘light in the
intellect’ means transparent clarity of cognition’.76 In trying to distance
himself from the metaphor he can only return to it. It seems to have no
graspable referent. It turns back on itself, only deepening the sense that
imagination – and verbal images – rule.
duplicitous words
The clearest instance of the absolute power of language is mendacity. In
this case words do not function as they should, as a tunnel into the mind of
the speaker, but as a devious propaganda painting, as a false reflection of
the speaker’s mind. In interacting with others we only have their sensible
words to go on. We just have to trust that they speak their mind. If they do
not, we are none the wiser. Montaigne explains that language is the sole
means of communication and that therefore if we speak duplicitously we
stab the heart of society. ‘Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words
which bind us together and make us human. If we realised the horror
and weight of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than
other crimes.’77 Given his belief that ‘most of our actions are but mask
and cosmetic’, our words are likely to follow suit.78 Bacon pinpoints words
as particularly susceptible to untruth, advising the courtier, himself an
arch dissembler, that ‘more trust be given to countenances and deeds than
73
Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 64. 74 Bacon 1994b, p. 64. 75 Descartes 1984b, p. 134.
76
Descartes 1984b, p. 135. 77 Montaigne 1991, p. 35. See Zagorin 1990; Berti 1999; Iliffe 1999.
78
Montaigne 1991, p. 263.
to words; and in words, rather to sudden passages and surprised words,
than to set and purposed words’.79
Hobbes reiterates that we can never know for sure that people mean
what they say. They are bound only by what I shall call a tacit moral
contract to speak their minds, and contracts, as Hobbes knows all too
well, are effortlessly renegable. ‘Bonds . . . have their strength, not from
their own nature, (for nothing is more easily broken than a mans word,)
but from feare of some evill consequence upon the rupture’.80 It is
because men cannot be trusted to keep faith that the mighty Leviathan
must terrify them into justice. We can only hope that speakers express
themselves ingenuously. However, the deceptive potency of language
turns out to be one of its defining characteristics. Following Bacon,
Hobbes divides communicative signs into those that ‘cannot easily be
counterfeited; as actions and gestures, especially if they be sudden’, and
those ‘that may be counterfeited: and those are words or speech’.81 Speech
is ‘abused’ ‘when by words [people] declare that to be their will, which is
not’.82 We are forever beholden to a man’s words, hence the impossibility
of establishing the authenticity of a convert, or a penitent. ‘No man is
able to discern the truth of another mans repentance, further than by
externall marks, taken from his words, and actions, which are subject to
hypocrisie.’83 As Hobbes says in the context of an Enthusiast who claims
supernatural inspiration, a man ‘may err, and (which is more) may lie’.84
Elaborating on the moral contract, Pufendorf declares that the parties
are obliged to keep to the terms – as it were – or else the system falls apart.
His chapter heading on language reads ‘of speech, and the obligation
which attends it’, as though the possibility of deceit were so close to the
practice of speech that it inheres in any discussion of the subject. He
highlights the great weight that presses on the fidelity of men, given that
words themselves are irrevocably opaque. ‘Signs do not inform us of the
minds of others by an infallible, but only by a probable certainty, men
being naturally capable of dissimulation and disguise.’85 We lie when our
words belie our conceptions and when ‘the person to whom the signs
were directed, had a right to understand, and to judge of those concep-
tions; and we on our part, lay under an obligation to make him appre-
hend our meaning’.86 Pufendorf even goes so far as to suggest that the
moral aspect of language is separate from and takes precedence over the
79
Bacon 1996b, p. 273. 80 Hobbes 1996, p. 93. 81 Hobbes 1969, p. 64.
82
Hobbes 1996, p. 26. 83 Hobbes 1996, p. 348.
84
Hobbes 1996, p. 257. See Capp (1972) on such men.
85
Pufendorf 1703, iv, p. 278. 86 Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 281.
paradigmatic mind-revealing aspect. He says that it is legitimate to speak
falsely when it is in the ‘interest and safety’ of the hearer.87 Then, it is
not called ‘lying’. Language is a powerful instrument that can be used
to good and evil ends, and it is its honest use – with all the moral
connotations of that word – that makes a good speaker.
Pufendorf attacks one particular form of lying prevalent in his own
time: so-called ‘mental reservation’, according to which it is not lying to
say something you believe to be false and by which you intend to deceive
the hearer, so long as you quietly add words that make the statement true
to yourself.88 This casuist doctrine came to shocking light in the seven-
teenth century when it was adopted by Catholic priests under Protestant
interrogation. When asked about their religious identity they vocalised
things that would not incriminate them, but silently told the truth.
Facing inquisition in 1606, the Catholic priest John Ward was asked by
the Protestant authorities if he was a priest. He replied ‘no’, but later
claimed he had not lied because he had silently added ‘of Apollo’.89 This
mealy-mouthed justification cuts no ice with Pufendorf. He ‘abhors’ and
‘detests’ ‘those mental reservations’, ‘the effect of which is, that a person
seems outwardly to affirm what he inwardly intends to deny’. By this
practice ‘the whole use and design of speech’, which is ‘declaring what we
conceive in our minds’, ‘is utterly perverted’.90 Speech is quintessentially
a communicative, not a self-reflexive, action. Deceptive speech ravages the
trust which fuels society. Unlike the angels, I cannot look into your mind,
but must rely on words to publicise it, and am therefore at their mercy.
The things which bind people together can tear them apart again.
Another author who sees mendacity as tied ineluctably to speech itself
is Pascal. Videte an mentiar, he scribbles at one point, alluding to God’s
capacity to see through our words.91 Pascal sees our social condition as
necessarily deceptive, given that we are desperate for the love of others,
but so unworthy of it. The ‘charitable’ institution of confession is an
emblem of our mutual suppression: we keep our sins secret from our
peers so that we might ‘be esteemed by them as other than we really are’,
and reserve our sacrilegious truth for God, whose censure we foolishly
fear less than the community’s.92 Pascal feels himself drowning in a sea of
lies. ‘Truth is so darkened nowadays, and lies so established, that unless
87
Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 287.
88
I take my account of mental reservation from Sommerville 1988, a fascinating analysis of this
practice.
89
Somerville 1988, p. 160. 90 Pufendorf 1703, iv, p. 285.
91
Pascal 1995a, p. 62. The allusion is to Job 6:28. 92 Pascal 1995a, p. 180.
we love the truth we will never know it.’93 Lies seem endemic to speech.
‘Even when people’s interests are not affected by what they say, we must
definitely not conclude from this that they are not lying. For there are
people who lie simply for the sake of lying’.94
We lie not only to other people, but to ourselves as well, ejecting truth
from our lives altogether. Even at our most honest, in the quiet cool of
private reflection, we are polluted with self-deception born of self-love.
‘Our own interest is another wonderful means of pleasantly blinding
ourselves ( pour nous crever les yeux agréablement).’95 The self-righteous
way that we speak belies the content of our words. ‘Speeches about
humility are a matter of pride for those who care for reputation . . . we
are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise
ourselves from ourselves’.96
Pascal’s affiliates in Port-Royal offer a deep account of self-deception
and the key role that language plays therein. As part of their raft of
observations on self-delusion, the Logique posits our internalisation of
other people’s lies.97 Language is an amoral conveyance that bears truth
and falsity alike. ‘Absurdities’ take hold of people because they are ‘happy
to be tricked’.98 Nicole elucidates how people fall in love with false
opinions. Having ‘dressed’ them up ‘with reasons of conscience’, ‘not
perceiving this double motion of their hearts’, they become bathed in
the warm light of ‘spiritual considerations’.99 Language plays a part in
naturalising, even sanctifying, false opinions. Words cover the errors and
confusion, and impose upon ourselves as well as our listeners:
Man is so far removed from an acquaintance with truth, that he knows not the
marks and signs of it. He often forms confused ideas of very clear and plain
terms; and this makes, that he can apply them to those airy and glaring notions
that dazzle him. All that pleases him becomes evident, and the manner also
wherein he maintains it. And having, as it were, consecrated his own fancies,
under the title of indubitable verities, clearly held forth by Scripture, (church, or
93
Pascal 1995a, p. 135. 94 Pascal 1995a, p. 136. 95 Pascal 1995a, p. 20 (1963, p. 505).
96
Pascal 1995a, p. 127. See Moriarty (2003) on self-delusion and self-division in early-modern French
authors.
97
For example, the Logique explains how we misrepresent ourselves to ourselves in order to hide our
baseness from our proud eyes. ‘By sinning we have similarly lost true greatness and excellence. So
to love ourselves we are forced to represent ourselves as other than we really are, to hide our
miseries and poverty from ourselves, and to include in our ideas of ourselves a great many things
that are completely separate from this idea, in order to enlarge it and make it grander. Here is the
usual cause of false ideas’ (Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 54).
98
99
Nicole 1828, p. 119. Another subtle story of self-deception is when, in response to criticism from
others, people ‘disguise to themselves the secret displeasure they take’ at their own bruised egos by
‘persuading themselves’ that they are only upset because their assailants are in the wrong (p. 202).
tradition) he stifles from thenceforward all the doubts that offer to rise in his
mind, and suffers not himself to reflect on them. Or, if they ever come in his
thoughts, he considers them under the ideas of doubts and difficulties and so
disarms them of all the force that should make impression on his mind.100
We can feel Locke wholeheartedly embracing the sentiments of Nicole, as
he exposes the undetectably (self-)deceptive power of our beloved words.
The concern about linguistic deception is part of a more general
anxiety about the public persona parting company with the private self, a
divergence best perpetrated by language. This divided self haunts
seventeenth-century texts on account of the new, Protestant emphasis on
individual conscience, the increasing democratisation of authorship and
the divisive demands of formal obedience from the fast-changing
governmental and religious authorities in the period. The unturnable tide
of print culture, the pockets of and the pressure for press liberty, and the
valorisation of libertas philosophandi worked vigorously against oaths of
allegiance, calls for religious observance, and censorship laws. This
explosive dialectic heightened, exposed and forced painful discrepancies
between inner belief and outward speech.101 The strength of this worry
about speaking against one’s conscience is attested to by Hobbes, who
struggles to dispel it in his plea for obedience. In the same way that the
theory of ‘mental reservation’ is based upon self-reflexive as opposed to
communicated truth, Hobbes maintains that ‘profession with the tongue
is but an externall thing’ and irrelevant to our moral status – which is
determined by our hearts.102 The subject who is ordered by the ‘lawfull
prince’, upon pain of death, to worship in a certain way does not, by
obeying, commit idolatry. ‘Seeming worship . . . joined with an inward,
and hearty detestation’ does not impugn our souls.103 On a darker note,
Hobbes, like the archetypal Renaissance courtier, positively gives thanks
for the mask of words which enable us to dissemble our ‘obscene’ ‘secret
thoughts’.104 Words afford us the opportunity of putting on a good face.
Spinoza, a Jew whose family had fled the Spanish inquisition, only to
be excommunicated from the synagogue for his own radical philosophy
and forced to live in the dissenting shadows of the Netherlands, responds
to the legitimisation of external perfidy with horror and disgust.105 In the
100
Nicole 1828, p. 66.
101
See Bracken (1984, pp. 67–82) on the contemporary anxiety about oaths and the externalisation of
the mind; cf. Berti 1999; Comparato 1996; Iliffe 1999.
102
Hobbes 1996, p. 343. 103 Hobbes 1996, p. 452 (see Ryan 1983). 104
Hobbes 1996, p. 52.
105
Yovel (1989) and (1992) emphasise Spinoza’s Marrano mentalité ; Feldman (1992) underplays it.
See Israel (2001) on the contemporary importance of libertas philosophandi; on the radicalism of
impassioned plea for freedom of speech that ends his Tractatus, Spinoza
says that, even if it were possible to make people outwardly conform, this
would lead to the corruption of both state and individual. If men are so
terrified of speaking their hearts that ‘they do not dare to utter a whisper,
save at the bidding of their rulers’, then ‘men would daily be thinking one
thing and saying another, to the corruption of good faith, that mainstay
of government, and to the fostering of hateful flattery and perfidy,
whence spring stratagems, and the corruption of every good art’.106
Censorship pains the souls of ‘upright’ and ‘honourable’ people, who are
treated as criminals ‘simply because they are enlightened’, and would
rather die than lie.107 Words provide the terrifying means of betraying
ourselves.
doing things with words

Many philosophers are concerned that, in their uniquely sensible capa-
city, words alone are at the forefront of human interaction. They, quite
literally, make up our minds. This is most basically the case in the sense
that we believe what we hear from trusted authorities. The premises
and values that direct our lives are impressed by the mouths of others. We
are never out of our formative years, forever being inscribed by those
around us.
The concern with what passes through the ears of children, which we
encountered in the use-based grammars, is an ancient one. Plato banishes
the poets precisely because of the moral weakness and falsehoods they sow
in their captive audiences. ‘All the weird and terrifying language’ must be
‘discarded’.108 In The Politics, Aristotle warns that ‘the directors of edu-
cation . . . should be careful what tales or stories the children hear’. In
particular they should pay special attention ‘that they are left as little as
possible with slaves’, whose poisonous tongues would leave their sting.
Moreover, there is a slippery slope from speech to action, which is why
children must be prevented from mimicking indecent words. ‘The light
utterance of shameful words leads soon to shameful actions.’109
Bacon wants to erase mental graffiti.110 Descartes expresses the same
anxiety about linguistic information. ‘Right from infancy our mind was
swamped with a thousand such preconceived opinions; and in later
the enlightenment and Spinoza’s central place therein. See Strauss (1997) for an argument that
Spinoza was writing between the lines.
106
Spinoza 1951, p. 261. 107 Spinoza 1951, p. 263. 108 Plato 2000, pp. 71–87; 72.
109
Aristotle 1996, p. 193. 110 Bacon 1994b, p. 106.
childhood, forgetting that they were adopted without sufficient exam-
ination, it regarded them as known by the senses or implanted by nature,
and accepted them as witty, true, and evident.’111 The contingent origin of
words is obliterated over time. Their secure and brilliant presence makes
them feel innate and true. ‘Because’ says Pascal, ‘you have been taught
(vous a dit) in the schools that there is no such thing as a vacuum, your
common sense, which understood the notion of a vacuum perfectly well
before receiving this false idea, has been corrupted’.112 Recalling the
problem of self-delusion, Pascal demonstrates the central role of speaking
to oneself in the formation of belief. Our self-reflexive conversations
substantiate and authorise our self-interested agendas:
We are so made that by telling us that we are fools we believe it. The more we
tell ourselves the same thing, the more we bring ourselves to believe it. For we
alone hold an inner dialogue with ourselves, which must be kept properly in
check . . . We must keep silence with ourselves as much as possible, conversing
only about God, who we know is the truth. That way we persuade ourselves that
he is.113
Hobbes worries about indelible words. Our opinions are often merely
the verbal implantations of those who exert power over us; even belief in
‘articles of faith’ is caused by ‘the Hearing’ of ‘parents’ and ‘pastors’.
Hobbes goes on to ask rhetorically by what means there could be such
consensus in the Christian states that Scripture is the word of God, if
subjects had not heard this ‘fact’ from their ‘infancy’.114 As a young man
himself when writing the Elements Hobbes declares that men’s minds are
filled with rubbish that is difficult to clean up. ‘But when men have once
acquiesced in untrue opinions and registered them as authentical records
in their minds; it is no less impossible to speak intelligibly to such men,
than to write legibly upon a paper already scribbled over. The immediate
cause therefore of indocility, is prejudice; and of prejudice, false opinion
of our knowledge.’115 The roots of sensible words run deep in our
absorbent brains. Later, in De homine, Hobbes alludes to our addiction to
sensuous words. ‘And so those accustomed to wine from youth by no
means easily break the habit; and those imbued with no matter what
111
Descartes 1985e, p. 219. 112 Pascal 1995a, p. 19 (1963, p. 505).
113
Pascal 1995a, p. 33 (1963, p. 511. The translation is rather free here. The French is: ‘l’homme est
ainsi fait qu’à force de lui dire qu’il est un sot il le croit. Et à force de se le dire à soi-même on se le
fait croire, car l’homme fait lut seul une conversation intérieure, qu’il importe de bien régler . . . il
faut se tenir en silence autant qu’on peut et ne s’entre tenir que de Dieu qu’on sait être la vérité, et
ainsi on se le persuade à soi-même’).
114
Hobbes 1996, p. 406. 115 Hobbes 1969, p. 51.
opinions from boyhood retain them even in old age.’ In the next sentence
the image undergoes a horrible metamorphosis. ‘Religion and doctrine,
which everyone hath been taught from their early years . . . shackle them
forever’.116 Hobbes’ worry about the disfiguring, corrupting force of
external ‘authorities’ on our minds focuses on the Greek and Roman
republican books which ‘make the people’s disposition hostile to kings’.
Alluding again to the sensibility of words, he compares another loathed
tradition, that of the Presbyterian clergy, to that sweet music against
which even Ulysses did not trust himself. People have been ‘corrupted
by . . . the listening to siren songs of those who want supreme power in
the kingdom to belong to an ecclesiastic in civil form’.117
Inscribing people is only one of the things that language does. Hobbes
offers a taxonomy of the interpersonal uses to which people put
language.118 The first I have just discussed: ‘teaching’, whereby we ‘beget’
our thoughts in others. This primary use is divided into ‘learning’ (when
the speech is based on evidence) and ‘persuasion’ (when ‘there be not
such evidence’).119 The second use is ‘counselling’, whereby the expectation
of good or evil is engendered in the hearer.120 Hobbes goes on to
enumerate ‘expressions of appetite’ (such as when by interrogation we seek
knowledge, or by request, action), ‘expressions of intention’ (such as
promising or threatening), ‘expressions of will’ (such as commanding) and
‘instigation and appeasing, by which we increase or diminish one another’s
passions; it is the same thing with persuasion: the difference not being real’.
This final use of speech illustrates not only that words are deeds, but
reminds us that they might belie the truth without losing any of their
potency. ‘For not truth, but image, maketh passion; and a tragedy affecteth
no less than a murder if well acted.’121 In De cive Hobbes gives us an
appalling instance of the fantastic power of words. ‘How many men have
been killed by the erroneous doctrine that sovereign kings are not masters
but servants of society?’122 By the time he concludes Leviathan, when his
intimations of regicide had reached their bloody realisation, he goes so far
as to codify the harm one does with words as an (ab)use of language: ‘when
they use them to grieve one another’. Where nature ‘armed’ beasts with
teeth and horns, she gave man his tongue.123
116
Hobbes 1993, p. 65.
117
Hobbes 1993, p. 68. Serjeantson (2006) identifies Hobbes’ hatred of the universities as stemming
from their status as mouthpieces for the Presbyterian clergy as well as the democratical gentlemen.
118
Pufendorf (1703, iv, p. 273) follows Hobbes on this, explaining how by words we might ‘teach’
and ‘command’. Biletzki (1997) argues that Hobbes has a ‘pragmatic’ theory of language.
119
Hobbes 1969, p. 64. 120 Hobbes 1969, p. 67. 121 Hobbes 1969, pp. 67–8.
122
Hobbes 1998, p. 8. 123 Hobbes 1996, p. 26.
In A Direction for the Government of the Tongue according to Gods Word
(1593) the Puritan William Perkins articulates this contemporary concern
about the ‘lamentable and fearefull . . . abuse of the tongue’. He lists the
verbal means which cause ‘manifold sinnes against God, and innumerable
scandals and grievances to our brethren’: ‘swearing, blaspheming, cursed
speaking, railing, backbiting, slandering, chiding, quarrelling, contend-
ing, jesting, mocking, flattering, lying, dissembling’.124 He concludes that
‘the man of an evill tongue, is a beast in the forme of a man’, whose
venom is more toxic than a serpent’s.125
While Spinoza pleads for free speech, he admits that in itself it may
threaten the state. There are some words that must be censored due to
their actively subversive force, such as when a citizen declares that ‘the
supreme power has no rights over him’. Apparently ‘abstract’ doctrines
can have a dangerous, revolutionary power.126 Pufendorf, quoting
Hobbes, agrees that ‘the tongue of men is often us’d for a kind of trumpet
of war and sedition; which is able . . . to propose false rules of living and
of acting’.127
The active and informative power of language becomes especially
important when it is considered in the context of the desperately socially
orientated nature of the passions that drive us.128 Obsessed by our public
appearance and how we compare to others, language is the means to
fashion ourselves favourably and superlatively. When Bacon advises
gentlemen how to strut on the political stage, he draws on the funda-
mentally linguistic resources of wilful redescription.129 The rhetorical
strategy of paradiastole donates the means of donning an attractive,
laudable face. ‘Whatsoever want a man hath, he must see that he pretend
the virtue that shadoweth it; as if he be dull, he must affect gravity; if a
coward, mildness’.130
Hobbesian men suffer socially motivated passions, jostling for power
over each other. ‘All the heart’s joy and pleasure lies in being able to
compare oneself favourably with others and form a high opinion of
124
Perkins 1603, sig. A2r. 125 Perkins 1603, p. 536.
126
Spinoza 1951, pp. 260; 261. See Madanes 1992. 127 Pufendorf 1703, vii, p. 143.
128
Spinoza (1994, pp. 68–113) offers a deeply interactive theory of the affects; cf. Descartes (1985f,
p. 349) on passions as passively stimulated by external sources and pp. 350–404 for a typology of
the often other-regarding passions; Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 207: ‘the human mind is not only
naturally enamoured of itself, but it is also naturally jealous, envious, and malicious towards
others’. See James (1997 and 1998) for peerless accounts of the integral role of the emotions in
seventeenth-century philosophy.
129
See Greenblatt (1980) on the poignancy of Renaissance self-fashioning.
130
Bacon 1996b, p. 279. Cf. Shaw (1972, p. 98) on people’s inherent ‘tropicality’.
oneself ’.131 Hobbes explains that one reason for rebellion is that people
cannot bear being subject to others. Their
discontent which troubleth the mind of them who otherwise live at ease, without
fear of want, or danger of violence, ariseth only from a sense of their want of that
power, and that honour and testimony thereof, which they think is due unto
them. For all joy and grief of mind consisting . . . in a contention for precedence
to them with whom they compare themselves; such men must needs take it ill,
and be grieved with the state, as find themselves postponed to those in honour,
whom they think they excel in virtue and ability to govern.132
The intense concern with one’s superiority and with impressing other
people also induces people to copy those who glow in the eyes of their
community. ‘They revere those who are praised and they imitate those
whom they think worthy.’133
The vanity of man, exercised through language, appears throughout
the Augustinian French texts. Our ‘indelible’ appetite for ‘glory’ is sati-
ated by other people’s esteem.134 Pascal depicts a world where people are
so gripped by the desire to be admired that they forge a purely fictional,
second, external self. ‘We constantly strive to embellish and preserve our
imaginary being, and neglect the real one . . . we would happily be
cowards if that gained us the reputation of being brave’.135 Virtue is
turned on its head, hollowed out or reduced to that which brings us
renown, while our true self stagnates in the dark. Nicole marvels at the
way in which men are utterly in thrall to ‘the phantom of reputation’ that
‘possesses and dispossesses them, tumbles and turns them’, as Locke
poetically renders it.136 Nicole cannot believe how we stake our happiness
on that ephemeral ghost. ‘We soar aloft upon the opinions of men.’137 We
are enslaved to the approbational gaze of others. ‘ ’Tis the opinion of the
world that pushes him on – that drives him like an enemy at his heels,
and suffers him to think of nothing else.’138 Malebranche repeats Pascal’s
claim that we fashion a pleasant public self at the expense of our real,
private ones. ‘They study more to acquire a chimerical grandeur in the
131
Hobbes 1998, p. 26. Nerney (1991, p. 69) argues from Hobbes division of names into
(communicative) signs and (private) marks, that the Hobbesian mind ‘must already implicitly
exhibit the structures of intersubjective representation’ and therefore that people are ‘more social
by nature than an arrant wolf brought to heel’ (p. 71).
132
Hobbes 1969, p. 169. 133 Hobbes 1993, p. 67. 134 Pascal 1995a, p. 173.
135
Pascal 1995a, p. 147. 136 Nicole 1828, p. 76. 137 Nicole 1828, p. 82.
138
Nicole 1828, p. 85. Cf. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 216: ‘we can generally say that most things in
the world are admired only externally, because hardly anyone penetrates to the core and the
foundation of things. Everything is judged by appearances, and woe to those who do not have a
favourable appearance.’
imagination of others, than to give their mind greater force and com-
prehension’.139 It is the ‘inclination all men have for eminency and
greatness’ that ‘is a secret spur and incitement to our talking, walking,
dressing, and deporting our selves’.140
Pascal is explicit that it is by language that we convince other people of
our greatness. For example, he attributes curiosity to the desire to tell
others what we have discovered. ‘More often than not curiosity is merely
vanity. We only want to know something in order to talk about it
(en parler). Otherwise we would not go on a sea voyage to say nothing
about it, but simply for the pleasure of seeing things without ever hoping
to describe them (jamais communiquer).’141 He denigrates knowledge in
the same way. ‘There are those who go to extraordinary lengths to know
about these things, not to become wiser but simply to show that they
know about them.’142 Words are both literally and figuratively the means
by which we impress other people, and so we identify with them. They are
part of our beloved mask. We defend them fervently and cannot give
them up, whatever their credentials, for fear of losing face. Nicole writes:
man rejoices in the notions which he utters, says the Scripture; for, by uttering
them, he owns them to be his: he makes them part of his possessions; and it
becomes his interest to maintain them. To destroy them is to destroy something
that belongs to him, which cannot be done, without showing him that he is
deceived; and he is never pleased with that prospect.143
We seek the grail of esteem with our words, those cherished contrivances
that project for the world a laudable image of ourselves.
There is one final action which the sensible front of language performs.
Words make things in their own image. Verbal description is simulta-
neously, but secretly, an act of creation. Words are supposed to follow
things, but in many situations they precede and thereby constitute them.
By the simple act of applying a word to a thing, it makes it so, and we are
none the wiser.
This is less the case with the natural world, which presses irresistibly on
discourse. All the same, the more remote parts of the physical universe are
subject to verbal invention. The cry of the seventeenth century not to take
words for things, is grounded in anxiety about verbal fantasies passing for
truth. Bacon is concerned that the idols of the marketplace not only
139
Malebranche 1694, sig. a1v. See Lennon (1993a) on interpersonal contagion; Moriarty (2003) on
Malebranche’s acute sensibility to our imaginative communications.
140
Malebranche 1694, i.ii, p. 85. 141 Pascal 1995a, pp. 28 (1963, p. 509). 142 Pascal 1995a, p. 47.
143
Nicole 1828, p. 117.
harbour misconceptions about the world, but positively constrain and
control our view of it. ‘While men believe their reason governs words, in
fact, words turn back and reflect their power upon the understanding.’
When an acute scientist wants to write a truer map of the world than
that drawn by ‘common comprehension’, ‘words shout him down’.144
Descartes remarks on the way that common use clouds the truth and
paints an alternative world. He interjects his description of his clear and
distinct perception of wax with the following remarks about the way in
which speech can deceive us,
but as I reach this conclusion I am amazed at how weak and prone to error my
mind is. For although I am thinking about these matters within myself, silently
and without speaking, nonetheless the actual words bring me up short, and I am
almost tricked by ordinary ways of talking. We say that we see the wax itself, as if
it is there before us, not that we judge it to be there from its colour or shape; and
this might lead me to conclude without more ado that knowledge of the wax
comes from what the eye sees, and not from the scrutiny of the mind alone.145
Hobbes also bemoans the way in which our language forges mis-
conceptions about reality. The very substantiality of words suggests
equally clear and distinct, existent referents. He rails against insignificant
sounds which, despite themselves, incarnate a purely fictional but
apparently real world filled with ‘essences abstract, or substantial formes’.
He explains how scholastic churchmen terrify their parishioners into
rebellion and superstition by inventing ‘empty names’ that they spin out
of the verb ‘to be’ such as ‘entity, essence, essentiall ’.146 These prattlers
hoodwink their subjects with ‘ghosts’ and the ‘spirit’ of Christ in the bread.
Hobbes laments the fact that ‘insignificancy of language . . . hath a quality,
not onely to hide the truth, but also to make men think they have it’.147
He combats the magically creative power of language by decon-
structing it, and revealing the absences that underpin various discourses.
He repudiates the view that the law (rather than the sovereign) should
govern by remarking on the powerlessness of ‘words, and paper, without
the hands, and swords of men’.148 He dryly asks how ghosts can walk in
churchyards, when motion can only be ascribed to body.149 This attempt
to disenchant language is exemplified in his defusing the ‘word of God’.
Hobbes undercuts its singular, embodied status by translating logos as
144
Bacon 1994b, p. 64. 145 Descartes 1984a, p. 21. 146 Hobbes 1996, pp. 464–5.
147
Hobbes 1996, p. 473.
148
Hobbes 1996, p. 471. See Salmon (1996, pp. 61–4) on the mystical-Christian belief in the power of
words themselves.
149
Hobbes 1996, p. 466.
‘speech, discourse, or saying’.150 He denies any intelligible identity
between the divine word and Christ, ‘they might as well term him the
Nown of God: for as by Nown, so also by Verbe, men understand
nothing but a part of speech, a voice, a sound, that neither affirms, nor
denies, nor commands’.151 His target is a culture that tends to elevate
words themselves to a level that belies their inherently meaningless status.
Rejecting the miraculous power of words, he puts ‘spells’ down to
‘imposture, and delusion, wrought by ordinary means’.152
He is worried that the world is made in the image of language. He
criticises people who say things like ‘the colour is in the body; the sound is
in the ayre’, implying that our subjective perceptions are somehow ‘in’ the
external bodies.153 The universality of names leads people to imagine a
corresponding universality of things:
This universality of one name to many things, hath been the cause that men
think that the things themselves are universal. And do seriously contend, that
besides Peter and John, and all the rest of the men that are, have been, or shall be
in the world, there is yet somewhat else that we call men, (viz.) man in general,
deceiving themselves by taking the universal, or general appellation, for the thing
it signifieth.154
Having set out the Aristotelian predicaments in his Logic, Hobbes warns us
not to imagine that they are ‘true of the diversities of the things them-
selves’.155 The Port-Royal Logique echoes Hobbes’ concern that the cate-
gories, with their pretensions to describe the world, do so for the
frightening number of people who are ‘satisfied with words, and . . .
imagine that they know everything when they know only their arbitrary
labels’.156 By their mere presence, words conjure something out of nothing.
Spinoza, with his special sensitivity to the erroneous but domineering
images of words, is extremely concerned by the creative power of lan-
guage. The fantastic notions that ‘ordinary people’ have of nature are
substantiated ‘because they have names, as if they were [notions] of beings
existing outside the imagination’.157 People ‘can will something contrary
to what they are aware of’ simply by affirming with words that it is so.158
Errors proliferate because ‘the nature of words – not the nature of
things – allows us to affirm them’.159 When Spinoza is enumerating ideas
that we cannot ‘feign’ he breaks off with the sudden caveat that ‘there is
150
Hobbes 1996, p. 287. 151 Hobbes 1996, p. 289.
152
Hobbes 1996, p. 304. Cf. Bacon (1996b, p. 217) on ‘fascination’ with ‘characters’.
153
Hobbes 1981, p. 35. 154 Hobbes 1969, p. 21. Cf. 1996, p. 35. 155 Hobbes 1981, p. 25.
156
Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 34. 157 Spinoza 1994, p. 30. 158 Spinoza 1994, p. 64.
159
nothing that cannot be put into words’. He then notes that because the
idea of a soul is learned with the corporeal word the subject imagines ‘a
corporeal soul: because he does not distinguish the name from the thing
itself ’.160 The very sensibility of words makes us imagine that they stand
for equally perceptible things.
The creative power of words is even more problematic and acute when
it comes to the moral world, whose strict non-existence provides no
objective block to its description.161 Indeed, in a strong sense, it is
constituted by language. Hobbes is concerned by evaluative terms being
misapplied to things, ‘to make the unjust appear just, as may seem to suit
the speaker’s purpose’.162 He rails against the ‘foole’ who speciously
reasons – with his ‘heart’ rather than his head – that breaking one’s
contract might be reasonable. So it is that ‘successful wickednesse hath
obtained the name of vertue’.163 We have seen rhetoric positively enshrine
words’ capacity to redescribe moral situations, ‘by which some men can
represent to others, that which is Good, in the likenesse of Evill; and
Evill, in the likenesse of Good; and augment, or diminish the apparent
greatnesse of Good and Evill; discontenting men, and troubling their
Peace at their Pleasure’.164 Evaluative redescription so effectively colours
things that it actually causes immoral acts, such as regicide, so convinced
are the murderers that theirs is a triumph of virtue over vice. In the
masterbook of renaissance self-fashioning, Il cortegiano (1528), or The
Courtyer as it was rendered in Thomas Hoby’s translation (1561),
Castiglione explains how truth remains ‘hid’, while we call things
according to our ‘fansye’ by means of linguistic redescription. Men are
‘alwayes coverynge a vyce with the name of the next vertue to it, and a
vertue with the name of the nexte vice: as in calling him that is savage,
bolde: hym that is sober, drie’.165
160
161
See Kraye (1998) on the ranges of moral philosophy in the period, and in particular on a shift from
an ethics which rests ‘on the foundation of authority’ (p. 1307) to one ‘grounded on logically
rigorous deductions from self-evident principles’ (p. 1279). On natural law see Haakonssen 1998;
Simmonds 2002; Tuck 1987; on the innatism prevalent in English theological morality (Locke’s
main target) see Yolton 1993, pp. 30–48. See Struever (1983) on the humanist presentation of a
conventionally, discursively constructed, morality; Burke (1991) on reason of state and moral
scepticism; Tuck (1988b) on the relation between moral scepticism and toleration; Tuck (1993) on
humanist political thought. See Marshall (1994, p. 31) on Locke’s reading of ‘late sixteenth-century
scepticism about the founding of any principles of morality’, and pp. 201–4 on Locke’s
commitment to Pufendorf.
162
Hobbes 1998, p. 123. 163 Hobbes 1996, p. 101. 164 Hobbes 1996, pp. 119–20.
165
Castiglione 1994, p. 37. Locke had a copy of Il libro del cortegiano (Harrison and Laslett 1965,
p. 103) and notes passages from the author in his commonplace book (e.g. MS. Locke d. 1, pp. 5;
29; 57; 61; 65).
Robert South gives an even more direct account of the shockingly
constitutive power of words in two aptly named sermons, Of the Fatal
Imposture and Force of Words (1686). They are based on Isaiah v. 20: ‘woe
unto them that call evil good, and good evil’. South reminds us of where
we began in this chapter, at the invisibility of meaning and sovereignty of
sensible words. He spells out the dangerous consequences of playing with
these ‘dreadful weapons’.166 ‘Words are the signs and symbols of
things . . . in the course of human affairs, words and names pass for
things themselves: for things, or objects, cannot enter into the mind’.167
Things influence the mind according to the ‘respective names or
appelations by which they are notified and conveyed to the mind’.168 All
men are therefore ‘captivated and enslaved by words’.169 Their mis-
application is undetectable, and their claims absolute. When something
evil is verbally misrepresented as good, the mind understands it as such. It
was the Devil’s saying to Adam that the apple would bring him
immortality that caused his Fall. ‘God commanded and told man what
was good, but the devil surnamed it evil, and thereby baffled the com-
mand, turned the world topsyturvy, and brought new chaos upon the
whole creation.’170 By the same token, when inappropriate moral labels are
pinned on private individuals they perfectly disguise the truth. ‘Honour’ –
‘the height and flower, and top of morality’ – applied to a dishon-
ourable man, is like ‘a rich and glistening garment . . . cast over a rotten,
fashionably-diseased body’.171
This form of evaluative creation is not restricted to obviously moral
terms. It extends to a wealth of words that seem neutrally to describe but
that in fact praise or censure. Using the example of ‘lie’, Pufendorf explains
how the descriptive content of words is supplemented with an ‘additional’,
evaluative one.172 The Port-Royal Logique likewise describes how saying to
someone ‘you lied about it’ does not only mean ‘you know that the
contrary of what you say is true’. Those pragmatic words carry ‘an addi-
tional idea of contempt and outrage. They make us think that the person
who says them does not care whether they injure us, and this makes the
words insulting and offensive.’173 And Lamy, using the same example,
refers to the ‘contemptuous’ overtones of ‘lyar’.174 Hobbes gives the
following pertinent example of this kind of subtle speech act. ‘A Tyrant
originally signified no more simply, but a Monarch: But when afterwards
166
South 1823b, p. 123. See Reedy (1992, pp. 88–106) on South’s views on the misuse of language.
167
South 1823b, p. 121. 168 South 1823b, p. 111. 169 South 1823b, p. 125.
170
South 1823b, p. 111. 171 South 1823c, p. 269. 172 Pufendorf 1703, iv, p. 279.
173
Arnauld and Nicole 1996, pp. 66–7. 174 Lamy 1986, p. 201.
in most parts of Greece that kind of government was abolished, the name
began to signifie, not onely the thing it did before, but with it, the hatred
which the Popular States bare towards it.’175 When Charles I was called a
tyrant, he was hated and ‘legitimately’ executed. Another example of an
apparently purely descriptive term that in fact condemns is ‘heresy’. This
takes us back to the radically unstable connections of words to meanings,
and hence of the possibility of creative redescription. ‘Men give different
names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own
passions: as they that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they
that mislike it, haeresie: and yet haeresie signifies no more than private
opinion; but has onely a greater tincture of choler’.176
South is desperately aware of the evaluative heart of supposedly neutral
words, and of the fatal consequences of their misapplication, as becomes
clear in his examples of the ‘absurd empire and usurpation of words over
things’.177 The first is the charge of ‘popery’ that has subverted the church
of England. This word seems harmless but in fact incites rebellion. ‘It is a
certain word made up of six letters; that has been ringing in their ears ever
since their infancy, and that strangely inflames, and transports, and sets
them a madding they know not why.’178 The second example is ‘tyranny
and arbitrary power’, an ascription that overthrew Charles I and threa-
tened to do the same to his namesake. These are ‘rabble-charming words,
which carry so much wild-fire wrapt up in them’.179 The true intention of
the speech act is concealed beneath a carapace of words that trumpets the
public good.
More generally, words write the cultural structures we inhabit. For
example, according to Hobbes, they incarnate God. ‘And because words
(and consequently the attributes of God) have their signification by
agreement, and constitution of men; those attributes are held to be sig-
nificative of honour, that men intend shall so be.’180 We are subject to the
way in which opaque words write the story desired by the speaker – the
‘praetext’ beyond which we cannot reach.181 Hobbes cites ‘transub-
stantiation’ as a completely wilful misreading of the Bible; its pro-
mulgation by authoritative churchmen confers upon it a truth value.182
One can say whatever one wants and, given favourable circumstances,
such as power, one realises one’s fiction simply by virtue of its articula-
tion. Hobbes lampoons the invocation of insignificant words that become
175 176 177

Hobbes 1996, p. 470. Hobbes 1996, p. 73. South 1823b, p. 128.
178 179 180
South 1823c, p. 207. South 1823c, p. 243. Hobbes 1996, p. 253.
181 182
Hobbes 1996, p. 402. Hobbes 1996, p. 451.
significant only by being invented, and proceed to unsettle peace.
‘Temporall and Spirituall Government, are but two words brought into
the world, to make men see double, and mistake their Lawfull Sover-
aign.’183 This fantastic duality grips the people’s minds who, with perhaps
a reference to the ancient account of seeing two suns at Bacchus’ revels,
are driven mad trying to reconcile two masters, with devastating results
for all concerned.
We are at the mercy of what the words tell us, and of the responses
they solicit. The following declaration of South serves as a fitting end to
this chapter: ‘The generality of mankind is wholly and absolutely gov-
erned by words or names’.184
At the end of this part of the book we are confronted by a proliferation of

concerns about language. However, they should not be overstated. I have
pulled out anxieties about the relationship between sign and signified
from texts that simultaneously, albeit to very varying degrees, exhibit a
great deal of confidence in the possibility at least, of the truth, univocity,
and plenitude of everyday verbal signification. It is a rich mixture of
scepticism and faith that Locke inherits and to which he responds. But
there is one thing upon which all are agreed. Words are a force to be
reckoned with. All early-modern philosophers would concur with South
that ‘there is a certain bewitchery or fascination in words, which makes
them operate with a force beyond what we can naturally give an account
of ’.185 It remains to be seen how Locke parries this ‘verbal magic’.186
183 184 185

Hobbes 1996, p. 322. South 1823b, p. 122. South 1823b, p. 124.
186
South 1823b, p. 126.
part iii
Locke on language
chapter 7
Words signify ideas alone
Like the reader, Locke is immersed in the discursive framework that

I have laid out. Emerging from his books, he vehemently attacks the
widespread assumptions, echoed and bred in the logical tradition, either
that words are an unmediated nomenclature of things or that the con-
cepts which do mediate things represent them perfectly and realistically.
These assumptions are apparent in the secret fusion of concepts and
things which melts away or downplays the mentalism to which everyone
simultaneously, if sometimes less obviously, subscribes. But Locke takes
his ammunition from the very target of his fire. He repeats the universal
assumption that a speaker expresses his ideas about the world and, in the
context of his (r)evolutionary epistemology, pushes it steadily to its
necessary conclusions. Given his twin beliefs that all our external
knowledge is derived from sense perception, and that there is a radical
discontinuity between appearance and reality, our words simply cannot
capture the heart of things. While it was a well-worn conviction that we
can only talk about the world as we know it, we have seen that concepts
and things were frequently collapsed into each other with unabashed
confidence, to present an apparently seamless continuity of language,
mind and world. With unprecedented force Locke robs this triumvirate
of its last man. His tirade about language therefore fits squarely into his
overarching philosophical polemic. Just as he tightly reins in our claims to
real– or ‘adequate’– knowledge, so does he bridle our mouths.1 Just as our
knowledge about the world is limited to our reasoned experience of it, so
are our words. With a series of fierce strokes Locke lays waste two pro-
minent and ambitious epistemologies of the time. He sweeps aside the
broadly Aristotelian view that bare experience is a route to nature, and the
Cartesian view that while experience does bar the way, reason can grasp
1
Locke 1975, pp. 378–82 (ii.xxxi.6); 568–9 (iv.iv.11–12).
185
things essentially.2 Given that Locke denies both the rationalist’s ‘eye of
the mind’ and, sometimes connectedly, the existence of innate ideas,
experience is all we have, but it falls far short of reality and we should not
let our tongues run away to the contrary.
As we saw in chapter 4, the new philosophers had already repudiated the
Aristotelian unity of nature and experience, and the hylomorphic ontology
that underpinned it. We also met a broadly sceptical and empirical tradition
that had blazed Locke’s particular trail. In various ways, certain philoso-
phers carved out a space between the world and our creative interpretation
of it. But they were more keen than Locke to use a mixture of reason and
experiment to hypothesise about the underlying structure of reality.
Furthermore, they and the new philosophers more generally neither
developed the rich extent of Locke’s new epistemological programme nor
made the link nearly so explicit between epistemological and linguistic
limits. Nor did they, with the exception of Hobbes, deal with language
about things distinctly from and in addition to thought about things.
Hobbes veered off down an extreme nominalist route that located uni-
versals in language alone and thereby put our imaginations, as well as
things, a long way from our words. While Locke subscribes to the
more traditional view that mental and verbal discourses might in
theory run in perfect parallel, he fears that in practice they do not. His
purpose is to prise off the mask of words and reveal what could possibly
lie beneath, which is very different from what people had imagined. The
gulf between language and the world had not received such sustained and
rich exposure until Locke laid it bare.
the subjective, sensible bounds of words

Locke begins book iii of the Essay concerning Human Understanding – ‘Of
Words’ – conventionally, by positing his fundamental semantic thesis
that words signify ideas. He also reiterates the time-honoured opinion
that we met in rhetoric: human beings are uniquely able to forge com-
munities by virtue of their quintessential capacity for language. Locke
agrees. It is ‘the great instrument, and common tye of society’ that God
has given us in order to realise our ‘sociable’ nature.3 It works by ‘con-
veying’ ‘the thoughts of men’s minds . . . from one to another’.4 Later on,
2
Lennon (1993b, p. x) says that Locke’s ‘Essay can be read without exaggeration as an anti-Cartesian
polemic from beginning to end’.
3
Locke 1975, p. 402 (iii.i.1). 4 Locke 1975, p. 402 (iii.i.2).
Words signify ideas alone 187
Locke reveals his thoroughgoing inheritance of the logical–grammatical
presentation of language, according to which verbal discourse exactly
articulates mental discourse. He repeats the fundamental distinction
between categorematic and syncategorematic terms, that stand, respec-
tively, for simple concepts and mental operations. That is to say, he
explains that words are divided into ‘names of ideas in the mind’, and
words which ‘signify the connexion that the mind gives to ideas, or
propositions, one with another’. These ‘particles’, as Locke calls them,
‘intimate some particular action’ of the mind. He gives the familiar
example of the copula: ‘Is, and Is not are the general marks of the mind,
affirming or denying.’5 He seems to be singing an old tune.6 Language
effects ‘the communication of thoughts’, without which there would be
no ‘comfort and advantage of society’.7
But this calm, recognisable rendition of linguistic theory is interrupted
by an urgent defence of the apparently uncontroversial thesis that words
express thoughts. The change of pace and tone signals Locke’s departure
from the received wisdom and the onslaught of his rebellion:
Words in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing, but the ideas
in the mind of him that uses them, how imperfectly soever, or carelesly those ideas
are collected from the things which they are supposed to represent. When a man
speaks to another, it is, that he may be understood; and the end of speech is, that
those sounds, as marks, may make known his ideas to the hearer. That then which
words are the marks of, are the ideas of the speaker: nor can any one apply them, as
marks, immediately to any things else, but the ideas, that he himself hath: for this
would make them signs of his own conceptions, and yet apply them to other ideas;
which would be to make them signs, and not signs of his ideas at the same time;
and so in effect, to have no signification at all. Words being voluntary signs, they
cannot be voluntary signs imposed by him on things he knows not. That would be
to make them signs of nothing, sounds without signification.8
This harangue, which echoes Hobbes’ blunt rejection of real stones in the
head, labours the truism that we cannot talk about things of which we have
no idea. It also alludes disdainfully to the supposition theory associated
with Terminist logicians, and begins Locke’s systematic limitation of the
5
Locke 1975, p. 471 (iii.vii.1). See Berman (1984) and McRae (1998) on Lockean particles. On Locke’s
success with regard to particles and the propositional attitude/content distinction see Ott 2004,
pp. 34–52.
6
On Locke’s scholastic background see Milton 1984. 7 Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.1).
8
Locke 1975, pp. 405–6 (iii.ii.2). Ott 2002, p. 32, argues that one of the reasons why words cannot
signify things for Locke is the ‘contingent fact’ that ‘whenever anyone utters the word ‘‘stone’’ ’, a
stone does not appear. It seems to me that far from there being ‘no logical impossibility’ of words
signifying things in this way, words can only ever signify ideas, and nothing else for Locke, because
insofar as they are invented by men, words can only be applied to what men know, that is, ideas.
scope of language to the speaker’s (albeit rationally manipulated) ideas and
nothing else, fitting squarely into his overall aim of limiting the scope of
knowledge to the thinker’s ideas and nothing else. He threatens to jettison
the objective world from both language and knowledge.
I turn first to his innovative highlighting of the speaker’s, rather than
the words’ meaning. Part of Locke’s project is to insist that ‘knowledge’
can only be knowing for oneself. ‘We may as rationally hope to see with
other mens eyes, as to know by other mens understandings.’9 In Of the
Conduct of the Understanding, and as a kind of empiricist, Locke
attenuates the relationship between seeing and knowing from one of
comparison to one of identity. ‘Knowing is seeing, and if it be so, it is
madness to persuade our selves that we do so by another man’s eyes, let him
use never so many words to tell us, that what he asserts is very visible.’10
Just as we cannot know without ideas, so we cannot understand words
without them, however lightly words trip off the tongue. Words only
make sense insofar as they coincide with the thoughts of the language
user. On probing the undisputed proposition that words signify ideas,
Locke concludes that they must signify the ideas of someone, and are
therefore limited to the ideas of particular speakers. He thereby shakes the
prevailing orthodoxy out of its complacency. His emphasis on the indi-
vidual speaker refocuses meaning from a generic and given set of thoughts
to particular and contingent collections of them.
We hear this new, individualist accent very early in the life of the Essay.
In Draft B (1671) Locke declares ‘noe man could apply them [words] or
make them significant of any ideas but those which he hath’.11 Its central
place in Locke’s linguistic theory is clear from the Essay abstract (1689?).
His amanuensis, Sylvester Brownover, traces the tenet that words ‘can be
properly & immediately signes of noething but the ideas in the minde of
him that uses them’.12 The point about words only meaning what par-
ticular individuals take them to mean recurs in many different contexts in
the course of the published work. In the midst of Locke’s round rebuttal
of innate ideas, he laughs at the absurdity of the belief that principles are
written in the minds of babes who can have no ideas to correspond with
the supposedly native inscriptions. A child cannot agree or disagree with
such propositions as ‘it is impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be’,
9
Locke 1975, pp. 654 (iv.xv.1); 101 (i.iv.23). See Ayers (1991, i, p. 276) on ‘individualistic intuitionism’.
10
Locke 1993, p. 77. 11 Locke 1990b, pp. 178–9.
12
MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 62r. For further information on the organisation and provenance of Locke’s
manuscripts, see Long 1959.
‘for words being empty sounds, any farther than they are signs of our
ideas, we cannot but assent to them, as they correspond to those ideas we
have, but no farther than that’.13 With characteristic obviousness, when he
is laying out the limitations of reason, Locke says that ‘it perfectly fails us,
where our ideas fail’. And in case people think they can get away with
fine-sounding words they do not understand, they should think again. ‘If
at any time we reason about words, which do not stand for any ideas, ’tis
only about those sounds, and nothing else.’14
Locke’s promotion of the speaker is part of his development of those
broadly sceptical trains of thought which stress the human as opposed to
the natural origins of language and knowledge. He puts an unprecedented
emphasis on the subjectivity, artificiality and wilfulness of the ideas that
form the irrevocable limits to language and knowledge:
since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate
object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident,
that our knowledge is only conversant about them. Knowledge then seems to me
to be nothing but the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement
and repugnancy of any of our ideas. In this alone it consists.15
This inflexible ideational circumscription dominates the Essay as a whole
and preys upon his mind until the end of his life. In 1703, in Some
Thoughts concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman, he succinctly
asserts that ‘the extent of our knowledge cannot exceed the extent of our
ideas’.16 By the same token, our words cannot outstretch our ideas. Locke
explicitly connects these two fundamental contentions over a familiar
bugbear of the new mechanists: ‘real essences, or substantial forms’. Locke
rejects these scholastic fantasies on the grounds of their unintelligibility.
They ‘come not within the reach of our knowledge, when we think of
those things; nor within the signification of our words, when we discourse
with others’.17 We have no sense experience of a ‘real essence’ and
therefore no idea of what such a thing might be. Having no idea of it, we
cannot know it. Nor, to paper over the crack, can we name it.
All the ‘vast store’ of ideas that we have comes from ‘experience’. The
mind begins like ‘white paper, void of all characters’. It is then ‘painted’,
either through ‘sensation’ (our perception of ‘external sensible objects’,
giving rise to ‘sensible’ ideas), or through ‘reflection’ (our perception of
‘the internal operations of our minds’).18 Sensation is the absolute limit to
13
Locke 1975, p. 61 (i.ii.23). 14 Locke 1975, p. 682 (iv.xvii.9). 15 Locke 1975, p. 525 (iv.i.1–2).
16
Locke 1997, p. 349. 17 Locke 1975, p. 461 (iii.vi.33).
18
Locke 1975, p. 104 (ii.i.2). Ideas can be ‘sensible’ in the sense of being ideas of external objects (such
as words, of which we have sensible ideas). But this usage ought not to detract from the opposition
our ideas about things. Were we to ‘dive farther into the nature of things,
we [would] fall presently into darkness and obscurity’.19 Locke lampoons
‘the affectation of knowing beyond what we perceive’.20 Already in Draft
A (1671) Locke is drawing up the sensible frontiers which are also the
static boundaries of our talk. All knowledge is ‘noe thing else but the
compareing uniteing compounding enlargeing & otherwise diversifying
these simple ideas one with an other’.21 Our knowledge, as it is recorded
by our words, ‘reaches very little farther than our experience.’22
The reduction of knowledge and language to ideas would not be so
devastating were it not for the opaque connections between things and a
large number of our sensible ideas, connections which Locke takes from
the new philosophy and shades darker. His project in the Essay is dras-
tically to rein in our epistemological pretensions – and their linguistic
accomplices under whose cloak the pretensions gain currency. His aim is
‘to examine our own abilities, and see, what objects our understandings
were, or were not fitted to deal with’.23 He discovers that ‘the compre-
hension of our understandings, comes exceeding short of the vast extent of
things’.24 The acuity of Locke’s sense that we see through a glass darkly
emerges in his private journals. The year 1677, in France appropriately,
seems to have been marked by doubt. On 12 February he jots distractedly:
‘our understanding sticks & bogles & knows not which way to turne’. On
the 8th of that month he remarks that ‘our mindes are not made as large as
truth nor suited to the whole extent of beings’ and goes on to muse on the
‘incomprehensible’ and ‘unintelligible’. By 26 March he is in full flow:
‘the extent of knowledg of things knowable is soe vast, our duration here
soe short & the entrance by which the knowledg of things gets into our
understandings soe narrow’.25 Back in England, early in 1680, Locke
suggests that what seems ‘miraculous’ is only so because of the great
inadequacy of our knowledge.26
It is our benighted state which gives urgency to (as well as taking
succour from) his fashionable championing of the degrees of ‘prob-
ability’, and which underpins his passionate plea for toleration in the
overlapping debates about morality, religion and nature that rage in
Europe at the time.27 We ought humbly ‘to sit down in a quiet ignorance
I drew in chapter 6 and shall do in chapter 9, between public and palpable sensible words, and
private and ephemeral insensible ideas.
19
Locke 1975, p. 314 (ii.xxiii.32). 20 Locke 1975, p. 116 (ii.i.19). 21 Locke 1990a, p. 8.
22
Locke 1975, p. 546 (iv.iii.14). 23 Locke 1975, p. 7 (Epistle to the Reader).
24
Locke 1975, p. 45 (i.i.5). 25 MS. Locke f. 2, pp. 58; 42; 43; 87. 26 MS. Locke f. 5, pp. 36–7.
27
See Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.5); see also pp. 654–68 (IV.xv) on not demanding ‘certainty, where
probability only is to be had’. On Locke’s involvement in the emergence of probability, see
of those things, which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the
reach of our capacities’, rather than arrogantly and noisily ‘be so forward,
out of an affection for universal knowledge’ to pronounce upon them.28
So narrow are the bounds of our knowledge that we ought to ‘com-
miserate our mutual ignorance’, rather than pounce upon people whose
views differ from our own, stigmatising them as ‘obstinate and perverse’.
Locke’s blood is up when he considers the ‘magisterial’, ‘insolent and
imperious’ way in which opinionated loudmouths ‘impose’ themselves on
others.29 In Socratic mode, he feels that the more we know, the more we
know that we know little, and the less right or disposition we ought to
have to judge the beliefs of others. ‘The necessity of believing, without
knowledge, nay, often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of
action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to
inform our selves, than constrain others.’30 Ignoring his own injunctions
about non-judgementalism, but following their premise, Locke is moved
to write An Examination of P. Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing all Things
in God (1693). He attacks Malebranche for the extraordinary arrogance
immediately apparent in the title of his work.31 He ought to have
‘humility enough to allow that there may be many things which we
cannot fully comprehend’.32 This knowledge deficit should stop our
mouths.
Hacking (1975a, p. 86). On Locke’s crucial change of mind in favour of toleration see Dunn (1984,
p. 20). Tuck (1988b) explains how moral and religious scepticism might be used to justify
‘excessive ideological repression’ (p. 21). On toleration see Ashcraft 1992a; Goldie 1991; Israel 1997;
Rogers 1992.
Yolton (1993) shows (especially pp. 48–71 and 169–81) that Locke’s Essay was regarded as a
radical intervention in Enlightenment debates on religion and morality, and suggests (especially
pp. vii and 115–17) that Locke cannot have been unaware of its subversive implications. Stewart
(2000) urges us to see Locke as involved in the theological debates of the period, articulating a
concept of the person which squared uneasily with the trinity, as much a ‘promoter of a particular
religious epistemology’ (p. 246), as he was writing, as Padley (1985 and 1988, I, p. 350) puts it, ‘the
epistemological manual of the Royal Society’. See Thiel (2000) on Locke’s argument for personal
identity in the context of the South–Sherlock trinitarian controversy of the early 1690s, just prior
to Locke’s publication of his chapter on identity. Marshall (2000, p. 184) makes the important
point that while Locke might privately have held unorthodox beliefs, his overriding public concern
was with toleration and anti-dogmatism and he was therefore loathe to pin himself to any sect for
principled as well as pragmatic reasons. A private musing about the difference between soul and
spirit within the same substance can be found at MS. Locke f. 33, fo. 131r.
28
Locke 1975, p. 45 (i.i.4). 29 Locke 1975, pp. 660; 661 (iv.xvi.4).
30
Locke 1975, p. 660 (iv.xvi.4).
31
Locke owned four copies of De la recherche, as well as Desgabet’s and Simon Foucher’s Critiques of
it (Harrison and Laslett 1965, pp. 182–3). See Nadler (2000, p. 2) on Locke’s identification of
Malebranche as an Enthusiast.
32
Locke 1706a, p. 142.
However, our epistemological myopia – and therefore our linguistic
confines – do not extend to a ‘perfect Scepticism’. Locke has no truck
with this other extreme, nor is it the object of his serious engagement,
as it was for some of his, particularly French, predecessors. Instead, he
jocularly sweeps aside those who maintain that, if knowledge falls short
of ‘the vast ocean of Being’, then we have none at all. Rather than
‘wander into those depths, where they can find no sure footing’ they
ought to be content at the shore.33 He compares those who are ‘in
despair of knowing any thing’ to someone who does not walk, but sits
down and dies ‘because he had no wings to fly.’34 Locke entreats us to
find the ‘horizon . . . which sets the bounds between the enlightened and
dark parts of things’.35 In his journal, in April 1677, he lights upon this
midway between dogma and scepticism, this mitigated form of doubt.
‘’Tis of great use in the pursuit of knowledg not to be too confident nor
too distrustfull of our owne judgment.’36 Back in the metaphorical mass
of the Essay he declares that while we might not have ‘broad sun-shine’
we ought not ‘idly’ to use this as an excuse for mental inaction, but do
our ‘business by Candle-light’. Sounding a threatening note, Locke
declares that it would be ‘unpardonable, as well as childish peevishness’
if we were to give up the pursuit of knowledge altogether, just because
there are some things that cannot be known. While certainty is rare, it is
rarely required, and probability is generally ‘sufficient to govern all our
concernments’.37 God, our ‘bountiful author’, has given us the capacity to
discover ‘whatsoever is necessary for the conveniences of life, and infor-
mation of vertue’.38 ‘The candle, that is set up in us, shines bright
enough for all our purposes’ and we must use it effortfully to light our
way in this life and towards the next.39 God has given us minds that are
perfectly coincident with his intentions for us, that is, that we should be
preserved.
Accordingly, at least until the end of his life, Locke is confident that we
can arrive at demonstrative, or highly probable, knowledge of the divine
or natural law, the only true standard of morality, on the basis of the
certain knowledge we have of the existence of ourselves and God, ‘whose
33
Locke 1975, p. 47 (i.i.7). 34 Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.6; i.i.5).
35
Locke 1975, p. 47 (i.i.7). 36 MS. Locke f. 2, p. 133 (p. 125).
37
Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.5). 38 Locke 1975, p. 45 (i.i.5).
39
Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.5); cf. p. 634 (iv.xi.8). For some crucial commentary on the centrality of
teleology in Locke see Dunn 1969, p. 95; Harris 1998, pp. 327–8, and passim; Rogers 1996; Tully
1980, pp. 38–50, and passim. See also Nidditch 1975, pp. xviii–xx on the moral and religious
motivation for the Essay.
workmanship we are, and on whom we depend’.40 We do not need, and
therefore do not have, the same certainty about the natural world. While
we know almost certainly that there are things out there that cause in us
sensations which enable us to preserve ourselves, we are ignorant of the
primary causes and the connections between them and our sensations.41
With such massive gaps in our ideas and without knowing how the ideas
that we do have connect to each other, we cannot have demonstrative
knowledge of them.42 The effects of the world are designed for our
convenience.43 They tell us precious little about the world itself.
The majority of names of sensible ideas record the effects of objects on
our senses as opposed to qualities innate to the objects themselves. Like
new philosophers before him, Locke rejects, in the main, the homology
between idea and thing, positing instead a purely causal connection. ‘We
may not think (as perhaps usually is done) that they are exactly the images
and resemblances of something inherent in the subject.’ He thereby rejects
the tenacious, and broadly Aristotelian, view that concepts are facsimiles
of things – forms abstracted from matter. Using the same analogy that
Descartes had used in the context of light, Locke says that most sensations
are ‘no more the likeness of something existing without us, than the
names, that stand for them, are the likeness of our ideas, which yet upon
hearing, they are apt to excite in us’.44 As words are arbitrary signs of ideas,
ideas are natural ‘signs’ of things.45 In his Examination Locke speculates on
the material causes of perception. He rejects the scholastic claim that ‘any
material species carrying the resemblance of things . . . bring the perception of
them to our senses’. He postulates instead that ‘from remote objects, material
causes may reach our senses, and therein produce several motions that may be
the causes of ideas in us’.46
40
Locke 1975, pp. 552–3 (iv.iii.21); 549 (iv.iii.18). On Locke’s use of probability to shore up his
account of morality, see Tully 1993, pp. 312–14. In moral reasoning, Locke wants to argue that it
does not matter that we have inadequate ideas of the substance of man. We can reason the rights
and duties of ‘moral man’ from the ‘immoveable unchangeable idea’ of a ‘corporeal rational being’
(Locke 1975, pp. 516–17 (iii.xi.16)). See Tully 1980, pp. 27–8; Ayers 1991, ii, p. 188; Mattern 1998;
Waldron 2002, pp. 44–82. Cf. Tully (1980, pp. 25–6) on the important thing for demonstration
being not ‘clear ideas but . . . a clear perception of the agreement or disagreement between the
relevant aspects of two or more ideas’. Harris (1998, pp. 152–9) explores the relationship between
Locke’s claims about our imperfect knowledge of species and his strict hierarchical division
between men and animals in his political theory. Yolton (2001) wants to insert embodied ‘man’
back into personhood.
41
Locke 1975, pp. 634 (iv.xi.8); 537 (iv.ii.14); 545 (iv.iii.12).
42
Locke 1975, pp. 556–9 (iv.iii.26–8). 43 Locke 1975, p. 564 (iv.iv.4); cf. p. 150 (ii.x.3).
44
Locke 1975, p. 134 (ii.viii.7). Cf. Descartes 1985b, p. 81. 45 Locke 1975, pp. 720–1 (iv.xxi.4).
46
Locke 1706a, pp. 147; 152. This goes even for vision.
Echoing Boyle, as he does so often and so closely, Locke distinguishes
between primary and secondary qualities of things.47 The former
constitute the actual, possibly corpuscularian, constitution of things.
They include ‘solidity, extension, figure, motion, or rest, and number’.
They exist independently of us and are therefore ‘real qualities’.48 The
ideas they would and sometimes do cause in us are indeed ‘exact
resemblances of something in the things themselves’.49 Primary qualities
cause so-called secondary qualities. These are in fact ‘nothing in the
objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us’. They
produce, and are somewhat indistinguishable from, their effects on us,
such as ‘colours, sounds, tasts, etc.’50 These ideas bear ‘no resemblance’ to
the objects themselves.51 While they seem to be in the objects, they are in
fact wholly the product of the interaction of our senses with the objects,
and would not exist in our absence. Repeating every new philosopher,
Locke thereby rejects the Aristotelian view that sensible species are dis-
tinct entities which inhere in objects as well as minds and which are
substantiated and reified in their ‘abstract’ terms like ‘whiteness’.52 While
Locke’s characterisation of primary qualities seems to accord us an
impressive foundation for real knowledge – and speech – in fact we have a
negligible grasp of them. The deep being of the world is hidden from
view and, while we can make probabilistic hypotheses about it we can
do this only tentatively – and even then there are moral matters of
greater importance. Locke subscribes to ‘the corpuscularian hypothesis, as
that which is thought to go farthest in an intelligible explication of the
qualities of bodies’.53
47
Locke owned sixty three works by Boyle (Harrison and Laslett 1965, pp. 91–3). Alexander (1985)
puts Locke squarely in the context of the scientific revolution, arguing for Boyle’s enormous
influence on Locke whom he sees as developing Boyle’s ‘hypothetico-deductive argument’ (p. 7)
and the implications of his corpuscular hypothesis (p. 8) as well as his primary/secondary quality
distinction (p. 8). See Givner (1991) on the way Locke’s scientific preconceptions, born of his
friendships with Boyle the matter theorist and Sydenham the physician, motivated his experiential
philosophy of language; Schuurman (2000, pp. 42–3) on Sydenham’s medical-historical influence;
Milton (2001) on the centrality of Locke’s medical concerns. Bolton (1983) traces a Pyrrhonian
influence. On Locke’s (muddled?) primary/secondary quality distinction see Alexander 1974; Ayers
1991, i, pp. 62–6, 183–4 and 207–17; Bennett 2001, ii, pp. 74–90; Campbell 1998; Curley 1991
(1st edition, 1972); Lennon 1993b, pp. 249–50 and 298–307; Yolton 1970, pp. 121–31.
48 49
Locke 1975, pp. 135 (ii.viii.9); 137 (ii.viii.17). Locke 1975, p. 373 (ii.xxx.2).
50
Locke 1975, p. 135 (ii.viii.10). 51 Locke 1975, p. 137 (ii.viii.15).
52
Du Trieu (1826, p. 11) defines an abstract term as one ‘which signifies only the form, but not the
subject: such as this utterance, whiteness’ (‘qui significat solam formam, non autem subjectum: ut
ista vox, albedo’). Cf. Locke (1975, pp. 474–5 (iii.vii.1–2)) on the duplicity and insignificance of
abstract terms.
53
Locke 1975, p. 547 (iv.iii.16).
Beyond this general characterisation of the world that lies behind the
veil of appearances, we cannot even guess at its more specific details.
Instead, our heads swim with ideas of secondary qualities which tell us
nothing about the underlying reality from which they emanate. Locke
evokes the dissimilarity between the ‘blue colour, and sweet scent’ of a
violet and those ‘insensible particles of matter’ which cause them, by
comparing them, respectively, to ‘the idea of pain’ and ‘the motion of a
piece of steel dividing our flesh’.54 In a strange and vivid thought
experiment inspired by the amazing inventions of modern times, Locke
demonstrates just how much it is the human perspective that determines
our descriptions of things and how wildly these diverge from reality. He
imagines a man with acute, microscopic senses that could ‘discern the
minute particles of bodies, and the real constitution on which their
sensible qualities depend’ and imagines how different the world would
seem to him. The yellow colour of gold, so central to its essence, would
‘disappear, and instead of it we should see an admirable texture of parts of
a certain size and figure’.55 The trademark redness of blood fades under a
microscope, showing ‘only some few globules of red, swimming in a
pellucid liquor’.56 The redness would evaporate altogether were this
mythical man’s eyes 10,000 times stronger than the best ‘glasses’. While
such a man might indeed pierce to the nature of things and get ‘ideas of
their internal constitutions’, he ‘would be in a quite different world from
other people’.57 And it is their world, not the real one, that language
describes. While Locke articulates a causal realism, whereby things relate
to ideas as causes to effects, these ideas – and the words that express
them – possess a subjective and superficial intentional content.
The fog of ideas does not pose the radical sceptical or idealist con-
sequences for Locke that commentators have imposed upon his theory.58
54
Locke 1975, pp. 136–7 (ii.viii.13). 55 Locke 1975, p. 301 (ii.xxiii.11).
56 57
Locke 1975, p. 302 (ii.xxiii.11). Locke 1975, p. 303 (ii.xxiii.12).
58
This sceptical interpretation of Locke was immediate (Yolton 1993, pp. 72 and 98–114). The realist/
representationalist/idealist debate is still raging. Tipton (1999) exposes the problems of ‘traditional’
critics (e.g. Aaron 1971, p. 101) but agrees that the sceptical problem remains for Locke. Cf. Bennett
(1971, p. 69): ‘Locke puts the objective world, the world of ‘‘real things’’ beyond our reach on the
other side of the veil of perception.’ Yolton (1970, pp. 118–37) strongly opposes the
representationalist Locke, locating him in the tradition which begins with Aristotelian ‘formal’
awareness, and seeing him as attempting ‘to preserve perceptual realism’ (pp. 127–8), according to
which our ideas of primary qualities (though not of secondary ones) resemble the object’s qualities.
For Yolton, the way of ideas is just elaborating the truism that things must be known by the mind
(p. 131). Yolton (1984) asserts that Locke’s ‘doctrine of idea-signs’ (p. 212) makes ideas ‘not things,
but ways of knowing, of being perceptually acquainted with objects as groups of experienced
qualities’. See also: Armstrong (1965) on Locke’s ‘new metaphysics’, according to which the idea
signifies the thing in a causal rather than a qualititatively similar relationship; Alexander (1985,
His ‘way of ideas’ does not build the ‘castle in the air’ that Sergeant
bemoans in his Solid Philosophy Asserted, against the Fancies of the Ideists
(1697).59 Locke turns the criticism on its head, reminding his readers what
they already knew: that the mind knows the world by means of ideas.
‘’Tis evident, the mind knows not things immediately, but only by the
intervention of the ideas it has of them.’60 These ideas do not block the
way for Locke but form an, albeit straightened and transformative, pas-
sage to the world. He does entertain Descartes’ hyperbolic doubt that our
ideas represent nothing external, but concludes that our senses give us ‘an
assurance that deserves the name of knowledge’.61 Presumably alluding to
Descartes’ meditation in the stove, Locke curtly declares that ‘I believe he
will allow a very manifest difference between dreaming of being in the
fire, and being actually in it.’ The pain gives us the kind of evidence that
‘puts us past doubting’.62 Our simple, sensible ideas are ‘real’ and afford
us ‘real knowledge’ because they exhibit a ‘steady correspondence . . . with
pp. 303–4) on the real knowledge Locke envisages. Land (1986, pp. 31–77) presents Locke as an
‘idealist’. Soles (1988, p. 172) argues that Lockean ideas are not objects, but modes of thinking. See
Ayers (1991, i, pp. 36–43 and 62–6) on simple ideas as natural signs of their regular causes which do
not resemble them but which enable ‘real knowledge’, pp. 44–51 on ideas as images, pp. 52–66 on
Locke’s relation to the Malebranche/Arnauld furore and Yolton’s Arnauldian interpretation of
Locke; Ayers (1997, p. 5) on Locke’s ‘undogmatic realism’; Ayers (1998c, p. 25) on Locke’s ‘direct
causal realism’; Lennon (1993b) on Locke the representationalist, whose ideas are material images
or objects (p. 247) which are caused by things, but (with the exception of ideas of solidity) bear no
resemblance to things (p. 303). Watson (1995, p. 66) asserts that Locke’s circumscription of
essential knowledge removes the worry about ideas not resembling objects. See Mackie (1998) on
Locke’s intentional object representationalism; Prinz (2000), who interprets Locke as anticipating
the modern claim that ‘our concepts have two kinds of content’, determined by the world and by
the mind (p. 1); Hight (2001) on Locke’s handling of the debate as to whether ideas are substances
or modes; Ott (2004, pp. 138–49) on Locke’s externalism with regard to ideational representation.
On a related point see Rorty (1980, pp. 141–2) on Locke’s ‘naturalistic fallacy’, whereby he confuses
a mechanistic, causal account of belief with a justification for that belief. Formigari (1988) comes
from a different angle at the question of the relationship between language and the world for
Locke, claiming that they are linked by ‘an arbitrary pattern’ (p. 99); see Crouch (2001) for a
response to Formigari.
59
Sergeant 1697, sig. a1r; sig. a4v. Locke owned this edition (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 230).
Sergeant says that the ‘ideists’ (Locke and Descartes) ‘ground all their discourses on ideas; that
is . . . on similitudes or resemblances; which similitudes . . . are meer fancies: mine is to build them
solely and entirely on the things themselves’ (sig. a4v ).
60
Locke 1975, p. 563 (iv.iv.3). See Ashworth (1981 and 1984) on the scholastic background to Locke’s
comments about words’ signifying ideas (and things); Vickers (2002, p. 314) on Locke’s
appropriation of the ‘Aristotelian triad’. While it is absolutely right to recognise Locke’s enormous
Aristotelian debt, one ought not to forget his vehement rejection of the isomorphic Aristotelian
link between concept and thing; Locke might keep the triad in some ways but he lays waste its
symmetry. Some commentators, in very different ways, argue for a more robust role for things:
Alexander 1985, p. 242; Colman 1983, p. 110; Guyer 1994, pp. 120–3; Kretzmann 1968; Landesman
1991; Losonsky 1994, pp. 135–8; Ott 2004, p. 93; Yolton 1970, pp. 206–7.
61
Locke 1975, p. 631 (iv.xi.3); cf. p. 537 (iv.ii.14). 62 Locke 1975, p. 537 (iv.ii.14).
the distinct constitutions of real beings’.63 That is, certain ideas are reg-
ularly produced by certain things.64
However, for all their causal conformity with things, ideas (and the
rational work we do with them) are the limits of our knowledge – and
therefore our speech – about the world. Any other claims are more or less
fictional – or nominal. It is here that the problem of language in relation
to the world really comes to the fore. While words can hook on to the
world in a phenomenal, experiential, and therefore ‘real’ way, we are led
by our neat and apparently penetrative system of everyday words like
‘gold’ and ‘man’ to imagine a greater referential depth than can ever be
the case. Locke also cites the great number of learned words which seem to
pick out things, but which must be devoid of content because we have no
sensible ideas of them – the only means of grasping and describing things
out there. His ears ringing sympathetically with the accusations of
insignificance which his predecessors had levelled against their foe, Locke
makes it his business to tear down the grand linguistic edifices which
purport to reflect the universe. He exposes the ideational vacuum that
underlies the terms of art which are the building blocks for ontological
constructions. His targets fall into two overlapping categories. There are
words which are just pure fantasy. ‘The Platonists have their Soul of the
World, and the Epicureans their endeavour towards motion in their
atoms.’65 There are also words which signify things we can reasonably
suppose to exist but of which we have no clear or distinct ideas, such
as ‘substance’, which is used by ‘the whole tribe of logicians’ as though
they knew exactly what it meant.66 This general anxiety about our
words outrunning our ideas motivates Locke’s excited strictures on
the ideational limits of our words. I deal in the final chapter with
Locke’s despair both at our taking words for things and at insignificant
but impressive words. Now I sketch the shadowy and manufactured
world which goes beyond simple, sensible ideas and about which
Locke does speak – mindful of its limits – if only to lay bare its
unspeakableness.
63
Locke 1975, pp. 372–3 (ii.xxx.2). 64 Locke 1975, p. 564 (iv.iv.4).
65
Locke 1975, p. 497 (iii.x.14).
66
Locke 1706b, p. 192. See Ott (2004, pp. 95–113) for an interesting investigation of whether Locke’s
limitation of meaning to ideas prohibits him from talking about things of which we have no idea,
particularly ‘God’, ‘real essence’ and ‘substance’. Rogers (1995) explores Locke’s empiricist, anti-
rationalist, specifically anti-Cartesian, successful mission to talk about ‘infinity’ without the notion
of an innate idea.
manufactured maps
Locke demolishes the precise, essentialist taxonomies that logicians and
their philosophical students present as real. It is not nature but we who
divide up the world into substances such as ‘gold’. Their names signify
certain collections of sensible ideas that we observe regularly to go together,
such as ‘a body yellow, of a certain weight, malleable, fusible, and fixed’.67
Recalling and blurring the scholastic division between substance and acci-
dent, this formulation echoes new empiricist descriptions of substances as a
‘troop’ of qualities, and particularly Bacon’s and Boyle’s summations of
gold.68 This combination of simple ideas, or ‘complex idea’ as Locke calls it,
is the absolute semantic limit to substance terms. Our minds do not
penetrate beyond the superficies of things, and neither, therefore, can our
names. The perceived divisions between things, instantiated by names, are
all that we have to divide things. Complex ideas are therefore the ‘nominal
essences’ of substances and it is these alone ‘that the name, which is the mark
of the sort, signifies’.69 Our knowledge cannot cross this line and, despite
their singular and precise appearances, words too can go no farther.
Words pick out things as our experience delineates them, not, Locke
insists again and again, on the basis of any real delineations. They do not
denote the ‘real essences’ of substances or ‘the real internal, but generally
in substances, unknown constitution of things’.70 We have no idea of this
‘constitution of the insensible parts of that body’ on which its sensible
properties depend and therefore must not imagine that they ground our
own talk.71 We only suppose that ‘essences’ exist, without knowing
anything about them, except that they differ completely from their sen-
sible manifestations.72 Challenged by Stillingfleet, Locke asserts more
unambiguously the existence of ‘real essences’, whose ‘certainty’
‘nobody . . . ever denied’. But he reasserts with equal vigour the fact that
we ‘have no idea or conception at all of what they are’, which therefore
restricts the signification of our names of substances to ‘simple ideas of
sensation and reflection’ and ‘no further’ or ‘perfecter’.73 Locke compares
our ignorance of the real essence of ‘man’ to a ‘gazing country-man’
looking at the ‘famous clock at Strasburg’, unable to see beneath the face
to the ‘springs and wheels’.74
67
Locke 1975, p. 439 (iii.vi.2).
68
Bacon 1994b, p. 137. See chapter 4 above, p. 100 and p. 125 on Bacon’s and Boyle’s experiential
accounts of gold.
69 70
Locke 1975, p. 443 (iii.vi.7). Locke 1975, p. 417 (iii.iii.15).
71 72
Locke 1975, p. 439 (iii.vi.2). Locke 1975, p. 442 (iii.vi.6); 419 (iii.iii.18).
73 74
Locke 1823, pp. 82; 26. Locke 1975, p. 440 (iii.vi.3).
Locke further proves that language does not fit the world by appealing
to the process of democratic linguistic legislation we have already seen
lurking in the trivium. Common use, certain grammarians and rhetor-
icians had reluctantly admitted, is forged not by the learned, but by the
masses. It is they, in their carelessness, who have carved up the world.
Therefore, even if we might know the world better, it will not be reflected
in our linguistic classifications. These were ossified long before the sci-
entists arrived, wielding their ‘forms and essences’. The ‘ignorant and
illiterate people . . . sorted and denominated things, by those sensible
qualities they found in them, thereby to signify them, when absent, to
others’.75 Not only does language harbour the mundanity (and sometimes
the errors) of the mob,76 but it is a hopelessly thin representation of the
great expanse of experience. Picking up another familiar complaint,
especially prevalent at a time of scientific development, Locke declares that
‘there are not words enough in any language to answer all the variety of
ideas, that enter into men’s discourses and reasonings’.77 The deficiencies
of language could be partially reformed by and for philosophers, and,
indeed, this is precisely Locke’s aim in his discussion of language. When
they ‘come to have ideas different from the vulgar and ordinary received
ones’, they can make new words, or else ‘use old ones, in a new sig-
nification’.78 Yet philosophers will always be partially constrained by the
mob, hoping that ‘common use’ will admit their novelties.79 Developing
the popular commonplace that ‘man should speak as the vulgar, and think
as the wise’, Locke explains how philosophy cannot entirely insulate itself,
but must clothe itself in the ordinary garb of the country.80
A far more serious obstacle blocks even philosophers from the world.
They can never know what simple ideas to collate under the names of
substances. Even if, says Locke, we could discover the primary qualities of
bodies, we could never know how they relate to the secondary qualities.
We will therefore never know whether a certain set of ideas necessarily
coexist.81 Having no sure hold on ideas of substances, we have no material
for certain demonstrative science. Without adequate ideas of substances
75
Locke 1975, pp. 453; 452–3 (iii.vi.25).
76
See e.g. p. 93 (i.iv.15) on ‘vulgar’ significations of ‘God(s)’.
77
Locke 1975, p. 13 (Epistle to the Reader). 78 Locke 1975, p. 515 (iii.xi.12).
79
Locke 1975, p. 471 (iii.vi.51).
80
Bacon 1857, iv, p. 434; as E. S. De Beer tells us, this was also the motto of Sir Henry Blount, the
father of Tyrrell’s brother-in-law. Tyrrell cites a version in a letter to Locke of 29 August 1687:
‘loquendum cum vulgo; sentiendum cum philosophis’ (Locke 1976–89, iii, p. 257); Locke 1975,
p. 243 (ii.xxi.20).
81
Locke 1975, pp. 545 (iv.iii.13); 546 (iv.iii.14); cf. pp. 556–60 (iv.iii.26–29).
we simply cannot perceive whether they agree or disagree with each
other – the perception of which is the definition of knowledge.
Nor do we have much more luck with the underlying causes of our
ideas. The constant coexistence of certain sensible ideas leads us to sup-
pose that there is one thing to which they belong, from which they
emanate and to which we give the name ‘substance’, but of which we have
‘no clear distinct idea at all’.82 The mind ‘takes notice also, that a certain
number of these simple ideas go constantly together’ and presumes they
‘belong to one thing’.83 It is Locke’s claim for an obscure idea of sub-
stance(s) that so upsets Stillingfleet. In response to Stillingfleet’s protest
that we have clear and distinct ideas of substances, particularly of ‘man’,
Locke reaffirms that we have a ‘very obscure idea’ of the ‘substance,
wherein the properties of a man do inhere’. Clarity and distinctness of
ideas obtain only to ideas of sensation and reflection, to figures ‘that I
clearly see’, or sounds ‘that I distinctly hear’.84 Locke systematically lays
waste confident contemporary talk about substance which is widely
broadcast by the eclectic majority of his contemporaries as holding the
key to the heart of the world. He probes our ‘notion of pure substance in
general’ which, though a legitimate postulate, has no clear content. He
compares us to children who, when asked what it is that underpins the
perceptible world, ‘readily give this satisfactory answer, that it is some-
thing; which in truth signifies no more, when so used, either by children
or men, but that they know not what; and that the thing they pretend to
know, and talk of, is what they have no distinct idea of at all, and so are
perfectly ignorant of it, and in the dark’.85 Locke thereby bursts the
learned, ontological bubbles by reducing substance to an ‘obscure and
relative idea’, which simply signifies ‘support’ or, ‘in plain English,
standing under, or upholding’.86
Locke is ambivalent about the reality of any kind of essence, insofar as
the concept generally refers to a man-made class. He does sometimes
82
Locke 1975, p. 316 (ii.xxiv.37).
83 84
Locke 1975, p. 295 (ii.xxiii.1). Locke 1823, pp. 35; 25. 85 Locke 1975, p. 296 (ii.xxiii.2).
86
Locke 1975, p. 296 (ii.xxiii.2). There is a debate over whether Lockean ‘substance’ is a naked logical
subject or a real thing. Bennett (2001, ii, pp. 108–17) proposes the ‘argument from language’
whereas Ayers (1991, ii, p. 15) postulates that substance is ‘the fundamental nature or essence which,
in interacting with perceivers and surrounding things, is responsible for the object’s various
appearances’; substance is therefore unknowable not in principle, but because of our poor
cognitive reach (cf. Ayers 1998c, pp. 34–44). Bolton (1998b, p. 127) argues that ‘discourse about
substances has existential import; it implies that something, having certain qualities, actually
exists . . . to have a substratum is to be an actual thing with an internal constitution (or real
essence) which lawfully gives rise to certain properties’. See Von Leyden (1969) on Locke’s
ambivalence towards substances as knowable/fictional.
admit talk of real essences which exist but are undiscoverable, but these
are nothing like – and indeed are wielded in opposition to – a deter-
minate set of specific ‘substantial forms’ which make individual species
what they are.87 It is often this corrupt, Aristotelian sense of ‘essence’ that
Locke does his best to cut down to its nominal size.88 He rejects scholastic
real essences as not only unimaginable but completely fictitious – most of
the time, that is. In chapter 4 we saw the sway essentialism held over
philosophers and even Locke cannot entirely eradicate its mark. If we
turn to his manuscripts we see the power of the old taxonomies. In some
notes on the division of the sciences he lays out a kind of Wilkinsian
skeleton of knowledge, dividing ‘homo’ (‘anima rationalis’) from ‘ani-
malia’ (‘anima brutorum’), which includes ‘serpentia’, ‘reptilia’, ‘insecta’.89
Although his categories include human artifice (for example, putting
‘cultus’ and ‘tempus festi’, under ‘theologice’), they do grate with the rabidly
conventional, anti-essentialist polemic of the Essay. In his journal entry
for 27 July 1677 he betrays another attachment to his pedagogical
inheritance:
In reading of books & making adversaria methinks these are the principall parts
or heads of things to be taken notice of The first of which is the knowledg of
things their essence & nature properties causes & consequences of each species
which I call philosophica & must be divided according to the severall orders &
species of things. And of these soe far as we have the true notions of things as
really they are.90
While these strange excursions into the enemy camp are surely not indi-
cations of a hidden philosophical commitment, but are merely about how
to organise and remember material, they reveal the staining signature of
scholasticism.91
Beyond the recesses of his private papers, Locke is generally passionate
about killing the essentialist myth. When Locke does allow that there are
real essences he explains, with a mundane, debunking eye for the ety-
mology, that these are simply what things are. In the new de-animated,
corpuscularian world, the real essence of a thing is just ‘that constitution
of the parts of matter’ on which a certain collection of sensible qualities
depend.92 As Locke says to Stillingfleet, ‘the real essences of things’ are,
87
Locke 1975, p. 445 (iii.vi.10). 88 Locke 1975, p. 417 (iii.iii.15).
89
MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 158r. Cf. MS. Locke f. 8, p. 175 on ‘Bruta non cogitare’ (written 29 September
1684).
90
MS. Locke f. 2, pp. 247–8.
91
See Yeo (2004) on Locke’s method of commonplacing and its connection to his theory of memory.
92
Locke 1975, p. 442 (iii.vi.6).
unmysteriously, ‘the very real constitution of things’.93 But the extent to
which these are essences is minimal or even, according to some of Locke’s
pronouncements, non-existent because ‘even in this sense’ they relate ‘to a
sort’, to an idea that we have made up rather than particulars in the
world.94 None of the sensible qualities on the basis of which we distin-
guish between things is essential or ‘inseparable’ to any ‘individual parcel
of matter’, says Locke, alluding to the scholastic patchwork of essential,
inseparable and separable properties of substances.95 In a typical piece of
self-deconstruction Locke explains how ‘there is nothing I have, is
essential to me. An accident, or disease, may very much alter my colour,
or shape; a fever, or fall, may take away my reason, or memory, or both;
and an apoplexy leave neither sense, nor understanding, no nor life.’96
Qualities such as ‘reason’ or ‘life’ are only essential to the nominal essence
of ‘man’. He expands his point with reference to a ‘parcel of matter’
which possesses all the qualities associated with ‘iron’ except ‘obedience to
the load-stone’. It would be ‘absurd to ask’ whether such a thing ‘wanted
any thing essential to it’.97 Properties are essential to things only insofar as
they are part of the abstract idea of a thing. Essentiality itself is a purely
human construction, grounded in the notion of a ‘sort’ or universal which
is inapplicable to nature, being made up entirely of particulars, them-
selves constituted by matter in motion.98 ‘All things, that exist, being
particulars’, all universals – which cover the great majority of words –
must be the result of human fabrication.99
Developing the long, nominalist tradition but falling short of Hobbes’
denial of universal ideas, Locke describes the gulf that separates experience
from language and reason. ‘General and Universal, belong not to the real
existence of things; but are the inventions and creatures of the under-
standing, made by it for its own use, and concern only signs, whether
words, or ideas’.100 The process of abstraction, whereby we positively
contrive general ideas, is coincident with the introduction of the language
that we use to express them. Together these generalising capacities mark
‘a perfect distinction’ between (our abstract ideas of !) ‘man and brutes’.101
Together they haul us out of the world of experience into a world that we
actively create. Most of the time, it is this artificial world we inhabit. ‘The
93
Locke 1823, p. 83. 94 Locke 1975, p. 442 (iii.vi.6).
95
Locke 1975, p. 442 (iii.vi.6). See Atherton 1998.
96
Locke 1975, p. 440 (iii.vi.4). Cf. Colie (1969) on self-(de)construction as an essayist; Gray (1999)
on the essay form.
97 98
Locke 1975, p. 441 (iii.vi.4–5). Locke 1975, p. 442 (iii.vi.6); cf. p. 440 (iii.vi.4).
99
Locke 1975, p. 409 (iii.iii.1). 100 Locke 1975, p. 414 (iii.iii.11). 101 Locke 1975, p. 159 (ii.xi.10).
far greatest part of words, that make all languages, are general terms.’102
We abstract particular ideas by ‘separating them from the circumstances
of time, and place, and any other ideas, that may determine them to this
or that particular existence’, and thereby make them ‘general repre-
sentatives of all of the same kind’.103 Locke explains how children, at first
only familiar with particular complex ‘pictures’ of their mother and
nurse, on meeting other things that ‘resemble’ these images, frame an
abstract complex idea of ‘man’. They proceed to omit further particular
ideas such as man-shape and construct the idea and the term ‘animal’.104
While abstraction comes from the heart of the Aristotelian tradition,
Aristotle and his logical interpreters see the process as intimately related
to the nature of the world and even reaching to its very core. Locke, by
contrast, sees the process as in some ways an amputation of the world. He
administers a distinctive blow to the names of substances when he
explains that the so-called ‘simple’ concepts that logicians had presented
as insulated from human judgement and therefore from truth or falsity,
are in fact not immune at all. In the logics we saw ‘man’ standing
innocently, subject to neither affirmation nor denial, before the second,
judgemental or compounding propositional stage of thought. Locke
counters with the ground-breaking claim that the name of a substance is
‘in effect an affirmation’.105 The mind does not passively receive the
(complex) ideas of substances, but actively affirms a collection of qualities
to go together and to belong to one thing. At first, when he says that the
mind neither affirms nor denies at the level of simple conception, he
seems conventional. However, he is talking about simple ideas of sen-
sation and reflection. According to his Baconian, Boylean, redefinition of
simplicity, whereby sensations are simple and substances complex, the
mind stirs before the propositional stage, when it unites various simple
ideas into a complex one. ‘As the mind is wholly passive in the reception
of all its simple ideas, so it exerts several acts of its own, whereby out of its
simple ideas, as the materials and foundations of the rest, the other are
framed.’106 The wilful, judgemental nature of the construction of the
ideas of substances makes them at least as human as real. Moreover, in
flagrant breach of the received wisdom, it introduces the possibility of
102
Locke 1975, p. 409 (iii.iii.1).
103
Locke 1975, pp. 411 (iii.iii.6); 159 (ii.xi.9). In the debate over Lockean abstraction, Ayers (1991, i,
pp. 242–63) argues that Locke has a ‘partial consideration’ theory. Walmsley (2000) agrees that
this is so for Locke’s early thought, but contends that he later adopts the ‘separation’ position (see
Walmsley 1999). Bennett (2001, ii, pp. 16–17) also makes the case for separation.
104 105
Locke 1975, pp. 411–12 (iii.iii.7–8). Locke 1990a, p. 8.
106
Locke 1975, p. 163 (ii.xii.1); cf. p. 373 (ii.xxx.3).
truth and falsity into the very building blocks of thought. Whereas the
first sections of logic textbooks had exempted simple concepts (and
terms) from such veridical scrutiny, Locke lifts the bar in the corre-
sponding section (book ii, ‘of ideas’) of his own logic. By locating
complexity in advance of the propositional stage, he makes the reality of
our most basic thoughts balance precariously on the uncertainty of
human discrimination. A complex idea might be ‘false’ if it joins ‘simple
ideas, which in the real existence of things, have no union’. A ‘false idea of
an horse’ might be composed of the shape and size of a horse, and ‘the
power of barking like a dog’.107 Substantial complexity advances the
moment of human intervention in the reasoning process. Locke thereby
opens the floodgates of human error and diversity into the keep of the
castle.
These contingent fabrications are the true sources of the extravagant
tables of substance that adorn the various encyclopaedic projects of the
period. It is they that lie at the roots of the Porphyrian tree. Essences are
no more than abstract, complex ideas.108 ‘This whole mystery of genera
and species, which make such a noise in the schools, and are, with justice,
so little regarded out of them, is nothing else but abstract ideas, more or
less comprehensive, with names annexed to them.’109
Locke proves that our verbal taxonomies are manufactured, as opposed
to natural, by appealing to nature herself. Were our specific divisions
coincident with ‘certain precise essences or forms of things’, she would
bear this out.110 However, particular things fall foul of our blueprint,
thereby exposing its authorship. Locke’s favourite example is the symbol
of the monstrous birth which we met in Plato, Montaigne, Gassendi and
Hobbes. The tight grip of this leitmotif on contemporary imaginations
becomes clear at the embryonic stage of the Essay. ‘Even that species
which we may be supposed to know best & cal man is not soe readily
distinguished from beast.’111 This rubbishes the dictum that rationality
divides men from animals. The claim can amount to ‘noe more but that
the idea I have framd which I call man conteins in it the idea which I cal
rational & soe is but a predication of names suited to my idea but not to
the knowledg of things existing in rerum natura. It being evident that
children for some time & some men all their live times are not soe
rational as a horse or dog’.112 Locke subtly appropriates the negative and
107 108
Locke 1975, p. 391 (ii.xxxii.18). Locke 1975, p. 439 (iii.vii.1).
109 110 111
Locke 1975, p. 412 (iii.iii.9). Locke 1975, p. 448 (iii.vi.14). Locke 1990a, pp. 9–10.
112
Locke 1990a, p. 27.
distasteful connotations of monstrosity and affixes them to the peddlers of
the view that rationality is a ‘specific difference’ of things themselves.
Only unreasonable fools think reason can be essential to what is only an
invented idea. The instances of ‘irregular and monstrous births’ which
proliferate in the pages of the fully fledged Essay must make us doubt the
essential division between man and beast that is peddled so freely in the
logics and beyond.113 Those who believe that there are ‘a certain number
of forms of molds, wherein all natural things, that exist, are cast’, ought to
be rendered speechless in the face of ‘changelings, and other strange issues
of human birth’; things which have the same essence must have the same
properties.114 How could it be that things supposed, in Aristotelian jar-
gon, to be ‘inseparable’ from a species are in fact lacking, such as reason
in the case of what is otherwise, apparently, a man?
Locke’s obsession with this topic, and with this example in particular,
further emerges from his manuscripts. In his journal on 18 November
1677 he explores the fact that language does not fit the world. ‘If a woman
should bring forth a creature perfectly of the shape of a man that never
shewed any more appearance of reason than an horse nor had noe
articulate language. And another woman should produce an other with
no thing of the shape but the language & reason of a man I aske which of
these you would call by the name man.’ So much did the false and
seductive fable of a real language prey upon his mind, and so much did he
want to drive home the point that our carving up of nature is ‘voluntary’,
that in the fourth edition of the Essay he added an historical incident to
emphasise his point.115 His draft of this addition explains how the Abbot
of St Martin testifies that when ‘he was borne he had so little the figure of
a man but rather a monstre. Twas for sometime under deliberation
whether he should be baptised and declared a man provisionally.’116
While Locke does not generally reference his sources, he does so on this
occasion. In the 1700 edition he tells us that the anecdote comes from
‘Monsieur Menage’, precisely locating its position as ‘Menagiana 278/
430’.117 Locke harnesses an actual case, where it was up to men to decide
whether a creature was to be included in their tribe or not. This appeal to
experience is characteristic of the experimentalist fever that heated the new
science and that produced ‘histories’ of everything imaginable. Locke’s
113 114
Locke 1975, p. 448 (iii.vi.16); cf. pp. 450–2 (iii.vi.22). Locke 1975, p. 418 (iii.iii.17).
115 r
MS. Locke f. 2, pp. 356–8. Cf. MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 36 ; Locke 1976–89, iv, p. 626 on the relation
between language and species.
116
MS. Locke e. 1, p. 184. The published version of the story is at Locke 1975, p. 454 (iii.vi.26).
117
Locke 1975, p. 454 (iii.vi.26).
enthusiasm for snippets of ‘experience’, particularly from travel literature,
is abundantly obvious in his manuscripts, which teem with them.118 Many
record the disjunction between fluid experience and fixed language. In his
journal for September 1683, he cites ‘Glanius’, who has heard of ‘men in
Formosa with long tails like beasts’, which the author did not believe until
he saw with his own eyes a prisoner tied to a stake whose ‘tail was above a
foot long, all coverd with red hair, & very like to that of an ox’. A month
later Locke is still reading Glanius and writes in his diary that ‘the women in
Formosa . . . have great beards grow upon their chins as well as men, &
were they not very diligent in pulling it out they would be much better
furnished’.119
We write our map of things. While God might indeed have designed a
great chain of being whose species ascend ‘by gentle degrees’, it is quite
opaque to us.120 In a piece of breathtaking cinematography Locke pans
out from our talk about this world to reveal that we are only on a ‘stage’,
‘in the hands of a faithful creator and a bountiful father, who disposes not
of his creatures according to our narrow thoughts or opinions, nor dis-
tinguishes them according to names and species of our contrivance’.121 To
our short-sighted eyes, in the context of the ontological handiwork that
we have woven in the dark, nature seems anarchic. ‘There are fishes that
have wings’ and birds that swim in water.122 Even the perceptible world
runs roughshod over our pragmatic lines.
Locke does accept that, despite the blurred edges, there seem to be
natural kinds.123 It is not just wilful imagining, but our experience of
resemblance, that motivates our linguistic divisions. ‘I do not deny, but
Nature, in the constant production of particular beings, makes them not
always new and various, but very much alike and of kin one to
another.’124 He also admits that there is a natural, objective benchmark
for our names of substances. That is, there are things out there which act
upon people in a uniform way. The ideas we combine have a public
union which grounds the creation of nominal essences. ‘The mind, in
making its complex ideas of substances, only follows nature; and puts
118
See Carey (2004) on Locke’s use (and abuse) of travel literature in repudiating innate ideas.
119
MS. Locke f. 7, pp. 132; 139. 120 Locke 1975, p. 447 (iii.vi.12).
121
Locke 1975, p. 570 (iv.iv.14). 122 Locke 1975, p. 447 (iii.vi.12).
123
Mackie (1976, pp. 93–100) argues for Locke’s near-anticipation of Kripke on natural kinds; cf.
Troyer (1975) on Locke’s version of Kripke’s ‘causal account of meaning’, whereby ‘the extension
of terms like ‘‘gold’’ – is determined by essential features of the kind of thing instances of which
are used to fix the reference of terms’. Stanford (1998) challenges Mackie, postulating instead that
Locke anticipated the challenge to Kripke’s causal theory of reference. See also Laporte 1996.
124
Locke 1975, pp. 462 (iii.vi.37).
none together, which are not supposed to have an union in nature.’ We
do not combine the baa-ing of a sheep with the shape of a horse. Such
fantastic conglomerations would make it impossible for us to understand
each other, the public standard for communication being erased. ‘If they
will be understood, when they speak of things really existing, they must,
in some degree, conform their ideas to the things they would speak of: or
else men’s language will be like that of Babel.’125 It is because the names of
substances are not completely arbitrary but are ‘referred to standards
made by nature’, albeit experiential rather than essential ones, that they
are not liable to endless semantic proliferation.126 In Locke’s mythic
exploration into the generation of language, he conjectures that ‘the
standard’ for the names Adam gave to substances was ‘made by nature’.
He was bound by the ‘necessity of conforming his ideas of substances to
things without him, as to archetypes made by nature’.127
However, while nature prompts us to collect certain ideas together into
arrangements which might be called ‘real’, we remember that they can
never amount to either the real (corpuscularian?) essences of substances or
even to the full and necessary complement of sensible features which
belong to a substance. In Draft B he sets out the compatibility between
taking our lead from nature and taking absolute responsibility for the
specific lines we draw. ‘Though nature made many particular things which
doe agree one with an other in many qualitys or simple ideas, yet it is men
who takeing occasion from those qualitys wherein they finde them to agree
that destinguish them into species in order to their naming for the con-
veniency of speech.’128 In the Essay itself Locke develops his view that our
present ignorance about the real constitution of a substance from which
sensible properties flow makes it impossible to say which properties are
indispensable to its description and which are not. ‘We can never know
what are the precise number of properties depending on the real essence of
gold, any one of which failing, the real essence of gold, and consequently
gold, would not be there, unless we knew the real essence of gold it
self, and by that determined that species.’129 Moreover, our irrevocable
ignorance about how ‘the real constiution’ relates to its perceptible
125 126
Locke 1975, pp. 455–6 (iii.vi.28). Locke 1975, p. 481 (iii.ix.11).
127 128
Locke 1975, pp. 468 (iii.vi.46); 470 (iii.vi.51). Locke 1990b, p. 190.
129
Locke 1975, p. 449 (iii.vi.19). Bolton (1998c) argues that, rather than there being no objective
essences, the basis for Locke’s belief that kinds are determined by abstract ideas alone is his ‘idea-
theoretic’ argument, that is, ‘the idea has a content defined by what is immediately perceived and
intuitively known, and the idea represents exactly those things that conform to its content’, so that
‘a referentialist theory of the signification of kind terms is precluded by the way Lockean ideas
function’ (p. 225).
qualities bars us from ever knowing whether those qualities necessarily
coexist.130 While we do have an objective pattern to go on, the lines we draw
between species lack the precision and necessity required for taxonomy.
While it is ‘obvious’ that ‘Nature in the production of things, makes several
of them alike’, as demonstrated most clearly by ‘all things propagated by
seed’, ‘the sorting of them under names, is the workmanship of the
understanding’.131 That is, while we might make our words ‘true’, in the
sense of fitting them to experience, insofar as we take them to represent
essences or kinds of any sort, this is our, not nature’s, labour.132
Our linguistic classifications record our uniquely human perspectives
and needs. The division between ‘sun’ and ‘stars’, for example, is a
(probably false) distinction resulting from our proximity to the sun and
the important role it plays in our lives.133 Locke evokes the pragmatism at
the heart of language when he reflects on whether an ‘English-man, bred
in Jamaica’ who knew nothing of ‘ice’, coming to England and finding
the water frozen in his basin, would think it anything other than ‘hard-
en’d water’ – rather than another species.134 Given that the essences of
things can only be nominal, ‘rain is as essentially different from snow, as
water from earth’.135 We can see that the convenient origins of species
were of consistent and early concern to Locke if we look at a diary entry
he made in September 1676. ‘How many sorts of insects are there that we
have not distinguished into species but passe under the generall names of
flies or wormes & that because haveing litle use of them we have not
ranged them under more distinct & precise names & consequently into
species’.136 On 18 November the following year he mused on the same
point. ‘The species of things are distinguished & made by chance in order
to naming & names imposed on those things which either the con-
veniency of life or common observation brings into discourse.’137 We
choose which simple ideas are to be included in the complex idea – or
meaning – of a substance. This choice ‘depends upon the various care,
industry, or fancy of him that makes it’.138 And generally, people pick only
‘some few sensible obvious qualities’ which enable them to distinguish
things ‘for the common affairs of life’, rather than spend ‘time, pains, and
skill’ on enlarging and fixing the extension of the word.139 Our names of
130
Locke 1975, p. 546 (iv.iii.14). 131 Locke 1975, p. 415 (iii.iii.12).
132 133
Locke 1975, pp. 385 (ii.xxxii.5); 390–1 (ii.xxxii.18). Locke 1975, p. 439 (iii.vi.1).
134
Locke 1975, pp. 447–8 (iii.vi.13).
135
Locke 1975, p. 416 (iii.iii.14). Cope (1999) argues that Locke’s ‘taxonomic flatness’ is the ‘hallmark
of Locke’s empirical, anecdotal worldview’ (p. 49).
136
MS. Locke f. 1, p. 442. 137 MS. Locke f. 2, p. 356. 138 Locke 1975, p. 456 (iii.vi.29).
139
Locke 1975, p. 457 (iii.vi.30).
things tend to answer our convenience rather than pursue reality. We are
not supine receptors of a given world, but write it in accordance with our
(albeit collective) subjective experience, interests and beliefs.
As the products of our understanding, animated and fixed in names,
essences are immutable and eternal, while nature is like Proteus. The ‘real
constitutions of things . . . begin and perish with them. All things, that
exist, besides their author, are all liable to change.’ Alexander and
Bucephalus might die, grass become sheep and then human flesh, and a
fish-woman not exist at all, but ‘man’, ‘horse’, ‘grass’, ‘sheep’ and ‘mer-
maid’ remain ‘safe and entire’ in our minds and on our tongues, our
creatures all.140
And it is words that play the crucial part in this ontological inscription.
Although they logically succeed our complex ideas, they give life to
species and make them ‘pass for such’ in society. Locke gives the examples
of a ‘silent and a striking watch’ which ‘are but one species, to those who
have but one name for them’.141 The name ‘clock’ introduces a wholly
new species with a distinct meaning. Without this distinct nomenclature,
there would be no such essential distinction of things.
Towards the end of his lengthy discussion of substance terms, Locke is
brought up short by the difficulty of talking about this subject, so
completely is he at the mercy of the words and divisions which limit what
he can say. In trying to get us to see that our names of substances pick out
the experiential innovations of people rather than the real essences of
things, he cannot talk about ‘man’ without immediately calling up its
nominal essence – the ultimate frontier of its meaning and a far cry from
reality. But if he does not use the word ‘man’, he says nothing. He has no
way of referring to ‘man, as he is in himself, and as he is really dis-
tinguished from others’, outside the term ‘man’.142 In chapter 9 I shall
probe the consequences of the position that I have laid out in this one:
our words are, fundamentally if not completely, strangers to the world
itself, and create the world as we know it.
140 141
Locke 1975, pp. 419–20 (iii.iii.19). Locke 1975, p. 463 (iii.vi.39).
142
Locke 1975, pp. 465–6 (iii.vi.43).
chapter 8
Semantic instability: an inherent imperfection
While some early-modern philosophers had brushed with the problem of

verbal equivocity, Locke makes it a central plank in his critique of lan-
guage. It was a deeply embedded assumption that men share the same
mental discourse. Think, for example, of the universal language projects,
and in particular of the frontispiece of Cave Beck’s Universal Character,
where an Englishman (is it Bacon, the father of the movement?), a Turk, a
grass-skirted American and a figure who is harder to decipher (is it an
African, or a Roman in the shadows of time?) all communicate with each
other at the table.1 Think also of the generic mind of the trivium, the
rationalising, ‘philosophical’ grammarians and the worldwide res. Reacting
against this commonplace and drawing on its detractors, Locke goes so
far as to say that semantic instability is endemic to language. His pre-
decessors had probed the phenomenon, particularly in the contexts of the
elocutionary use of language, superficial semantic disagreement in the self-
consciously conciliatory republic of letters, textual hermeneutics, hedo-
nistic moral terminology and mental divergence. While Locke repeats and
develops these themes, he also takes the radical step of identifying the
problem as one that affects language per se. It is part and parcel of the
human condition. If we talk at cross purposes then we cannot understand
one another, and language as a whole becomes a bankrupt enterprise. No
one besides Locke had made semantic proliferation a quintessential feature
of language, with the possible exception of Pascal, who had speculated on
the probability of miscommunication. But while he may well have
passed on his linguistic scepticism to Locke, Pascal’s was coming from a
very different, fallen and non-systematic place. Locke’s disquiet emanates
from his consideration of the individualistic depths of human under-
standing. His forbears, Montaigne in particular, had explored mental
multiformity, but they had not squarely inserted this into philosophy of
1
See cover illustration, this volume.
210
Semantic instability: an inherent imperfection 211
language. And Locke himself, while he takes the problem much further
than ever before, is nevertheless caught between his grisly inkling of
semantic instability and the conventional subscription to uniformity and
communication. We will see Locke tussling, half-aware, with these two
extremes, demonstrating the kind of stresses that are so characteristic of his
linguistic theory as a whole and even of his general philosophical outlook.
a play on words
Before I examine this profound deconstruction of language, I look at the
more superficial and intentional ways in which words become equivocal
according to Locke, and which are basically reiterative of old concerns.
The most straightforward inheritance is from the heart of the logical
tradition – which we saw dealing with ‘connotative’, as well as equivocal,
words. At the end of the Essay – his own reformed logic – in the same,
ultimate, location ordained by all practitioners, Locke repeats that verbal
ambiguity is a source of erroneous argument and knowledge. ‘The argu-
ments being . . . brought in words, there may be a fallacy latent in them’.2
A deeper concern is stimulated by the characteristically rhetorical view
of words as detachable from, if not completely unattached to things.
Echoing the anti-eloquent cries of the century, Locke is horrified at the
breach of the semantic contract between sign and signified in which
orators take such pride and which, it will be remembered, had come to be
synonymous with the discipline as a whole. The five elements of the
subject had been reduced to one: elocutio, the figures and the tropes,
whose very job it is to play with words and disrupt their semantic bed.
Locke explicitly refers to this development, and his disgust at it, in the
finale to his chapter ‘of the abuse of words’. There, ‘figurative speeches,
and allusion in language’ are identified with ‘all the Art of Rhetorick’.
Eloquent speakers apply words as they desire and positively misdescribe
the world. ‘If we would speak of things as they are’, then ‘all the artificial
and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented’ is ‘wholly to
be avoided’. Locke renames eloquence ‘the Arts of Fallacy’.3
In addition to this fierce denunciation, the whole chapter reverberates
with outrage at semantic fission – the cardinal linguistic sin. There is
even a verbal echo in his description of another abuse of words – their
2
Locke 1975, p. 715 (iv.xx.13).
3
Locke 1975, p. 508 (iii.x.34). See Walker (1994) on Locke’s own ‘rhetoric’, and Zerilli (2005) on
Locke’s use of rhetorical structure in his political theory.
inconstant use. While rhetoric is a ‘perfect cheat’, this is ‘a perfect abuse
of language’ and a ‘plain cheat’.4 To ‘make them stand sometimes for one
thing, and sometimes for another’ is either ‘great folly, or greater dis-
honesty’, words’ whole signifying power flowing from ‘a voluntary
imposition’.5 Being joined to meanings by purely arbitrary connections,
applying them variously makes them perfectly unintelligible, these fragile
threads being the only mechanisms by which language works at all.6
Locke compares breaking the semantic contract to the debtor who calls
‘8 sometimes seven, and sometimes nine, as best served his advantage’,
and to the marketeer ‘who sells several things under the same name’.7
A further abuse of language, ‘affected obscurity’, also involves words in
an unclear relation to their meanings. Old words are applied to new
significations, ambiguous words are coined, or words are compounded ‘as
may confound their ordinary meaning’. Locke’s targets are philosophical
sects, particularly the Aristotelians and Cartesians, who ‘cover’ their
necessarily ‘imperfect’ knowledge in obscure words and ‘confound the
signification of words, which, like a mist before peoples eyes, might
hinder their weak parts from being discovered’.8 Locke blames the
blossoming of this abuse on ‘the admired Art of Disputing’. By privile-
ging victory over truth, it positively encourages men to ‘perplex, involve,
and subtilize the signification of sounds, so as never to want something to
say, in opposing or defending any question’.9 This ‘learned gibberish’,
this knavish attitude towards the communal linguistic legislator, enables
gentlemen ‘to prove, that snow [is] black’.10 This is Anaxagoras’ proof
which we saw in Sextus and Montaigne, and which associates disputation
with scepticism. Locke ends his attack on a dark note. He dramatically
changes the register by explaining how this abuse affects not only ‘logical
niceties’, but assaults ‘the great concernments of humane life and society’.
It has ‘obscured and perplexed the material truths of law and divinity;
brought confusion, disorder, and uncertainty into the affairs of mankind;
and if not destroyed, yet in great measure rendred useless, those two great
4
Locke 1975, p. 508 (iii.x.34). Bennington (1987) argues that Locke cannot eliminate the figural from
language.
5
Locke 1975, pp. 492–3 (iii.x.5).
6
Almond (1999, pp. 126–42) argues for the importance of the Adamic cause in the seventeenth
century, and for the revolutionary nature of Locke’s rejection of it. According to Aarsleff (1982,
pp. 27 and 42–83) it is Locke’s anti-Adamicism that motivates his views on language, and also the
Essay as a whole. Vickers (1984, pp. 110–13) also locates Locke in the anti-occultist movement. See
Hacking (1988) for a criticism of Aarsleff’s interpretation.
7
Locke 1975, pp. 493 (iii.x.5); 506 (iii.x.28). 8 Locke 1975, p. 493 (iii.x.6).
9 10
Locke 1975, p. 494 (iii.x.7). Locke 1975, p. 495 (iii.x.9–10).
rules, religion and justice’.11 Locke’s wrath is perhaps aimed at the unholy
alliance of Filmerian absolutists and Anglican clergy, who spin out of
Scripture and law the divine right of kings and persecutors, and thereby
instantiate a terrifying blend of savagery and authoritarianism in Church
as well as State.12 These rightless factions ‘demonstrate’ the fancy of iure
divino power. They expropriate dissenters in the name of the ‘law’,
thereby obliterating the entire rationale of the law, which is to protect
people’s property. They gratuitously, malignantly, interpret their seminal
texts, such as the Bible and the Clarendon Code. Projecting shadows that
suit their cause, they ‘darken truth, and unsettle peoples rights; to raise
mists, and render unintelligible both morality and religion’.13
These abuses, wilfully rending res from verba, are grounded in the
fundamental disunity between sign and signified that lies at the heart of
early-modern philosophy of language. Locke jocularly refers to the
severability of words in a love letter of July 1659, perhaps to Anne Evelyn.
He teases that she will rue the day she mis-fixed a favourable appellation
to his writing. ‘You will finde your ponishment in being ingaged to read
what you have nicknamed good.’14
When he expresses his general abhorrence at licentious uses of language,
he is echoing the concerns and the well-established modes of attack of his
contemporaries. His correspondence provides a good example of this hall
of mirrors. There philosophers walk, all using the same theoretical claims
to console or insult. On 26 October 1697 William King writes to William
Molyneux about Locke’s unforgivable acts of linguistic re-legislation of the
terms ‘agreement’ and ‘disagreement’ with regard to knowledge and cer-
tainty, which Locke says refer to the relationship between ideas rather than
between ideas and things. The ‘liberty’ Locke claims is allowed in new, but
not in known, words. While ‘words were indeed arbitrary signs of things in
those, that first imposed them . . . they are not to us. When wee use the
best caution wee can we are apt to transgress in changing them, and when
wee do so out of weakness, wee must ask pardon, but must not claim it as a
liberty, it being really a fault’.15 King turns Locke’s strictures back upon
him; it is unacceptable to rupture the morally inviolable union between
word and meaning, even if the speaker announces his action. The anxiety
about res being displaced from their proper verba is fostered by the ease
with which it can be achieved, and by a rhetorical and disputing culture
that positively encourages it.
11 12
Locke 1975, p. 496 (iii.x.12). See Goldie (1983) on this alliance.
13 14
Locke 1975, p. 497 (iii.x.13). Locke 1976–89, i, p. 93. 15 Locke 1976–89, vi, p. 241.
Thus far, however, Locke has not distinguished himself from the
limited and traditional claims for semantic instability. It is still funda-
mentally circumscribed by a faith in one proper word meaning and the
voluntary crimes of the abusers who betray propriety.
textual exegesis
Textual exegesis is another site of concern about semantic instability on
which Locke leaves his mark. Textual obscurity challenges the supposedly
one-to-one word–meaning pairings that common use is meant to effect.
Locke reveals a rich, complex view of the relationships between text,
context, speaker’s intention and reader, shattering the neat res–verba
coupling by presenting it as a necessarily polygamous affair.
He chips away at the self-evidence of words by renovating the old
disjunction between literal sense and intention. He explains that where he
diverges from a strict translation of Nicole’s Essais, he is following the
(extra-verbal) intention of the author. ‘I made bold to follow his designe
rather then his words.’16 He broadens the issue of plural interpretation
when he considers the divergent reception of his own Essay. He excuses its
repetitiousness by appealing to the fact that it has to be ‘dressed’ in many
ways, because ‘we have our understandings no less different than our
palates.’17 He further questions verbal transparency when he alludes to the
endless hermeneutic webs spun by religious and legal commentators. ‘In
the interpretation of laws, whether divine, or humane, there is no end;
comments beget comments, and explications make new matter for
explications.’18 He despairs at the necessary opacity of God’s design, being
represented in indeterminate human language. ‘Nor is it to be wondred,
that the Will of god, when cloathed in words, should be liable to that
doubt and uncertainty, which unavoidably attends that sort of conveyance,
when even his son, whilst cloathed in flesh, was subject to all the frailties
and inconveniences of humane nature, sin excepted.’19 The comparison of
16
MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 44r. In a letter to Molyneux of 20 January 1693 Locke applauds his friend’s
reading skills, which penetrate the authorial intention despite the words. ‘But it not being
reasonable for me to expect that every body should read me with that judgment you do, and
observe the design and foundation of what I say, rather than stick barely in the words’ (Locke
1976–89, iv, p. 624). Cf. the letter to Molyneux of August 1693: ‘I hope my words express no such
thing, for it is quite contrary to my sense, and I think would be useless tyranny in their governors’
(p. 720); v, p. 677, to Molyneux in August 1696 on the subject of Mr. Burridge’s translation of his
Essay: ‘so he has but my sense, I care not how much he neglects my words’.
17
Locke 1975, p. 8 (Epistle to the Reader). 18 Locke 1975, p. 480 (iii.ix.9).
19
Locke 1975, p. 490 (iii.ix.23).
words with Christ’s flesh is shocking, indicating the depth of Locke’s
cynicism about perspicuous words. They cannot be simply peeled away to
reveal one true meaning beneath. They are integral to meaning. Or even,
they are all we have.
Locke’s contingent, readerly view of meaning seems sometimes to
shake the authority of the law and the Bible. They are not necessarily the
public and fixed standards by which we know how to order our lives. In a
manuscript which debates the question whether ‘an infallible interpreter
of Holy Scripture be granted in the church’ (written 1661–2), Locke
explains that the right of interpretation affords its holders great power
because ‘anybody may attach a new meaning to the words to suit his own
taste’.20 His sensitivity to the obscurity of bare text, and to the room for
divergent readings, is shown in a little comment he makes in his journal in
November 1686 about a Pensylvania law. ‘Whosoever shall speake loosely &
profanely of Almighty God Christ Jesus the Holy Spirit & the Scriptures
of Truth shall pay . . . or 5 days imprisonment.’ Locke queries: ‘what is
loosely or prophanely’?21 He publicly echoes this sensitivity in 1695 when
he objects to the punitive Licensing Act of 1662, whose indeterminate
wording afforded extensive censorship:
Some of these termes are so general and comprehensive or at least soe submitted
to the sense and interpretation of the Governors of Church or state for the time
being that it is impossible any book should passe but just what suits their
humors. And who knows but that the motion of the Earth may be found to be
Heretical, etc, as asserting Antipodes once was?22
The prohibition of ‘heretical, seditious, schismatical or offensive books’,
as the Act has it, effectively licenses the government to ban any book they
like.23 The unstable content of discretely evaluative terms is a subject that
had vigorously exercised Locke in his Letter concerning Toleration (1689).
There, he had expressed the truism that ‘every Church is Orthodox to it
self; to others, Erroneous or Heretical’. ‘Idolatry’ is another word which
has no fixed referent, but is understood divergently and conveniently.24
While it is not clear from his well-known works, if we turn to his
manuscripts and correspondence we discover that Locke himself is increas-
ingly obsessed with Scriptural exegesis.25 His scribblings disclose a mitigated
20
Locke 1997, pp. 204; 205. 21 MS. Locke f. 9, p. 33. 22 Locke 1976–89, v, p. 785.
23
Locke 1997, p. 330. 24 Locke 1983, pp. 32; 42.
25
E.g. in 1685 Locke purchased Boyle On the Style of the Holy Scriptures (MS. Locke f. 8, p. 300), and
notes on the New Testament, which record the influence of Boyle can be found in a parchment
box (MS. Locke f. 30, fo. 1r). At the beginning of 1686 Locke registers an interest in Grotius’
scriptural work (MS. Locke f. 9, p. 1). See MS. Locke f. 9 (p. 117) on ‘Ludovi Cappelli’ and the Old
view of verbal uncertainty. In a letter to Samuel Bold on 16 May 1699, he
reveals the reader’s role in creating meaning. Commentators ‘wind and twist
and pull the text’, making it say what they like, so that it accords with their
‘system’ or ‘denomination’.26 But while meaning can be made to proliferate
by the reader, Locke maintains that the text safeguards one authorial, divine
meaning, which good readers (like Locke) can figure out through the fog of
language. His extensive and minute engagement with Scriptural exegesis
discloses both his awareness of the possibility of semantic confusion and his
belief in one, recoverable authorial intention behind the words. It would be
wrong to over-modernise Locke’s depiction of the scriptable text. His con-
cerns about endlessly re-interpretable words should be considered more in
the context of an attack on bad interpreters, rather than a Derridean denial of
one true meaning. The authorial intention is, after all, the object of Locke’s
intense exegetical quest, and according to his polemical philosophy of lan-
guage, the only feasible meaning of words.
However, it turns out that the meaning of words tends towards mul-
tiplication in the minds not only of malevolent readers but of benign ones
too. It is precisely because meaning is created subjectively by the author
and not by one standard of common use, that interpretation is needed to
disperse the linguistic mists.27 Locke’s contextualist, even cornucopian
hermeneutic approach shows that he thinks words are not paired reliably
with meanings, but are dependent for their specific application on parti-
cular speakers in particular historical situations who have untold figurative
and imaginative reserves. On 3 July 1676 Locke records John Lightfoot’s
comment on Maimonides. This great contextualiser of the Bible provides
‘the great register of the Jews customs, & Antiquity’.28 Locke’s notes on
the New Testament contain examples of his historicist exegesis. On verse
six of Paul’s first epistle to Timothy, Locke writes: ‘foundation . . . is here
Helenistically taken & answers Heb . . . which signifies both a foundation
and a Bil or contract made’. And on Revelation, verse 11: ‘Angel. In the
and New Testaments. On 19 November 1692 Locke received Cudworth’s Discourse concerning the
Notion of the Lord’s Supper (MS. Locke f. 10, p. 169). Following his close reading of Simon,
possibly in 1691, Locke makes notes on the books of the Old Testament (MS. Locke f. 32, e.g. fos.
28r; 45r; 48v; 65v).
26
Locke 1976–89, vi, p. 629.
27
Cf. Locke (1976–89, viii, pp. 69–70) on his recommendation of certain commentators
(Hammond, Whitby, Mede, Lightfoot), presumably because they help to discover Scripture’s
true meaning; MS. Locke f. 6, pp. 84; 85, where Locke copies out Hale’s interpretations – which
allow for metaphor and multiple signification.
28
MS. Locke f. 1, p. 306. On 22 November 1685, Locke makes notes on Maimonides (taken from
Spencer) about Hebrew rituals and Mosaic law (MS. Locke f. 8, p. 300).
synagogue he that was called the Angel 1. praid in the synagoge. 2. cald that
who were to read.’29
Among the last things that Locke wrote were lengthy pieces of
Scriptural commentary. There, we encounter the Bible as an ambiguous
text, demanding hermeneutic effort to hone down the plethora of
semantic possibilities to the intended sense. In the Paraphrase and Notes
on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans he supplies a synopsis of the letter,
in which he uncovers the unseen motivation of Paul’s polemic, namely
that the Jews were insisting that the new Christians obey Mosaic law and
partake in ancient rites.30 At one point in the commentary he writes ‘it is
visible by the context that what he opposed was Juddaisme’.31 He divides
the work into text and paraphrase/notes. The latter part forms a massive
metatext which far outstrips its source. Locke cross-references, alerts us to
figurative passages and words, does some philological work, and generally
instructs us how to read, teasing out the original intention, divorced as it
is from the literal text.32 For example, ‘to take the thread of Paul’s words
here right all from the word Lord in the middle of the 3rd to the
beginning of this 7th must be read as a parenthesis’.33 In his Paraphrase
and Notes on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians there is an interesting
comment on the problems of translation, on the incommensurability
between, and the particularity of, languages, and on the possibility of
attaining understanding nevertheless:
Clear This word answers very well . . . in the Greek: but then to be clear in
English is generally understood to signifie not to have been guilty; which could
not be the sense of the Apostle, he having charged the Corinthians so warmly in
his first Epistle. His meaning must therefore be that they had now resolved on a
contrary course & were so far clear. ie were set right & in good disposition
again.34
In the synopsis of A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistle of St. Paul to the
Galatians Locke elucidates the speaker’s intention. It is not apparent from
the words alone. ‘The business of it is to dehort & hinder the Galatians
from bringing themselves under the bondage of the Mosaical law.’35
As so often, however, the obscurity of the speaker’s meaning is undercut
by appeals to the self-evident univocity of words. Like Protestants before
29
MS. Locke f. 30, fos. 86v; 114v. 30 MS. Locke e. 2, fo. 1r. 31 MS. Locke e. 2, fo. 4v.
32
Cf. Limborch on the ‘literal and the mystical’ senses of prophecy (Locke 1976–89, v, p. 210).
33
MS. Locke e. 2, fo. 4r. 34 MS. Locke e. 2, fo. 184r.
35
MS. Locke e. 2, fo. 201r. In a letter to Locke, querying his reading of a section of Paul’s letter to the
Corinthians, Newton offers an alternative which suits ‘well to the words and designe of St. Paul’
(Locke 1976–89, viii, p. 2).
him, Locke champions textual transparency in his sola Scriptura belief.
‘The most certain interpreter of Scripture is Scripture itself ’.36 In a draft
letter to Gabriel Towerson in December 1660, Locke declares that he is
‘only content with that light which the Scripture affords its self, which is
commonly the clearest discover of its own meaning’.37 In his lengthy
biblical rebuttal of Filmer in the First Treatise, Locke appeals to the ‘direct
and plain meaning of the words’, as though they were uniformly lucid,
only dulled by misreaders.38 He also invokes the perspicuity of common
use. In The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) he urges us to attend to the
‘plain direct meaning of words and phrases, such as they may be supposed
to have had in the mouths of the speakers, who used them according to the
language of that time and country wherein they lived’.39 He follows this up
with an attack on the ‘learned, artificial, and forced senses’ of the text
which are avoidably imposed by various religious parties. Sometimes
therefore, Locke talks as though there were just one ‘ordinary vulgar sense
of the word’ upon which everybody agrees.40
the epistemological roots of semantic instability

Locke’s extraordinary innovation with regard to semantic instability flows
from his inter-determinate philosophies of mind and language. While
verbal univocity starts to slide into divergent, individual meanings in the
context of textual interpretation, his way of ideas threatens to dissolve
objective word meaning in a sea of subjectivity. Locke’s appeal to the
‘literal sense’ is revealed as whistling in the wind. His revolutionary
contribution to early-modern linguistics is to assert that language is
inherently and inadvertently equivocal. Although he draws on the
sporadic voices of his predecessors, it is from his distinctive epistemo-
logical views that an equally distinctive – and damning – account of this
innate imperfection flows.
36
Locke 1997, p. 209. 37 MS. Locke e. 7, fo. 35r. 38 Locke 1988, p. 165.
39
Locke 1993, p. 5. On the transparency and propriety of God’s word see also Locke 1988, p. 173 and
1997, pp. 206; 208. Cf. Mandelbrote (1994) on the use of the Augustinian dictum Scriptura
humane loquitur in the seventeenth century.
40
Locke 1976–89, vi, p. 629; cf. Samuel Bold (in a letter to Locke of 18 October 1699) on the way in
which common use does change over time, but is identifiable at a given time nonetheless: ‘me
think’s a Critick should know that the words in which a revelation is delivered, must stand for,
and signify the ideas, of which they were designed to be marks or signs, at that time when the
revelation was delivered: and if they were then used to signify other ideas, then they did ordinarily
signify, what those different ideas were, must then be made known, so that who so ever wil insist
on a spiritual or mystical sense of words, must prove the alteration of their sense at the time of the
revelation, otherwise it leaves us in the depth of uncertainty’ (p. 712).
The starting point for his reformulation of semantic instability is the
same fundamental truism that drives his whole polemic about language.
We saw him wield it to expose the gulf between words and the world:
words can only ever signify the speaker’s ideas. Words ‘in every man’s
mouth, stand for the ideas he has’.41 Given that ideas do not occur in one
generic mind but in the minds of individuals, they will vary accordingly.
The corollary of the view that words signify the speaker’s particular
ideas is that, once uttered, they also signify the hearer’s ideas. At all points
in a word’s travels, meaning is constructed subjectively. In the Conduct of
the Understanding Locke refers to the sovereign reader. ‘Words having
naturally none of their own, carry that signification to the hearer, that he
is us’d to put upon them, whatever be the sense of him that uses them.’42
In a letter to William Molyneux of 20 September 1692 Locke comments
on the discontinuity between writer and reader. ‘What men by thinking
have made clear to themselves, they are apt to think, that upon the first
suggestion it should be so to others, and so let it go not sufficiently
explained; not considering that what may be very clear to themselves may
be very obscure to others.’43 Language emerges as a web of empty sig-
nifiers, hovering indeterminately, except as incarnated in the mouths and
ears of particular men.
However, semantic individualism does not necessarily make Locke a
private language theorist who prohibits the possibility of a common
mental discourse and communication.44 Indeed, like his predecessors, he
uses the axiomatic premise of semantic universalism to prove that words
are connected to their meanings arbitrarily. If there were a ‘natural
connexion’, he says, ‘there would be but one language amongst all men’.45
41 42
Locke 1975, p. 406 (iii.ii.3). Locke 1993, p. 106. 43 Locke 1976–89, iv, p. 523; cf. p. 623.
44
I am not using ‘private language’ solely in a Wittgensteinian sense, but in addition to indicate the
privacy of meaning. For a detailed analysis of Locke’s communication theory and the secondary
debate on the issue see Dawson (2003). See Martinich (1996, p. 493) and Miller (1998, p. 36) on
Locke as the ‘locus classicus’ for private language theory. The entry on Locke in the Concise
Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language (1997) declares that he concludes that language is an
imperfect vehicle for communication due to the privacy of ideas. Amongst those who maintain
that Locke does not have a workable theory of meaning are Alston (1964, pp. 22–6), Apel (1976,
p. 42), Bennett (1971, p. 5), Jolley (1999, pp. 163–5), Land (1986, pp. 35–42), Lowe (1995, pp. 149–50),
Lycan (1999, pp. 78–9), Odegard (1970, p. 14) and Taylor (1984, p. 209). Locke’s apologists include
Colman (1983, pp. 110–11), Cope (1999, p. 67), Formigari (1988, p. 117), Kretzmann (1967, p. 380
and 1968), Landesman (1991), Losonsky (1994), Ott (2004, pp. 129–37) and Yolton (1970, pp. 205–
15). Ashworth (1984 and 1981), and Hacking (1975b, pp. 51–2) take a more historicist approach, and
I am greatly indebted to them both. See Ayers (1991, i) for a stunning elucidation and defence of the
Lockean position that ‘consciousness is the source of meaning’ (p. 301). Cf. Ott (2004, p. 138–43) for
a defence of Locke’s mentalism.
45
Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.1).
Locke also repeats the commonplace that the argument is about words
not things, indicating the uniformity of the semantic bedrock. ‘I am apt
to imagine, that when any of them quitting terms, think upon things, and
know what they think, they think all the same: though perhaps, what they
would have, be different.’46 In Draft A he had trotted out the old dictum
that most of our disputes are ‘rather about the signification of words than
about the natures of things’.47
There are two parts to Locke’s account of how it is theoretically possible
to communicate. In the first place, the uniformity of our perceptive faculties
and the ideas that result, together with our capacity for abstraction by which
particular ideas become general, enable us (probably) to have the same
ideas.48 Then the ideas, still private, become the publicly accessible objects
of conventional linguistic legislation in the following way. Sensible ideas are
caused by external things and can therefore be identified and named by the
community through ostensive definition.49 There is a still a question,
however, as to how we agree the names of ‘ideas that come not under the
cognizance of our senses; v.g. to imagine, apprehend, comprehend, adhere,
conceive, instill, disgust, disturbance, tranquillity’. His rather tenuous answer,
but an answer nonetheless, appeals to the metaphorical use of names we met
in Peacham. The ostensively definable names of sensible ideas are applied to
ideas of reflection. ‘Spirit, in its primary signification, is breath; angel, a
messenger; and I doubt not, but if we could trace them to their sources, we
should find, in all languages, the names, which stand for things that fall not
under our sense, to have had their first rise from sensible ideas.’50 Locke
thereby accounts for the communication of all ideas of sensation and
reflection – which are the rudiments of our entire mental edifice.51
While it is possible for different individuals to mean the same things by
their words, it is not necessarily the case. For a number of reasons, that I
shall now lay out, Lockean minds turn out to be diverse and mutable.
This mental kaleidoscope is shadowed in the semantic realm and menaces
the community of meaning that enables communication and secures
linguistic intelligibility.
The principal reason Locke gives for semantic diversity is that we
voluntarily and therefore possibly divergently make up the meanings of
46
Locke 1975, p. 504 (iii.x.22).
47
Locke 1990a, p. 2. Cf. Locke 1975, p. 480 (iii.ix.9); Locke 1975, p. 511 (iii.xi.7).
48
Locke 1975, pp. 180 (ii.xiii.27); 303 (ii.xxiii.12); 409–10 (iii.iii.3).
49
Locke 1975, pp. 403–4 (iii.i.5).
50
Locke 1975, p. 403 (iii.i.5). For Peacham, see chapter 3, p. 73.
51
Locke 1975, p. 292 (ii.xxii.9).
the overwhelming proportion of our words. While we probably do agree
in the meanings we give to the names of simple ideas such as ‘blue’, this is
not the case for the names of complex ideas. Whereas we passively receive
simple ideas, we actively compound them into complex ones.52 They are
therefore liable to vary from individual to individual, as experience and
judgement varies. ‘Tis plain, that the mind of man uses some kind of
liberty, in forming those complex ideas: how else comes it to pass, that
one man’s idea of gold, or justice, is different from anothers? But because
he has put in, or left out of his, some simple idea, which the other has
not.’53 At the inception of the Essay Locke expresses the revolutionary
view that it is quite possible, indeed highly probable, that men speak their
language perfectly, and converse endlessly with each other without
communicating. They talk ‘according to the grammar rules of that lan-
guage . . . yet speake gibberish to one another the notions their words
which are but signes stand for not being agreed & determind amongst
them’.54 Locke’s compositional nominalism, and his early location of
mental action in the cognitive process result in profound semantic
instability. This stunning charge cuts to the quick of language. If words
are to communicate, ‘it is necessary . . . that they excite, in the hearer,
exactly the same ideas, they stand for in the mind of the speaker. Without
this, men fill one another’s heads with noise and sounds’.55 If speaker and
52
Locke 1975, p. 163 (ii.xii.1). For an account of the way in which communities do and do not
control nominal essences, see Holmes 1996.
53
Locke 1975, p. 373 (ii.xxx.3). Even Adam made them up (pp. 466–9 (iii.vi.44–7)).
54
Locke 1990a, p. 14.
55
Locke 1975, p. 478 (iii.ix.6). Locke (p. 389 (ii.xxxii.15)) seems to contradict himself by saying that
the meanings of colour terms are determined by the public objects which cause them rather than
the private sensations of those colours; he says of a man who sees in a marigold what others see in a
violet, that he would use the terms ‘blue’ and ‘yellow’ in the same way. Locke therefore seems to
distinguish between public meaning and private ideas, and to make the latter immaterial in
communication. However, Locke’s thought experiment occurs in a chapter on true and false ideas,
where he is primarily concerned to prove that simple ideas are always ‘true’ because they conform
to their (public) causes. He concludes that he believes ‘nevertheless’ that people do have the same
simple ideas. And in numerous places elsewhere he identifies the meaning of names with the
qualitative experience (e.g. with the meaning of ‘pineapple’ (p. 424 (iii.iv.11)), as well as expressing
mystification about how people could communicate if they did not have the same (qualitative)
ideas (e.g. the man with microscopic eyes (p. 303 (ii.xxiii)). On Locke’s incoherence see Bennett
1971, pp. 6–7 and Miller 1998, pp. 39–41. For a credible defence of Locke see Ayers 1997, pp. 207–9.
Alexander (1985, p. 248) argues (against nearly everything Locke says) that the public use of words
is more important for Locke than the private one. Ott (2004, p. 133–7) uses Locke’s treatment of
the inverted spectrum to suggest that while it is necessary for people to have the same ideas to
communicate, what determines the sameness of ideas is not their qualitative content, but their
significative role. Ott concludes that ‘Locke’s insistence on the causal connections between mental
representations and their referents is not so far removed after all from Putnam-style externalism’
(p. 141).
hearer do not mean the same things by their words, they can not
understand each other, and communication is impossible.
There are two types of names of complex ideas. The first are substances,
names of ‘things’, like ‘man’ and ‘gold’. Second, there are the names of
mixed modes. Mixed modes are ‘dependences on, or affections of sub-
stances’.56 These have no settled or necessary existence, such as ‘murder’,
‘apotheosis’, ‘reprieve’. Relations are relations between ideas, such as
‘identity’ and ‘morally good and evil’. Locke tends to include relations
under the broad heading of mixed modes, and I shall do the same.57
Turning first to the names of substances, we have already seen that they
can signify only collections of simple ideas regularly observed together.
These collections are ‘made by the mind, and not by nature’, and are
therefore ‘by different men, made very differently’.58 ‘For were they
nature’s workmanship, they could not be so various and different in
several men, as experience tells us they are.’59 The meanings of names of
substances are circumscribed by the particular experiences, education and
decisions of individuals. They are ‘those several simple ideas, which he
has usually observed, or fancied to exist together under that denomina-
tion’.60 A Cartesian who believes that the essence of ‘body’ is ‘extension’
has a different understanding of the word ‘body’ to, say, Locke, who
deems ‘solidity’ essential.61 To emphasise the point that people under-
stand the world differently, Locke uses his favourite example of the
monstrous birth. Given our ignorance of real essences and our con-
struction of nominal ones, ‘if several men were to be asked, concerning
some odly-shaped Foetus, as soon as born, whether it were a man, or no,
’tis past doubt, one should meet with different answers’.62 Divergent ideas
splinter meanings, further demolishing the table of substances that was
56
Locke 1975, p. 165 (ii.xii.4).
57
Locke 1975, p. 437 (iii.v.16). Locke titles book iii, chapter v: ‘of the names of mixed modes and
relations’, but discusses only ‘mixed modes’.
58 59
Locke 1975, pp. 453 (iii.vi.26); 458 (iii.vi.31). Locke 1975, p. 453 (iii.vi.26).
60
Locke 1975, p. 298 (ii.xxiii.6).
61
Locke 1975, p. 441 (iii.vi.5); cf. p. 450 (iii.vi.21) for Locke’s repudiation of the view that extension is
the essence of body.
62
Locke 1975, p. 454 (iii.vi.27). Locke’s vision of semantic diffusion is indebted to Bacon’s idols of
the marketplace, but Locke reverses Bacon’s view that the names of qualities are clear and the
names of substances obscure. Using the same experiential language that Locke is to inherit, Bacon
(1994b, p. 65) explains how names of qualities cover a sprawling mass of meanings. He peels away
‘moist’ and finds it teems with disparate significations. ‘It signifies not only something with no
definite boundaries and unable to become solid; something which yields easily in every direction;
something which easily subdivides and scatters itself; or easily coalesces and becomes one; easily
flows and is set in motion; easily adheres to another body and makes it wet; and which easily
liquefies, or melts, when it was previously solid.’
apparently set in stone. Locke declares of the names of substances that ‘I
believe it is very seldom that in speaker and hearer, they stand for exactly
the same collection.’63
Locke’s account of semantic divergence is notable for the innocence it
affords speakers. Rather than maliciously twisting words, they inad-
vertently and necessarily mean different things by them. This is most
clearly the case when it comes to divergent sense experience. Locke puts
this guiltless spin on the issue in Draft A, where he says that a ‘skilful
horsman’ will understand the word ‘horse’ differently from someone less
acquainted with the animal. As a result, a name is the ‘same in every mans
mouth through a whole country speakeing the same language, yet the
collective idea which a man thinkes on or intends to expresse when he
hears or names that word is in men using the same language very dif-
ferent, soe that to one man it stands for one thing & to another man for
an other’.64 In the published work we meet the (al)chemist, the ordinary
man and the boy, whose divergent experience cannot but make their
understanding of ‘gold’ differ.65 The boy, who has noticed only ‘the
bright shining colour’ in gold takes that colour for the meaning of word
‘gold’, applying it equally to a ‘peacocks tail’. For the man feeling the ring
on his left hand, the word might also signify ‘great weight’.66 The chemist
would add ‘solubility in Aqua Regia’, ‘fusibility’ and ‘ductility or fixid-
ness’.67 Although this point occurs in the midst of the Essay, tucked away
in book iii, it is at the front of Locke’s mind in 1671 when he first
conceives the work. The same boy who takes the word ‘gold’ to mean
‘shineing yellow’, and applies it equally to ‘guilded cork’, appears at the
beginning of the very first draft.68
One name is voiced by all, but all ‘frame very different ideas about it;
and so the name they use for it, unavoidably comes to have, in several
men, very different significations’. ‘It will always unavoidably follow’,
announces Locke, ‘that the complex ideas of substances, in men using the
same name for them, will be very various; and so the significations of
those names, very uncertain’.69
However, it is really only in philosophical discourse, where ‘general
truths are to be established’ and precisely constituted nominal essences are
necessary, that the problem of semantic individualism in the names of
substances becomes acute or important. The situation is less serious in
63 64
Locke 1975, p. 487 (iii.ix.18). Locke 1990a, p. 10.
65
Locke 1975, pp. 482–3 (iii.ix.13); 406 (iii.ii.3). 66 Locke 1975, p. 406 (iii.ii.3).
67
Locke 1975, p. 483 (iii.ix.13).
68
Locke 1990a, pp. 3–4. 69 Locke 1975, pp. 482–3 (iii.ix.13).
‘civil and common conversation’, where ‘the general names of substances,
regulated in their ordinary signification by some obvious qualities . . . do
well enough, to design the things men would be understood to speak
of ’.70 While severe problems attend philosophical communication about
substances, there are objective (or collectively subjective) ‘patterns to
follow’ which enable, albeit inexact, communication. People can ‘regulate
the signification of their names by the things themselves’, and thereby
have a pragmatic modicum of communion in ordinary conversation.71
Not so for mixed modes. They are ‘scattered and independent ideas,
put together by the mind’ and formed for our convenience, such as
‘obligation, drunkenness, a lye’.72 Unlike substances, which, however
superficially and uncertainly, ‘are referred to standards made by nature’,
mixed modes have ‘no real standards existing in nature, to which those
ideas are referred, and by which they may be adjusted’.73 There is
therefore no objective block on the meanings of these names. While the
public world checks talk about itself, the mind has complete ‘liberty’ to
construct mixed modes. Their essences are ‘not only made by the mind
[as substances are, too], but [unlike substances, are] made very arbitrarily,
made without patterns, or reference to any real existence’. People actively
gather together ideas to make an ‘archetype’, whether such a thing exists
‘in rerum natura, or no’.74 Hence it is that lawyers can legislate about
actions which have never been committed, and have ‘no other existence,
but in their own minds’. ‘Resurrection’ is an example of an idea that
existed before the event.75 Even if the mixed mode does occur existen-
tially, it may not publicly reveal all its attributes. ‘Pulling the trigger of
the gun’ would need the addition of the invisible ‘intention of the mind’,
which itself ‘has no natural connexion’ with the shooting action, to make
it ‘murder’.76 The completely ‘arbitrary’ status of the meanings of mixed
modes, combined with their unwieldy complexity, makes them ‘liable to
great uncertainty and obscurity in their signification’.77 Contrary to those
commentators who have accused him of falling naively into the private
language trap, Locke emerges as concerned about the problem of mis-
communication caused, precisely, by the privacy of meaning. Mixed
modes will be different for different people because they ‘have no certain
connexion in nature; and so no settled standard, any where in nature
existing, to rectify and adjust them by’.78
70
Locke 1975, p. 484 (iii.ix.15). 71 Locke 1975, p. 481 (iii.ix.11). 72
Locke 1975, p. 288 (ii.xxii.1).
73
Locke 1975, p. 481 (iii.ix.11). 74 Locke 1975, p. 429 (iii.v.x). 75 Locke 1975, p. 430 (iii.v.5).
76 77
Cf. Locke 1975, pp. 478–9 (iii.ix.7). Locke 1975, pp. 479 (iii.ix.7); 477 (iii.ix.5).
78
Locke 1975, p. 477 (iii.ix.5).
Moral ideas are Locke’s most vexed examples of mixed modes and it is
sometimes hard to see, on Locke’s own account, why these are susceptible
to multiplication. At first sight, it seems odd that these should diverge,
given Locke’s commitment to the one true and (whether certainly or
probably) knowable natural law. While Locke does, towards the end of
his life, lose faith in our rational potential, he never wavers from his belief
in God’s law. For the most part he is confident that we can reason to it,
and even when we do so not demonstratively but probabilistically, this is
nothing less than a ‘celebration’ of our God-given powers.79 We can
reason to God’s law by two interconnected means. First, the certain
knowledge we have of ourseleves as rational beings, and of God, who
made us and ‘on whom we depend’, enables us to work out what God
wants us to do, and why we are obliged to obey him.80 Second, knowing
perfectly the real essences of moral ideas (because we construct them), we
are able to perceive precisely the agreement or disagreement of those
ideas – that is, to achieve demonstrative knowledge of morality.81 This
should make moral ideas less, not more, plural than ideas of substances,
which we can neither know adequately, nor (therefore) reason with
demonstratively. Indeed, morality should not and need not proliferate at
all. However, Locke believes that in practice people do not reason to
God’s law, but make up an erroneous array of normative rules. While he
does not thereby (contrary to his contemporaries’ accusations) become a
moral relativist, he rejects the still strong raft of innatist and ‘authority-
based’ morality, and argues instead, partly following Pufendorf, that we
invent morality and therefore might invent it differently.82 I use the word
‘invent’, the sense of which balances between ‘create’ and ‘find’, to try to
elucidate Locke’s sometimes contradictory account of morality, to indi-
cate how Locke might simultaneously maintain that morality is arbitrarily
manufactured and truly demonstrated. It is not hard to see how ideas
like ‘steal’ and ‘worship’ are the random brainchildren of men. Their
status as morally good or bad is determined by their conformity or not
with a law.83 It is Locke’s conception of law that is difficult to square
with his artificial account of morality. While purely positive human
laws are clearly fabricated, the natural law, which underpins his entire
79
Tully 1993, p. 312. 80 Locke 1975, p. 549 (iv.iii.18). 81 Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.16).
82
See Yolton 1970, p. 173 and 1993, pp. 26–71 and 115–17. Kraye (1998, p. 1307) puts Locke among the
reformers who transformed ethics into a ‘rationally based discipline’. See also Pufendorf 1703,
i, pp. 2–3. Carey (1997) argues that Locke verged on moral scepticism and was influenced by
anti-Stoic scepticism.
83
Locke 1975, p. 351 (ii.xxviii.5).
ethico-political theory, is the will of God and is discovered, rather than
written by men. In a manuscript entitled Of Ethic in General (c. 1686–8?),
he explains that it is ‘not made by us, but for us’.84 However, it is still up
to us to work out (like we might work out a mathematical problem) the
law on the blank slates of our minds. We incarnate its true and universally
accessible dicta. But while we would invent even the one true law, Locke
fears that for the most part, out of idleness, pliancy and self-interest, we
do not, attending instead to customary and state law – the more obvious
fruits of men.
Sometimes Locke proposes that conventional laws coincide with the
natural law, which also speaks against the proliferation of morality. When
he is elucidating ‘moral relations’ in the Essay, he says that, in the main
men applaud that which is in their interest and disdain that which is not.
This pursuit of personal advantage simultaneously ‘advances the general
good of mankind’, which is God’s will. ‘’Tis no wonder’, then, ‘that
esteem and discredit, vertue and vice, should in great measure every-
where correspond with the unchangeable rule of right and wrong, which
the law of God hath established ’.85 While Locke repeats this view in other
works, he is also, more often and urgently perhaps, keen to stress the
frequent opposition between interest and the natural law, as well as the
multiplicity of sinful or non-Christian standards that various cultures,
including his own, hold dear. Only a few paragraphs after he has
announced the concurrence of the laws of nature and fashion, he explains
that duelling is a ‘sin’, but ‘in some countries, valour and vertue’.86 His
lifelong denial of innatism is partly grounded in the diversity and
wickedness of moral laws. It is because entire cultures deposit children
into the graves of their dead mothers, or abandon the terminally ill to the
elements, or eat their children, that Locke knows that people do not have
the law of God engraved on their hearts, but concoct it erratically.87
This commitment to the abundance of moral systems (and therefore to
the widespread ignorance of the law of nature) is particularly strong in
Locke’s treatment of language. One of his prime purposes in book iii is to
show that because moral ideas are devised by us, they proliferate wildly.88
While they are incarnated in conventional language and theoretically
84
Locke 1997, p. 302. 85 Locke 1975, p. 356 (ii.xxviii.11).
86
Locke 1975, p. 359 (ii.xxviii.15). On the coincidence of interest, conventional morality and the
natural law see also Locke 1954, p. 207 and 1997, p. 299 (Of Ethic in General). On the opposition
between interest and the natural law, see 1954, p. 207.
87
Locke 1975, pp. 70–1 (i.iii.9). Cf. 1954, pp. 137–45 and 161–79.
88
E.g. Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.15).
ought to exist inter-subjectively, the purely normative banks of common
use cannot stem the rivulets of private use.89 The fabricated, archetypal,
‘adequate’ status of moral ideas, which is what makes them candidates for
demonstrable science, simultaneously releases the demons of semantic
plurality.90
Moral language had always been a prominent locus of semantic
instability. However, while Locke’s predecessors had neither explicitly nor
consistently held the two apart, their qualms had centred on the inde-
terminate application of moral terms to a state of affairs (such as calling
‘liberality’ what one might call ‘prodigality’), rather than on the
instability of the senses of the terms themselves. Locke’s radical con-
tribution was to systematise this deep form of semantic diversity. His
vision of a manufactured and contingent moral semantic structure
threatens the prospect of its universality.
Semantic fissures begin to open up at the intercultural level. Developing
the grammatical claim that languages are not intertranslatable, Locke gives
a philosophical reason for the incommensurability between languages and
the semantic systems that underpin them. He explains why it is that ‘when
men come curiously to compare’ moral terms ‘with those they are trans-
lated into, in other languages, they will find very few of them exactly to
correspond in the whole extent of their significations’.91 Mixed modes
reflect the customs and conveniences of particular cultures. There are
therefore ‘in every language many particular words, which cannot be
rendred by any one single word of another. For the several fashions,
customs, and manners of one nation, making several combinations of
ideas familiar and necessary in one, which another people have had never
any occasion to make, or, perhaps, so much as take notice of ’.92
Locke’s treatment of mixed modes coincides with his fascination with
travel literature.93 Beyond monstrosities, these sources abound with exotic
89
Locke 1975, p. 479 (iii.ix.8). For an example of Locke’s confidence in common meanings of mixed
modes, see p. 466 (iii.vi.43): ‘the complex ideas of modes, are referred sometimes to archetypes in
the minds of other intelligent beings; or which is the same, to the signification annexed by others
to their received names’. See Tully 1980, p. 15: ‘mixed modes and relations, and so the objects of
which they are the essences, are not subjective but inter-subjective; existing in the continued
normative employment of their names in the language of common use’; Colie (1991) on the
intimate relationship between language, individual and society in Locke; Walmsley (1995) on the
balance between our ethical obligation to common use and our liberty rationally to stray from it,
which liberty Walmsley asserts is the main concern of book iii (p. 421). Cf. Markus (1996, pp. 105–24)
on Augustine on the essential involvement of the community in meaning.
90
Locke 1975, p. 565 (iv.iv.7). 91 Locke 1975, p. 433 (iii.v.8).
92
Locke 1975, p. 290 (ii.xxii.6). See Chase 1997.
93
See Paxman (1995) on the relationship between language and travel literature in Locke; Batz (1991)
for an interpretation of Locke’s political theory that sees it as motivated, justified and even
practices and beliefs which Locke devoured, as they fed and proved his
moral conventionalism.94 The Essay shows traces of Locke’s interest, as
when he notes that ‘there are places where they eat their own children’.95
But the scale of his preoccupation only becomes clear in his journals. On
20 March 1682, Locke writes: ‘many ancient authors have treated of the
different laws & customs of severall nations’.96 He mentions Plato,
Sextus, Nicole and Casaubon. In addition to François Bernier’s The
Religion and Suppositions of the Heathen of Indostan, Jean Baptiste
Tavernier is another important author, supplying Locke with a place
where they make their children ‘euenuchs they often cut off all & many
of those that are soe served die of the operation’.97 In July 1677 Locke
notes under the heading of ‘Polygamie’ that ‘à Marroc chacun a deux ou
trois femmes et plusiers concubines’.98 In November 1686 he enumerates
the ‘Pensilvania Laws’ which include: ‘adultery to be punishd with 12
months imprisonment’. He also remarks on their policy of toleration and
free speech: ‘if any person shall abuse or deride any other for his different
persuasion & practise in manner of Religion such shall be looked on as a
disturber of the peace & be punished accordingly’.99
Locke’s plural vision also pierces particular cultures over time. Fashion
is mercurial, and so too therefore is the language that informs and is
informed by it. ‘Languages constantly change, take up new, and lay by old
terms.’ This is a surface transformation that reflects deeper shifts. ‘Change
of customs and opinions’ are concomitant with ‘new combinations of
ideas’ that ‘become new species of complex modes’.100 Locke alludes to a
familiar example of this type of semantic gulf: ‘the true meaning of ancient
authors’ is almost irretrievable. Therefore, sighs Locke, not without relish,
‘we may lay them aside, and without any injury done them’.101 His his-
torical interest provides fuel for his fire; in his journal between 1684 and
1685, he makes notes on José de Acosta’s Histoire de’origine et du progress des
revenus ecclesiastiques, writing that ‘the government of the church, was at 1st
borrowed from his reading of travelogues, especially Acosta’s The Naturall and Morall
Historie of the East and West Indies (1604, English translation). Cf. Glat (1991, pp. 631–2) on
Locke’s use of America in the Two Treatises.
94
E.g. Locke 1975, pp. 70–2 (i.iii.9); pp. 87–8 (i.iv.8).
95
Locke 1975, p. 71 (i.iii.9). 96 MS. Locke f. 6, p. 50.
97
MS. Locke f. 1, p. 255 (journal, May 1676); MS. Locke f. 2, p. 260 (journal, September 1677).
Locke included The History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogul (1671), A
Continuation of the Memoirs (1672), and other travel writings in his reading list for gentlemen
(Locke 1997, p. 378). Cf. MS. Locke f. 2, p. 257, on ‘poligamia’; MS. Locke c. 25, fo. 25r on
‘polygamie’.
98
MS. Locke f. 2, p. 216 (p. 208). 99 MS. Locke f. 9, p. 33.
100
Locke 1975, p. 291 (ii.xxii.7). 101 Locke 1975, p. 481 (iii.ix.10).
democratical, afterwards aristocratical’.102 Apparently immemorial and
sacred institutions (like maxims) have murky human beginnings.
Cultural contingency does not in itself jeopardise the possibility of
communication within speech communities at a given moment. But Locke
does not stop there. He intensifies his microscopic analysis and comes to rest
on individuals of a supposedly common tongue. He finds that semantic
diversity underlies even their unitary moral language. ‘Justice is a word in
every man’s mouth, but most commonly with a very undetermined loose
signification.’103 It becomes clear that this is at the forefront of Locke’s mind
at the conception of the Essay, if we look at the manuscript contents list of
Draft B. There Locke writes that ‘if it be hard to finde the exact complex
ideas of substances it is harder to agree in the complex ideas that morall
words shall stand for it be more arbitrary’.104 The very last words of this early
sketch concern the ‘uncertain signification’ of ‘morall words’.105 In the
finished product he expands on the generality and blamelessness of the
phenomenon. It occurs not simply between enemies in a mode that we met
in chapter 5, but even between those ‘that have a mind to understand one
another’.106 Beyond the arbitrariness and complexity of the ideas them-
selves, Locke puts this phenomenon down to the way children, their minds
blank slates, learn first the sounds, and then only loosely (if at all) the
meanings.107 All these factors conspire to create a situation where ‘though
the names Glory and Gratitude be the same in every man’s mouth, through a
whole country, yet the complex collective idea, which every one thinks on,
or intends by that name, is apparently very different in men using the same
language’.108 One world of sounds fills the air between countrymen, while as
many worlds are played out as there are people.
fractured speakers
In addition to Locke’s ideational compositionalism, the pressure on
semantic universality comes from another albeit related angle. Meanings
are further diversified by the deeply partial nature of Lockean man.109
102
MS. Locke f. 8, p. 211. See Formigari (1988, p. 136) on Locke’s ‘historicist semantics’. Glat (1991)
argues, contra Pocock, that Locke was a ‘historicist’ rather than a ‘rationalist’, a claim he evidences
with Locke’s historical understanding of language. See McLaverty (1995) on the influence of
Locke’s historicist understanding of language on Johnson.
103
Locke 1975, p. 513 (iii.xi.9). 104
MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 36r. 105 MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 40r.
106 107
Locke 1975, p. 479 (iii.ix.8). Locke 1975, p. 480 (iii.ix.9).
108
Locke 1975, p. 479 (iii.ix.8).
109
Dunn (1969, p. 191) argues powerfully that ‘the intention of the entire epistemological venture’
was to ‘restrain the encroaching flood of partiality’ by providing a ‘morals of thinking’.
His self-referential passions imbue nearly every thought he has. Just as
there is barely a sensation in his body that is not painful or pleasurable, the
great majority of his ‘perception[s] of the mind’ are ‘accompanied also
with pleasure or pain’.110 Our minds are not cool, uniform receptors, but
rather like furnaces that mould every incoming idea in accordance with the
particular relishes that our unique history has entrenched. Moreover, in
the hedonistic, Epicurean mode that so upset his contemporaries, Locke
expains how naturally good and evil are those things that cause pleasure
and pain in us. ‘Things then are Good or Evil, only in reference to Pleasure
or Pain. That we call Good, which is apt to cause or increase pleasure, or
diminish pain in us.’111 Our evaluative language is therefore saturated with
the concoction of desires and dispositions that habit has ingrained in us.
While Lockean man has his gaze trained avidly on his ineluctably social
context, and his behaviour is overwhelmingly socially constructed and
conscious, all this springs from his own self-interested desires. The self-
centred constellation of his mind plots a unique course for his words.
Our moral partiality lies at the core of Locke’s mature political theory. It
is because we cannot be trusted to be indifferent that we have to give up our
right of executing the law of nature – that is, of preserving mankind – to a
common (impartial) judge. The state of nature, where every man has the
right to judge and punish breaches of the law, is a perilous and uncertain
place. As Locke says in Two Treatises of Government (1689), ‘it is unrea-
sonable for men to be judges in their own cases’, because ‘self-love will
make men partial to themselves and their friends. And on the other
side . . . ill nature, passion and revenge will carry them too far in punishing
others’. One ought not to expect a man who ‘was unjust as to do his brother
an injury’ to ‘be so just as to condemn himself for it’.112 The reason
that motivates us to quit the state of nature is the same reason that
determines judicial action once we arrive: ‘nobody’s testimony about
himself is acceptable’.113 The inevitability of moral partiality is also an
argument against absolute monarchy. An unchecked prince is liable to the
same, if not more, injustice feared of men in the state of nature. The
desperate one-sidedness of our judgements plays a key role in Locke’s
argument in favour of religious toleration. The fight between different
churches over orthodoxy can never be resolved on this earth. We remember
that ‘every church is orthodox to it self’. There is no ‘Judge, either at
Constantinople, or elsewhere upon the earth, by whose sentence’ doctrinal
110
Locke 1975, p. 229 (ii.xx.1 and 3). 111 Locke 1975, p. 229 (ii.xx.2).
112
Locke 1988, pp. 275; 276. 113 Locke 1997, p. 207.
quarrels ‘can be determined’.114 Our indelibly selfish understandings make
our descriptions of the world unlikely to converge.
Our private interest, often unbeknown to ourselves, colours our
opinions. Verbally echoing Hobbes, Locke pleads that since propositions
‘can receive no evidence from our passions or interests, so it should receive
no tincture from them’.115 As a leading participant in the new holistic
approach to logic, Locke is concerned with the ethics of understanding. In
the Conduct of the Understanding, a work specifically devoted to this cause,
he identifies a miscarriage of the mind. It involves putting ‘passion in the
place of reason’ and acting and speaking only insofar as it suits our
‘humour, interest, or party’.116 Our cognitive partiality is not just moral,
but determines all the thoughts of the great majority of people, who either
cannot be bothered or are not brave enough to step outside their subjective
cocoons. Locke recalls Paul’s meditation on the dark glass that is locked in
front of human eyes. ‘We see but in part, and we know but in part . . . no
one sees all, and we generally have different prospects of the same thing,
according to our different . . . positions to it’.117 The circumstances into
which we happen to be born determine the specific blinkers which we
cannot shake from our skulls. The ‘day labourer’ and the ‘country gen-
tleman’ are both victims of their confinement, whether it be ‘poor con-
versation’ or ‘claret’.118 Locke’s thoroughgoing rejection of innate ideas
makes our minds the subjects of whatever chance puts in our path.
Interpersonal semantic multiplication is guaranteed by the nature of the
scripts that experience writes on our souls. Each one is irrevocably unique.
Locke does not stop there. Not satisfied to let semantic instability rend
our interpersonal relations, he proposes that it is also an intrapersonal
phenomenon. Meanings not only differ from person to person, but in the
same individual from moment to moment. ‘Moral words, have seldom, in
two different men, the same precise signification; since one man’s complex
idea seldom agrees with anothers, and often differs from his own, from that
which he had yesterday, or will have tomorrow.’ Here is that Montaignian
dictum, previously employed primarily to indicate cognitive fluidity,
inserted explicitly and systematically by Locke into the heart of language.119
114
Locke 1983, p. 32.
115
Locke 1975, p. 698 (iv.xix.1); cf. Hobbes 1996, p. 31. Locke owned Leviathan (Harrison and Laslett
1965, p. 155).
116
Locke 1993, p. 7. MS. Locke c. 25, fos. 23r-23v lists a plethora of passions in Locke’s journal index
for 1676.
117
Locke 1993, p. 8. 118 Locke 1993, p. 13.
119
Locke 1975, p. 478 (iii.ix.6). Locke owned both the 1669 French edition of the Essais and Florio’s
1603 translation (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 191).
The thoughts of an individual appear prone to change if we reflect on
Locke’s dynamic representation of personal formation in, most con-
spicuously, his Thoughts concerning Education. Drawing on an extensive
externalist tradition involving Aristotle, renaissance humanists, and those
custom-focused grammarians we met in chapter 2, Locke registers his
own commitment to the awesome power of education. ‘I think I may
say’, he announces, ‘that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are
what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. ’Tis that
which makes the great difference in mankind.’120 If we add to this the
deconstruction of personal identity that, almost despite himself, Locke
lays bare, the self looks very unsteady. As Sydenham had taught him, ‘the
human body is . . . a continual flux of particles’.121 And the self is ‘nothing
but consciousness’.122 Although Locke did not add the chapter on identity
(ii.xxvii) to the Essay until the second edition of 1694, we can see from a
journal entry of 3 June 1683 that early on he located the self in the
capacities of memory and consciousness. ‘Identity of persons lies not in
having the same numerical body made up of the same particles, nor if the
minde consists of corporeal spirits in their being the same. But in the
memory & knowledg of ones past self & actions continued on under the
consciousnesse of being the same person whereby every man ownes
himself .’123 While Locke is concerned to intervene in a longstanding
philosophical debate that has huge ramifications for the trinity and res-
urrection, and while he wants a robust account of the self that is
accountable to God on the Day of Judgement, Locke’s location of the
self in consciousness and memory is somewhat like locating it in
quicksand.124 Ideas fly through the camera of our minds in bewildering
120
Locke 1989, p. 83. 121 Sydenham 1696, sig. a1r.
122
Locke 1975, p. 343 (ii.xxvii.21). Cf. MS. Locke f. 8, p. 5, on Malebranche on the different
characters of men; Locke 1976–89, v, p. 162 where James Tyrrell writes to Locke in October 1694
that ‘this supposition will not onely make a mad or drunken man another person, from himself
when sober; but also will make those that quite forget, (as some have done) all that ever they did
in their lives, tho’ not to be different men, yet different persons from what they were an hour
agone, and consequently they will be as many different persons, as they make different reflections
upon themselves, or their own actions, without any concerne of what is past, which seems very
hard if not impossible to conceive’. See Colie (1966, 1969 and 1991, pp. 268–9) on the Lockean
self; Eng (1980) on fixing the fleeting self; Thiel (1998b, pp. 888–99) on conceptions of personal
identity in seventeenth-century philosophy, and (1998a) on principles of individuation, especially
pp. 233–44 for an atomist treatment of identity over time, including Locke’s and a criticism of it.
123
MS. Locke f. 7, p. 107.
124
On our only being accountable to God for what we are conscious of see Locke 1975, pp. 343–7 (ii.
xxvii.22–6). There is perhaps a tension between this and Locke’s frail description of human
memory. It looks as though we might not be accountable for those bad thoughts we have
forgotten, but this cannot be Locke’s intention. Presumably, he means that we are accountable for
whatever we were conscious of at the time, regardless of whether we forget it subsequently.
and fleeting numbers. Most leave ‘no more footsteps or remaining
characters of themselves, than shadows do flying over fields of corn; and
the mind is as void of them, as if they never had been there’.125 In a sad
simile that seems to dissolve the self entirely, Locke compares our aging
minds to ‘those tombs, to which we are approaching; where though the
brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the
imagery moulders away. The pictures drawn in our minds, are laid in
fading colours; and if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear’.126
An early journal entry, dated December 1678, reveals that our meta-
morphic identity is a perennial and deep preoccupation. ‘It is impossible
to set a standing rule of recreation to ones self Because . . . the unsteady
fleeting condition of our bodys & spirits require more at one time than
another’.127 In the context of the ‘constant decay of all our ideas’ Locke’s
concern about semantic instability within one and the same man comes
sharply into focus.128 The dark room of our minds, where the great
anthology of our ideas lies mostly forgotten – some ideas, sometimes, ‘by
some turbulent and tempestuous passion’, launched back into the light,
but most overlooked, or repressed forever – is a rickety home for our
words, which must be subject to endless caprice.129
the empty appeal to common use

The semantic contract ought to stem this tide. Common use ought to
effect semantic closure. Locke does sometimes appeal unproblematically
to ‘vulgar use’ as the standard to which our speech is bound, breaches
of which are ‘very ridiculous’.130 He explains that ‘common use, by a
tacit consent, appropriates certain sounds to certain ideas in all lan-
guages, which so far limits the signification of that sound, that unless a
man applies it to the same idea, he does not speak properly’.131 While
Adam ‘voluntarily’ forged the names/ideas of ‘jealousy’ and ‘adultery’,
his children are ‘obliged’ to apply those names to the same archetypes.
‘By degrees’ these applications of sounds to ideas ‘grew into common
use’.132 Locke often writes as though common use were perfectly clear
and brooked little argument. For example, he says that he dislikes the
conventional definition of ‘schism’. It is understood as the ‘errors . . . in
worship or discipline’, which makes it a tool of righteous persecutors.
125 126
Locke 1975, p. 151 (ii.x.4). Locke 1975, pp. 151–2 (ii.x.5). 127 MS. Locke f. 3, p. 352.
128 129
Locke 1975, p. 151 (ii.x.5). Locke 1975, p. 153 (ii.x.7).
130
Locke 1990a, p. 14; Locke 1975, p. 471 (iii.vi.51). 131 Locke 1975, p. 408 (iii.ii.8).
132
Locke 1975, pp. 467 (iii.vi.44); 468 (iii.vi.45); 467 (iii.vi.45).
It should signify ‘an ill-grounded separation in ecclesiastical commu-
nion’, and so pour cold water on the Church’s fire. But Locke bows to
‘common use’ on the grounds that ‘use . . . is the supream law in matter
of language’.133 He counts it an abuse of words, when men ‘apply the
common received names of any language to ideas, to which the com-
mon use of that language does not apply them’.134 To remedy the
problem of semantic confusion he draws on the well-worn monetary
metaphor and prescribes that men apply their words ‘as near as may be,
to such ideas as common use has annexed them to. For words, being no
man’s private possession, but the common measure of commerce and
communication, ’tis not for any one, at pleasure, to change the stamp
they are current in; nor alter the ideas they are affixed to.’135
No sooner has Locke recommended ‘propriety’ than he bombards its
efficacy, and ultimately its existence in a succession of strikes. To begin
with, he picks up the tired concern of his predecessors and notes the
fragile human base of the semantic contract. In Lockean society, where
trust is invested more often out of necessity than desire, the contracts that
are made by men may just as easily be broken by them. The bonds that tie
res to verba can be shattered as they were forged, by the will of man, and
this with alarming ease given the ineluctable opacity of language that I
shall discuss in the next chapter. Locke inveighs against the abuse of
language whereby speakers ‘apply . . . [words] amiss’. His example is an
explicit dig at the rhetorical trick of paradiastole and the breach of con-
tract it epitomises: ‘when I apply the name frugality to that idea which
others call and signify by this sound, covetousness’.136
However, the problem with the law of propriety is much more serious
than Locke’s predecessors had thought. It is not just that it can be dis-
obeyed. It is that it threatens to evaporate altogether. As he had made plain
in the Two Treatises, ‘no body can be under a law, which is not promul-
gated to him’.137 It is hard to see how the law of propriety can be any such
thing, given that it is nowhere promulgated. As Locke admits, ‘common
use has not so visibly annexed any signification to words, as to make men
know always certainly what they precisely stand for’.138 If ‘the rule and
measure of propriety’ is ‘no where established’, then it effectively boils
down to no more than an echoing chamber of the same sounds to
which different people apply ideas as they personally see fit, in sometimes
133
Locke 1983, p. 58. 134 Locke 1975, p. 504 (iii.x.23). 135
Locke 1975, p. 514 (iii.xi.11).
136
Locke 1975, p. 507 (iii.x.33). 137 Locke 1988, p. 305. 138
Locke 1975, pp. 514–15 (iii.xi.12).
overlapping ways.139 Common use turns out to be ‘a very uncertain rule,
which reduces itself to the ideas of particular men’.140 We are supposed to
have given up the liberty that Adam had to construct ideas and join them to
sounds as he liked. We are supposed to be locked in a set of reciprocal
obligations to use words in a certain way. Yet given the private, ideational
nature of meaning, the semantic contract cannot really get off the ground.
Man still ‘has so inviolable a liberty, to make words stand for what ideas he
pleases’. To demonstrate the impossibility of linguistically legislating for
others, Locke declares that even ‘the great Augustus himself, in the pos-
session of that power which ruled the world, acknowledged, he could not
make a new Latin word’. In the last analysis, ‘no one hath the power to
make others have the same ideas in their minds, that he has, when they use
the same words, that he does’.141 The absence of a linguistic legislator makes
a mockery of the idea of the law.142 Given that nobody has the ‘authority to
establish the precise signification of words’, there must be ‘great latitude’ in
usage.143 The extraordinary conclusion that common use is, in fact, no such
thing takes the wind out of the attacks on those who wilfully break the
semantic contract. If we think back to Locke’s own example of this offence,
we are forced to wonder if ‘covetousness’ and ‘frugality’ have any agreed
meaning to be subverted. And indeed, at another place, Locke himself
admits this very point. ‘Covetousness’, he declares, is ‘to one man, which is
not so to another’. Individuals remain free, precisely not bound by any
linguistic obligations, to engage in the process of semantic fabrication. The
reason that complex ideas, such as covetousness ‘are often, in several men,
different collections of simple ideas’ is that ‘these essences, or abstract ideas,
(which are the measures of names, and the boundaries of species) are the
workmanship of the understanding’.144
The speaker who longs to communicate can only do so by losing all the
convenience of the names of complex ideas and by minimally, laboriously
enumerating the simple ideas that make up his train of complex thought
and that are (probably) intelligible to all. Unfortunately, men will not be
so inclined. Moreover, they are unlikely to see the need for such scruples.
The void at the heart of conventional language is especially problematic
because speakers are not only unaware of it, but positively imagine the
opposite to be the case. Echoing Pascal, Locke declares that people, driven
139
Locke 1975, p. 479 (iii.ix.8). 140 Locke 1975, p. 522 (iii.xi.25).
141
Locke 1975, p. 408 (iii.ii.8). Cf. Pufendorf 1703, v, p. 51: ‘Caesar might, if he pleased, naturalize
men, but words he could not.’
142
Locke 1975, p. 483 (iii.ix.14). 143 Locke 1975, p. 479 (iii.ix.8).
144
Locke 1975, p. 416 (iii.iii.14).
by their desire to be understood, unconsciously and misguidedly ‘suppose
their words to be marks of the ideas in the minds also of other men, with
whom they communicate’, whereas really they share only the names.145
While a semantic communion is to be hoped for, it must not be taken for
granted, given that individual uses in practice rarely overlap. This leaves
Locke in a strange position. If the connection between words and
meanings is purely arbitrary, then common use is the only mechanism
whereby words have any public meaning at all.146 Communication (in
Locke’s sense) and meaning (in ours) are thereby rendered impossible.
At the end of the last chapter of his book on language, having written
off common use as a suitable remedy for verbal obscurity, Locke makes a
final and muted suggestion. He says that individuals ‘should use the same
word constantly in the same sense’.147 But almost in the same breath he
dismisses this final hope. Given the paucity and vulgarity of the words at
hand, even the best intentioned speaker will ‘be forced often to use the
same word, in somewhat different senses’.148 Without an infinitesimal
account of the simple ideas that make up his discourse the hearer will be
at a loss as to the intended meaning. And so, on this quiet note of despair,
when he has run out both of words and of any confidence in their
communicativity, ends Locke’s book on language.
Before ending my own chapter, I ought to sound a note of caution. It
would be wrong to overplay Locke’s repudiation of ‘common use’, given
that it must remain the lifeblood of communication, words only having
public meaning by convention. Moreover, he publishes at length, which
betrays some faith in a semantic communion. He often refers straight-
forwardly to ‘common use’, as though it were existent, apparent and in
charge.149 Sometimes he suggests that it is only philosophers who need worry
about the indeterminacy of words, and that ordinary people do just fine,
‘civil’ (as opposed to ‘philosophical’) use serving ‘for the upholding common
conversation and commerce’.150 While philosophers must know precisely
what their words mean so that they can reason with them, common use
‘regulates the meaning of words pretty well for common conversation’.151
145
Locke 1975, pp. 406 (iii.ii.4); 387 (ii.xxxii.11). See above chapter 5, p. 144, for Pascal’s critique of
the supposition of communication. This is the first of two ‘secret references’ (the other being
taking words for things) Locke says people mistakenly make for their words. Several
commentators interpret them as elucidating communication and reference, where Locke’s bare
signification theory fails. See below chapter 9, p. 263, on the commentary and for Locke’s rejection
of these secret references as false suppositions.
146
Locke 1975, p. 514 (iii.xi.11). 147 Locke 1975, p. 523 (iii.xi.26).
148
Locke 1975, p. 524 (iii.xi.27). 149 For example, Locke 1975, p. 471 (iii.vi.51).
150
Locke 1975, p. 476 (iii.ix.3). 151 Locke 1975, p. 479 (iii.xi.8).
However, even this concession is hard to square with what Locke says
elsewhere. At other times his reason for attending to philosophical use and
leaving civil use alone is not that the latter is satisfactory for rudimentary
needs but precisely that it is so full of ‘obscurity, doubtfulness, or equi-
vocation’ and its practitioners so unreachable, that there is no hope of
reform.152 If we take Locke’s effusive claims about semantic instability
seriously, it is difficult to know how civil use can ‘serve pretty well the
market, and the wake’.153 Admittedly, it might well be the case for names
of substances; if a farmer were looking to buy a ‘horse’ from a horse
breeder, the two would probably be able to cut a deal, even though one
had a far larger understanding of the word than the other. However, in the
case of the names of mixed modes, like ‘liberty’, ‘prayer’ and ‘justice’,
where the nominal essence is all there is, and the inclusion or exclusion of a
particular idea is crucial to its identity, it is hard to see how people can
communicate when there is not a perfect match. Moreover, the Straits of
Messina seem to bear down on even the philosophers, for whom Locke
admits that semantic indeterminacy is a real problem, and who, after all,
are the speakers (and readers) Locke is primarily addressing. It seems that
they cannot escape the vagaries of the vulgar, but must bow down before
them: ‘Philosophy itself, though it likes not a gaudy dress, yet when it
appears in publick, must have so much complacency, as to be cloathed in
the ordinary fashion and language of the country, so far as it can consist
with truth and perspicuity.’154 And even amongst themselves, philosophers
cannot easily extricate themselves from the maze of common use which is
their ineliminable starting point in speech, and which hems them in at
every turn with disorder and obfuscation. The ‘gaudy dress’ is a motley
number, and philosophers still have to struggle with it in private. Even if
they were able to shake it free, they would remain subject to the mental
divergence between themselves which Locke is at such pains to expose.
There is probably no way of resolving the overarching tension between
Locke’s confidence in common use and his denial of the same, except to
say that he believed in neither absolutely. Neither wholly sceptical nor
wholly optimistic, Locke sketches human interactions that are both vexed
and illuminated by language, men neither perfectly isolated nor perfectly
united, but negotiating their way through the dappled light. What can be
said for certain about Locke’s view of communication is that, insofar as his
theory of endemic semantic instability is radically different from anything
152
Locke 1975, p. 509 (iii.xi.2–3).
153 154
Locke 1975, p. 514 (iii.xi.10). Locke 1975, p. 243 (iii.xxi.20).
that had been said before, Locke’s concern is to push this home. While he
doubtless believes that individual uses overlap and sometimes even match,
he wants to show that it is wrong simply to assume semantic uniformity.
The polemic of book iii is to explode the complacent contemporary faith
in ‘proper’ speech. ‘The signification of words, in all languages, depending
very much on the thoughts, notions, and ideas of him that uses them, must
unavoidably be of great uncertainty, to men of the same language and
country.’ In each author that we read, we will find ‘a distinct language,
though the same words’.155 From our deeply subjective standpoints, we
make up the meanings of our names of complex ideas, whose resultant
multiplicity is inestimable and untold. ‘These Ideas of men’s making, are,
by men still having the same power, multiplied in infinitum’.156
When we hear Locke repeating the familiar claim ‘that the greatest part of
disputes were more about the significations of words, than a real difference
in the conception of things’, this is not the light-hearted rapprochement it
is for his philosophical friends, or indeed for our modern selves who still
like to put our disagreements ‘down to semantics’.157 It is a truth that
leaves Locke in despair. While his forbears railed against the breach of the
semantic contract, Locke doubts its very presence. While an extraordinary
range and number of his contemporaries sought to repair Babel, Locke
laughs it off as an impossibility, gainsaying the universal language move-
ment. ‘I am not so vain to think, that any one can pretend to attempt the
perfect reforming the languages of the world, no not so much as that of his
own country, without rendring himself ridiculous’.158 Even when he and
Limborch lock horns over ‘liberty’ in letter after letter, spelling out their
different understandings of the word, they cannot agree and the con-
sequences for toleration are severe.159 Locke’s presentation of semantic
plurality shreds the cultural lexicon. While some of his forbears had
intimated this divided picture of speech communities, they had not
explained it in any systematic way or presented it as endemic. In the
context of Locke’s epistemology and the central place he accords language
in a person’s mental and practical life, his charge that ‘most disputes are
about the signification of words’ is one that should make us seriously
question the ‘community’ we inevitably inhabit.160
155
Locke 1975, p. 489 (iii.ix.22). 156 Locke 1975, p. 480 (iii.ix.9).
157
Locke 1975, p. 485 (iii.ix.16).
158
Locke 1975, p. 509 (iii.xi.2). Colie (1991, p. 267) proposes that Locke’s flexible view of language
was grounded in the flux of both nature and epistemology.
159
Locke 1976–89, vii, pp. 274ff. 160 MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 35v.
chapter 9
A life of their own
Locke’s profound deconstruction of the signification of words, prosecuted

by both his arguments and his self-reflexive example, is designed to make
his readers humble, cautious and careful speakers. Having seen words
crumple under the searing glare of his inquiry and having wound along its
circuitous route, so that we could not but get his meaning, we are sup-
posed to reflect continually on the superficial and manufactured nature of
the meanings of words and on the likelihood that we talk at cross pur-
poses. Having realised the limits of our linguistic horizon, we can move
forward with language toward knowledge and communication, realisti-
cally and properly using what is indeed a wonderful God-given instru-
ment. However, Locke is pessimistic of us resetting our sights. This is
partly because we are lazy, proud and deluded, but also because language
itself positively encourages the kind of problematic speech against which
we have seen him rail. Language allows us to corrupt ourselves; it pro-
motes vanity and introversion, not only in speech but even in thought.
We might arrogantly assume impossible knowledge and proffer deaf ears
to our fellow men, but it is the nature of words that enables, if not causes
us to hold forth and cogitate in an overambitious and self-centred way. It
enables us to mouth sounds without signification. Locke spells out a
man’s predicament: words are ‘external sensible signs, whereby those
invisible ideas which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known
to others’.1 The sensible, inherently opaque façade of language covers its
imperfections and abuses, and projects only itself. In communication and
often in private thought as well, words are all we have. We are caught in
the dangerous situation of saying what we like and being victims of the
linguistic world we inherit.
We remember from the logics and from the Ockhamist presentation of
the oratio mentalis that thought had often been considered discursive, but
1
Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.1).
239
in the sense that mind and language were deemed exactly parallel, the
former firmly dictating the latter. Locke turns this hierarchy on its head,
drawing on the anxieties of his predecessors about the rule of words. We
saw them grappling with a terrifying host of consequences about practical
linguistic pre-eminence. While Locke repeats the sensible word/insensible
meaning duality, he integrates it deeply into his anxiety about language
and locates it squarely in the more general tension between visceral
sensation and ethereal intellect that so engrosses seventeenth-century
philosophers. His forbears remark on the duality in the context of lan-
guage almost in passing, neither connecting it systematically to their
wider concerns about the mind/body conflict, nor to their vociferous
concerns about language. While they did indeed address the implications
of the practical predominance of words, they did so without referring
particularly to their sensible character. Locke makes explicit what they
had implied. He provides a theoretical basis for the old concerns. While I
actively drew out the connection between the dual nature and the practice
of language for his predecessors, Locke makes it himself, having inter-
nalised – like the reader – their anxious words.
the rule of sense

‘All knowledg is founded on and ultimately derives its self from sense.’2
This belief, here in its stark immaturity in the first sentence of the first
draft of the Essay, underpins Locke’s linguistic theory as much as it does
his epistemology. In addition to setting semantic limits, it has an impact
on words themselves. Given that, for Locke, the mind begins as a tabula
rasa – the myriad ideas it has about the external world being painted
solely by sensation – the sensible quality of words is exceptionally
important.3 We have no access to the ideas of others except by the
mediation of (the sensible ideas of) words. As the Essay abstract puts it,
‘the ideas in mens mindes are so wholy out of sight to others that men
could have noe communication of their thoughts without some signes of
their ideas’.4 In the Essay itself, Locke elaborates that the thoughts of a
man ‘are all within his own breast, invisible, and hidden from others, nor
can of themselves be made appear’. Thus isolated, men would be denied
‘the comfort, and advantage of society’.5 They cannot ‘divine’ each other’s
thoughts by ‘immediate communication’, as the spirits do, communing
2
Locke 1990a, p. 1. 3 Locke 1975, pp. 104–5 (ii.i.2–3).
4
MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 62r. 5 Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.1).
A life of their own 241
mind to mind.6 Imprisoned in bodies, we are bound ‘to make use of
corporeal signs, and particularly sounds’.7 ‘The use then of words, is to be
sensible marks of ideas.’8 By definition then, while meaning is logically
prior to language, in communication language is experientially prior to
meaning.
Moreover, sensible words take up a strong and autonomous position in
our minds. In and of themselves they are fixed there, part of ‘that vast
store’ of ideas that furnishes it.9 ‘Every articulate word is a different
modification of sound.’10 In written form they are visible ‘ideas of . . .
letters’.11
Insignificant words exemplify how words, in their intrinsic identity as
ideas, subsist in the mind quite independently of meanings. Locke blames
‘the several sects of philosophy and religion’ for introducing these ‘empty
sounds’ that buttress their correspondingly empty dogmas.12 His
favourite, familiar target is scholastic language whose ‘substantial forms’
and ‘real essences’ signify nothing.13 Members of a party ‘think it enough
to have them often in their mouths, as the distinguishing characters of
their church, or school, without much troubling their heads to examine,
what are the precise ideas they stand for’.14
The isolation and meaninglessness of words themselves also emerges in
Locke’s insistence that the names of simple ideas are indefinable. ‘For
words being sounds, can produce in us no other simple ideas, than of
those very sounds . . . he that thinks otherwise, let him try if any words
can give him the taste of a pineapple’. Locke picks an exotic fruit that few
of his contemporaries have eaten. Only its name exists in their minds,
seductively but strictly unintelligible. To try and explain its meaning in
words would be like trying to explain to a blind man what a ‘rainbow’
was.15 Telling him about ‘light and colours’ will not clear ‘up the darkness
of . . . [his] mind’.16 ‘To hope to produce an idea of light, or colour, by a
sound, however formed, is to expect that sounds should be visible, or
colours audible.’17 One cannot talk someone into knowledge. Locke’s
point is partly aimed at scholastics and Cartesians who purport to
define all terms, but whose definitions fold in upon themselves as
they swap words for words, travelling rather than breaking the verbal
6
Locke 1975, pp. 368 (ii.xxix.12); 316 (ii.xxiv.36). Cf. Locke (1954, p. 261) on the need for outward
worship ‘to testify that inward one to men’.
7
Locke 1975, p. 316 (ii.xxiv.36). 8 Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.1). 9 Locke 1975, p. 104 (ii.i.2).
10
Locke 1975, p. 224 (ii.xviii.3). 11 Locke 1975, p. 634 (iv.xi.7).
12
Locke 1975, p. 491 (iii.x.2). 13 Locke 1975, pp. 444–5 (iii.vi.9–10).
14
Locke 1975, p. 491 (iii.x.2). 15 Locke 1975, pp. 424 (iii.iv.11); 426 (iii.iv.13).
16
Locke 1975, p. 127 (ii.vi.6). 17 Locke 1975, p. 425 (iii.iv.11).
circle, and leaving their readers baffled without ideas.18 Inherently, words
do not signify beyond themselves; as Locke says, they are ‘but empty
sounds’, except insofar as ‘they are signs of our ideas’.19 They only
become signs of ideas ‘by a perfectly arbitrary imposition’, and are
therefore intrinsically opaque.20 ‘Words, by their immediate operation on
us, cause no other ideas, but of their natural sounds.’21
When we look at Locke’s manuscripts, we find that the native
meaninglessness of words is a perennial preoccupation. It is preying on
his mind in the summer of 1676 when he scribbles in his journal: ‘simple
ideas cannot be defined. Nor can we ever gain any notion of them by
words.’ On 26 March 1677 he attacks insignificant speech. ‘Words are of
noe value nor of use as they are signes of things, when they stand for noe
thing they are lesse than cyphers for instead of augmenting the value of
those they are joyned with, they lessen it and make it noe thing.’22 Alone,
words are worse than useless. Their presence positively confuses. The
blind man, who so poignantly exemplifies Locke’s point, appears in the
first draft of the Essay. He can have no understanding of the word ‘blew’ –
that can only be got ‘by the senses them selves’.23 ‘All the words in the
world’ cannot convey the idea ‘unless it be of the sound its self ’.24 The
centrality to Locke’s philosophy of language of the separateness and
sensibility of words also appears in the Essay abstract. ‘Words then are
signes of ideas but no articulate sound having any natural connection
with any idea but barely of the sound itself .’25 Locke therefore gives
sustained voice to the century’s sporadic concern about embodied
linguistic circularity.
In his optimistic moments, he talks as though the palpable indepen-
dence of words were no object, as though they acted as they ought: the
‘common conduit’ that transports the thoughts of one man to another.26
Moreover, the ideas, to which words seamlessly direct us, might be more
apparent than the words that represent them. Locke repeats the Cartesian
wonder at the almost imperceptible mediation of words in communica-
tion which habit has inculcated. Certain sounds become associated with
certain ideas, ‘as if the objects themselves, which are apt to produce them,
did actually affect the senses’.27 ‘A man who reads or hears with attention,
takes little notice of the characters, or sounds, but of the ideas that are
18
Locke 1975, pp. 422–4 (iii.iv.8–10). 19 Locke 1975, p. 61 (i.ii.23).
20
Locke 1975, p. 408 (iii.ii.8). 21 Locke 1975, p. 689 (iv.xviii.3).
22 23
MS. Locke f. 1, p. 392; MS. Locke f. 2, p. 90 (p. 88). Locke 1990a, p. 7.
24
Locke 1991, p. 7. 25 MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 62r. 26 Locke 1975, p. 509 (iii.xi.1).
27
Locke 1975, p. 407 (iii.ii.6). Cf. Descartes 1985b, p. 81.
excited by them.’28 We read best when we ‘fix in the mind the clear and
distinct ideas of the question stripp’d of words’.29 Ideally, the sensible
images flit into our minds and as swiftly disappear, leaving behind their
luminous ideational cargo.
Falling yet more precisely into step with his visionary forebears, Locke
urges us to ditch words when we can. While they are indispensable to
communication, we ought to banish them from private reasoning. In the
Conduct of the Understanding he records his commitment to extra-
linguistic knowledge: being only the perception of the relations between
ideas, ‘which is done without words; the intervention of a sound helps
nothing to it.’30 Words are not only unhelpful, but positively harmful to
thought. By contrast with brilliant ideas, that are only and completely
what they seem, words are obscure and duplicitous, their meanings
shifting or nonexistent. Words are not bound to ideas and can therefore,
and must, be cast off. In his journal, in April 1677, Locke makes some
prescriptions ‘concerning study’, identifying words as an obstacle to truth
and the cause of confusion and error. As a remedy, he confidently pre-
scribes that we ‘thinke upon things abstracted & separate from words’.
‘Tis better to lay them aside & have an immediate converse with the ideas
of the things. For words are in their signification for the most part soe
uncertain and undetermined, which man even designedly have in their
use of them increasd.’31 If we think in ‘pure ideas separated from sounds’,
our minds will be ‘divested of the false lights and deceitful ornaments of
speech’.32 Words often having no definite or clear meanings, we must
settle the ideas themselves in our minds, ‘if we would make any clear
judgment about them’.33
Locke’s appeal to the clarity of ideas is understandable in the context of
simple ideas, such as ‘black’, ‘sweet’ or ‘judge’, which are as, if not more
conspicuous than the words that represent them. His case is more sur-
prising in the context of unwieldy complex ideas and particularly of
ephemeral mixed modes. Nevertheless, he frequently extends even to
them the mantle of illumination. Indeed, one of his most startling, if
sometimes faltering, claims is for the absolute intelligibility of moral ideas
and the connections between them. One of the Essay’s principal aims is to
insist on the knowability (and reality) of true morality, whether by
probable or demonstrative reasoning.34 At his boldest, Locke declares that
28
Locke 1975, pp. 146–7 (ii.ix.9). 29 Locke 1993, p. 122. Cf. Locke 1975, p. 567 (iv.iv.9).
30
Locke 1993, p. 10. 31 MS. Locke f. 2, p. 132 (p. 124). 32 Locke 1993, p. 124.
33
Locke 1993, p. 39. 34 Locke 1975, pp. 281–2 (ii.xxi.70); Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.16).
moral science is possible due to the completeness of a maker’s knowledge.
It is because mixed modes are ‘not of nature’s, but man’s making’ that
they are ‘perfectly’ knowable.35 As Hobbes had also argued, ‘moral
knowledge is as capable of real certainty, as mathematicks’ because in
both cases, as their draughtsmen, we know the ‘archetypes’ – the ‘real
essence[s] of the things moral words stand for’.36 Unlike our ideas of
natural substances, the real essences of which we do not know, our
knowledge of the real essences of moral ideas (which are also their
nominal essences) enables us to discover certainly the ‘congruity, or
incongruity of the things themselves . . . in which consists perfect
knowledge’.37 Having ‘adequate, and complete’ moral ideas, we can
perceive exactly how they agree and disagree. And for Locke, ‘the per-
ception of the agreement, or disagreement of our ideas’ is the definition
of certain knowledge, demonstrable knowledge being the result of a chain
of such perceptions.38
While this argument threatens to open the way to any internally
coherent system of moral ideas, Locke grounds the one true morality in
the divinely created nature of man and so secures its reality. From the
knowledge of our own existence, we can demonstrate the existence of
God our maker ‘on whom we depend’ and thence our obligation to
preserve mankind.39 Locke elaborates this in the Two Treatises – a work
driven by intelligible natural law. Given that God made us, we are
rightfully subject to his will.40 We can work out what this is from the
(divine) facts of our common, rational existence.41 He made us, so we
35
Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.15–16). Cf. Tully 1980, pp. 16–27. On the importance of maker’s
knowledge in contemporary science, see Pérez-Ramos 1991; Bates 2000.
36
Hobbes 1991, pp. 41–3; Locke 1975, p. 565 (iv.iv.7), Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.16). Locke also
draws the comparison between ‘mathematiques & morality’ in his journal on 26 June 1680
(MS. Locke f. 5, p. 82). Cf. his journal on 25 February 1676, where he writes that ‘there are virtues
& vices antecedent to & abstract from society. v.g. love of god. unnatural lust’ (MS. Locke f. 1,
p. 123).
37
Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.ix.16). 38 Locke 1975, p. 565 (iv.iv.7).
39
Locke 1975, p. 549 (iv.iii.18); cf. pp. 552–3 (iv.iii.21). See Yolton (1970, p. 169). See also Tully
(1980) on the workmanship model as ‘a fundamental feature of all Locke’s writing’, founding
morality (and property) (p. 4), and repudiating Hobbesian egoism (p. 47), and p. 43 on rewards
and punishments not as the grounds for obligation but as ‘psychological inducements to the
man who does not control his desires with his reason’ and pp. 40–2 on the question of the
grounds of obligation. On the voluntarist/rationalist natural law debate see: Aarsleff 1969,
pp. 105–29; Abrams 1967, p. 107; Ayers 1991, ii, pp. 189–202; Colman 1983, p. 235; Dunn 1969,
pp. 187–99; Oakley 1997; Rogers 1999; Tuckness 1999; Tully 1993, pp. 179–241 and pp. 281–314;
Yolton 1970, pp. 179–80.
40
Locke 1988, pp. 179; 271.
41
See Waldron (2002, pp. 76–82) for his argument that Locke’s account of human equality has an
inextricably theological basis.
must assume that he wants us to be preserved. We are his ‘property’,
‘made to last during his, not one anothers pleasure’.42
For our purposes, the important thing to note in Locke’s natural law
theory is his recurrent assertion of its luminosity, its effortless presence to
our minds. We have ‘but [to] consult’ our reason and we will learn its
right precepts.43 God’s law, ‘the only true touchstone of moral rectitude’,
comes to us by the ‘light of nature’.44 Even in the Reasonableness of
Christianity, the text in which he almost completely turns his back on
rational deduction in favour of revelation, Locke declares that someone
who has never read the Bible, has never even heard of Jesus, can find out
God’s law through the exercise of his reason.45 He too has ‘this candle of
the lord’.46 Locke’s commitment to the self-evidence of morality is
sometimes so strong that he talks like the innatists against whom he
otherwise rails, most explicitly in the Essays on the Law of Nature (c. 1663–
64).47 In the first ‘essay’ he asserts baldly that ‘this law, then, is not
written, but innate’,48 and ‘implanted in our hearts’.49 It ought be to
noted that the authenticity of the work is complicated. It is a series of
disputations that emerges out of his time as Censor of Moral Philosophy
at Christ Church. It was designed for the Bachelors, whose MA exam-
inations consisted in part of disputations. Locke was therefore concerned
to teach them not only about the natural law, but also how to win an
argument and what lines of argument they might marshal. It could be
42
Locke 1988, p. 271; cf. pp. 350–3. 43 Locke 1988, p. 271. 44 Locke 1975, p. 352 (ii.xxvii.8).
45
Locke 1999, pp. 148–51: ‘’tis too hard a task for unassisted reason, to establish morality in all its parts
upon its true foundations; with a clear and convincing light . . . Experience shews that the knowledge
of morality, by meer natural light, (how agreeable soever it be to it) makes but slow progress, and
little advance in the world . . . ’tis plain in fact, that humane reason unassisted, failed men in its great
and proper business of morality. It never from unquestionable principles, by clear deductions, made
out an entire body of the law of nature. And he that shall collect all the moral rules of the
philosophers, and compare them with those contained in the New Testament, will find them to
come short of the morality delivered by our Saviour, and taught by his apostles; a college made up
for the most part of ignorant, but inspired fishermen . . . But such a body of ethicks, proved to be
the law of nature, from principles of reason, and reaching all the duties of life; I think no body will
say the world had before our Saviour’s time.’ Dunn (1969) argues that the ‘Reasonableness offers an
immediate and effective psychological instrument’ (p. 194) to overcome our rational and instinctive
shortcomings. Cf. Yolton (1970, p. 179) on Locke turning to revelation on account of it being a
‘clearer statement’ of the law of nature than reason can deliver; Harris (1998, pp. 292–3) on the way in
which Locke views revelation as a useful substitute for reason; Parkin (1999, pp. 215–22) on Locke’s
difficulties with the natural law, and his relations to Hobbes and Richard Cumberland.
46
Locke 1999, p. 139.
47
According to Yolton (1970, pp. 174–5), Locke’s more overt view that one can reason to the good
itself resembles ‘dispositional’ innatism, especially that of Nathaniel Culverwel.
48
Locke 1954, p. 117 (Von Leyden adds ‘i.e. natural’ in his translation).
49
Locke 1954, p. 111. He comes close to admitting an innate idea of God in the midst of his anti-
innatist tirade at the beginning of the Essay (Locke 1975, p. 92 (i.iv.13)).
that Locke, here the exemplary polemical dialectician, is raiding the topic
and taking all arguments that suit his cause pro the law of nature. It could
also be that in the first disputation Locke is running through, rather than
condoning the arguments which are generally made in favour of the
existence of natural law, which he will analyse in subsequent quaestiones,
and in some cases reject. Certainly, a later disputation is devoted to
denying that the law of nature is ‘inscribed in the minds of men’.50
Whatever the status of this piece of juvenalia, he still expresses some
commitment to ‘the light of nature’ at the end of his life, when it had
come to seem so terribly dim. He rekindles it in a manuscript entitled
‘Error’ (1698). He states that while an illiterate ploughman might know
little, ‘he has a conscience’.51 While Locke is normally interested in jet-
tisoning the Enthusiast’s easy, justificatory refuge in ‘conscience’, here the
simple farmer cannot but be confronted with the blazing ideas of right
and wrong.
Locke’s affirmation of the clarity of ideas themselves also emerges in
the metaphors he uses to characterise them. Like his forbears, he draws on
sensuous figurative funds to suggest the substantial palpability of ideas.
His frequent characterisation of words as ‘conveying’ ideas indicates that
there is some thing to carry.52 Rehearsing his forbears, he urges us to
‘strip’ ideas of their verbal clothing and look on the ‘naked truth’, as
though it were a body.53 His main figurative reserve is the rich well of
visual imagery. Calling ideas ‘visible’ accords them the highest degree of
self-evidence, sight being the ‘most comprehensive’ and ‘most instructive
of our senses’.54 Locke’s work is suffused with the potential ‘clarity’ of
ideas. The use men have of words is ‘to bring out their ideas, and lay
them before the view of others’.55 Words ‘fail’ when they ‘lay not open
one man’s ideas to anothers view’.56 In Draft A Locke appeals confidently
to ‘clear & destinct & perfect’ simple ideas.57 He explicitly compares the
mind to the eyes and ideas to things seen. In a letter to Limborch on 28
September 1702, referring to the way in which we are free to look, but not
free not to see when looking, he writes ‘what I have said of the eyes may
be transferred to the understanding: the principle is the same for both’.58
In the Essay he explains that ‘the understanding’ is ‘like the eye’, that
the ‘perception of the mind’ is ‘most aptly explained by words relating to
50
Locke 1954, pp. 137–45. 51 Locke 1997, p. 347.
52
E.g. Locke 1975, pp. 401 (iii.1.2); 504 (iii.x.23); 505 (iii.x.24).
53
Locke 1975, pp. 368 (ii.xxix.12); 567 (iv.iv.9).
54
Locke 1975, pp. 146 (ii.ix.9); 303 (ii.xxiii.12). 55 Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.2).
56 57
Locke 1975, p. 1 504 (iii.x.23). Locke 1990a, p. 15. 58 Locke 1976–89, vii, p. 681.
the sight’ and that ‘our knowledge . . . has a great conformity with our
sight’.59 He describes the fundamental first step in knowledge as per-
ceiving the ‘identity’ of ideas – perceiving that an idea is what it is. This
form of knowledge resembles the immediacy and indubitability of vision.
It is perceived ‘at first sight’, ‘as soon and as clearly as the ideas themselves
are, nor can it possibly be otherwise’.60 Echoing the new, natural logic,
Locke dismisses verbal syllogising and enjoins ‘the eye or the perceptive
faculty of the mind’ to do its work. We ought ‘to lay the naked ideas’ out
in chain and, ‘taking a view of them’, judge the inferences.61 In the
Conduct of the Understanding he refers to the brilliant visibility of extra-
linguistic ideas and lays down the law that we should regulate our assent
according to the ideational evidence, rather than the numerous extrinsic
factors which move us to opine. In response to his own rhetorical
question as to how this might be done, he replies that we are to use our
eyes: ‘there is a correspondence in things, and agreement and disagree-
ment in ideas . . . and there are eyes in men to see them if they please’.62
Locke’s visual metaphors do not consume themselves in the way that
Descartes’ did. According to Locke’s empirical epistemology, ‘under-
standing’ is in a strong sense and at a basic level the same as ‘sensing’, and
more particularly ‘seeing’.63 On 22 January 1678 Locke presents ideas as
images in his journal. ‘Memory is always the picture of something the
idea whereof hath existed before in our thoughts as neare as life as we can
draw it.’64 In his journal the previous year, he had remarked on the clarity
of ideas, this time by contrast with the obscurity of the words that
represent them. ‘He that would call to minde his absent friend, or pre-
serve his memory does it . . . most effectually by reviveing in his minde
the idea of him & contemplating that & tis but a very faint imperfect way
of thinking on ones friend barely to remember his name & thinke upon
the sound he is usually cald by’.65 Locke makes good his claims to escape
the gloom of words and shed light on their meanings in his proposal for a
pictorial dictionary of things. Participating in the explosion of graphic
natural histories, such as that recommended by Sydenham of diseases, or
the Micrographia of Robert Hooke (1655), and recalling the empiricist
grammarians, particularly Comenius and his Visible World, Locke writes
59
Locke 1975, pp. 6 (Epistle to the Reader); 363 (ii.xxix.2); 650 (iv.xiii.1).
60
Locke 1975, p. 526 (iv.i.4). 61 Locke 1975, pp. 674; 676 (iv.xvii.4). 62 Locke 1993, p. ii.
63
Cf. Ayers (1991, i) who writes brilliantly about the role of consciousness in knowledge, see
especially pp. 264–8 and 301–4; Law (1993) for an account of the relationship between vision and
language in Locke; Walker (1994) for an alternative examination of Locke’s figurative
representations of the mind and ideas; Weinsheimer (1997) on Law’s proposals.
64
MS. Locke f. 3, p. 17. 65 MS. Locke f. 2, p. 133 (p. 125).
that ‘words standing for things, which are known and distinguished by
their outward shapes, should be expressed by little draughts and prints
made of them’.66 He therefore continues the mission of making meaning
visible.
However, while Lockean ideas are clear in a way that Descartes’ cannot
be, this clarity extends only a little way before it too becomes a wilful
metaphor whose referent is obscure. While it works for ideas (even
complex ones) of sensation such as cold and gold, and of imagined
extrapolations of sensation such as unicorn, it collapses into an empty
figure for more ethereal ideas. Locke’s claims for their luminosity are
undercut by more convincing claims to the contrary. In addition to
advocating their brilliance, the Essay pushes the view that mixed modes,
moral ideas in particular, are extremely obscure. While morality is
theoretically demonstrable and like mathematics, both the claim and the
comparison turn out to be practically duplicitous. The silence on any
systematic moral demonstration in Locke’s oeuvre speaks loudly for his
doubts. He himself almost admits defeat in a letter to Molyneux in
September 1692. ‘I thought I saw that morality might be demonstratively
made out, yet whether I am able so to make it out is another question.’67
The difficulty stems in part from the elusive sophistication of moral ideas.
Locke wants to appropriate for morality both the visible ideas and their
extrication from obscure words which mathematics enjoys. Three months
after he had expressed doubts about his capacity actually to deliver a full
moral science, Locke writes again to Molyneaux, now wistfully, enviously,
commenting on the deverbalised minds of mathematicians. They are
‘open’d, and disintangl’d from the cheat of words’, free of these ‘doubtful
and fallacious’ interventions.68 However, their angelic condition owes
66
Locke 1975, p. 522 (iii.xi.25); Sydenham (1696, sig. a1v) says the art of medicine would be improved
by ‘a history, or description of all diseases, as graphically and naturally as possibly may be’. Locke’s
1680 journal teems with notes on disease and medicine (MS. Locke f. 4).
67
Locke 1976–89, iv, p. 524. Locke has been condemned for failing to deliver a demonstrable
morality; see Von Leyden (1991, p. 13 (originally 1956)) on Locke’s failure to derive obligation from
reason; Abrams (1967, p. 98) on Locke’s belief that while an objective morality exists and is
theoretically discoverable, it is ‘perenially undiscovered’ due to the passionate partiality of men.
Dunn (1969, p. 92) argues that ‘the Essay breaks off at the point at which Locke is confronted by
his inability to present morality as a system of universally intelligible obligatory truths’. Yolton
(1970, pp. 171–2 and 176–7) attributes Locke’s failure to produce a demonstrable, true morality to
his inability to reveal the inferential connections between man as God’s work (p. 169) and moral
obligation. See Marshall (1994, p. xviii) on Locke’s inability to reconcile hedonism and social duty,
pp. 436–9 and 453. Tuckness (1999) argues that The Reasonableness of Christianity, the Essay and the
Two Treatises are the products of a ‘coherent mind’.
68
Locke 1976–89, iv, p. 609.
itself to something that is forever out of reach of the moral scientist. The
mathematicians’ ideas are visible because their signs are perfectly trans-
parent. In the case of shapes, this is because the connection between sign
and signified is natural. Triangles on a page do not so much represent the
ideas they stand for, as positively present them, closing the gap between
the two. This is almost the case for numbers and mathematical notation.
Their meanings are so unambiguous and obvious to all alike that their
primordial conventionality is almost erased. The geometer’s demonstra-
tions ‘can be set down, and represented by sensible marks, which have a
greater and nearer correspondence with them than any words or sounds
whatsoever. Diagrams drawn on paper are copies of the ideas in the mind,
and not liable to the uncertainty that words carry in their signification’.
This translucency cannot be replicated with the arbitrary words that the
moral scientist is bound to use. A perfect mirror cannot be erected for
moral ideas. They have ‘no sensible marks that resemble them’ and
‘nothing but words to express them by’. The inherent opacity of moral
words is further darkened by the semantic proliferation I explored in the
previous chapter. While the words ‘remain the same, yet the ideas they
stand for, may change in the same man; and ’tis very seldom, that they are
not different in different persons’.69 Their internal complexity and
insensible elusiveness clouds moral thought and puts it a fair distance
from singular, fixed and sensible words.
Locke’s overt rhetoric about the clarity of moral ideas is often
underwritten by his fear of their obscurity. Indeed, one can regard his
political theory as emanating from this ambivalence. Men, equal and free
in the state of nature, decide to subject themselves to the might of gov-
ernment on account of the unintelligibility, as well as the intelligibility, of
the natural law. It clearly obliges us to enter the commonwealth precisely
because it is obscure to most men, ‘being unwritten, and so no where to
be found but in the minds of men, they who through passion or interest
shall mis-cite, or misapply it’.70 The reasonable Locke sees at once our
obligation to preserve mankind and the myopic, partial view his fellows
have of the matter. Although Locke sometimes talks as though moral
ideas might be as light as day and extricated from words, in his darker
moments he is bound to conclude that they need sensible representation,
and this necessarily comes in the form of obscure signs. Given that we
69
Locke 1975, p. 550 (iv.iii.19).
70
Locke 1988, p. 358. See Dunn 1967, p. 182 on the ‘unedifying drama’ of the ‘shifting struggle in
every human conscience of reason and passion, good and evil’ and the ‘bizarre’ fact that the ‘sole
sufficient rationale’ of human life ‘must remain in another world than this’.
have no sensible means of naturally signifying our moral ideas, we are
bound to rely on opaque words.
Locke’s anxiety about the inevidence and insensibility of certain ideas is
invigorated by his commitment to the might of the senses. Locke worries
so much about the insensibility of ideas because they are partnered
inescapably by sensible and therefore powerful words. His concerns about
the relative powers of words and ethereal ideas are motivated by the
longstanding despair at the pull of sensuous things on our weak human
souls. Locke reiterates the point, which we heard, notably from certain
French philosophers in chapter 6, that the senses have us by the nose,
while insensible things leave us cold. In his journal in 1676 he explains
that we cannot conceive of spiritual pleasures because ‘being immersed in
the body and beset with material objects, when they are continually
importuning us, [we] have very little sense or perception of spiritual
things, which are as it were at a distance and affect us but seldom’.71 In
the Conduct of the Understanding Locke spells out this worry in the
context of language. He is concerned about those ‘corporeal objects that
constantly importune our senses, and captivate our appetites’ which ‘fail
not to fill our heads with lively and lasting ideas’ so that ‘the mind wants
room’ for more useful ideas. Words, leading examples of sensible objects,
shove ‘moral and more abstract ideas’ out of the mind.72
Our embodied minds yearn for sensible marks with which to think.
They do it neither easily nor well with insensible ideas. The mathema-
tician can perceive precisely and unmistakably the connections between
his plethora of ideas because they ‘can be set down, by visible and lasting
marks, wherein the ideas under consideration are perfectly determined’.73
And while it is practically beyond the bounds of human possibility to
remember these demonstrable chains of ideas, they can be fixed, ‘unal-
terable in their draughts’. The mathematician has ‘in view before him the
result of all his perceptions and reasonings’. The moral scientist has no
such transparent marks to correct and reify his reasoning. His ideas,
lacking any perspicuous, sensible representatives, ‘slip’ out of ‘view’. ‘The
mind cannot easily retain those precise combinations’ of mixed modes,
and therefore tends to think only in their sensible but arbitrary and
ambiguous verbal counterparts.74 While men’s ‘thoughts flutter about, or
stick only in sounds of doubtful and uncertain significations’, they cannot
‘discover the agreement or disagreement of ideas themselves’ which is
71
Locke 1997, p. 242. 72 Locke 1993, pp. 37; 36. 73
Locke 1975, pp. 535 (iv.ii.10).
74
Locke 1975, pp. 551–2 (iv.iii.19).
requisite to knowledge.75 Unable to ‘abstract’ thoughts from names, they
think on ‘sounds’ and engender the ‘perplexity, puddering, and confu-
sion’ which had always been the great obstacle to the advancement of
learning.76
Locke’s belief in the power of sense in cognition and more particularly
in the inescapable presence of words in private thought (as well as in
communication) emerges partly out of a traditional claim for the mne-
monic function that words perform. Following Hobbes’ binary division
of words into communicative signs and self-reflexive marks, Locke
explains that people need them not only to communicate but also to
‘record their own thoughts for the assistance of their memory’.77 The
sensibility of words is indispensable for fixing otherwise evanescent ideas
in our minds. It prevents them from disappearing as fast as they enter.
The memory, ‘no very sure repository’ for ideas, needs words to ‘record
them for our own use’.78 In a letter to Samuel Bold of 16 May 1699 Locke
recommends Bacon’s advice ‘never to go without pen and ink’, in order
to retain thoughts that otherwise ‘slip from you’.79 In his journal in
December 1686 Locke is preoccupied by the way people confuse the
imagination with the intellect. Among the remedies he suggests is the use
of words; by fixing them univocally to the concepts, one is less likely to be
led astray. Another is the use of characters, in emulation of mathematical
aids.80 Required to retain insensible ideas, sensible words weave them-
selves into the fabric of our minds.
Mixed modes are in particular need of private, sensible representation.
These complex ideas, entirely fabricated in the mind, would disperse
again and be quickly forgotten, if they did not have names to hold them
fast.81 Indeed, the use of names is not only mnemonic but positively
constitutive. Mixed modes only really exist as a unity in virtue of their
names. ‘It is the name’, declares Locke, ‘that seems to preserve those
essences, and give them their lasting duration’.82 Words incarnate ideas.
Whereas his predecessors had mainly characterised language as the
external, servile replica of thought, Locke breaks new and prescient
ground by arguing that language is intimately implicated in (re)mem-
bering thought. Words are, in practice, profoundly important in the way
we think – or not, as the case may be – and are therefore fundamental to,
rather than a mere copy of human understanding. When Locke is
75
Locke 1975, p. 561 (iv.iii.30). Cf. Hobbes 1996, p. 28 on fluttering.
76
Locke 1975, p. 561 (iv.iii.30). 77 Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.2); cf. p. 476 (iii.ix.2).
78
Locke 1975, p. 721 (iv.xxi.4). 79 Locke 1976–89, vi, p. 627.
80
MS. Locke f. 9, p. 65. 81 Locke 1975, p. 437 (iii.v.15). 82 Locke 1975, p. 434 (iii.v.10).
discussing ‘truth’, he admits that ‘it is very difficult to treat of ’ thought
and words ‘asunder’. This is necessarily the case for Locke, who is writing
about the understanding. In his book ‘it is unavoidable, in treating of
mental propositions, to make use of words’. When Locke comes to
exemplify a case of perfect reasoning, he is bound to lay out the con-
nection of ideas in words.83 The proposition ‘that men can determine
themselves’ is inferred in the following way: ‘Men shall be punished, – God
the punisher – just punishment, – the punished guilty – could have done
otherwise – freedom – self-determination’. Locke proudly advertises this as a
‘chain of ideas thus visibly link’d together in train’, but they are visible
only by virtue of their verbal representation.84 The ideas inevitably slide
into words in communication, and Locke does not stop at this truism.
We also use words in private thought.85 In Draft A Locke talks of men
‘most commonly fixing their owne thoughts within them upon words
when they would thinke of things’.86 This is particularly so in the case of
the names of universal ideas which are distant and abstracted from
experience, and even more particularly in the case of abstract, complex
ideas. These are so much the fabrications of the mind, so abstruse and
unwieldy and only permanently existent in their names, that the names
are more manageable and gratifying than the ideas themselves. While we
do think extra-linguistically about simple ideas that have their own
graspable sensibility, like ‘white or black, sweet or bitter, a triangle or a
circle’, we cannot so easily do so for complex ideas like ‘man, vitriol,
fortitude, glory’. Then, ‘we usually put the name for the idea’. Names are
‘more clear, certain, distinct, and readier occurr to our thoughts’ than
‘imperfect, confused, and undetermined’ ideas. We think only of the
names of substances because we like to imagine that they signify some
correspondingly singular and knowable real essence. Having no such
ideas, however, we signify absolutely nothing by the names. As for the
names of mixed modes, we think only on them, either because it takes too
much ‘pains’ to recollect their unwieldy and abstruse ideational combi-
nation or because we have ‘never troubled . . . [ourselves] in all . . . [our]
lives to consider’ what the words mean and so have only words.87 While
Locke does believe in the theoretical possibility of complex thought
outside language, he fears that in practice the two cannot be held apart,
nor, moreover, in their proper hierarchy. More often than not people use
‘sounds for ideas’. He appeals to the experience of ‘every one’ to prove
83 84 85
Locke 1975, p. 574 (iv.v.3). Locke 1975, p. 673 (iv.xvii.4). Locke 1975, p. 574 (iv.v.4).
86
Locke 1990a, p. 4. 87 Locke 1975, p. 575 (iv.v.4).
that ‘even when men think and reason within their own breasts’, they use
‘names . . . instead of the ideas themselves’.88
The inextricability of language from thought is in large part due to the
way children learn simple, sensible names before, if ever, they gather their
complex meanings.89 The situation is especially perilous with the names
of mixed modes that have no ostensible public referents and are therefore
‘got, before the ideas they stand for are perfectly known’.90 The child is
either ‘beholden to the explication of others’ or left to work them out for
himself. These unforthcoming methods leave ‘these moral words . . . in
most men’s mouths, little more than bare sounds’.91 In Draft A Locke
writes that ‘it is far easier to learne the sound gratitude’ than painstakingly
to discern which precise collection of simple ideas might go into the
meaning of that word.92 In the Essay itself he elaborates. Neither words
nor meanings are born with children. They must be learnt, and learnt
separately, because they are not naturally connected. ‘We by degrees get
ideas and names, and learn their appropriated connexion one with
another.’93 Learning language is an incremental, contingent process that is
unlikely to result in a perfect symmetry between sign and signified, but
rather to remain on the surface of sounds. Our linguistic education
positively facilitates insignificant speech. ‘From their cradles’ people
‘easily’ obtain and retain the names of complex ideas, but do not ‘take the
pains’ to settle their complicated meanings. They do not care to ‘trouble
their heads’ with seeking out the meanings because they can say the words
and so conceal their ignorance.94 The shocking consequence is that
‘Wisdom, Glory, Grace, etc. are words frequent enough in every man’s
mouth; but if a great many of those who use them, should be asked, what
they mean by them? They would be at a stand, and not know what to
answer.’95 ‘By familiar use from our cradles’ sensible words are secure in
our memories and ‘readily on our tongues’, so that we think ‘more on
words than things’.96 Our frail and lazy sensual minds prefer to cogitate
in language. Beyond our ‘natural’ linguistic education, Locke attacks the
grammatical tradition that, as we saw, emphasises the semiotic aspect of
language at the expense of the semantic. Following on from those
reformist grammarians who pour sense into sounds, Locke blames the
discipline for inculcating into the educated elite the habit of making ‘a
noise without any sense or signification’. They master the custom of
88
Locke 1975, p. 579 (iv.vi.1). 89 Locke 1975, p. 61 (i.ii.23). 90 Locke 1975, p. 437 (iii.v.15).
91
Locke 1975, p. 480 (iii.ix.9). 92 Locke 1990a, p. 13. 93 Locke 1975, p. 60 (i.ii.23).
94
Locke 1975, pp. 491–2 (iii.x.4). 95 Locke 1975, p. 491 (iii.x.3).
96
Locke 1975, pp. 407–8 (iii.ii.7).
manipulating bare signs with vacuous heads. ‘For all such words, however
put into discourse, according to the right construction of grammatical
rules, or the harmony of well turned periods, do yet amount to nothing
but bare sounds, and nothing else.’97 It is language, on the wings of its
seductive sensibility but utterly insignificant per se, which fills our minds.
Locke’s insistence that ‘men use to think of words instead of things’, as
he puts it in the contents list for Draft B (1671), verbally recalls the
complaints of his predecessors.98 Locke’s concern springs, in part, from
the same source: words do not map the world and therefore the currency
of our thoughts is purely verbal. However, Locke’s anxiety is also fuelled
by a deeper consideration of the reasons inherent in language as to why it
is so ‘common . . . for names to be made use of, instead of the ideas
themselves’.99 Our incorporated selves accord prominence to the sensible
ideas of words themselves. We either cannot, or cannot be bothered to,
think in unadulterated, abstruse ideas, but wander ‘in the great wood of
words’.100 In a letter of 1693 to William Molyneux, Locke admits that
writing book iii ‘cost me more pains to express than all the rest of my
Essay’ and he fears there is ‘in some places of it obscurity and doubt-
fulness’.101 Locke struggles to say what he means, so deeply are words
enmeshed in thought. When it comes to talking about the fog of words, it
closes in, and consumes itself in a flood of unintelligibility. In the midst
of trying to illuminate the limits of the meaning of the word ‘gold’, Locke
feels the duplicitous force of that word on his page. ‘So hard it is, to shew
the various meaning and imperfection of words, when we have nothing
else but words to do it by.’102 We are locked in a verbal circle. Locke
echoes Bacon. We cannot solve problems about words with more words.
They count for ‘noething but being mere sounds unlesse where they
signifie’.103 To explicate words simply by means of other words is to
embark on an infinite regress.104 If we approach ‘whole volumes of lex-
icons & dictionarys’ in search of enlightenment, we find ourselves caught
in promiscuous words.105 There is certainly no escape in communication
because ‘one man’s mind could not pass into another man’s body’, and
get ‘behind’ the words.106 The same seems to go for private thought, so
much do sensible words predominate.
97
Locke 1975, p. 505 (iii.x.26). 98 MS. Locke c. 28, fo. 34r.
99
Locke 1975, p. 579 (iv.vi.1). 100 Locke 1975, p. 561 (iv.iii.30).
101
Locke 1976–89, iv, p. 629. 102 Locke 1975, p. 449 (iii.vi.19).
103
Locke 1990b, p. 168. 104 Locke 1990b, p. 169; cf. Locke 1975, p. 421 (iii.iv.5).
105
Locke 1990b, p. 176. 106 Locke 1975, p. 389 (ii.xxxii.15).
While Locke does subscribe to the traditional theory that language is
logically subsequent to thought and a mere expression of it, in practice the
two are disturbingly tangled. ‘It is impossible to discourse with any
clearness, or order concerning knowledge’ without probing the nature of
words, because knowledge, ‘being conversant about propositions, and those
most commonly universal ones, has greater connexion with words, than
perhaps is suspected’.107 In the abstract of the Essay Locke comments that
he is not sure whether to explain the intimate connection between language
and knowledge in terms of ‘custome or necessity’.108 The abstract is
interesting because it suggests that in addition to there being a habitual
integration of words in thought (as he claims in the Essay), there cannot be
thought without words. If we recall Locke’s refiguration of the words as
clothes metaphor, where he compares words to flesh and meaning to the
soul, we see that lurking behind his injunction there to strip ideas of words,
is the painful suggestion that language is deeply integral to thought.109
Locke’s metaphor rebels against its author’s purpose, and is emblematic of
the optimistic/pessimistic struggle that might be said to characterise his
philosophy of language as a whole. It is Locke’s sense of the intense rela-
tionship between words and thoughts that motivates him to insert a whole
book about words into an essay on understanding, or, more precisely, into
a natural logic of ideas. At the end of book ii he explains that he had
intended to move straight from ideas to knowledge, but that ‘upon a nearer
approach, I find, that there is so close a connexion between ideas and
words; and our abstract ideas, and general words, have so constant a
relation one to another, that it is impossible to speak clearly and distinctly
of our knowledge, which all consists in propositions, without considering,
first, the nature, use, and signification of language’.110 We know that he is,
in part, being disingenuous here, his concern about language appearing on
the first page of the first draft of his Essay. Nevertheless, he is also recording
a genuine cultural shock at the way that the old house of concepts that
logicians had built, and in which his early-modern predecessors had grown
up, seemed to come tumbling down without words to hold it up.
Locke’s separate treatment of language from thought, his sharp break
between verbal and ideational signs in his ·„"¶!¶ ·, or semiotike – as he
also calls his ‘Logick’ (his Essay) – is one of his most remarkable innovations
in logic and in thinking about human understanding more generally.111 It is
107
Locke 1975, p. 404 (iii.ii.6). 108
MS. Locke c. 28, fos. 61v–62r.
109 110
Locke 1975, p. 490 (iii.ix.23). Locke 1975, p. 401 (ii.xxxiii.19).
111
Locke 1975, p. 720 (iv.xxi.4).
true that logicians had, as we saw in chapter 1, often included a discussion
of the division of terms in between discussing concepts and the affirmation/
negation of the same, although this was in no way to indicate a linguistic
obstacle but instead to elaborate the symmetry between thought and lan-
guage. Locke’s trajectory from ideas, to words, to the agreement/dis-
agreement of ideas clearly draws on traditional logic. And his treatment of
language records the familiar division of terms into abstract and concrete,
categorematic and syncategorematic (or names and particles, as Locke calls
them) and even, simple and complex – although in the latter case, as we
have seen, Locke’s intention is to demolish and invert the time-honoured
complacencies about mental simplicity. The Essay, therefore, records the
depth of Locke’s immersion in his scholastic heritage as much as it dis-
plays his revolution, and speaks against those commentators who stress
the radical novelty of Locke’s logic, particularly those who declare that
language is largely irrelevant to his ‘new’ logic of ideas.112 While some new
logicians, such as Descartes and Spinoza, do banish language from their
directions for the mind, Locke absolutely did not. Instead, he attacks the
new guard, as well as their shared scholastic enemy, for assuming that
words simply copy ideas and for not analysing them on their own.
Indeed, his quarrel with the new, natural logicians is particularly fierce
because they (pretend to) ignore words, concentrating with self-assurance
on ideas alone, and because often the ‘clear and distinct ideas’ of which
they proudly speak seem, in fact, to be empty words. Locke’s protest,
against all logicians, is that the smooth words they use betray a rough
picture.
It is ironic that historians of logic and early-modern philosophy have
asserted a change of focus from terms to ideas when in fact both sides of
112
We can find a further indication of Locke’s familiarity with and internalisation of scholastic logic
(and the place of language therein) in a manuscript entitled ‘Logica’. It rattles out the familiar
refrains, differentiating between categorematic and syncategorematic, simple and complex,
concrete and abstract, univocal and equivocal terms (MS. Locke f. 33, fo. 8r; fo. 9r ). This is
absolutely not to say that Locke was not involved in the new movement of natural logic. Indeed, it
is part of the ambition of this book to show the profundity of his involvement. I only want to
complicate this picture, by indicating too the marks of the old, and the opposition to the new,
that the Essay also exhibits. With regard to the relationship between words and ideas, it seems to
me that, by contrast with his fellow innovators, albeit drawing on their concerns and sometimes
despite himself, Locke sees language (and its dangers) as integral to an account of the
understanding. Here I disagree with Schuurman 2004, p. 54, who describes book III as ‘a side-
show produced by an after-thought’ that is not integral to the bipartite structure (of ideas and
knowledge) that Schuurman identifies as essential to the new logic of ideas, of which the Essay is a
prime example and which Schuurman describes so well and so carefully. See also Jolley 1999,
p. 168, who claims that book III is more epistemological than linguistic and ‘is essentially a
propadeutic to book 4’.
the putative Aristotelian/new philosophical divide were overtly concerned
with mental entities while simultaneously considering them inter-
changeably with and prior to words. It is this collection of blithe
assumptions on the part of Cartesians and their contemporaries, as well as
Aristotelians that I noted in chapter 1, that leads Locke to treat words
distinctly from ideas. Far from subserviently replicating ideas, words
dominate them in thought as well as in communication. Moreover, they
are not honest substitutes for them. They are clear and distinct. They are
simple and palpable, whereas the ideas they signify are often confused,
obscure, unstable and even non-existent. Unfortunately, however, the very
reality and uniformity of the words themselves hides the underlying
semantic vacuity and multiplicity and suggests a semantic foundation that
is as solid as its verbal architecture. The ‘concepts’ that constitute many of
the supposedly great systems of natural and ethical philosophy that Locke
reads are really only words and the systems therefore more fantastic than
real. Locke’s extraordinary divestment of ideas in book iii reveals not only
that words do not reflect a correspondingly rich and uniform web of ideas
but also that it is words and not ideas with which we think and which
therefore conceal the ideational mess beneath. The problem of language is
not only then that it is not true, full and stable, but that it seems as if it is,
and so clouds our vision with layers of delusion and deceit.
the deceitful cover of words

As Locke’s predecessors had noted, lying is the most obvious demon-
stration of the effective sovereignty of language over thought. Despite the
normative injunction to the contrary, our words need not reflect the inner
workings of our minds. The inherent insensibility of our thoughts makes
the tacit moral contract that obliges us to tell the truth weigh lightly on
our shoulders. In ftacit, we can say anything; words act as an impene-
trable cover. Speakers can paint the picture they want to project and
imperceptibly betray the truth.
What ‘lying’ is, is itself double. In his Truth Tried (1643) John Wallis
had referred to the common distinction between ‘veritas logica’ (‘when the
proposition agrees with the thing; and falsehood, when they disagree’),
and ‘veritas moralis’ (‘when our words and actions agree with our mind,
and is opposed to a lye, to hypocrisie’).113 While Locke reiterates the
distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘real’ or ‘metaphysical’ truth, and while
113
Wallis 1643, pp. 1–2.
he accepts the strict definition of ‘lying’ as saying what one does not believe
to be the case, he also blurs the line between moral and real falsity by
making men culpable for the latter.114 If they speak falsely where the truth
could be discovered, even if they are not speaking disingenuously, they can
be blamed and accused of a kind of lying.115 Both types of falsehood can
obtain in the same instance. And as a precarious result of the magnetic
combination of human vanity and the embodied nature of language,
both types can veer on the inadvertent. One such potentially twofold,
(un)conscious lie is the ‘opinion’ against which the Two Treatises fulmi-
nates: that princes ‘have a divine right to absolute power’.116 This lie is
talked into a truth that legitimates illegality. It continues to preoccupy
Locke in a manuscript written in 1690. Just as the stipulative, opaque
power of language had given Charles II arbitrary power, so did it threaten
William III’s regime. The Tory pamphleteers who noisily, passionately
declare that the royal succession ought to be established jure divino, but
really mean to charge William with illegitimate usurpation, may be
speaking in good faith, but then they have deceived themselves and are
enjoying the cloak of language just as much as their supporters.
Locke is so concerned about these lies because he sees the ascription of
language, even false language, as creative. To say that Charles II is
appointed by and accountable only to God is in a strong sense to make him
so. In turn, these linguistically constituted facts have their own cata-
strophic, practical effects. A king who rules by divine right can legitimately
destroy parliament, sequester property and execute those he pleases. Words
are deeds and, unhindered by the truth, can be the causes of war.
Locke’s sensitivity to the concealing and creative power of language is
especially excited on the subject of toleration. Language has such a
duplicitous potency that sometimes it cannot be tolerated. In his early
work, Two Tracts on Government (c. 1660–2), he goes so far as to oppose
toleration altogether, on the grounds that ‘religion’ is a potent ‘shield’ for
sedition, ‘all those tragic revolutions which have exercised Christendom
these many years’ having assumed ‘the specious name of reformation’.
The ‘flames’ that have desolated Europe, and that were only ‘quenched’
‘with the blood of so many millions’, were ‘blown with the breath of
those that attend the altar’. He inveighs against two particular
114
Locke 1975, pp. 578–9 (iv.vi.9–11); p. 292 (ii.xxii.9).
115
This might be said to sit uneasily with Locke’s commitment to sincerity; see, for example, Locke
1983, p. 38.
116
Locke 1988, p. 142. See Goldie (1983) on Locke’s distaste for those who flatter Charles II with what
he wants to hear.
self-righteous pretexts that enable zealots to enact the ‘greatest cruelty’:
that it is their duty ‘to vindicate the cause of God with swords in their
hands’, and to destroy heresy.117 These proclamations shroud the truth of
the Christian calling. While Locke is converted to the cause of toleration
by the 1680s, his Letter concerning Toleration still warns of opinions that
look benign but secrete a hidden agenda. These are ‘dangerous to the
commonwealth’.118 ‘A specious shew of deceitful words’ can ‘cover’ an
attack on the ‘civil right of the community’.119 For example, the doctrine
that ‘Dominion is founded on Grace’ is a way of stealing property. ‘Kings
excommunicated forfeit their crowns and kingdoms’ can depose a king.120
Wrapped in Christian words, un-christian actions are facilitated. While
really interested in personal gain, the oppressors ‘cry out continually the
Church, the Church’.121 Locke jokes bitterly that the Anglicans could
hardly claim convincingly, without watering their eyes and spinning a
fiery speech, that they are in fact saving from the flames of hell the non-
conformists they are burning.122 They ‘cover’ their ‘pride and ambition’,
their ‘passion and uncharitable zeal’ ‘with some specious colour’, such as
the ‘pretence of the publick weal, and observation of the laws’.123 Here
Locke implicitly joins the chorus of disapproval about the colours of
rhetoric – ‘that powerful instrument of error and deceit’ that is too
beguiling to be gainsaid. ‘Eloquence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing
beauties in it, to suffer it self ever to be spoken against. And ’tis vain to
find fault with those Arts of Deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be
Deceived.’124
Locke also laments the post-Reformation trauma of being forced to lie
by an intolerant government. He who makes an outward profession of
worship that belies his inner faith, commits the sin of ‘hypocrise, and
contempt of his divine majesty’.125 Although Locke himself was not
subject to the strong kind of victimisation he railed against, he had to
tread carefully as a holder of increasingly unorthodox religious views. He
refuted original sin, for example, and may have been sympathetic to
unitarianism.126 As the author of the controversial Essay, he was besieged
117
Locke 1967, pp. 160; 161–2. Cf. Tully 1993, p. 48.
118
Locke 1983, p. 49. See Dunn (1991) on the illiberal limits to Lockean freedom of speech.
119
Locke 1983, p. 49. 120 Locke 1983, p. 50. 121 Locke 1983, p. 30. 122 Locke 1983, p. 35.
123
Locke 1983, p. 25.
124
Locke 1975, p. 508 (iii.x.34). Cf. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 6: ‘anyone who sets out to trick the
world is sure to find people who will be happy to be tricked’.
125
Locke 1983, p. 27.
126
Marshall (1994) gives a rich account of the radical developments in Locke’s religious thought. Cf.
Nuovo (2002) on Locke’s credal minimalism; Marshall (2000) on Locke’s likely anti-trinitarianism
for perpetrating deism and moral relativism.127 Moreover, his belief that
‘faith only, and inward sincerity, are the things that procure acceptance
with God’ makes hypocrisy ‘the paramount sin’ which will itself see us in
hell.128 People should not be forced to betray themselves and lose their
chance of salvation.
Locke’s concerns about the deceptive power of language are deeper
than those of his forbears because for him, words dominate ideas in
thought as well as communication. This has the disturbing result that
deceitful words captivate speakers as well as hearers, thereby entrenching
the imposture and evacuating any subjective space for the truth. Armed
with his insight about the private potency of language, Locke deepens the
old view that language operates as an unconsciously deceptive instrument.
Selfish men think, as well as say, that they have right on their side and
language sows the deceit. ‘Bias’ is a misconduct of the understanding;
this is when men ‘suffer their own natural tempers and passions . . . to
influence their judgments’ and cover ‘interest’ with ‘a pretence that it is
for God, or a good cause’.129 Lying is often a matter of lying to oneself, an
innocent rather than a malignant deception. This is why one must beware
the ‘passionate zeal of the deceived’.130 Locke remarks perceptively that
‘there is no body in the commonwealth of learning’ who does not want to
be thought of as a lover of truth, and that even though most of them are
in fact ill-disposed towards and ill-acquainted with truth, they ‘perswade
themselves’ that they love it.131 He even extends this olive branch of self-
delusion to the vain philosophers, whose ‘hard or misapply’d words, with
little or no meaning . . . are but the covers of ignorance’. It is because
erroneous authors are themselves in love with their ‘uncouth, affected, or
unintelligible terms’ that Locke has to spend so much time in book iii
removing them: the ‘rubbish, that lies in the way to knowledge’. ‘So few
are apt to think, they deceive, or are deceived in the use of words; or that
the language of the sect they are of, has any faults in it, which ought to be
examined or corrected.’132 Language itself is therefore ‘no small obstacle
and his concurrence with aspects of Socinianism. Higgins-Biddle (1999, p. xv) explains how
The Reasonableness of Christianity attracted charges (which Locke denied) of Deism, Socinianism
and Hobbism.
127
Yolton 1993. For various views of Locke’s radicalism, see Ashcraft 1986 and 1992b; Dunn 1984,
pp. 4–6 and 8–13; Scott 1992. Hoffheimer (1986) argues for Spinoza’s direct influence on Locke’s
political theory.
128
Locke 1983, p. 38; Tully 1993, p. 53. See Tully (1991, p. 651) on how individuals must obey their
conscience, even as they disobey the civil law.
129
Locke 1993, pp. 50–1. 130 Locke 1967, p. 162. 131 Locke 1975, p. 697 (iv.xix.1).
132
Locke 1975, p. 10 (Epistle to the Reader).
in the way to knowledge’. It is by means of words of ‘uncertain
or mistaken signification’ that men put ‘fallacies . . . upon themselves, as
well as others’. These are particularly dangerous because far from being
identified as a scourge, they are positively bred in formal education.133 By
their singular and substantial presence, words seem to signify more than
they really do or can, their meanings being prone to multiplicity, unre-
ality and vacuity.
Locke’s worry about words being both the subtle source of error and
the means of covering those errors, surfaces in his journal for 11
November 1677. The ‘foundation of error & mistake in most men’ is not
only ‘wavering obscure or confused notions of things’, but also:
doubtfull & obscure words, our words always in their signification depending
upon our ideas, being clear or obscure proportionably as our notions are soe
& sometimes . . . litle more but the sound of a word for the notion of the thing.
For in the discursive part faculty of the minde I doe not finde that men are soe
apt to erre but it availes litle that their syllogisms are right if their termes be
insignificant & obscure or confused & undetermined or that their internall
discourse & deductions be regular if their notions be wrong.134
We seem to be reasoning perfectly when we organise our words according
to syllogistic rules. However, the apparently seamless verbal construction
conceals a mass of logical fissures that are unapparent to speaker and
hearer alike.
Words also emerge as the ‘secret and unobserved’ source of confused
ideas.135 Given that men use names rather than ideas ‘for the most part’
when they reason within themselves and ‘always’ when they communicate
to others, they assume that nominal distinctions mark ideational ones
when none really exist.136 For example, the ‘clear and distinct’ ideas of
which the Cartesians are so proud and which they oppose to the
scholastics’ meaningless terms turn out themselves to be nothing other
than clear and distinct terms that cover a mess of obscurity and confusion.
While they trumpet the verbal distinction between a ‘chiliaëdron, or a
body of a thousand sides’ and a figure of 999 sides, they cannot imagine
the two distinctly.137 Vaingloriously parading the names of ‘extension’,
‘substance’ and ‘infinity’, they are able to fantasise that they have a grip
133
Locke 1975, pp. 488–9 (iii.ix.21).
134
MS. Locke f. 2, p. 347. See Barnes (2001) on Locke’s ill-grounded attack on seventeenth-century
logic (as opposed to on Aristotle himself) and particularly on the syllogism, and on his own flawed
inferential proposals. See De Gandt (2001) for a criticism of Barnes.
135
Locke 1975, p. 367 (ii.xxix.10). 136 Locke 1975, p. 367 (ii.xxix.12).
137
Locke 1975, p. 368 (ii.xxix.13).
on the universe. The felicitous impression that words make in human
minds is deep and ubiquitous. ‘Having frequently in our mouths the
name Eternity, we are apt to think, we have a positive comprehensive idea
of it’, but we have no idea of limitless time.138 The reign of language is
secure because everyone, loving to be seduced, is implicated in the process
of (self-)deception.
writing our worlds

The crushing weight of Locke’s anxiety about false language comes from
his belief that it seems to be true. Words stick. They enthral our minds,
regardless of their content. We have already witnessed the creativity of
language as fall-out of its deceptive capacity. I now focus more closely on
the creative power itself. While his predecessors were no strangers to the
empire of lies, Locke was peculiarly sensitive to the way that everyday
words were innocently taken to describe things they did not or could not.
His polemic, sharpened by his epistemology and, within this, his belief in
the dominion of sensible words, argues that the world as we know it is to
a great extent created by language.
He exerts so much energy explaining the manufactured nature of the
meanings of words because the verbal surface is commonly perceived as a
transparent glass, when in fact it reflects back only itself. The very sub-
stantiality of language, coupled with its inherent opacity, lends it an
apparently insurmountable constitutive force. In Draft A Locke explains
that he had to insert the discussion of words into his book because they
are ‘soe apt & usuall to be mistaken for things’.139 He repeats the point in
Draft B, defending his ‘long digression about words’ with the claim that
he had to ‘distinguish’ between them and ‘things’, or else we would
continue to confuse them, and to take words ‘for the constant regular
marks of the natures of things when they are no more but the voluntary
signes of our owne ideas’.140 His overarching mission is to show the great
gulf that separates language from the natural and moral spheres and so
strip it of its creative power. He has to convince people of the con-
tingency of language in the face of a situation where ‘the greatest part of
men take the sounds of words for the notions of things’.141
138
Locke 1975, p. 369 (ii.xxix.15). 139 Locke 1990a, p. 13.
140
Locke 1990b, pp. 197–8. Cf. Richetti (1983, p. 116) on Locke’s dismantling of certainty through his
essayistic, self-cancelling style; Clark (1998) on the limits of the Lockean mind and the need both
to realise them and toil within their bounds.
141
Locke 1990a, p. 13.
Turning first to the natural world, Locke worries that people suppose
that words stand for real ‘things’. This supposition had not been a
worry – indeed, it had been positively encouraged as we saw in chapters 1
and 4 – when the correlate epistemologies and ontologies were strong
enough. However, as Locke watched and then partook of the destruction
of certainties old and new, and it appeared that words could no longer
catch the essences of things, the problem of constitutive language raised
its head. Words had become empty, or at best poor, subjective approx-
imations of reality. Yet in their embodied might they seemed to describe
bodies themselves.
When he first sits down to write the Essay, two related polemics gush
from his pen: we can only ever have phenomenal knowledge of things but
words trick us into thinking that we know the essences of things them-
selves. He does not thereby only attack specific essentialist epistemologies
but also announces a pervasive and innocent assumption, perpetrated by
logicians, that a word’s unity denotes a corresponding unit-thing. While
our ideas about substances are made up of collections of experiential ideas,
the affixing of simple names belies the underlying complexity and
superficiality, and suggests that we know the real essence. ‘By inad-
vertency’, Locke says, ‘we are apt . . . [after naming] to talke of & con-
sider’ the substance ‘as one simple idea’.142 It is the introduction of
language into our ideas about the world that causes such terrible mis-
conceptions about it. By the time of the published work, Locke has
codified these linguistically rooted errors into an ‘abuse’ of language: ‘the
setting . . . [words] in the place of things, which they do or can by no
means signify’. Although we can only ever know the nominal essences of
substances, their general names make us imagine that we are describing
real ones. When we talk about ‘gold’, for example, we imagine that we are
talking about ‘what has the real essence of gold’. Talking leads us to this
delusion. Unconsciously dissatisfied with our epistemological deficit, we
‘commonly tacitly suppose’ our names of substances to stand for real
essences, proudly pushing our speech beyond our ken.143
This false identification of language with reality is a ‘secret reference’
that people make for their words.144 People’s general, impracticable desire
to talk deeply and truly about things lures them into making their
words ‘by a secret supposition, to stand for a thing’.145 If we recall the
Terminists’ theory of ‘supposition’, whereby words are conceived as
142
Locke 1990a, p. 1. 143 Locke 1975, p. 499 (iii.x.17). 144
Locke 1975, p. 406 (iii.ii.4).
145
Locke 1975, pp. 407 (iii.ii.5); 500 (iii.x.18).
standing directly for things, we see where Locke’s attack is coming
from.146 Having repudiated this common error, institutionalised by
logicians, he asks ‘leave here to say, that it is a perverting the use of words,
and brings unavoidable obscurity and confusion into their signification,
whenever we make them stand for any thing, but those ideas we have in
our minds’.147 This referential self-delusion is at the root of another abuse
of words: ‘taking them for things’. Locke’s targets here are those dogmatic
philosophical system-builders who pass off their imaginative pictures of
the world as true. Members of a sect ‘come to be persuaded, that the
terms of that sect, are so suited to the nature of things, that they perfectly
correspond with their real existence’. First on his list of preposterous
language-worlds is that invented by Aristotelians. Those who are ‘bred up
in the Peripatetick Philosophy . . . think the Ten Names, under which are
ranked the Ten Predicaments’ are ‘exactly conformable to the nature of
things’ and are ‘persuaded, that substantial forms, vegetative souls, abhor-
rence of a vacuum, intentional species, etc. are something real’. He then
proceeds to lampoon the fantasies of the Platonists and Epicureans.148
The great raft of insignificant words that keeps vain speakers afloat is
dangerous because it seems significant. It does not matter that there is
nothing, not even an idea, let alone a thing, behind the words. Locke is so
worried about this verbal trickery that he lays it down as a ‘fundamental
146
See above chapter 1, p. 29 on the Terminists.
147
Locke 1975, p. 407 (iii.ii.5). Yolton (1970, pp. 205–6), Alexander (1985, pp. 240–2), Formigari
(1988, p. 117) and Losonsky (1994, pp. 134–5) all draw on Locke’s discussion of the two ‘secret
references’ (the other being taking our words to stand for ideas in the minds of others, see above,
p. 236, fn. 145), to supplement what they see as his inadequate theory of signification, which they
say fails to elucidate meaning and reference. See for example, Yolton 1970, pp. 205–6:
‘immediately and properly my words are only signs of the ideas I have, but Locke admits that we
give words a ‘secret reference’ to other men’s ideas and also to things . . . Locke needed a doctrine
of signs which could do more than stand for our ideas. The conditions for communication and
the conditions for the reality of our talk make necessary these referential suppositions about words
standing for other than our own ideas.’ Locke’s remarks (which these commentators omit to
quote) about the two suppositions being a ‘perversion’ of the use of words reveal that language
does not necessarily work in the ways that we suppose, and that therefore these automatic
suppositions should be discouraged. While Locke does say that the ideational signification of our
words should possess this ‘double conformity’ (Locke 1975, p. 386 (ii.xxxii.8)), it is a normative not
a descriptive claim about language, rarely realised in the case of precise communication and never
in the case of substantial real essences. Cf. (Ayers 1991, i, p. 275) on semantic individualism and
(p. 269) on the secret references as ‘mistakes’; Aarsleff (1982 pp. 3–41) on double conformity as a
‘serious mistake’. Ashworth (1984, p. 64) claims that the double conformity is the basis for Locke’s
‘criteria for the meaningful use of language’.
148
Locke 1975, p. 497 (iii.x.14); cf. p. 499 (iii.x.15) on materia prima. Jolley (1999, pp. 143–61) sees
Locke’s principal aims in book iii of the Essay as to lampoon Aristotelian classification and to set
out the limitations of our knowledge of things.
rule’ in the Conduct of the Understanding : ‘not to take words for things,
nor suppose that names in books signifie real entities in nature, ’till [one]
can frame clear and distinct ideas of those entities’.149 Words accrue a
false but forceful life of their own. In the intense debate between
Limborch and Locke about ‘freedom’ and whether judgement is separate
from or determines the will, Locke suggests on 12 August 1701 that his
correspondent is seduced by the common misapprehension, enshrined in
and constituted by language, that the ‘will’ is a distinct agent. He berates
him for being ‘led away by a common way of speaking’, when he says that
‘the Will is master of our actions’. ‘How great is the force of custom in
the use of words, which steals in from time to time while we are una-
wares.’150 While ‘names made at pleasure, neither alter the nature of
things, nor make us understand them’, they ensnare us into imagining
otherwise.151 Forced to use the invented linguistic map of the world,
Locke cannot help but perpetuate its fallacies:
But I desire, it may be considered, how difficult it is, to lead another by
words into the thoughts of things, stripp’d of those specifical differences we give
them: which things, if I name not, I say nothing; and if I do name them, I
thereby rank them into some sort, or other, and suggest to the mind the usual
abstract idea of that species; and so cross my purpose.152
Trapped in language, we cannot talk about the world.
The creative power of language is even more effective in the moral sphere.
While people can say what they like about nature, it presses irresistibly on
discourse. The objective world, albeit only imaginatively known, sets a
limit on what will be believed. The actions and particularly the intentions
of men, however, provide no such block and fall victim to whatever labels
are applied.
Words bestow value on things. Locke therefore inherits the worry about
the fact, flagrantly exploited by rhetoricians, that calling something good
makes it so. He refers implicitly to paradiastole when he says that ‘in mixed
modes, we are much more uncertain, it being not easy to determine of
several actions; whether they are to be called Justice, or Cruelty; Liberality,
or Prodigality’.153 Words make actions virtues or vices according to the
speaker’s wish. Language not only masks injustice with specious words,
but constitutes the moral complexion of the action. Rather than act as a
transparent window to the truth, they describe it, and the audience has no
149
Locke 1993, pp. 86–7. 150 Locke 1976–89, vii, pp. 406; 405. 151 Locke 1975, p. 174 (ii.xiii.18).
152
Locke 1975, p. 465 (iii.vi.43). 153 Locke 1975, p. 387 (ii.xxxiii.10).
access to anything beyond. When Locke is defending the right of war
against an unjust aggressor, he vehemently declares that the attack ‘is still
violence and injury, however colour’d with the name, pretences, or forms
of law’.154 Later, in 1690, when William is under siege for having stolen the
throne, Locke explains how Louis XIV’s labelling William a ‘usurper’ has a
creative effect. ‘I wonder not to hear that the French king calls him so, as the
most pernicious opinion [which] can be fixed on him.’155
This example recalls a subtle means of evaluation that had been noted
by Locke’s predecessors. He explicitly refers to the way in which
apparently neutral, purely descriptive terms in fact perform an evaluative
act. ‘The positive idea of the action, and its moral relation, are com-
prehended together under one name’, hiding its normative import, im-
perceptibly eliciting an emotional response. Locke gives the example of
‘stealing’. This word is ‘commonly understood to signify the moral pra-
vity of the action, and to denote its contrariety to the law’.156 But taking
away a madman’s sword is no sin, although it ‘be properly denominated
stealing’ and undeserving of the ‘contempt’ the word inherently
inspires.157 Locke also refers us to ‘the laudable and esteemed names of
Subtlety and Acuteness’.158 He urges us to drain our descriptive terms of the
evaluative content which dangerously clouds our judgement. By con-
fusing the morality with the action ‘under one term, those who yield too
easily to the impressions of sounds, and are often forward to take names
for things, are often misled in their judgment of actions’.159
While Locke is basically echoing, if developing, old concerns, he makes
an innovative contribution to the view that words create morality. As
noted above, naming plays an indispensable part in the genesis of mixed
modes. Having selected the simple ideas to be included, the mind unites
them into one idea and ‘ties them together by a name’.160 There is so
close a relationship between the nominal (and real) essence of a mixed
mode and its name as to make them almost identical. Their essences
‘being made by the mind’ and nowhere existent ‘would cease again, were
there not something that did, as it were, hold it together, and keep the
parts from scattering. Though therefore it be the mind that makes the
collection, ’tis the name which is, as it were the knot, that ties them fast
together.’161 It is the sensible, fixative quality of language that brings
morality into existence. The ‘fleeting, and transient combinations of
154
Locke 1988, p. 281. 155 Locke 1997, p. 311. 156 Locke 1975, p. 359.
157 158
Locke 1975, p. 360 (ii.xxviii.16). Locke 1975, p. 494 (iii.x.8).
159
Locke 1975, p. 359 (ii.xxviii.16). 160 Locke 1975, p. 429 (iii.v.4).
161
Locke 1975, p. 434 (iii.v.10).
simple ideas’ attain ‘a constant and lasting existence’ only in their names,
which are therefore ‘very apt to be taken for the ideas themselves’.162
A moral idea is neither ‘noticed’ nor ‘supposed’ to exist ‘unless a name be
joined to it’.163 Moral terms are therefore not only constitutive of the
moral status of the thing to which they are applied, but the nature of the
moral edifice itself is dependent on its instantiation in language.
writing ourselves
In addition to writing the natural and moral worlds outside us, language –
literally, as well as figuratively – writes our selves. Locke’s characterisation
of the mind as ‘white paper’ is only half a metaphor.164 To a great extent
the views and values with and against which we identify our selves are
written by others on our minds. Their truth is no object, ‘for white paper
receives any characters’.165 Locke’s maverick rejection of innate ideas and
principles, and his concomitant identification of sensation as the fount of
all external knowledge make us the irredeemable victims of the words
we hear. With added reason then, he reiterates the pedagogical and
philosophical aphorism that people unthinkingly ingest authorities. This
is a particularly grim predicament for Locke, as a consequence of his
radical stance on the plurality – and therefore falsity – of belief systems,
notably moral ones. Given that the drastic multiplicity of moralities
necessarily fall away from the one true natural law, they must embody all
manner of error. While he sometimes speculates on the goodness of
conventional systems, Locke’s heart is generally heavy with the depravities
that people applaud, asking us to remember, for example, ‘whole nations,
and those of the most civilized people’ who condone the exposure of
children.166 It is this sinful array that is whispered into the unguarded
minds of men.
As had long been noted, people are especially pliable when they are
young and soft. In his Thoughts concerning Education (1693) Locke worries
about the corrupting chatter of servants: a ‘contagion’ that ‘infects’ us
with incivility and vice.167 More generally and inevitably, children ‘receive
into their minds propositions (especially about matters of religion) from
their parents, nurses, or those about them: which being insinuated into
their unwary, as well as unbiass’d understandings, and fastened by
162
Locke 1975, p. 291 (ii.xxii.8). 163 Locke 1975, p. 435 (iii.v.11).
164
Locke 1975, p. 104 (ii.i.2). See Eng (1980) for an interpretation of the tabula rasa metaphor.
165
Locke 1975, p. 81 (i.iii.22). 166 Locke 1975, p. 70 (i.iii.9). 167 Locke 1989, p. 127.
degrees, are at last (equally, whether true or false) riveted there by long
custom and education beyond all possibility of being pull’d out again’.168
Contingent moral principles become naturalised and entitled ‘innate’ by
their being whispered into the receptive and unsuspecting ears of babes.
Doctrines with ‘no better original, than the superstition of a nurse, or the
authority of an old woman’, with time and social endorsement, assume
‘the dignity of principles in religion or morality’. Adults ‘instil into the
unwary, and, as yet, unprejudiced understanding’ those doctrines they
have themselves swallowed.169 Words occupy such a prominent place in
our formative experience that in the mouths of self-interested and short-
sighted human beings they inconspicuously sow new seeds of error and
bigotry, and yield a viciously circular harvest. In his 1677 journal Locke
is concerned by the ‘opinions implanted . . . by education’, when we are
too innocent to close our ears. The civil laws ‘must be questioned’.
Instead, they are ‘looked on with reverence as the standards of right &
wrong truth & falshood when perhaps those soe sacred opinions were but
the oracles of the nursery’. This kind of brainwashing turns people into
dupes. Rather than doing their duty and judging whether their govern-
ment serves the public good, they idolise its dicta, which were inscribed in
‘time out of minde’. ‘Traditionall grand talke’ passes down generations
without test. ‘This is the fate of our tender age which being seasoned early
grows by continuation of time as it were into the very constitution of
their minde.’170 The words of others seep into the kernel of the self,
becoming inseparable from and identical with it, erasing their own
adventitious and contingent origins.
As lazy and socially enamoured ‘camelions’, we unthinkingly imbibe
words and propositions, examining neither their meaning nor their
credibility.171 The words of those we trust and whose interests we share
successfully make up our minds, while our enemies’ speeches fall on deaf
ears. In the Conduct, Locke inveighs against ‘those who always resign their
judgment to the last man they heard or read’.172 We ground our opinions
on propositions such as ‘the founders or leaders of my party are good
men, and therefore their tenets are true’; ‘it is the opinion of a sect that is
erroneous, therefore it is false’; ‘it hath been long received in the world,
168
Locke 1975, p. 712 (iv.xx.9).
169
Locke 1975, p. 81 (i.iii.22).
170
MS. Locke f. 2, p. 125 (117). Cf. Dunn (1969, p. 197) on how men inherit a moral vocabulary
which embodies ‘the misapprehensions of the moral truth generated by the laziness and
viciousness of their forebears. . . . All men are educated in historical societies and are thus trained
in particular moral errors merely by learning their duties in the language of their society.’
171
Locke 1989, p. 126. 172 Locke 1993, p. 82.
therefore it is true; or it is new, and therefore false’.173 Locke attacks the
simple ‘imbibing’ of prejudices to which ‘education, party, reverence,
fashion and interest’ lead us blindly.174 He rejects the ‘implicit faith’ with
which we indolently swallow words.175 The ‘country gentleman’, that
recurrent object of Locke’s distaste, knows no more than what he has
learnt and heard from his books and his small circle of drunk, self-
satisfied company. Their education encourages them to copy and then
rattle out ‘other men’s thoughts, floating only in the memory’ on one or
other side of a question.176 In their easy, sensible guise words hang sus-
pended, ungrounded but dominant in our minds.
The adhesive depth of this internal inscription cannot be under-
estimated, given that we are objects of nurture. The thrust of Locke’s
Thoughts concerning Education is to reveal the sovereignty of customary
praxis. Custom has such potency that it merges with a man’s fibre,
becoming indistinguishable from it. ‘Habits’ are ‘woven into the very
principles of his nature’. They become ‘indiscernible’.177 If children are
made to do something repeatedly, it ‘will be natural in them’.178 Likewise,
statements we hear and echo repeatedly knit themselves into our nature.
The contingency of the meanings of these verbal impressions – manu-
factured, unreliable and opaque as they are – is hidden. We are unaware
that the beloved tenets that support us and that feel so natural are in fact
the fabrications of ignorant and selfish external sources which insinuate
themselves by ‘gentle and insensible degrees’.179
As so often in Locke’s philosophy of language, his innocent portrayal of
men dominated by poor language marks out his account. Unlike many of
his contemporaries, he does not accuse the great bulk of insignificant
speakers of malign deception. They do not know that they do not know
what they say but instead believe that their precepts, which chime so
uniformly with their company’s, are good and true. Locke begins his
Conduct with the incisive claim that we never do anything without a
reason for doing it.180 Such reasons are never self-consciously evil or
stupid, even in our private moments. Unable to bear the (self-)accusations
of ignorance or falsity, we convince ourselves of the opposite, but the
process of self-conviction barely reaches consciousness. As Locke remarks,
173
Locke 1993, p. 21. These closely recall the ‘sophisms of authority’ of the Port-Royal Logique,
whereby we believe ‘not by sound and essential reasons which make the truth known to us’, but
on account of external testimony (Arnauld and Nicole 1996, pp. 220–1).
174
Locke 1993, p. 40; cf. p. 102. 175 Locke 1993, p. 9. 176 Locke 1993, p. 52.
177
Locke 1989, pp. 110; 111. 178 Locke 1989, p. 120. 179 Locke 1975, p. 87.
180
Locke 1993, p. 3.
‘men would be intolerable to themselves, and contemptible to others, if
they should embrace opinions without any ground, and hold what they
could give no manner of reason for. True or False, Solid or sandy, the
mind must have some foundation to rest it self upon’.181 ‘Everybody has
some maxims which govern all their thoughts.’182 Ironically, it is our very
love of ‘truth’ that ensnares us into believing the ‘fallacies’ that animate
the mouths and minds of teachers and pupils alike.183 What Locke des-
ignates as prejudiced and ill-grounded principles, we embrace with clear
consciences. We utter them ‘in earnest’, fully ‘persuaded’ of what we
say.184 When we experience misfortune, this is precisely what it is; it is
never our fault.185 The ‘country gentleman’ is ‘muffled up in the zeal and
infallibility of his own sect’.186 Our tenets might be chance and fallible
intrusions, but they feel incontrovertible.
Our myopia about the false principles by which we live is acute not
only because they have been stamped on us unawares but also, and
somewhat contradictorily, because they are ultimately self-created. This is
another aspect of the tension – or insightful complementarity – between the
malleability and the agency of man that overarches Locke’s philosophy.187
His presentation of human pliability is powerfully coincident with his
robust account of natural rights and responsibilities, his (albeit strained)
theory of cognitive freedom and his rejection of the apologetic prop
of original sin.188 In the final analysis, we have not been blindfolded by
181
Locke 1993, p. 21. 182 Locke 1993, p. 28. 183 Locke 1993, pp. 120–1. 184 Locke 1993, p. 22.
185
Locke 1993, pp. 24–5. 186 Locke 1993, pp. 13–14.
187
See Tully (1993, pp. 4–5) on this juxtaposition, and the important caveat that ‘it does not follow
from the point that humans are tractable that governments have a right to mould them as they
please or that they will not rightfully resist’; cf. p. 179 on Lockean subjectivity as denoting ‘a
subject who is calculating and calculable, from the perspective of the probabilistic knowledge and
practices; and the sovereign bearer of rights and duties, subject to and of law from the
voluntaristic perspective’. See also Balibar (1996) on the complex relations between subject,
individual and citizen in seventeenth-century philosophy; Dietz (1990) on the subject/citizen
identity in Hobbes.
188
On political freedom see Tully 1993, pp. 315–23; pp. 281–314 on liberty and the natural law. On
freedom of belief see Passmore 1986. On emotive motivation and the agent’s freedom to suspend
their desires, see Ayers 1991, ii, pp. 192–5. On Locke’s strained account, see James 1997, pp. 284–8.
See also Chappell 1994a and 1994b; Losonsky 1996 and 2001, pp. 72–104. Dunn (1990, p. 19)
points to the tensions between Locke’s convictions that belief cannot be coerced and that people
are ‘nevertheless unequivocally responsible for almost all their less edifying beliefs’. On property
in the broad Lockean sense see Tully 1993, pp. 96–117. Cf. Tully (1983, p. 11) on Locke’s seminal
part in formulating the discourses of ‘the sovereign individual and his or her subjective rights’;
Brett (1997) on the history of the subjective rights discourse. Brown (1999) argues that Locke’s
figuring of God as an absolute monarch ‘circumscribes the vaunted liberalism of Locke’s political
philosophy’ (p. 100). On Locke’s rejection of original sin see Locke 1997, pp. 320–1; Locke 1999,
pp. 7–9; Locke 2002, pp. 229–30; Marshall 1994, pp. 414–15. Vogt (1997) argues for the centrality
of the Fall in Locke and the ‘noble, if anxious, rebel’ who results (p. 524).
anyone but ourselves, and it is this which makes the problem of self-delusion
so intractable. We have ‘put colour’d spectacles before our eyes’, and are
therefore in thrall to what we see.189 Locke uses the potent symbol of sight –
symbolising irresistible testimony – to show how deep our self-delusion
goes. He refers to the powerful ‘disposition’ we have ‘to put any cheat upon
our selves’.190 This self-imposition ‘is the strongest imposition of all oth-
ers’.191 This self-‘persuasion’ (as Locke calls it, evoking the charms of
rhetoric) reveals its indomitable power in Enthusiasts.192 They ‘perswade
themselves’ that God speaks to them ‘by a ray darted into the mind
immediately from the fountain of light’.193 Picking up on a ubiquitious
image from the time, Locke explains how this mere ‘ignis fatuus’ has men by
the nose because they are ‘most forwardly obedient to the impulses they
receive from themselves’.194 Although Locke only added the chapter on
Enthusiasm in the Essay’s fourth edition (1700), he is clearly thinking about
the force of self-persuasion much earlier. In a manuscript dated December
1687 he asks whether ‘an inward inspiration’ should ‘be distinguished from a
strong persuasion’.195
We are not then, just led by the ears, but are responsible for the speeches
we internalise and replicate. Our autonomy therefore serves also as an exit
from our habituated verbal bondage, but it takes punitive self-discipline to
extricate ourselves. We are accountable for the cataracts that cloud our
vision and we must remove them ourselves, as Locke says in one deliberately
gruesome image.196 It is painful to see with our own eyes and speak with our
own minds, rather than those of others. Just as the dancer on the tightrope
got there by the sweat of his brow, and the land lies barren unless we
cultivate it, we have to labour at becoming virtuous and wise.197 Rather than
impose our vision upon the world, we must submit ourselves to its evi-
dence.198 We ought as far as possible to haul ourselves out of our subjective
mire, travel the world, converse with others and really listen, in an attempt
189
Locke 1993, p. 101. Spellman (1997, pp. 11; 17; 50) highlights Locke’s concerns about Enthusiasm
and his despair at the ‘inglorious end’ to the ‘Cromwellian experiment’ as ignorant Protestant
sectarians demonstrated their enslavement to their passions (p. 85).
190
Locke 1993, p. 43. 191 Locke 1993, p. 45. 192 Locke 1975, p. 696 (iv.xix.1).
193
Locke 1975, p. 699 (iv.xix.5).
194
Locke 1975, pp. 702 (iv.xix.10); 669 (ix.xix.7). One pertinent example of this image appears in
Hobbes (1996, p. 36), where he derides the ‘ignes fatui’ of rhetorical speech. This Hobbesian echo
further intimates the rhetorical overtones of Locke’s concerns about Enthusiasm. Hobbes also
seems to be in Locke’s mind in his circular description of the Enthusiast’s reasoning: ‘it is a
revelation because they firmly believe it, and they believe it, because it is a revelation’ (Locke 1975,
p. 702 (iv.xix.10)). Cf. Hobbes: ‘to say he hath spoken to him in a dream, is no more then to say
he hath dreamt that God spake to him’ (1996, p. 257).
195
MS. Locke c. 27, fo. 73r. 196 Locke 1993, p. 40. 197 Locke 1993, p. 7; 1988, p. 297.
198
Locke 1993, p. 68.
to widen our narrow view.199 While it upsets our pride to turn our critical
faculties back upon ourselves, we must investigate the grounds of our
habitual principles.200 Their contingency has a double edge: just as they can
be implanted, so can they be weeded out again, but only if we work at it.201
Words enable and naturalise blind thought. They are both the cause of
our thoughtlessness and the cover which keeps it secret from ourselves
and others. We must rip off our linguistic masks, and examine what lies
beneath. However, this disguise is so deeply embedded that it is indis-
tinguishable from our natural face. To pull it off would seem to destroy
ourselves, and Locke despairs of our doing that.
The way in which we write ourselves with language proves especially

important when we turn to the socially-driven nature of Lockean people.
Most of us are, above all things, concerned to impress others, and words
are the pre-eminent means of doing this. Locke is repeating the insight of
his predecessors that emotions are extensively socially-orientated and in
particular, that people are vain creatures in constant search of admiration.
He develops this belief into a full-blown account of human motivation in
the Essay.202 There are three forms of law that govern us: divine, civil and
‘the law of opinion or reputation’.203 The last-named is by far the most
powerful and determines whether our actions be considered ‘virtues’ or
‘vices’. A virtue is simply that which is ‘thought praise-worthy’ and a
vice that which attracts ‘discredit’.204 The normative framework of our
community dictates our virtuous status and may or may not coincide
with God’s law, but it is our peers rather than our maker who exert the
strongest pull on us. The prospects of approbation and disapproval are
the sharpest spurs to human behaviour. While ‘most men seldom
seriously reflect on’ the eternal but distant punishments which attend the
breach of the natural law, and hope that they will get away with breaking
the civil law, no one can escape nor bear the contempt of his fellows. ‘No
body, that has the least thought, or sense of a man about him, can live in
society, under the constant dislike, and ill opinion of his familiars, and
those he converses with. This is a burthen too heavy for humane suf-
ferance.’205 Driven by our desire to be admired by others, words are the
means whereby we might work the levers.
199
Locke 1993, p. 10.
200
E.g. Locke (1993, p. 39; p. 127) on ‘bottoming’. Cf. Schouls 1994. 201 Locke 1993, pp. 29–30.
202
See Tully (1993, pp. 179–214) on Lockean subjection to ‘juridical government’ (p. 179).
203 204
Locke 1975, p. 352 (ii.xxviii.7). Locke 1975, pp. 354 (ii.xxviii.11); 353 (ii.xxviii.10).
205
Locke 1975, p. 357 (ii.xxviii.12).
At times, as in Of Ethic in General, Locke scoffs at the powerlessness of
the rule of virtue and vice which has for its enforcement only ‘reputation and
disgrace’.206 Without the law of a superior wielding hellfire and bliss, Locke
declares that ‘the force of morality is lost’.207 However, while it is correct
that the greatest happiness and our ultimate interest lies in heaven and the
avoidance of hell, generally Locke concedes that most of us only weakly
perceive this; we are bowled over instead by the grail of reputation. Indeed,
as though responding to his own ridicule, he declares in the Essay that ‘if any
one shall imagine, that I have forgot my own notion of a law’, that is, as
containing powers of enforcement, he who imagines that ‘commendation
and disgrace’ are not ‘strong motives on men’ are ‘little skill’d in the nature,
or history of mankind: the greatest part whereof he shall find to govern
themselves chiefly, if not solely, by this law of fashion’.208
Outside as well as inside the Essay, it is this conventional law that
generally seems to control us. In his journal Locke makes an entry in 1678
entitled ‘Credit, Disgrace’. ‘Reputation’ is the ‘principal spring from which
the actions of men take their rise’, and holds more sway than civil laws.209
In his commonplace book he copies the following statement from
Castiglione: ‘we al love commendations & very hardly defend ourselves
from flattery’.210 We slavishly follow custom. Indeed it ‘serves for rea-
son’.211 It makes things sacred.212 We do not ‘dare oppose it’, but parrot the
favourite tenets of the crowd, for fear of being deemed cultural ‘heretic[s]’.213
In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke advises parents that rather
than rods and sugar plums, ‘esteem and disgrace are, of all others, the most
powerful incentives to the mind, once it is brought to relish them’.214 Praise
and disgrace cause us to feel intense pleasure and pain respectively, and we
therefore seek the former and flee the latter. Given that we are intensely self-
conscious and social animals, it is fashionable words, at the interstices of
human interaction, that constitute and impress our personalities with the
greatest force. In turn, it is these words that we echo back and thereby
impress our selves on others.215
The passionate mechanism that operates the law of reputation is
something like vanity. While it pushes us toward sociability, it also wren-
ches us from it. Self-love inspires us to seek praise but it simultaneously
206
Locke 1997, p. 299.
207
Locke 1997, p. 302. On unease at the want of some absent good as the basic determinant of the
will, see Locke 1975, pp. 250–1 (ii.xxi.31).
208
Locke 1975, pp. 356–7 (ii.xxviii.12). 209 Locke 1997, pp. 271; 272.
210
MS. Locke d. 1, p. 57. 211 Locke 1989, p. 218. 212 Locke 1988, p. 183.
213
infects us with a strong competitive streak. Our ambitious desire to
dominate others, so patent in the Second Treatise, is at the root of Locke’s
doctrine of the separation of powers.216 The legislative must be separate
from the executive because ‘it may be too great a temptation to humane
frailty apt to grasp at power, for the same persons who have the power of
making laws, to have also in their hands the power to execute them’.217
The Letter Concerning Toleration is similarly riddled with dark intima-
tions about the libido dominandi which underlies purportedly religious
policy.218 These driving passions are part of an extensive typology of
passions that track our relations with other people. For example, ‘grief ’ is
stimulated by ‘the loss of a friend’.219 Words play a huge role in the
exercise of these social passions because it is by them that we interact with
other people.
In a culture where linguistic virtuosity is highly prized, language itself
might accrue glory and power. The disputing chicaneer is encouraged by
the fact that his is a ‘laudable’ pursuit.220 The gentleman whose head is
stored with ‘shreds of all kinds’, like a ‘magazine’, with which he can talk
on any subject he gets thrown, will impress his company.221 Locke does
not only snipe at men who make themselves with their words, but
recognises the worth of language in one’s self-promotion. In the manu-
script known as ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a
Gentleman’ (1703) he explains that reading is crucial for increasing our
knowledge but also for enabling us ‘to deliver and make out that
knowledge to others’, and it is the second of these uses that Locke sug-
gests is ‘chief’. This is because ‘the greatest part of [a gentleman’s] business
and usefulness in the world, is by the influence of what he says, or writes to
others’.222 In his Thoughts concerning Education, he had already made the
point, declaring that gentlemen are predominantly occupied ‘with their
tongues, and with their pens’, for it is these which effect their ‘greatest
business in the world’.223 It is therefore of immeasurable importance that
they are taught to speak and write well when they are young. The better they
do so, the more they will be esteemed by their peers.
It appears, then, that language is woven into our personalities. Not
only does it constitute thought, but it is a visible mark of our social
identity, whose beauty we are overwhelmingly interested to invent.
***
216
Locke 1989, pp. 169–70. 217 Locke 1988, p. 364. 218 E.g. Locke 1983, p. 23.
219
Locke 1997, p. 240. 220 Locke 1990a, p. 14. 221 Locke 1993, p. 56.
222
Locke 1997, p. 349. 223 Locke 1989, p. 225.
It should now be clear why Locke makes the innovative insertion of a
book on language into what is otherwise a logic of ideas. Logicians, along
with the vast majority of their readers, had taken it for granted that
words were a perfect copy of the workings of the mind and did not
require separate analysis. Locke’s counterclaim is that there is neither the
hierarchy nor the harmony between words and ideas that had generally
been supposed. While he subscribes to the conventional belief that
words ought to comply with and replicate thoughts, he concludes that in
practice they dominate and diverge, and therefore need individual
treatment. The pre-eminence of words conceals and propagates a trio of
semantic sins: a mess of unreality, instability and vacuity lurks beneath
words which, undeterred, spin their own brilliant yarn.
While the problem of language sometimes seems to be more about the
ideas which words signify than the words themselves, it is the words that
enable this ideational travesty. Indeed, in his discussion about the ‘imper-
fection of words’, Locke asks the pertinent question why he charges ‘this as
an imperfection, rather upon our words than understandings’. He replies:
though it terminated in things, yet it was for the most part so much by the
intervention of words, that they seem’d scarce separable from our general
knowledge. At least they interpose themselves so much between our under-
standings and the truth, which it would contemplate and apprehend, that like
the medium through which visible objects pass, their obscurity and disorder does
not seldom cast a mist before our eyes, and impose upon our understandings.224
In their beguiling, autocratic sensuality words fill our view and project
only their own deceptive story. Locke wants to peel away the words and
reveal the untold truth about what they can possibly mean.
Locke demolishes the foundations of early-modern linguistic theory.
He jeopardises reference, communication and truth. However, his
dynamite comes from within the ancient walls. He wholeheartedly agrees
with Aristotle and his multifarious, rebellious progeny that words are
arbitrary signs which signify the speaker’s thoughts. Through the filter of
his epistemology, and drawing heavily on the various detonations of his
predecessors, he pushes the commonplace to its logical and disturbing
conclusion. Internalising the theories of language he learnt in the trivium,
and disturbed by the complacencies as well as the concerns about lan-
guage he heard from philosophers, he paints a bleak picture of language,
rejecting proposals for its reform as fatally flawed. While his predecessors
had often focused on the rectificable abuses of language, Locke exposed
224
Locke 1975, p. 488 (iii.ix.21).
its irredeemable imperfections. While his predecessors had often blamed
men for the problems of language and could therefore plan for its
rehabilitation, Locke insists that language itself played a guilty part, and
therefore offers no easy solutions. Instead, he further, apparently
ineluctably, entrenches the three linguistic concerns which impinged on
and burst out of broader contemporary reflections on nature, morality,
religion and politics. The effect is a kind of reasoned despair which
is both unparalleled by and inexplicable without the unease about lan-
guage which had haunted early-modern philosophy.
Locke’s account of language goes far beyond what is usually claimed by
modern scholars. While words do, absolutely, signify ideas, these ideas are
themselves often forged in language and inscribed by other people. As
innately vapid, intensely sensuous, socially-orientated (though not very
sociable) creatures, our minds are scripted by the talk we hear applauded.
Locke in no way presages the logical priority of language to thought
which is now starting to sound like common sense. For him, language is
representative rather than constitutive of thought, and consciousness is
logically prior to words. However, he does probe the practical involve-
ment of language in cognition. He believes that our contingent linguistic
classifications largely determine our understanding of things. He there-
fore gives us another way of agreeing with Wittgenstein that ‘a picture
held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language
and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably’.225 Locke has his own
seductive story about how the boundaries are blurred between private and
public, between thought and language.
225
Wittgenstein 1958, p. 48e.
chapter 10
Locke in the face of language
Locke is most famous not for his philosophy of language but for his
epistemology and political theory. Having charted his linguistic concerns,
this book concludes by considering how they might make us rethink
his better-known contributions to philosophy. When his searing
deconstruction of words is injected into his views on human understanding
and civil society, various elements in these views come under pressure,
while others come more sharply into focus. I investigate the ramifications
of the following three aspects of his philosophy of language: first, the
concealing and constitutive power of words which belies their ideational
limits; second, the doubly contractual nature of language; and finally,
Locke’s sometimes contradictory account of semantic individualism. I
argue that these features of language unsettle, or rather further unsettle key
ambitions of Locke’s philosophy: intellectual humility, toleration, political
judgement, trust, community and sociability. The imperfections of words
threaten to poison already weak minds and communities.
This is therefore a more speculative chapter. It brings together claims
of Locke’s that he did not himself connect, particularly when it draws out
the consequences of language for society, and thereby throws up some
apparent contradictions. It could be objected that such an approach is
based on an unrealistic expectation of a unified authorial personality
between and even within texts that are written with different purposes,
‘by’ different discourses, and for different audiences.1 This objection is
particularly pressing in the case of Locke, whose oeuvre is notable for its
changes of mind. However, it would be equally objectionable to eschew
altogether the notion that it was one and the same man who put pen to the
papers we have before us now, and not to inquire into their coherence.
1
See Dunn (2003, p. 257) on the implausibility of Locke’s life being, and even less, seeming, a
‘unified whole’. For a discrete analysis of the impact of Locke’s philosophy of language on his
political project, see Dawson 2005a.
277
Moreover, the contradictions, if such they are, often occur within indi-
vidual texts, as well as between them. Locke’s incongruous commitments
cannot therefore always be dismissed as functions of different contexts and
purposes. Jostling and interlacing with each other on the page, it seems that
in some way Locke held them together. And finally, as I have shown in this
book, Locke’s concern with language is not confined to the Essay, but is a
thread that runs throughout his writing, often appearing in a social context.
Locke was concerned with the subject precisely because it seemed to him to
strike so brutally at its users. To hear this sensitivity we only need recall his
insistence that the ambiguous use of language does not merely attack the
ivory tower, but ‘hath invaded the great concernments of humane life and
society’ and ‘brought confusion, disorder, and uncertainty into the affairs
of mankind’.2 A more patent expression of the applicability of language to
society one could not find. It is therefore consistent with Locke’s purposes
to probe further this bleak intersection.
the contamination of the understanding

Turning first to human understanding, Locke’s most basic claim is that it
can reach no further than ideas. His stricture plays out in two opposing
directions. On the one hand it severely restricts the scope of our knowledge
of the objective world, and on the other it (sometimes, at least) removes all
bounds to our knowledge of morality. This imbalance of cognitive facilities
is the candle of the Lord.3 God has calibrated our intellectual sight in order
that we can live precisely according to his will – to which, as his work-
manship, we are rightfully subject. We can in part discover his will by
assuming that he works teleologically, and thereby inferring that what is
given or suggested by nature must be willed by its creator. So for example,
the apparently involuntary love for her child that suffuses a mother is an
inferential sign that we are obliged to preserve God’s creatures, as well as
God’s way of nudging us to do so.4 By the same token, we must use the
mental powers that (with the help of Locke’s Essay) we find ourselves with,
rather than pretend to those we lack or ignore those we have.5 Our poor
but by no means bankrupt capacity to know nature and our potentially
unfettered grip on morality, ought to make us less zealous in pursuit of the
former and relentless in search of the latter.6 As Locke announces at the
2
Locke 1975, p. 496 (iii.x.12). 3 Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.5). 4 Locke 1988, pp. 309; 181.
5
On the obligation to use and improve the faculties we do have, see Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.5).
6
Locke 1975, p. 646 (iv.xii.11).
Locke in the face of language 279
beginning of the Essay, ‘our business here is not to know all things, but
those which concern our conduct’.7 This picks up the even straighter
account of our purposes in the Two Treatises where it turns out that we are
‘sent into the world by his order and about his business’.8 Our business is
God’s business, that is: to be moral. I shall deal with morality when I turn
to Locke’s political philosophy. Now I focus on Locke’s modest agenda for
the knowledge of nature, arguing that while at first sight his philosophy of
language supports this agenda, on closer inspection it undermines it.
An express aim of the Essay is to establish the limits of the under-
standing, and more particularly to establish how much and how little
it can know about the outside world. This mission is backed up by
Locke’s fundamental linguistic dictum that words can only signify ideas.
Just as our knowledge about things is limited to the sensory ideas of
those things, so is our language. These twin theories are intimately
linked. The small extent of our knowledge ought to stop our strutting
speeches, and encourage us rather ‘to sit down in a quiet ignorance of
those things, which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the
reach of our capacities’. We ought not to be ‘so forward, out of an
affectation of an universal knowledge, to raise questions, and perplex
ourselves and others with disputes about things, to which our under-
standings are not suited’.9 Locke’s insistence on ‘this incertitude of
things’, as he puts it in A Letter concerning Toleration, is intended in
large part as we have already seen to champion toleration. His episte-
mology makes it indefensible for us not only to persecute people
for their beliefs, but also contemptuously to condemn those beliefs
or hubristically to vaunt our own.10 Having brandished the indigence
of the understanding, Locke uses the ideational confines of language
to push home the point that we cannot talk with any certainty or
depth about the world. ‘I think’, he writes in the key chapter in the Essay
on ‘the extent of humane knowledge’, ‘that it becomes the modesty of
philosophy not to pronounce magisterially, where we want evidence that
can produce knowledge’. Given that we often have barely ‘faith and
probability’, there is no space for dogmatism. The essential nature of
things, particularly of ‘substance’, the subject of such fatal controversies
between trinitarians and unitarians, is forever hidden. The vexing
question ‘about the immateriality of the soul’ cannot be answered with
7
Locke 1975, p. 46 (i.i.6).
8
Locke 1988, p. 271. 9 Locke 1975, p. 45 (i.i.4).
10
Locke 1983, p. 36; cf. 1997, p. 276.
‘demonstrative certainty’.11 Locke’s assertion of severely straitened ‘real’
knowledge is mirrored in his moderated presentation of speech.12
Book iii therefore carves deeper the groove already pugnaciously cut
mid-way between dogmatism and scepticism by the other three books of
the Essay and by mitigated and constructive sceptics before Locke, such as
Gassendi and Boyle. Locke’s aim is not to silence the sceptics, whose less
radical postulates had been fully appropriated into the new philosophical
mainstream, while Descartes’ hyperbolic doubt no longer kept thinkers
awake (if it ever did). Instead, Locke is concerned to attack dogmatists of
all colours, particularly those who were then banging loudest on the
drum – Aristotelians, Cartesians and ‘christians’. His limitation of the
scope of both knowledge and language is designed to undercut the doc-
trinaire warriors in philosophical and religious battles. By cordoning off
the space beyond which one cannot know or speak, Locke hopes to quell
both the groundless, loquacious condescension of the philosophical ‘sects’,
and the illegitimate expropriation of people’s rights by those whose ‘truth’
is accompanied by power and brandished in order to get more of it.13 His
trumpet call that our knowledge and therefore our language about the
world is circumscribed by the subjective and manufactured scope of our
albeit ‘real’ ideas is designed to quieten the supercilious declarations of
deluded speakers that they have got to the heart of matter and to restrain
the brutality which is justified through this war of words.
However, Locke’s dogged repetition that words can only signify ideas
sounds strained in the light of the practical force of words that we have
also seen him at pains to expose: they seem to – and we take them to,
want them to and make them – stand for things. The ideational
boundaries of language are belied by the improper power of language
itself. Looking and sounding like an exact replica of the world, language
threatens to undo the humiliating work at which Locke has laboured so
hard. Language can be such a consummate liar in its mirror-like
inscrutability that it is used by vain, gullible, peer-pressured, deceived but
generally passionately sincere speakers to promulgate the fantasies of their
party. So while words ought only to follow in the tiny, tentative footsteps
of the ideas to which they are eternally shackled, they leap to marvellous
truths. Language therefore undermines Locke’s tolerationist epistemolo-
gical project by seeming to tell the truth about things which it cannot
11
Locke 1975, pp. 541–2 (iv.iii.6).
12
On ideas of substances being ‘real’ when they ‘agree with the existence of things’ see Locke 1975,
p. 374 (ii.xxx.5); on ‘real knowledge’ of substances see Locke 1975, pp. 568–9 (iv.iv.12).
13
Locke 1975, p. 497 (iii.x.14).
really divine. It brings into being that certainty which Locke is so intent
on questioning. A large part of the purpose of book iii is therefore
therapeutic. It is to identify and thereby disarm the false lights of words.
In the same way that the obstacles to knowledge were cleared away by old
and new logicians in their treatment of linguistic sophisms and cognitive
errors, Locke brings to light the misconceptions and the gaping holes
which are hidden beneath words, enabling – and forcing – us to think
only in ‘determined’ ideas, which alone can constitute the meanings
of words and be fed into ratiocination. He warns us against the suppo-
sedly infallible refuge of ‘clear and distinct’ ideas, which are themselves
just another verbal cover for ‘obscurity and confusion’, for ideas that are
not ‘seen and perceived to be’ in the mind, but only asserted in words.14
In addition to the Cartesian discourse which is clearly in his sights here,
Locke strips all philosophical speech of its pretensions to a deep com-
prehension of the world. But there is an edge of hopelessness in Locke’s
protestations about people taking words for things – which continue,
unabated, to pepper book iv of the Essay. Locke’s strictures about the
ideational limitations of words are as much a plaintive response to the
compelling worldliness of words as they are the cool theoretical buttresses
of his restrictive epistemology. At the contradictory heart of his philo-
sophy of language lies the theoretical limitation of words to ideas coupled
with the practical appearance of limitless words. These twin linguistic
tenets by turns complement and defy his theory of knowledge. And since,
as we have seen Locke discover in spite of himself, language cannot be
separated from knowledge, the imperceptibly constitutive power of words
must be integrated into epistemology, and problematise it accordingly.
We know little, but our words make us believe the opposite.
Turning now from the natural to the moral and political spheres, the
scope of Locke’s epistemology is – in theory at least – markedly different.
In the Essays on the Law of Nature, the Two Treatises and particularly
strikingly in the Essay – on the whole a text that humbles the reader –
Locke is abundantly confident that morality, and most importantly
divine morality can be known, either probabilistically or even demon-
stratively. While God has not fitted us to know the world deeply, indeed
has ordered us not to try, he has fully equipped us to know his moral law,
the observance of which ought to pervade our being. As we have already
seen, our facility for moral science has two parts. The first relates to the
nature of moral ideas of all sorts. While our ideas of substances are
14
Locke 1975, p. 13 (Epistle to the Reader).
inadequate ectypes, or copies, of the archetypes they are supposed to
represent, our ideas of mixed modes are themselves the archetypes and
therefore entirely ‘adequate’ and ‘real’.15 Unlike existential entities such as
gold which are made by God and unknowable by us, moral entities are
made by us and therefore absolutely knowable.16 It is because we know
‘the precise real essence[s]’ of mixed modes that we can perceive when
they agree or disagree with each other and thereby arrive at demonstrative
knowledge.17 The second part of our moral facility enables us to
demonstrate the law of God, as opposed to any number of alternative,
purely human moral systems. We can discover the law that obliges our
nature in virtue of the little, but crucial certain knowledge we have of ‘the
real, actual, existence of things’: intuitive knowledge of our own existence
and thence demonstrative knowledge of our maker and our dependence
on him.18 And even if we are not rational enough to work out precisely
God’s law and why we must obey it, the ‘bare possibility, which no body
can make any doubt of ’, of eternal happiness or misery, has weight
crushing enough to induce us to be virtuous.19 Recalling Pascal’s wager,
Locke celebrates the fact that even probable knowledge of our maker’s
juridical apparatus can light our way.
Unlike the natural laws of other creatures, such as stars, which are
bound to shine, or plants, which grow as God decrees, the law of men is
more normative than descriptive, men being free to oppose divine
design.20 God’s law ought to be our nature. We avoid it on pain of
everlasting hell. Sometimes Locke presents the flames of hell as licking so
close upon our minds that God’s law seems to dwarf merely conventional
moral codes which have only public censure and praise for their ‘utmost
enforcement’.21 In addition to and as a result of being the organising
principle of human life on the basis of which we stand or fall for eternity,
the natural law is the foundation of Locke’s political theory. The duty to
preserve mankind is what urges us out of nature into the commonwealth,
what binds the government and what, when neglected, legitimates vio-
lence and revolution. The fulcrum on which political legitimacy rests is,
at least on earth, the moral judgement of the people. While Locke wants
to give an automatic account of the way in which a government is ‘dis-
solved’ and political power ‘devolves’ to the people when it acts against
their good, he has to admit that in fact this requires agency on the part of
15
Locke 1975, pp. 375–84 (ii.xxxii); 373–4 (ii.xxx.4). 16 Locke 1975, p. 564 (iv.iv.5).
17 18
Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.16). Locke 1975, pp. 552–3 (iv.iii.21); 549 (iv.iii.18).
19
Locke 1975, p. 281 (ii.xxi.70). 20 Locke 1954, pp. 109; 117. 21 Locke 1997, p. 299.
the people.22 ‘Every man is judge.’23 Every man therefore has to decide
when his king has broken the law of nature and attacked the public
interest. He has to know what is owed to God and when that debt is
unpaid. Knowing and acting on the law of nature is therefore central to
the happiness of natural and political life, and sometimes Locke suggests
that it is indeed intelligible and potent.
However, there are powerful cross-currents that drag the reader on to a
contrasting course. The conclusion of the Two Treatises that the people
must judge the legitimacy of their government can be read not so much as
a celebration as a regretful statement of that fact. While God waits in the
wings for his grand appearance, and might even adjudicate on earth, as he
did for Jephtha, in the first instance there are only men.24 The same
clouded judgement that made the state of nature so unbearable, and the
elimination of which is the whole purpose of entering the common-
wealth, is ultimately all there is when we arrive.25 It is corrupt, but it is all
we have got. Locke does not want to make the Hobbesian conflation of
the state of nature – ‘a state of peace, good will, mutual assistance, and
preservation’ – with the state of war – ‘a state of enmity, malice, violence,
and mutual destruction’.26 However, it is the avoidance of war and
injustice that is the ‘great reason of mens putting themselves into society,
and quitting the state of nature’.27 It seems that the law of nature is too
dim and feeble ever to have a natural reign. Locke’s somewhat pre-
emptive attitude towards the suspicious behaviour of others indicates the
depths of depravity he perceives. A man who takes absolute power over
me, and likewise a thief, commit acts of war against me and I may kill
them because it is reasonable to suppose that they want to kill me.28
The view that it is hard to internalise God’s commands also comes
through sharply in, yet again against the grain of, the Essay. In various
ways Locke’s impressive confidence about the demonstrability of the
natural law is undermined. He worries that the inferential chains of
mixed modes are too complex and abstruse for lazy thinkers. And while
Locke’s optimistic unfurling of probability is intended as a salve for our
uncertain minds, the doubts that he tries thereby to make irrelevant,
about the nature of the soul and the existence of heaven and hell, answer
22
Locke 1988, p. 412.
23
Locke 1988, p. 427. See Dunn (2003, pp. 277–8) on the ‘precariousness and onerousness, but also
the endless revitalisation, of human judgment’ that is at the centre of Locke’s ‘vision of the human
political predicament’. See also Hampsher-Monk (1996) on the increasing threat that subjectivity
posed to the state.
24
Locke 1988, p. 282. 25 Locke 1988, pp. 351; 324. 26 Locke 1988, p. 280.
27
Locke 1988, p. 282. 28 Locke 1988, pp. 279–80.
back, to create an agonised message that is so typical of Locke’s voice. At a
more psychological level, despite his sporadic hopes to the contrary, he
despairs of men being concerned with anything more than their
immediate interest, their local, petty, empty habits, and their fuelling
their amour propre with the esteem of their party. ‘They never employ’d
their parts, faculties, and powers, industriously that way, but contented
themselves with the opinions, fashions, and things of their country, as
they found them, without looking any further.’29 Locke’s damning view
of conventional moralities as embodying a morass of error and sin, makes
men’s supine acceptance of them particularly disturbing. This supposition
of faulty men is grimly confirmed by the way in which, untouched by
innate morality, they leap at the chance of sin. To prove his point, Locke
asks us to ‘view but an army at the sacking of a town, and see what
observation, or sense of moral principles, or what touch of conscience, for
all the outrages they do’.30 With the increase of Locke’s years, this pessi-
mistic strand of his ambivalent attitude towards both the accessibility and
the power of the natural law, hitherto vexed and negotiated, becomes the
strongest. By the time of The Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke fears that
the law of nature is obscure even to those, like him, who really seek it.
This conflicted account of moral understanding is replicated and
further disturbed by Locke’s linguistic theory. On the one hand, his
moral optimism is shored up by his insistence that the significations of
our moral terms are ‘not of nature’s, but man’s making’, and therefore
candidates for demonstrative knowledge.31 Locke’s account of moral
language not only duplicates his ambitious moral epistemology, but even
contributes to it: we remember that the names of moral ideas are integral
and indispensable to them.32 They are the knots that tie the otherwise
scattered simple ideas into one lasting, memorable entity.
On the other hand, the dark side of Locke’s philosophy of language
impedes our moral and political judgement. Our propensity to immorality
is fostered by linguistic interference. We can emit the hollow sounds of
moral speech, putting a good face on what is either bad or non-existent.
Moreover, in the unregulated idleness of living minds, language sheds its
subservience to ideas and takes on its ugly, domineering aspect, covering
the vacuous and confused ideational reality with a pleasing plenitude of
verbal clarity. Ceaselessly circulating in and out of our minds, language
forges an indiscernible but gaping loophole in rational moralising.
29
Locke 1975, p. 92 (i.iv.12). 30 Locke 1975, p. 70 (i.iii.9). 31
Locke 1975, p. 516 (iii.xi.16).
32
Locke 1975, pp. 434–7 (iii.v.10–15).
In addition to the customary, pleasurable psychological obstacles, moral
thinking is further stunted because the conditioned, perplexed and short-
sighted products of our scant efforts can be covered conveniently with fine-
sounding words. The subject who must judge whether to lead a revolution,
the magistrate who must choose whether to indict someone or the cleric
who must decide what to do with a ‘heretic’, are all sunk deeper in the
quicksand of adjudication, their heads filled with language that positively
encourages moral myopia. Inherently persuasive words hide, with imper-
ceptible motions, our corruption from ourselves and others, both spawning
and entrenching that corruption. Far from illuminating the natural law,
language admixes with the reasons why its knowledge hangs by a thread.
trust
The second aspect of Locke’s linguistic theory that I shall probe is the
contractual nature of language. This has consequences for another pivot
of his political theory: trust. Once more, language is a two-edged sword.
It attests to the immense importance of trust at the same time as it
displays human infidelity. And society, which depends on trust, is rocked
this way and that by the information.
The commonwealth is conceived and continued through trust. The
people entrust their natural political power to the government on the
condition that the government employs it ‘for their good’.33 If the govern-
ment ‘acts contrary to their trust’, it is dissolved and what was only ever a
‘fiduciary power’ devolves to the people.34 Trust brokers not only the
relationships between prince and people, but also between those people.
They rely, in innumerable ways in nature as well as in the city on the
good faith of others. In a manuscript from c. 1677–8, Locke explains that
without compacts to determine the property of individuals, men would
be at each other’s throats. Revealing the Hobbesian anthropological
pessimism on which he was later, albeit incompletely, to renege, he insists
that if men ‘enjoy all things in common’, ‘want, rapine and force will
33
Locke 1988, p. 381; cf. p. 427. Dunn (1985, pp. 34–54) brings out the crucial importance of trust for
Locke; trustworthiness is the fundamental duty of men, ‘the constitutive virtue of, and the key
causal precondition for, the existence of any society. It is what makes human society possible’
(p. 42). Dunn also captures the bracing contradiction of Locke’s conception of trust as ‘both
indispensable and ineliminably hazardous’ (p. 3). Cf. Dunn (1990, p. 34) on the irrevocable
twinship of trust and betrayal, and p. 5: ‘modern political legitimacy is an inescapably cooperative
project for the denizens and operatives of a modern state. But it is also, even at best, a highly
intermittent and sporadic achievement’.
34
Locke 1988, pp. 367; 412.
unavoidably follow’.35 He stresses the overwhelming necessity of honouring
one’s compacts, even if it is not to one’s immediate advantage. Not to do so
would make it permissible for others to do the same, ‘and then whatever I
possess will be subjected to the force or deceit of all the rest of the men in
the world’.36 The trust that we put in each other not to infringe each
other’s rights is what keeps us safe and happy. In the sometimes brighter
nature of the Two Treatises we observe men making ‘promises and com-
pacts’ and ‘bargains for truck’.37 Marriages and master–servant relation-
ships are ‘contracts’.38 Money, the lubricator of the world, is established
through ‘common consent’.39 Its value derives from ‘the tacit agreement of
men to put a value on it’.40 While this original settlement has almost
become naturalised with time and greed, trust still features prominently in
monetary exchange. People must believe that the face value of a coin is
equal to the amount of metal on which it is stamped, and they must believe
in the promise to pay a certain amount of money on a credit note – both
tall orders at a time of monetary debasement and massive arrears.
The pressure on trust appears yet firmer when we consider the social
ramifications of Locke’s pessimistic assessment of men’s reasoning
activity. Given that men guzzle the beliefs that suit and surround them,
rather than painstakingly thinking things through for themselves, they
must trust others to do their thinking for them. Locke had already come
to this precarious conclusion as a student at Oxford in 1659. In a letter to
one Tom, he declares that ‘men live upon trust and their knowledg is
noething but opinion moulded up betweene custome and interest, the
two great luminarys of the world, the only lights they walke by’.41
Sounding a note of despair that was to become symphonic in later life, he
urged that in the absence of a rational grasp of the law of nature, we just
take it on authority that we should honour our maker and love others.
Twenty years later, in a 1679 manuscript entitled ‘Opinion’, Locke evokes
our sorry dependence on the thoughts of others. ‘The greatest part of
men’, he says, do not reason themselves but ‘take the common belief or
opinion of those of their country, neighbourhood or party to be proof
enough, as believe as well as live by fashion and example, and thus men
35
38
Locke 1988, pp. 321; 322. See Shanley (1979) on the reconceptualisation, through the development
of social contract theory, of the marriage contract in the seventeenth century.
39
Locke 1991, p. 374.
40
Locke 1988, p. 293. Olivecrona (1974, p. 229) argues that Locke subscribes indirectly to the
compact theory of property because the actual distribution of property is based on the agreement
to use money.
41
Locke 1976–89, i, p. 123.
are zealous Turks as well as Christians’.42 The superiority of faith over
reason is not a habit Locke condones but given its tenacity, he fervently
hopes that we put our faith in the right sources.
The load that trust bears for Locke is perhaps at its starkest in his
refusal to tolerate atheists. In A Letter concerning Toleration, he explains
why: ‘promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of humane
society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, tho
but even in thought, dissolves all’.43 Without a sense of the obligation to
obey God’s will, pressed home by the prospects of heaven and hell, Locke
cannot see how anyone could be brought to honour their words – a virtue
which in itself is ‘necessary to the preservation of civil society’.44 In the
Essays on the Law of Nature, Locke sums up what was to be his lifelong
belief: societatis vinculum fides.45
If we turn to language, we find that there too trust is indispensable.
Trust makes words work. I can use words to signify certain ideas to you
only because you trust me to use those words in a certain way. More
precisely, communication is possible as a result of two kinds of contract
that we make with each other and trust each other to keep. The first I
have called the semantic contract, whereby men agree with each other
that certain sounds should signify certain ideas. Without this ‘tacit
consent’, words have no public meaning at all.46 The second linguistic
contract is the moral one, according to which men agree to speak their
minds. Given the invisibility of ideas which makes words necessary in the
first place, we have to trust that people tell the truth. These two contracts
are the essential mechanisms of communication. They enable otherwise
discreet individuals to become social. But they are based on leaps of faith
which, with every passing word, we are forced to take.
The trust-based nature of language intensifies the argument that trust
more generally is crucial to society. However, other aspects of Locke’s lin-
guistic theory tend in a more destructive direction, threatening the trust that
fuels language and thereby, as well by implication, the trust that fuels society.
In chapters 8 and 9 we saw that Locke is sceptical about people’s
propensity to respect either linguistic contract. The violation of the
semantic contract, when speakers disobey the law of propriety, is at its
most flagrant in elocutio. It is equally if not more pernicious in slippery,
self-serving legal and scriptural exegesis, and in illegitimate political
wordplay that tricks people out of their rights. The breach of the moral
42
Locke 1997, p. 274. 43 Locke 1983, p. 51. 44
Locke 1983, p. 49. 45
Locke 1954, p. 212.
46
Locke 1975, p. 408 (iii.ii.8).
contract is buried in every lie that men tell, whether consciously or not,
both to themselves and to others. Then they tear not only at truth but at
society. The regular transgressions of the two linguistic contracts them-
selves wound the civil body, as well as suggest the disinclination of
Lockean men to honour their words.
The suggestion of infidelity reinforces the doubts which Locke raises in
his broader political meditations and which make it look unlikely that his
stringent demands on trust can ever be met. The sharpest point of the
Second Treatise is to justify revolution precisely because Locke feels that
Charles II, egged on by acquisitive and impious Anglican clergymen, has
broken the people’s trust.
Locke’s worry about faithlessness also surfaces in his interventions in the
debate about how to resolve the currency crisis in the 1690s. We have already
seen how issues of trust cluster around money, and here we see the strain on
the trust which is required to make the world go round. In his Propositions
Sent to the Lords Justices Locke explains that the rationale of ‘coind silver’ is
to save a man the bother of weighing it in its natural unminted condition
and to assure him ‘what quantity of silver he gives, receives, or contracts for’.
‘Clipping’ – slicing off the edges of coins – or melting and recoining them
lighter or with a baser metal ‘defrauds’ people.47 These covert practices
shatter the identity between face value and real value, running roughshod
over the trust that people place in the identity and ultimately destroying
their faith in the currency. However, these practices are rife, so little do
people care for trust. Clipping, Locke says, is ‘so gainfull and so secret a
robbery that penalties can not restrain it . . . it is grown so universal and men
grown so skilful at it’.48 In his Answer to my Lord Keepers Queries he tries to
convince Parliament not to take the counterproductive and useless measure
of raising the face value of coins, the real value being determined by the
quantity of metal, irrespective of its nominal stamp. In the course of
explaining the rough mechanics of monetary exchange, he lets slip a telling
image of the marketplace. It is populated with ‘strangers or such as trust not
one another’, as though the two were interchangeable.49
The picture of perfidy becomes yet bleaker when Locke addresses the
subject of credit. In Further Considerations concerning Raising the Value of
Money he complains that the shortage of bullion in England is forcing its
subjects to rely on ‘hazardous paper-credit’.50 He declares that ‘the necessity
of trust and bartering is one of the many inconveniences springing from the
47 48 49
Locke 1991, p. 375. Locke 1991, p. 377. Locke 1991, p. 394.
50
Locke 1991, p. 450.
want of money’.51 Unlike silver and gold which have ‘intrinsick value’,
paper money has as much value as its signature is trustworthy – which
leaves it, in Locke’s eyes, pretty worthless. Even if I trust a friend to give me
a ‘bill’, I cannot pass it on to a third party, and even less to foreigners, who
justifiably doubt ‘that the man bound to me is honest or responsible’. Paper
bonds ‘are liable to unavoidable doubt dispute and counterfeiting and
require other proofs to assure us they are true and good security’.52
In various ways Locke’s treatment of money resembles his treatment of
language, and both model his overarching conundrum: we must trust
untrustworthy men. Indeed, in early-modern writing the analogy between
money and language is itself a site that is busy with this conundrum. For
Locke, both modes of exchange began with ‘mutual consent’.53 In arbitrary
actions erased by time, and themselves barely transparent to their actors,
‘the tacit agreement of men’ made certain sounds come to stand for certain
ideas, and certain types and amounts of metal for perishable goods.54 Gold
being so much more solid than meaning, its value soon became determined,
while meaning remained inherently contestable. The analogy then shifts:
words are like the face values of coins, signifying a certain meaning or
amount of metal. We have to trust that the signs signify what they profess. In
both cases the signified is inaccessible although, again, money tends to have
the upper hand in the analogy. The connection between the public stamp
and the metal beneath is generally considered more dependable than that
between words and meanings. This leads writers, Locke included, to appeal
to money as the standard to which words should attain.55 However, the
prospect of fool’s gold also looms large, and is compared to empty words.56
Wealth and communication both rest on loose ground.
The figurative web that joins money and language exposes an early-
modern anxiety about fidelity to which Locke gives voice. It shows that we
are unlucky hostages to good faith. It mimics and confirms the unsteadiness
51
Locke 1991, p. 451.
52
Locke 1991, pp. 522–3. See Muldrew (1998) on the huge importance of credit networks in early-
modern England as consumption rose and supplies of gold and silver were limited. He
demonstrates how the ‘community was redefined as a conglomeration of competing but
interdependent households which had to trust one another’ (p. 4) and how the massive explosion
of litigation in the period is testament to a pessimism about sociability and the strength of a man’s
word. Cf. Muldrew (2001) on the social value of money in early-modern England, including
Locke’s important contribution to the subject.
53
Locke 1988, p. 300. 54 Locke 1988, p. 293.
55
Locke 1975, p. 514 (iii.xi.11). Cf. Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 113. See Harrison (1996) on the hierarchies
associated with the analogy between money and language in seventeenth-century French comedy;
Shell (1982) on the disturbing breach of the link between face value and real value with the advent
of paper money and on the internalisation of the monetary form in discourse.
56
E.g. Hobbes (1996, pp. 28–9).
of a civil society that is dependent on precisely the trust that Locke suspects.
And language, the shady broker between individuals, is crucial in making
and breaking that trust, as well as exemplifying the sad dependency.
individualism
The final aspect of Locke’s philosophy of language which I shall use to
illuminate his broader concerns is his contradictory portrayal of semantic
individualism. On the one hand, Locke tells us that individuals make
meaning and therefore make it differently. On the other, he has a more
social story about the development and exchange of meaning. These
competing – or complementary? – accounts have two consequences for
Locke’s social and political theory. The first seems to make Locke’s civil
society logically impossible. The second indicates a more communal and
cohesive, though not necessarily saved society.
Turning to the first of these stories, we have seen Locke insist that
words signify only the ideas that particular individuals happen to associate
with them. We remember that this results in a thoroughgoing semantic
instability, whereby words mean different things for different people.
This questions the very existence of the semantic contract that attaches
certain ideas to certain words. We saw it broken in the previous section.
Now it appears to be a ghost that rarely materialises. While the breaches
of the semantic contract can be reversed by the goodwill of men, the
diffusion of meaning is an endemic condition that language users are far
less able to cure. While the contract could be honoured and commu-
nication made possible with self-reform, it now looks systematically
unfeasible. The problem of semantic plurality is particularly acute in
names of mixed modes, that immense vista of words that structures
cultural life. Mixed modes organise every aspect of non-‘natural’ experi-
ence, from marriage, market and adultery to government, ambition and
revolution. They are the channels of social interaction and development
and yet there is scant agreement about their meanings.
This thesis of radical miscommunication casts a sinister shadow over
Locke’s peculiarly sociable society. In the Two Treatises as well as the Essay,
he makes it clear that language is necessary for even the most basic forms of
society.57 As the means of interpersonal communication it was given by
God to be the ‘bond of society’.58 However, if we take Locke at his word, it
does not facilitate fellowship. The ‘great instrument, and common tye of
57
Locke 1988, pp. 318–19; Locke 1975, p. 402 (iii.i.1).
58
Locke 1975, p. 497 (iii.x.13); cf. Locke 1988, pp. 318–19.
society’ is defective.59 It offers a shaky bridge between solitudes. When
semantic instability is painted into Locke’s picture of society, a strange new
scene stretches out before us, where men brush past each other but barely
feel it. They are divided by walls of public sound.
In addition to problematising society in general, semantic instability
challenges Locke’s account of how political society in particular is generated
and sustained. The commonwealth, the only place where justice can
flourish, is created and invigorated by two kinds of verbal compact that
begin to look implausible in the light of semantic divergence among men.
In the first kind of compact, discrete individuals unite and in the second,
this unity erects a government.60 But how, at the first, can men agree to give
up their ‘natural power’ to the community and meaningfully ‘incorporate,
and act as one body’, given the radically disparate conceptual resources in
play?61 And how moreover, at the second compact – the trust discussed
above – can the trustee understand the same thing as the people when they
entrust their ‘natural rights to execute the law of nature’ on the condition
that the ‘public good’ is served? How can a man be of the same mind with
his magistrate, when he gives him his ‘power . . . of doing whatsoever he
thought fit for the preservation of himself, and the rest of mankind’, and
more pertinently perhaps, his ‘power of punishing’?62 What myriad
interpretations go through the minds of the people and their prince, both at
the moment of the initial declaration and in the countless subsequent
moments when the ‘public good’ must be determined? The pressure on
what has been subsequently (and misleadingly) called ‘the social contract’ is
particularly intense in Locke’s account because he is categorical (again, pace
Hobbes) that consent cannot be tacit.63 ‘Nothing can make any man’ a
subject or member of a commonwealth, ‘but his actually entering into it by
positive engagement, and express promise and compact’.64 That is to say,
the very genesis of political life depends on linguistic actions which are
59
Locke 1975, p. 402 (iii.i.1).
60
Locke is not always consistent about this bipartite arrangement, the first compact tending to get
lost in the second, or forgotten altogether. However, he is keen to promote a two-stage process in
order to see off Hobbes’ commonwealth which only exists in virtue of being represented by a
sovereign. In contrast, Locke wants to establish a strong body of the people, independent of and
prior to their prince.
61
Locke 1988, p. 406. 62 Locke 1988, pp. 352–3.
63
Locke 1988, pp. 347–8. While the first compact between individuals in the state of nature might be
properly characterised as a ‘contract’, the compact between people and government is emphatically
not. Contracts benefit all parties, whereas the second compact is designed purely for the benefit of
the people. The legal relationship between government and people is a trust, whereby only one
party (the people) benefits. I am grateful to Jim Murphy for clarifying this issue. Cf. Harrison
2003, p. 212.
64
Locke 1988, p. 349.
themselves dependent on a common understanding which Locke denies.
The foundation of the state turns out to be made of sand.
The distinctively high bar that Locke sets for politics accords with the
commitment his contemporaries have to these metamorphic linguistic
recitations. When men come of age they are required to take ‘oaths of
fealty, or allegiance, or other publick owning of, or submission to the
government of their countreys’.65 Locke’s fervent commitment to express
consent therefore makes sense in the context of the culture of oath-taking
in which he lived. Locke’s sensitivity is particularly acute as a result of the
embarrassing series of oaths which had tracked the changing allegiances of
the English people.66 In addition to these most fundamental of
declarations, ordinary lives are also punctuated by speeches, in churches
or courts for example, whereby people face up to their government. In all
these instances, contrasting ideas throng to the voices raised in unison.
The birth of the state is reliant on an agreement that is lacking. The body
of political society looks still-born.
Perhaps this is too strong. The role of express consent in Locke’s
political theory should not be overplayed.67 Locke’s argument about
consent is partly designed to rebut Filmer and is only part of his over-
arching polemic to limit political obligation and rationalise resistance. It
shows that men are not born subjects but make themselves so and that they
might, if the conditions of their consent are not met, resume their liberty.
It is wielded to prove the freedom and equality of men, and to justify
resistance to a government which does not serve the public good. Although
Locke sometimes presents it as a necessary condition of political legiti-
macy, it is by no means sufficient and often fades away in the light of the
deeper (though not unconnected) definition of lawful authority: govern-
ment for the public good.68 Not only is consent not the (only) linchpin of
Locke’s political theory, but it is hard to imagine. Even Locke loses the first
compact in his story, or conflates it with the second, which itself begins to
look uneasy in the face of a limited franchise, a hereditary monarchy and
more generally, in the face of history.69
65
Locke 1988, p. 309. 66 See Dunn (1969, p. 141) on this ‘excessive multiplication of oaths’.
67
Lively and Reeve (1989, p. 70) refer to Locke being ‘notoriously unclear’ on consent. For further
discussions, see Brough 2003; Dunn 1967; Dunn 1969, pp. 130–43; Halldenius 2003, pp. 266–74;
Harrison 2003, pp. 200–12; Simmons 1993.
68
See, for example, Locke (1988, p. 137), where he makes ‘the consent of the people’ the only basis of
‘lawful governments’. On the centrality of the public good see for example the definition of
‘political power’ (p. 268).
69
The more particular problems with the theory might not be as serious as is sometimes supposed. It
is plausible that all the people consent to be ruled by an hereditary monarchy and by a legislature
However, even if consent is in practice more behavioural and hypothe-
tical than express, it still calls on ideas that are subject to interpersonal
divergence and that are very probably, we remember, linguistically con-
stituted. Even if men do not publicly articulate their relationship with the
government, they still have to accept it, or not, using the unsteady currency
of mixed modes. Even if people find, rather than put, themselves under
government, they, who are naturally free, still have to decide whether they
would consent to their government, were they asked. They still have to
judge whether their ‘trustee . . . acts well, and according to the trust reposed
in him’.70 Given the normative dislocation that afflicts the people, they are
likely to judge distinctly from each other, let alone from their deputy. We
have returned then, to the great load borne by political judgement. We have
already seen it at an individual level, weakened by the deceptive power of
words. Now we see it inter-subjectively, destabilised by plurality.
To the extent that Locke is unequivocal that only express consent can
transform us from discrete individuals into a political unity, then that
political unity looks unfeasible in the light of semantic disunity. To the
extent that his texts also speak against the historicity of these primordial
performances, individuals must see, eye to eye, the rationale for their
ruling and being ruled. Even if the architecture of compacts is more
mythic than real, subjects and kings still have to agree the terms, as it
were, of their relationships with each other. Insofar as they do so
differently, they subvert the stability of Locke’s state.
However, Locke’s account of meaning is not always uncompromisingly

individualistic. Turning now to the more communal aspects of his
account, I consider how these soften the lines that divide men from one
another. In doing so, I provide a critique of the claims that Locke’s
political theory is individualistic.71 These claims are problematic not only
that is elected by a limited franchise. However, the latter does become problematic in the light of
Locke’s majoritarian rubric for the second compact (Locke 1988, pp. 331–3). See Dunn (1967,
p. 154) on how Locke’s theory of consent is not concerned with the form of government but with
how individuals become subject to others.
70
Locke 1988, p. 427.
71
The debate that these claims have occasioned is persistent, wide-ranging and valuable. I shall give
just a taste of it here. Lukes (1973, p. 141) classifies Locke as a political individualist, a claim that has
normative as well as methodological content. Taylor (1989, p. 193) identifies him as an atomist. By
contrast, Tully (1980) argues, against ‘common misunderstandings’ (p. 11), that Locke is not ‘a
philosopher of atomised and abstracted individuals’ (p. 24) but that ‘society is an irreducible datum
of man’s existence’ (p. 49). Dunn (1979) explores the societal relations that forged and limited
Locke’s (and the Lockean) self. Holmes (1993, pp. 190–1) defends liberals – including Locke –
against the charge of individualism. Lloyd Thomas (1995, p. 69) argues that Locke is ‘less
individualistic than is usually supposed’ on the issue of rebellion.
because they miss the collective elements of Lockean culture, but also
because they confuse concepts which are distinct and draw modern dis-
tinctions which skew early-modern arguments. For example, the ways in
which Locke might be termed a ‘methodological’ individualist (for whom
individuals are logically prior to society) do not prevent him from being,
Perhaps the most striking case for the prosecution was made by Macpherson (1954 and 1962).
Brace (1998) develops Macpherson’s account of Locke’s individualistic theory of property in the
context of the tithe disputes of the 1650s. Strauss (1953, p. 234) finds that he agrees with
Macpherson, arguing that Locke’s doctrine of property embodies ‘the spirit of capitalism’ and that
the rationale for civil society is to emancipate the acquisitiveness of individuals (p. 246); cf. p. 248
on how Locke made the ego the ‘center and origin of the moral world’. McNally (1988, p. 83) and
Wood (1984) both characterise Locke as an agrarian capitalist. Wood (1983) offers a socio-political
reading of the Essay and argues that ‘Locke’s ideal man is an individualist’ (p. 6). For commentary
on similar themes, though often dissimilar in content see Cohen 1995, p. 188; Coleman 2005;
Gough 1973; Grant 1987, pp. 1–5; Laski 1936, p. 160; Tarcov 1984; Taylor 1989, pp. 195–6; Waldron
1988, pp. 137–252. Macpherson’s case has been forcefully rebutted. Hundert (1977) shows that
Locke’s theories of property and politics support those who are rational and industrious in general,
and attack those who are lazy and irrational, be they peasant or lord. Dunn (1969, pp. 203–67)
argues against Macpherson that Locke was a proponent not of a ‘rationality of infinite desire’ but
one ‘firmly premised upon the reality of an after life’ (p. 262). See also Dunn (1968, p. 71) on
Locke’s ‘ambivalence’ towards the balance between property rights and charity, (1979) on Locke’s
punishing, religious individualism, (1993, pp. 38–41) on Locke’s suspicion of the market and the
profound limitations of his liberal individualism. Tully (1980) reveals that Locke is a defender not
of private property rights, but of inclusive claim rights from which exclusive use rights flow, all of
which derives from the fundamental duty to preserve mankind, and which turns out to be ‘in
hindsight, an obstacle to capitalism’ (p. 143). Cf. Tully (1979) for a further contextualisation of
Locke’s claims and (1993, pp. 71–95) for further reflections on Macpherson. By contrast, and in
detailed opposition to Tully, Waldron (1988, pp. 137–252) claims that Locke has a special rights,
rather than a general rights justification of private property, thereby reasserting Locke’s
individualism. See Tully (1993, pp. 118–36) for his response. Grant (1987, p. 131) argues that the
natural law is primarily individualistic in the state of nature and collectivist in civil society. At the
other extreme to Macpherson, Kendall (1965) argues that Locke’s majoritarian principles oppose
individual rights. See also Kramer (1997), who argues that far from being an individualist, ‘Locke’s
labour theory of property is rooted in a thoroughgoing communitarianism’ (p. ix). An important
part of the debate relates to the status of rights and duties in Locke. Strauss (1953, pp. 226–9) argues
that for Locke natural law (and duty) flows from natural right. Cf. Strauss (1959, p. 215) for the
same suspicion. Cox (1960, p. 189) claims the ‘irreducible primacy of rights over duties’ for Locke.
Simmons (1992) provides a powerful account of Lockean rights that are not ‘the mere shadows of
the duties we owe to God’ (p. 3). See Dunn (1969, pp. 262–7) on the theological centre of Locke’s
political thought and the questionable relevance of it for today; cf. Dunn (1985, p. 55, and 1990,
pp. 9–25), where he modifies his old view.
On the development of the interplay between self-interest and sociability see Hont (1987), who
tracks the complex relationship between individualism and sociability and its connection to
enlightened self-interest. Cf. Klein (1994) on Shaftesbury and sociability. On the development of
individualism more generally and of the ‘self’ in the early-modern period see: Comparato (1996)
on the uneasy advance of ‘individualism’ in the Baroque era; Balibar (1996) on how particular
junctures in religion, politics and metaphysics contributed to and problematised the ‘invention’ of
individuality. See also Booy 2002, p. 15; Chartier 1989; Coleman 1996; Mascuch 1997; Nardo 1991;
Thweatt 1980; Webber 1968. Moriarty (2003) offers a particularly illuminating and corrective
account of the fallen, neurotic, alienated and misanthropic ‘self’ that emerged in the turn ‘inward’.
While it is a story about Descartes, Pascal and Malebranche, it has much to teach us about what
Locke, who read those authors so deeply, thought about the individual.
simultaneously, a kind of collectivist, for whom the common good takes
priority over exorbitantly selfish desire.72 By the same token, Locke and,
perhaps even more so, Locke’s predecessors, would not have recognised
these categories; the influential Thomist–Aristotelian topos that man is a
social animal is both descriptive and normative.73 Likewise, for the Cicero
of De officiis, the gregarious nature of men is continuous with their duty
to benefit one another.74 And for Locke, the natural inclination that
drives men into society, itself planted there by God, cannot be separated
from our moral obligations.75 I argue that Locke is less of an individualist
than has been supposed, but in doing so I also suggest that his complex
treatment of the individual in society defies the anachronistic dichotomies
that have been forced on it. Locke reveals a place where agents and
structures, and concern for oneself and others, bear down on each other
with such a bewildering intricacy that they cannot be held apart. This is
not to say, however, that this less crudely individualistic arrangement
brings a Lockean politics back from the precipice.
There are three ways in which Locke’s account of how meaning is
generated and shared evokes a more integrated society. The first comes
from the core of his theory of communication and opens up an intense
arena of intersubjectivity. While the constructivist element of his epis-
temology prevents communication, his vivid attitude towards basic
human experience plunges us into communication far more deeply than
much recent philosophy of language would allow. We remember that for
Locke, though meanings are ultimately the ideas of individuals, they can
be common to all because all (probably) have the same, simple ideas.
Only when individuals have the same ideas in their heads do they
properly communicate. This stringent requirement delivers a peculiarly
rich quality to mutual understanding. Just as a man can only grasp the
meaning of the word ‘pineapple’ if he has tasted one, so can he only
communicate about that fruit if both he and his friend have crushed one
between their teeth.76 We might retort that Locke’s Europeans, who have
only heard tell of what grows in the Indies, can use the word perfectly,
72
For expositions of the modern dichotomy between individualism and holism see Hollis 1994,
pp. 5–20; Elster 1989, pp. 13–21. There are many (often non-normative) ways in which Locke may
well be described as an ‘individualist’; see, for example, Tully 1993, pp. 53; 299; Simmons 1993,
p. 21.
73
74
Cicero 1991, p. 61. Remember too that in De inventione Cicero (and subsequent humanists)
describe the ‘time when men wandered at large the fields like animals’ (Cicero 1976, p. 5). See
Skinner (1978, ii, p. 157) on the humanist/Thomist debate on the solitary/social nature of man.
75
Locke 1988, p. 318. 76 Locke 1975, p. 424 (iii.iv.11).
that the sensation of a pineapple has nothing to do with the meaning of
the word.77 While this might be strictly correct, it is a somewhat reductive
view. Locke’s account evokes that heady cocktail of language and
experience, whereby we can get a taste of another person’s mind. People
who have had the same visceral encounters seem to communicate dif-
ferently about those encounters than those who have not. To intimate the
penury of language without consciousness, Locke explains how a blind
man, desperate to discover what the ‘names of light, and colours’ meant,
beating his head with visible objects and seeking the advice of books and
friends, ‘bragg’d one day’ that ‘scarlet’ was ‘like the sound of a trumpet’.78
While this instance illuminates the holes in the language of a blind man,
his groping for another sensation that approximates to the energy of
scarlet captures the sensory pregnancy of words that the twentieth-century
externalist misses.79 When the blind man converses about colours his
communication is of a different order to that of those who can see. In the
unmistakable presence of experience then, the barriers between people
dissolve and meaning becomes a truly common entity. While Locke’s
identification of meaning with ideas may well, in the case of complex
ideas, cut individuals off from one another, in the case of simple ideas it
brings them into an extraordinary intimacy.
The second, social aspect of Locke’s semantic theory directly contra-
dicts his individualistic thesis and posits profoundly incorporated human
beings. According to this alternative thesis, it is the community, not
individuals, that dictates which words and meanings are in common use.80
Language is an essentially collective construction, primarily intended to
convey ideas between people, and legislated by them cooperatively.81 In
particular, the mixed modes that we have seen in tatters now appear the
most communal ideas of all. Almost in the same breath that Locke ties
them to discreet individuals, he explains that they instantiate the practices
of communities. While ideas of substances arise from the natural world,
mixed modes – which themselves constitute the thick conceptual web that
is culture – arise from collective habits of thought and action. That is to
say, the entire symbolic system that structures experience for individuals
derives from society. It is ‘customs and manner of life’ that determine
77
Locke 1975, p. 632 (iv.xi.4). See Ayers (1991, i, pp. 207–17) for an acute account of the way in
which Locke’s theory grasps ‘what we might call the ontology of perception’ (p. 210). He argues,
with Locke, that ‘there is something prior to language which makes language possible’ (p. 206).
78
Locke 1975, p. 425 (iii.iv.11). 79 Cf. Ayers 1991, i, p. 273.
80
For examples of Locke’s confident appeal to common use see Locke 1975, pp. 504 (iii.x.23) and 687
(iv.xvii.24).
81
Locke 1975, pp. 402 (iii.i.2); 409 (iii.iii.3).
what ideas a particular ‘country’ has.82 This is the reason why there are
words in one language that have no translation in another. Locke is clear:
‘mankind have fitted their notions and words to the use of common
life’.83 Far from controlling culture then, individuals draw breath from it.
I do not so much speak, as the discourse into which I am born. While this
holistic explanation of meaning is often eclipsed by the individualistic
one, it persists nonetheless, making it unclear whether actors write the
rules of the games they play.
The third feature of Locke’s analysis that intimates the pull of society
on individuals is darker and takes the argument into the moral sphere.
While we are obliged by God, when our lives, liberties and estates are not
in danger, to subordinate self-interest to the good of mankind, in practice
we do not.84 While in the course of his life, Locke does struggle with the
law of nature, in particular its relation to self-interest – sometimes
looking into the abyss of hedonism – and while he admits that personal
interest and conventional morality will often follow from and coincide
with the divine law, he cleaves to the view that we are obliged by God to
serve others, often at the expense of ourselves.85 The best of virtues, he
declares in the Essays, ‘consist only in this: that we do good to others at
our own loss’.86 However, the sad truth is that men readily break ‘the
great principle of morality, to do as one would be done to’ in the service of
their ‘interest’.87 The interesting thing is that while the reality is selfish,
this selfishness has as its pre-eminent goal the esteem of others. In chapter 9
we met the law of fashion that dictates what the community applauds and
disdains, and we saw how it rules with an iron hand.88 More than any-
thing, men want to be liked by other men. They stop at nothing to avoid
contempt. They are fixated on others as a result of being centred on
themselves.
82
Locke 1975, pp. 432–3 (iii.v.8). 83 Locke 1975, p. 349 (ii.xxviii.2).
84
Locke 1988, p. 271; 1975, p. 70 (i.iii.7).
85
For a clear example of Locke’s exploration of the view that loving our neighbour is the best way to
secure our present happiness see Ethica A (1692): ‘all the good we do to them redoubles upon
ourselves and gives us an undecaying and uninterrupted pleasure’ (Locke 1997, p. 319). On the
coincidence of natural law and interest (and customary virtue) see Locke 1954, pp. 207; 215; 1975,
pp. 69 (i.iii.6); 356 (ii.xxviii.11); 1997, p. 299 (Of Ethic in General ).
86
Locke 1954, p. 207. Indeed, he devotes an entire disputation to proving that ‘the basis of the law of
nature’ is not ‘every man’s own interest’ (pp. 205–15). Cf. Locke 1975, p. 75 (i.iii.13). Contra ‘the
Hobbist’ (p. 68 (i.iii.5)), our duty to others derives from God, and will often not coincide with our
own interests but must nevertheless be obeyed – see p. 352 (ii.xxviii.8); Locke 1988, p. 271; Locke
1997, pp. 302–3 (Of Ethic in General ); Locke 1975, p. 75 (i.iii.13)).
87
Locke 1975, p. 70 (i.iii.7). 88 Locke 1975, pp. 356–7 (ii.xxviii.12).
This fervent desire to conform feeds into language, as egoism and a
social conscience collapse into each other. Men who are frantically trying
to be conventional will embrace the mixed modes and the beliefs of their
community. For fear of ‘reproach’, men do not ‘dare venture to dissent
from the received opinions of their country or party’.89 Eager to follow in
the ‘foot-steps of others’, we give ‘our assent to the common received
opinions, either of our friends, or party; neighbourhood, or country’.90
Almost literally then, individuals, like the words they utter, are fashioned
by the community.
However, these three communal elements ought not necessarily to
comfort us. While there will be more communication than Locke
sometimes suggests, the nature of the exchange may still be impoverished.
It could be a trade of the shells of words, a swapping of impressive sounds
rather than ideas. Even if it is ideas that are transacted, they are likely to
come from that miscellany of conventional, defective beliefs, such as
those that applaud polygamy, throwing oneself onto the funeral pyre of
one’s husband, duelling, and religious intolerance.91 They are the ideas of
‘parties’ and of the marketplace, shot through with interest, dogma and
error. Somewhat ironically, for all Locke’s dissatisfaction with semantic
individualism and instability, he does not want us slavishly to emulate
the ideas of the vulgar, or even of our benighted peers. He loathes those
who are impervious to the ‘tincture’ of truth, but ‘camelion like . . . take
the colour of what is laid before them’.92 He would much rather we turn
away from the world, as he did in the Essay. With exemplary labour,
Locke has ‘raised himself above the alms-basket, and not content to
live lazily on scraps of begg’d opinions, sets his own thoughts on work, to
find and follow truth’.93 The community of opinion is therefore not
to be wished for, but it lures us all the same. The pull of the crowd
militates against our responding to our highest calling and thinking for
ourselves.
reform
It seems that Locke’s philosophy of language leaves men and their
communities in an even more wretched state than that in which they
already were. The communal aspects of his linguistic theory offer a
bittersweet prospect that itself dims in the glare of Locke’s otherwise
89
Locke 1975, p. 83 (i.iii.25). 90 Locke 1975, p. 718 (iv.xx.17). 91
Locke 1954, pp. 171–3.
92
Locke 1993, p. 82. 93 Locke 1975, p. 6 (Epistle to the Reader).
stringent semantic individualism. And in themselves, the legislative and
normative powers of the community entrench flawed and egotistical
activity. Is there any way out of this predicament? While language has the
inherent propensity to falter in its tasks, it is a God-given faculty that
could work sublimely if its human users worked at it. The problems of
language are not theoretically necessary, and might therefore be solved. I
end this book by considering what hope Locke offers of amending the
way that people exploit words.94
While Locke’s anti-innatism denies easy access to God and morality,
and seemed to his contemporaries to signal atheism and moral relativism,
it does leave open the possibility of reform. If there are no limits to how
individuals are scripted, they might be directed to a good part. In the
mercurial course of Locke’s intellectual trajectory, he struggled to identify
the cause of thought and action. He wanted it to be reason, but eventually
decided that habit is at the root of even the deepest of our ‘instincts’.95
Even passion and interest, as well as philosophy and behaviour, are
formed by repetitious practice.96 Depressingly, this insight gives ground
to irrational contingency, but it also offers the opportunity of deep
psychological transformation. While ‘education and custom’ have
ingrained ‘ill habits’, these might be reversed by ‘contrary habits’.97 The
delights of sin will pale in the practice of virtue, since ‘repetition wears us
into a liking, of what possibly, in the first essay, displeased us’. Evoking
their miraculous power, Locke goes on to declare that ‘habits have
powerful charms, and put so strong attractions of easiness and pleasure
into what we accustom our selves to, that we cannot forbear to do, or at
least be easy in the omission of actions, which habitual practice has suited,
and thereby recommends to us’.98 In a manuscript called Ethica that he
wrote in 1693, he explains how men can be ‘made alive to virtue and can
taste it’. A vicious man can be turned around if he is brought ‘to practise
in particular instances and so by habits establish a contrary pleasure’.99
This belief in the formative authority of habit dates back to antiquity. In
The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle had explained how ‘moral virtue comes
about as a result of habit’, and therefore how crucial it is that children are
94
In doing so, I draw heavily on Tully (1993, pp. 179–241) and Hundert (1972), who have identified
Locke as, among other things, a reformer. Cf. Taylor (1989, pp. 159–76) on Locke’s ‘punctual self’.
Mehta (1992) criticises Locke’s disciplining, directive regimes for eliminating freedom and
difference.
95
Locke admits his change of mind and the ‘difficulties that may yet remain’ at Locke 1975, p. 285
(ii .xxi.72).
96
For example, Locke 1975, pp. 261–2 (ii.xxi.45).
97
Locke 1975, p. 281 (ii.xxi.69). 98 Locke 1975, p. 280 (ii.xxi.69). 99 Locke 1997, p. 320.
tutored in good habits.100 ‘We ought to have been brought up in a
particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in
and be pained by the things that we ought.’101 Locke develops these twin
claims that the nature of man is pliable and therefore an appropriate
subject for (benevolent) manipulation. His three juridical apparatuses –
divine, civil and ‘humanist’, as Tully calls them – provide the motiva-
tional structures whereby men might be recovered.102 Of these, the last is
to be used in pedagogy, the sanctions of praise or disgrace being ‘very
sensible’, as Locke explains in Some Thoughts concerning Education.103
The stage is set for a metamorphosis of speakers. They might be
habituated to limit words to ideas, to honour the linguistic compacts and
to enumerate the simple ideas that they include under the name of a
complex one. However, such an education would have to be so intense
and disinterested that it might just be a fantasy. Certainly, it would only
be accessible to the educated classes. Locke only came to write on the
subject of education because his polite friends, Mr and Mrs Edward
Clarke, asked him for advice on rearing their son. Locke is quite explicit
that the rigours of linguistic reform can only be expected from the elite.
In his distinction between the ‘civil’ and the ‘philosophical’ users of
words, he dismisses the former as beyond the pale.104 Picking up on
Bacon’s idols of the marketplace, and his despondency about them, Locke
concedes that ‘the market and exchange must be left to their own ways of
talking, and gossipings not be robb’d of their ancient privilege’.105 Locke
is addressing the truly privileged, as opposed to the vulgar. It is not the
speech of society as a whole then, that Locke wants to reform but that of
gentle society – many of whose members would, according to the vast
extension of the term at that time, have counted themselves ‘philoso-
phers’. Arguably, it is this segment of society that Locke (and his con-
temporaries) often mean by ‘society’ and that has been such a large
subject of this chapter. While he did sometimes widen his sights, as in the
case of the (non-)working poor, and while he did sometimes talk of ‘the
people’ in the comprehensive sense that his democratic champions have
subsequently taken up, his audience and his reformatory concern was the
literate body.106
100
Aristotle 1980, p. 28. 101 Aristotle 1980, p. 32. 102 Tully 1993, p. 225.
103
Locke 1989, p. 116. 104 Locke 1975, p. 476 (iii.ix.3). 105 Locke 1975, p. 509 (iii.xi.3).
106
Wood (1992) argues that Locke has an anti-democratic agenda. Ashcraft (1992b) counters with
Lockean radicalism. In the Two Treatises Locke certainly argues for universal consent and
thereafter a majoritarian principle (Locke 1988, pp. 330–1). Kenyon (1977) argues that while Locke
was relatively radical, the Whigs were not his ‘deferential disciples’ (p. 1), but more conservative,
the line between themselves and the Tories often blurring.
Yet even within this learned group, the possibilities for reform
are limited. Locke writes a whole book about the problem of language
precisely because most ‘philosophers’ belie their name and abuse language
in the ways that he describes. If they are to teach the young to speak, the
same old muddles and duplicities will be embedded. Moreover, many
philosophers have a vested interest in maintaining the mist of words. In
the face of his linguistic ‘remedies’, Locke envisages that ‘the schools, and
men of argument would perhaps take it amiss to have any thing offered,
to abate the length, or lessen the number of their disputes’.107 The
educative process will only recycle the fog.
Locke’s Essay is the way out of this vicious circle. Logic was the means
by which boys (and some lucky girls) learnt how to speak about the
world. By proffering his own ‘Logick’, Locke intervenes at the very start
of early-modern education, and so cuts off the indoctrinating supply at its
source.108 It also confronts those men who have already drunk, decon-
structing their talk until it is no longer palatable. By revealing the con-
fused and empty contents of vaunted words and by putting words (back)
in their subservient place, Locke reeducates his readers. Yet precepts alone
will be of little effect. ‘No body is made any thing by hearing of rules, or
laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing
without reflecting on the rule.’109 The passive receipt of the proposition
that words signify the speaker’s ideas will result in the same unthinking,
unproblematic acceptance of that fact that had always dogged philoso-
phers. It will lodge inertly in our minds. Instead, we must travel again and
again along the tracks of thought that elucidate and exemplify that
proposition. Only then will we be embarrassed by immodest claims and
get a relish for strictly ideational and agonisingly expository speech. Locke
manages to invigorate us in this way by labouring and redecorating his
point. ‘I shall frankly avow’, he confides directly to us in his epistle, ‘that I
have sometimes dwelt long upon the same argument, and expressed it
different ways, with a quite different design’. He goes on to clarify what
‘pains’ he has taken:
Some objects had need be turned on every side; and when the notion is new, as I
confess some of these are to me; or out of the ordinary road, as I suspect they will
appear to others, ’tis not one simple view of it, that will gain it admittance into
every understanding, or fix it there with a clear and lasting impression. There are
few, I believe, who have not observed in themselves or others, that what in one
way of proposing was very obscure, another way of expressing it, has made very
107 108 109

Locke 1975, p. 509 (iii.xi.3). Locke 1975, p. 720 (iv.xxi.4). Locke 1993, p. 19.
clear and intelligible: though afterward the mind found little difference in the
phrases, and wondered why one failed to be understood more than the other.
But every thing does not hit alike upon every man’s imagination. We have our
understandings no less different than our palates.110
The kaleidoscope of repetitions draws readers in until we can see with our
own eyes what Locke sees. This experience of intersubjectivity not only
enables us to internalise his arguments, but also gives us a long taste of
one of them. It shows us true communication, where speaker and hearer
attach the same train of ideas to a train of words. By turning the
understanding in on itself, Locke makes an archetypal act of commu-
nication. There can be no doubt as to what is on his mind. The pecu-
liarities and differences of his readers’ mental contents, that are usually
obstacles to communication, cease to be so as Locke writes his mind in its
labyrinthine entirety on to the page from every conceivable point of view.
Locke’s circumlocutory elucidation of the problems of privacy and
plurality simultaneously divulges the means by which they can be over-
come. In cutting the furrows of Locke’s mind in our own, we learn how
to effect such a perfect synchrony, the toil that is required for it, and
the pleasure that it brings. The ‘delight’ that follows all these ‘pains’ of
the understanding is like the ‘hunter’s satisfaction’, only greater, since the
understanding ‘is the most elevated faculty of the soul’, and its exercise
the most lovely.111 In form as well as content, then, the muscular forays of
book iii are designed to habituate, identify and elate its readers, so that
they emerge with a relish for ideational speech.
Yet the possibility of linguistic reform only slightly illuminates the
gloom. For the great majority of the very few members of Locke’s society
who would be candidates, Locke fears that old habits will not die but
continue to thrive as the second natures of men who are desperate to
impress each other. In the tense lattice of the Essay, Locke expresses the
same conviction about human intransigence as we have just heard on the
subject of human mutability, and I suspect that his unhappy commitment
to the former is the stronger. While he absolutely believes in the pliability
of children, he is struck by the obduracy of men. Indeed, it is precisely
because of the effectiveness of youthful casting that he has little faith in
breaking the mould in later life. He complains in his journal in 1677
that the erroneous talk which we hear in the nursery dyes our mind so
deeply that ‘afterwards [it] very difficultly receives a different tincture’.112
110 111
Locke 1975, p. 8 (Epistle to the Reader). Locke 1975, p. 6 (Epistle to the Reader).
112
MS. Locke f. 2, p. 125 (117).
The Essay ends on this depressing note. The penultimate chapter is
entitled ‘of wrong assent, or errour’, and details the inexorable motors of
unreason.113 He explains how ‘wrong principles’, ‘riveted by long custom
and education’ when men were children, are now ‘beyond all possibility
of being pull’d out again’.114 The diverse and often appalled reception of
the Essay would perhaps have confirmed Locke in his long-nursed anguish
at the fractured and delusional community in which he lived. Certainly,
at the very end of his life, he turns away from it and concentrates on the
words of God rather than man.
It seems likely then, that Locke feels that people will not mend their
unrealistic and private speech. Urged on by the fragile nature of language
itself, men will continue to pretend even to themselves and to turn their
backs on each other. In turn, they will persist in hacking at the polished
halls of Locke’s rational society.
Locke’s philosophy of language throws up some apparently intractable
tensions in his political thought. It reveals the shabbiness of men’s poli-
tical judgement on which states rise or fall. It unmasks the terrifying
powers of self-delusion and vanity that silence toleration. It suggests that
the trust which makes society civil cannot be found in men. It threatens to
blow apart the shared understanding that would give life to the commu-
nity. And finally, it lays bare the moral individualism at the hollow core of
Lockean society, an individualism that is, all the same, tenderly transfixed
by the estimation and the false words of others. In the duplicitous face of
language, the enlightened giant of Lockean liberalism looks unsteady on
his feet. Or perhaps Locke is not the confident, idealistic champion that
he is often claimed to be.115 Indeed, perhaps the obstacles that he puts in
the path of politics are not embarrassing inconsistencies but acute insights
into the ineluctably problematic reality of political life, into the dense
layers of justification and motivation that organise human action and into
the fissures between theory and practice that comprise our condition.
To seek for a resolution of his paradoxes may be to labour under a
113
The final chapter is somewhat of an appendix, laying out the division of the sciences and locating
·, Logick’, within his framework.
the foregoing Essay, that is to say ‘‚o¶
114
Locke 1975, p. 712 (iv.xx.9).
115
Locke’s reputation as a liberal was established in the 1930s, for example by Laski 1936 (see Tully
1993, p. 97). More recently, Tarcov (1984, pp. 1–2) has explained how ‘there remains a very real
sense in which Americans can say that Locke is our political philosopher’; Tarcov goes on to avow
his ‘liberal politics’. A number of commentators have contested this modern ascription, notably
Dunn (1993, pp. 38–41), Hundert (1977) and Tully (1993). On Locke’s characteristic realism see
Dunn 1990, pp. 13–14 and 25. On the optimistic rationalism characteristic of liberalism see
Waldron 1993, p. 43; Dunn 1993, p. 32.
misapprehension about our nature. It may be that we just have to live
with these septic imperfections. Locke’s commonwealth is no castle in the
air made by the rational agents who are only the stuff of dreams. It is
fantasy to expect that we should agree on a universal set of values and then
live by them. Far from crafting our world according to reason, we are not
even transparent to ourselves. Nevertheless, mired in false opinions and
brutish passions, we can work at reason. Bravely treading the path
between hope and experience, Locke shows us that though we are proud,
unfaithful and insular, still we must judge, trust, and interact. Locke’s gift
was not only the splendid architecture of his state, designed with equality,
rights and duties in proportions that still enthral us, but also the clear-
sighted perception that it can only be built with frail men. His poignant
meditation on language helps us to feel the captivating warmth of his
imaginative arc and the brittle nature of its parts.
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r
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Index
Aarsleff, Hans, 3, 16, 99, 102, 106, 107, 110, 212, tripartite paradigm of word--concept--thing,
244, 264 26--7, 92--4
Abbot of St Martin, 205 verbal circularity, 124
Abelard, Peter, 34 verbal perspicuity, 70, 72, 77
Abrams, Philip, 244, 248 virtue/vice, 85, 138
abstraction, 30--1, 94, 95, 202--3 Armstrong, Robert L., 195
see also essences of substances; ideas; mind; Arnauld, Antoine, 15, 58, 110, 134, 174 see also
universals/particulars Port-Royal
Acosta, José de, 228 Ashcraft, Richard, 191, 260, 300
Adam, 23, 96, 98, 99, 102, 113, 160, 233, 235 Ashworth, E. J., 3, 13, 14, 15, 18, 25, 28, 29, 38,
Agricola, Rudolf, 66, 69, 83 102, 196, 219, 264
Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius, 84 atheism, 287
akatalepsia, 119 Atherton, Margaret, 92, 202
Alexander, Peter, 194, 195, 196, 221, 264 Augustine, St, 15, 69, 144, 155, 161, 165
Allen, James, 21 authority, deference to and importance of, 37,
Almond, Philip C., 99, 212 61, 138, 157, 171, 173, 267, 268--9, 286--7, 298
Alston, William, 219 Ayers, Michael R., 3, 91, 92, 118, 188, 193, 194,
Anaxagoras, 114, 117, 212 196, 200, 203, 219, 221, 244, 247, 264, 270,
Anderson, Judith H., 154 296
angels, 155, 168, 240
animal language, 112 Babel, 102, 104, 113, 133, 134, 238
Aquila, Richard E., 110 Bacon, Francis, 130, 171,
Aquinas, 30, 40, 94--5, 129 Aristotelian logic, 13, 22, 30
archetypes/ectypes, 135, 207, 224, 227, 233, 282 complex substances, 203
Aristotle and Aristotelianism, 7, 8, 13, 25, 31, 37, constitutive and deceptive power of words, 87,
50, 52, 91--6, 257, 280 166, 174
Art of Rhetoric, The, 65, 83 empty words, 68
categories, 32, 35 ephemeral ideas retained by words, 161, 251
continuing hold over new philosophers, 92, fascination, 178
98, 105--7, 129, 187, 201, 256, 275 gold, 198
experience, 93, 118 grammar, 41
education, 171, 299 idols of the marketplace, 122, 176, 222
identity of concept and thing, 28, 93 idols of the tribe, 121
in utramque partem, 82 importance of sensation, 160, 161
language maps thought, 19, 20, 26--7, 47, 275 induction, 26
language maps world, 29, 93--4, 185 language maps nature, 98--101
man a political animal, 295 money and language, 156--7
Organon, 13, 28 relationship between speech and writing, 47
simple concepts of substances, 30 semantic individualism, 136--7
sophistic speech, 38 sensible signs, 155
semantic universality, 27, 56, 129 syllogisms, 21, 36
349
350 Index
tripartite paradigm of word--concept--thing, Burke, Peter, 91, 179
121--3 Buroker, Jill Vance, 111
universal language and philosophical Busby, Richard, 46
grammar, 57, 62, 101--4 Byrne, Laura, 148
verbal circularity, 166, 254
Bailey, Alan, 115 Cabalism, 96
Balibar, Etienne 270, 294 Caesar, Julius, 65
Bardout, Jean-Christopher, 23 Calvin, John, 149
Barlow, Thomas, 15 Campanella, Thomas, 41, 52, 54
Barnes, Jonathan, 261 Carey, Daniel, 206, 225
Barton, John, 79, 80 Castiglione, Baldassare, 179, 273
Batz, William G., 227 Caussin, Nicholas, 69--70, 80, 83, 84
Beck, Cave, 50 Cave, Terence, 3, 79, 85, 132, 133
Behan, David, 108 censorship, 171, 215
Bennett, Jim, 99 Chappell, Vere, 270
Bennett, Jonathan, 194, 195, 200, 203, 219, 221 Charles, David, 19
Bennington, Geoff, 212 Charles I, 181
Berault, Peter, 122 Charles II, 258, 288
Berkeley, George, 3 Chartier, Roger, 294
Berman, David, 187 China, 96, 102
Bernier, François, 228 Chomsky, Noam, 3, 54, 55, 110
Berti, Silvia, 166, 170 church, the, 80, 81, 139, 149, 151, 177, 181, 213
Besnier, Pierre, 92, 135 Cicero,
Bianchi, Massimo Luigi, 96 ambiguous words, 86
Biblical exegesis, 80--1, 132, 139, 141, 148--51, 165, common use, 71
213, 214, 215--18, 287 constitutive and deceptive power of words, 86
Biletzki, Anat, 173 eloquence as a weapon, 83
Black, Robert, 42, 49 importance for early-modern philosophers, 65
Blackloism, 95 importance of sensation, 75
Blackwell, Constance, 13 irony, 79
Blair, Ann, 98 law, 153
blind man, 241, 242, 296 meanings contingent on culture, 62
Blount, Thomas, 14, 80, 84, 85, 156 power of metaphor, 72
Boehme, Jacob, 5, 103 relationship between wisdom and oratory, 81
Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 74, 77, 83 sight, 69, 77, 160
Bold, Samuel, 216, 218, 251 society, 70, 295
Bolton, Martha Brandt, 94, 98, 194, 200, 207 verba need res, 68
Bono, James T., 3, 16, 99, 102 circularity, see words
Borchardt, Frank L., 96 citizenship/subjection, 270
Boyle, Robert, 73, 124--6, 135--6, 194, 198, 203, Clare, William, 50
215, 280 Clarendon Code, 213
Brace, Laura, 294 Clark, S. H., 262
Bracken, Harry M., 111, 170 Clarke, Desmond, 30
Brett, Annabel, 149, 270 Clauberg, John, 17, 22, 23
Breva-Claramonte, Manuel, 54 Clauss, Sidonie, 104, 134
Briggs, John Channing, 68, 98 clothes metaphor, 42, 109, 156, 199, 246, 255
Brinsley, John, 46, 50, 52 Cockeram, Henry, 158
Brookbank, J., 50 Cohen, G. A., 294
Brown, Vivienne, 270 Cohen, Murray, 3, 93, 110, 154
Brownover, Sylvester, 188 Coimbra commentaries, 15, 16, 19, 27--8, 31
Buickerood, James G., 1, 14, 21, 22 Coke, Zachary, 35
Bullokar, John, 158 Coleman, Janet, 161, 294
Bullokar, William, 43, 45, 53, 54 Coles, Elisha, 62, 158
Bulwer, John, 70, 103, 160 Colie, Rosalie L., 202, 227, 232, 238
Burgersdijk, Franco, 16, 19, 25, 26, 31, 32, 34 Colman, John, 196, 219, 244
Index 351
Comenius, John Amos, 48, 50, 51, 56, 62, 104, Demonet, Marie-Luce, 3, 16, 27, 134
156, 160, 247 DeMott, Benjamin, 104, 107, 161
common use De Rijk, L. M., 29, 34
democratic and erroneous, 60, 71--2, 112--14, Derrida, Jacques, 216
122, 177, 199 Descartes, René, and Cartesianism, 7, 280, 281
problematic (insecure/inaccessible/non- book of nature, 101
existent), 16, 234--8, 290 clear and distinct ideas, 22, 30, 136--7, 156, 159,
relation to philosophical use, 72, 199, 223, 193
236--7, 300 deceptive power of words, 177
unproblematic, 70--1, 233--4, 236 ‘deep structure’, 54
see also semantic contract experience diverges from reality, 107--11
Comparato, Vittor Ivo, 170, 294 hyperbolic doubt, 196, 280
concupiscence, 162 in new logic, 20, 30, 33
confession, 168 Le Monde, 4
conscience, 169, 170, 246, 260, 284 method, 26
consent, express/tacit, 291--3 passions, 174
Coote, Edward, 82 problematic metaphor of vision, 159--60, 166,
Cope, Kevin L., 208, 219 247--8
copula, 20, 187 rejection of Aristotelian logic, 30
Cordemoy, Louis Gerauld de, 111, 156 scholasticism, 37
Cornelius, Paul, 103 syllogisms, 21
corpuscularianism, 124, 194, 201 thought without language, 134, 166, 242, 256
Costello, William T., 42 tripartite paradigm of language--mind--world,
Cottingham, John, 111, 156 55, 108, 185
Coudert, Allison P., 3, 16, 96, 103 truth, 128
Cowell, John, 14 universal language, 135
Cram, David, 104, 105, 107 words obscure ideas, 162--3, 171
Cressy, David, 116 Digby, Kenelm, 72, 123, 156
Croll, Morris W., 66, 98 Digest of Justinian, 158
Cromartie, Alan, 138 disputation, 35--7, 82, 212, 245
Cudworth, Ralph, 135, 216 divine right, 213, 258
cultural difference, 39, 62--3, 132, 152, 227--8 Drake, Stillman, 101
see also custom; words dreams, 127
culture: structured by language, 181, 290, 295--6 Dugard, William, 66
see also custom; words Du Moulin, Peter, 24, 30, 36
Culverwel, Nathaniel, 245 Dunn, John, 191, 229, 244, 245, 248, 249, 259,
Cumberland, Richard, 245 260, 268, 270, 277, 283, 285, 292, 293, 303
Cureau de la Chambre, Marin, 112 Dury, John, 48, 51, 61
Curley, Edwin, 149, 194 Du Trieu, Philippe, 14, 20, 21, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33,
currency crisis, 288 34, 194
custom, 59--61, 71, 112, 132, 140, 147, 227--9, 286,
296, 299, 303 Easton, Patricia A., 14, 22, 23, 25
Ebbesen, Sten, 92
Dalgarno, George, 45, 59, 105, 135 Eco, Umberto, 101
Daston, Lorraine, 144 Eden, 75, 99, 104
Davidson, Hugh M., 80, 144, 145 education, 4, 35, 41, 50, 61, 160, 261, 274
Davies, Tony, 98, 106 moulds men, 22, 222, 232, 267--8, 269, 273, 303
Day, Angel, 56, 66 see also self
Dear, Peter, 91, 98 Egypt, 102, 103
De Dijn, Herman, 22 elocutio, see rhetoric
Deely, John, 15 Elsky, Martin, 3, 103
De Grazia, Margreta, 99 Elster, John, 295
De-Lawne, Nathanael, 24, 36 empiricism, 8, 37, 92, 118, 186, 188, 247
Della Rocca, Michael, 110 nihil est in intellectu, 50, 74, 108, 119
352 Index
Eng, Erling, 232, 267 Glat, Mark, 228, 229
English Guide to the Latin Tongue, The, 44 God,
Enthusiasm, 246, 271 abuse of words threatens religion, 212--13
Epicureanism, 21, 118, 197, 230 all ideas in, 110
Epistemology, see, knowledge conventionally described, 181
Erasmus, Desideratus, 68, 69 day of judgement, 232
essences of substances Descartes on, 109
Locke’s equivocation about, 198, 200--1 divine language, 103, 177
nominal not real, 125--6, 189, 198, 252, 263 divine teleology, 69, 186, 192, 193, 214, 239,
real, 33, 93, 124 278--9, 281, 290, 295
Euclid, 149 gulf between sign and signified, 164
Evans, G. R., 149 oaths, 287
experience, obligation to him, 244, 278--9, 297
Aristotelian, 93 see also Adam; Biblical exegesis; heaven and
Baconian, 99, 101 hell
diverges from reality, 34, 91, 107, 186 gold, 100, 125, 195, 197, 207, 223, 263, 282, 289
source of knowledge, 189, 240 Goldie, Mark, 191, 213, 258
see also ideas; mind; sensation Golinski, Jan V., 98, 124
Grafton, Anthony, 13, 42
fairies, 127 grammar, 41--63
Farnaby, Thomas, 57, 82 attempts to tie verba to res, 42, 47--51
Feingold, Mordechai, 19--25, 42, 64, 65, 136 character of the discipline, 55
Feldman, Seymour, 170 circularity, 45, 48
Felton, Henry, 61, 85, 113 focus on verba not res, 8, 42--3, 49, 63, 154
Fenner, Dudley, 66, 80 operations of the mind, 53--5
Ferguson, Robert, 76, 78, 80, 81 propaedeutic role, 41
Filmer, Robert, 213, 218, 292 underpinned by universal and rational order,
Fish, Stanley E., 3, 98, 132--48 56--9
Flathman, Richard E., 127 words contingent on use, culture and time,
Formigari, Lia, 3, 92, 104, 196, 219, 229, 264 43, 59--63
forms words reflect mind, 53--6
Aristotelian, 95, 97, 119 words reflect world, 52
Baconian, 100 Grassi, Ernesto, 82
Boyle’s, 124, 126 Gray, Hanna H., 81
Foucault, Michel, 3, 16, 98, 101, 154 Greenblatt, Stephen, 174
freedom, 138, 147, 156, 165, 238, 252, 265, 270 Grice, H. P., 14
Frege, Gottlob, 3, 19 Grotius, Hugo, 215
Guyer, Paul, 196
Garber, Daniel, 110
Gassendi, Pierre, Haakonssen, Knud, 151, 179
imagination, 20 habit, 230, 269, 284, 287, 299
maxims, 37--8 Hacking, Ian, 3, 111, 144, 190, 212, 219
mitigated scepticism, 118--21, 280 Halldenius, Lena, 292
monstrous births, 204 Hammacher, Klaus, 23
new logic, 21, 22, 23, 24 Hammond, Nicholas, 146, 216
probable argument, 26, 37 Hampsher-Monk, Iain, 283
propositions, 21 Harris, Ian, 192, 193, 245
simple perception, 31 Harrison, Helen L., 289
thought as inner speech, 18 Harrison, Ross, 291, 292
Gaukroger, Stephen, 22, 66 Hartlib, Samuel, 51, 61
Geneva, Ann, 101 Hausman, David B., and Alan, 108
gesture, 102, 103, 155 heaven and hell, 193, 273, 282, 287
Givner, David A., 194 hedonism, 230, 297
Glanvill, Joseph, 67, 74, 76 Heinrichs, T. A., 126
Index 353
Hellenistic approach to signs, 3, 21 Hooke, Robert, 247
see also Epicureanism Hoole, Charles, 43, 44, 46, 50, 51
Herbert of Cherbury, Edward, Lord, 135 Horace, 77
Hermetic tradition, 96 Hoskins, John, 67, 78, 79, 85, 86
hieroglyphs, 96 Howell, A. C., 68, 98
Higgins-Biddle, John C., 260 Howell, Wilbur, 14, 19, 25, 84
Hight, Marc A., 196 Huizinga, Johan, 94
Hill, Christopher, 149 humanism, 13, 26, 37, 59, 68, 69, 70, 112, 130, 179
history, time and language, 59, 130, 132, 141, 144, Hundert, E. J., 294, 299, 303
150, 216, 228--9, see also words Hunter, Ian, 91, 144
Hobbes, Thomas, Hutton, Sarah, 135
abuse of words, 179
attack on Descartes’ visual metaphor, 166 idealism, 195
commonwealth, 291 ideas,
conventional descriptions of God, 181--2 actively, voluntarily composed, 203, 220--9, 235
deceptive power of words, 177--8 caused by but do not resemble things, 107,
definition of ‘res’, 107
110, 115--28, 120, 125, 126, 193--5, 197
Enthusiasm, 271
clear and distinct, 109, 147, 158, 159, 200, 246,
gold, 157, 289 281
human nature, 285 complex, 198--209, 221--9, 243, see also mixed
importance of sensation, 75 modes; substances
insignificant words, 164 divergent, 9, 39, 80, 133, 144, 220--9, see also
language based on trust, 167 semantic instability
lies, 170
natural signs of things, 193
logical composition, 20
only particular, 127--8, 142, 186
metaphor, 78 Platonic, 96
mnemonic and communicative functions of private, insensible, ephemeral, obscure, 9, 15,
words, 161--2, 251 45, 69--70, 84, 144, 155--7, 160--6, 232, 239,
monstrous births, 204 240--57, 281, 287
moral science, 244
relations, 222
names, 157
resemble things, 27, 28, 92, 93, 95, 96, 99, 193,
passions, 231 194, 195--6
semantic individualism, 137--43 sensible and autonomous, 51, 76--8, 157--60,
semantic universality, 202 242--8, 246, 252
sensibility of words, 15--16 shared, 134--5, 137, 220, 295--6
social contract, 291 simple conception, 19, 30, 31, 54, 94, 104, 106,
social passions, 175
121, 136, 189, 200, 203, 221, 252, 256
speech and reason, 18
see also mind
state of nature, 283 identity, 144, 232, see also self
syllogisms, 21 Iliffe, Rob, 166
truth only an attribute of language, 111 individualism/holism--collectivism, 294--5, 297,
verbal perspicuity, 71 303
victorious aim of rhetoric, 82
innate ideas, 188, 226, 231, 245, 267, 299, see also
words alone universal, 128, 186, 202
maxims
words as arbitrary signs, 87, 113, 134 interest, 226, 230, 231, 249, 260, 270, 284, 286,
words distinct from ideas, 31 299
words learnt before ideas, 172--3, 251 intersubjectivity, 146, 271, 302
words signify ideas not things, 28, 126--8, 187 Israel, Jonathan, 170, 191
Hoffheimer, Michael H., 260
Holdsworth, Richard, 16, 28, 35, 41, 64, 70, 161
Hollis, Martin, 295 Jackson, B. Darrell, 21, 155
Holmes, Leigh H., 221 James, Susan, 83, 118, 148, 174, 270
Holmes, Stephen, 293 Jardine, Lisa, 13, 32, 42, 100
Homer, 77 je ne sais quoi, 118, 200
Hont, Istvan, 294 Jephtha, 283
354 Index
John of St Thomas, 14, 27--8 conventional, 226, 272--3
Johnson, Francis R., 49 Locke’s three laws, 272, 300
Jolley, Nicholas, 110, 219, 256, 264 natural, 142, 147, 192, 225, 230, 244--5, 249,
Jones, Bassett, 52, 56, 57 267, 272, 282--3, 286, 297, see also morality
Jones, Richard Foster, 66, 74, 97 of propriety, 234, 235
Jonson, Ben, 44, 58, 63 see also common use; semantic contract
Law, Jules David, 247
Kahn, Victoria, 80 Lear, Jonathan, 30, 94
Katz, David S., 3, 96, 154 Le Clerc, Jean, 36
Keckermann, Bartholomaeus, 17, 25, 31 Le Doeff, Michele, 99
legal exegesis, 133, 141, 214
Kelly, Donald R., 150
Leijenhorst, C., 28, 126, 165
Kendall, Willmoore, 294
Kenyon, J. P., 300 Lennon, Thomas M., 92, 118, 176, 186, 194, 196
Kersey, John, 14, 158 Levi, A. H. T., 91
Kessler, Eckhard, 3, 93 Lewis, Mark, 46, 48--9, 50, 58, 60, 106
King, William, 213 Ley, John, 36
liberalism, 303
Kinney, Arthur F., 78
Licensing Act, 215
Kircher, Athanasius, 103
Kirwan, Christopher, 155 lies, 81, 166--70, 180, 257, 288
Klein, Lawrence E., 294 Lightfoot, John, 216
knowledge, 9, 106, 188, 189, 200, 278--85 Lily, William, 56, see also Royal Grammar, The
cannot exceed ideas, 189, 278 Limborch, Phillip van, 217, 238, 246, 265
certain knowledge of self and God, 192, 244, Lively, Jack, 292
Livy, 65
282
Lloyd Thomas, D. A., 293
civil/moral science, 138, 139, 227
of morality, 138, 192, 225, 243, 244, 278, 284 Locke, John,
of nature, 24--35, 91--128, 193, 196, 199, 278, characteristically ambivalent, a problematiser,
279--80 237, 242, 277--8, 283, 284, 290, 293, 303--4
see also experience; Locke; maker’s knowledge; constitutive and deceptive power of words, 9,
170, 239--76
morality; nature; sight; words
exemplary speaker, 239
Knowlson, James, 3, 104
Kramer, Matthew H., 294 inclusion of Book III in Essay, 1, 20, 23, 24,
Kraye, Jill, 121, 135, 179, 225 226, 255, 275
Kremer, Elmar J., 110 individual, emphasis on, 188, 210, 219
Kretzmann, Norman, 196, 219 individualism/holism--collectivism: false
Kripke, Saul, 206 dichotomies, 290--8
innocence of corrupt speakers, 9, 223, 269,
Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 13, 42, 64
276
Kroll, Richard W. F., 98, 154
Kusukawa, Sachiko, 13 innovator, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 24, 92, 210--38, 240,
255
knowledge and language, 9, 185, 188, 241, 243,
labour: necessary and desirable, 99, 146, 162, 165, 255, 278--85
235, 271, 301 language does not map nature, 30, 185--209,
Lamy, Bernard, 52--3, 67, 68, 71--2, 75, 79, 82, 85, see also nature
112, 135, 152, 180 language and society, 9, 278, 280--303
Lancelot, Claude, 58 maxims and innate principles, 37, 109, 110
Land, Stephen K., 3, 22, 161, 196, 219 metaphor as the origin of language, 73, 220
Landesman, Charles, 196, 219 moral science, 179, 192, 225, 227, 244, 248,
Lane, A., 52, 53, 57 281, see also knowledge; morality
language, see words on rhetoric, 65, 67, 211, 234, 259
Larmore, Charles, 91, 109, 110, 113, 118 private language, 2--3, 120, 219--20, 224
Laski, Harold J., 294, 303 proper conduct of the understanding, 22, 192,
Latin, 49--50, 58 277, 278--9, 281
law, 138, 152--3, 177, 212 purposes of the Essay, 190--7, 229, 231, 238,
civil, 272 279, 281, 301--2
Index 355
reasoning from experience, 118, 188, 192, 194 McRae, Robert, 91, 187
semantic instability, 8--9, 210--38, 290--3 maker’s knowledge, 137, 244
semantic universality, 131, 214, 219 Malebranche, Nicholas, 22, 110, 121, 163--4, 175,
supposition, 29, 263--4 191, 232
syllogisms, 21, 22 Malherbe, Michel, 14, 100
texts owned by Locke, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, Mandelbrote, Scott, 81, 99, 149, 218
28, 36, 41, 44, 46, 49, 51, 52, 58, 65, 66, 68, Marenbon, John, 13, 29, 34, 37
73, 76, 80, 82, 84, 85, 102, 103, 110, 111, 117, Marin, Louis, 144
125, 135, 136, 149, 151, 158, 163, 179, 191, 194, Markley, Robert, 3, 99, 165
196, 225, 231 Markus, R. A., 21, 155, 227
traditional theorist of language, 6, 186--7 Marshall, John, 118, 146, 151, 179, 191, 248, 259, 270
the self, 229--33, see also identity; interest; law; Martinich, A. P., 219
morality; passions; reputation; self; vanity mathematics/geometry, 137, 248--9, 250
words signify ideas alone, 8, 28, 49, maxims, 37, 188, 270
185--209, 219, 276, 279 common notions, 109, 147
Lodwick, Francis, 47, 105, 134 first truths, 120
logic, 13--40, 42 innate truths, 135
ambiguous words, 7, 37--9, 140 meaning, see signification
character of the discipline, 13, 19--25, 231, 247, Mehta, Uday Singh, 299
255--6 Melanchthon, Philip, 72, 77, 79
circularity, 32, 115, 117, 119, 122 Melzer, Sara E., 146, 165
deference to authority, 37 memory, 15, 61, 66, 160--2, 232, 247, 250, 251, 301
elision of differences between words, concepts Menn, Stephen, 69
and things, 17, 23, 29, 31, 154 mental reservation, 168
in grammar, 53 mentalism, see words
internal weaknesses, 35--9 Mercer, Christina, 13, 96
Locke’s Essay as a logic, 1--2, 13, 20, 22, 255--7, Michael, Frederick S., 22
275, 301 Miel, Jan, 54
simple concepts, 19--20, 30, 203 Mill, John Stuart, 3
predicaments and predicables, 32--4, 35 Miller, Alexander, 149, 150, 219, 221
sophistry, 26, 36, 37 Milton, J. R., 118, 120, 187, 194
three operations of the mind, 13, 19--21, 55, Milton, John, 46, 48, 49, 59, 102
187, 256 mind,
truth in, 30, 32, 34, 35, 203 active: possibly erroneous/divergent, 221, 235
Pascal on, 145 discursive thought, 18, 128, 161--3, 239--40,
verbal not real, 32, 36--7 247, 251, 276
words--world parallelism, 7, 24--35, 91, 93 distorts nature, 30, 34, 91, 93, 94--5, 97, 112,
Long, A. A., 21 115, 185, 209
Longinus, 74 divergent minds, 133, 142, 145, 219, 302
Losonsky, Michael, 14, 196, 219, 264, 270 generic minds, 129, 134--5, 188, 210, 219
Louis XIV, 266 mirrored by language, 17--24, 53--6, 68, 187
Lowe, E. J., 219 sensuous, 51, 74, 160, 250
Lukes, Stephen, 293 see also ideas
Lullism, 103 Mitchell, Linda C., 42
Lycan, William G., 219 mixed modes, 113, 222, 282
arbitrary, 224
Maat, Jaap, 105, 107 clear and distinct, 243--6
McCanles, Michael, 99, 132 customary and convenient, 227--9
McCraken, Charles, 108 divergent, 224--9, 290
Mackie, J. L., 196, 206 incarnated by language, 251, 266, 284
McLaverty, James, 229 insignificant names of, 252
Maclean, Ian, 3, 101, 111, 114, 152, 158 obscure, 248--50, 251, 252
McMullin, Ernan, 124 see also ideas; non-natural entities
McNally, David, 294 Modrak, Deborah K., 27
Macpherson, C. B., 294 Molyneux, William, 36, 213, 214, 219, 248, 254
356 Index
monarchy, absolute, 230 Newton, John, 18
money, 286, 288--9 Nicole, Pierre, 15, 117, 134, 163, 169, 174, 175--6,
money and language, 71, 157, 234, 289 214, 228, see also Port-Royal
Monfasani, John, 66, 70, 82, 98, 114 Nidditch, Peter H., 192
monstrous births, 97, 116, 119, 128, 204, 222 nominalism/realism, 34, 94--5, 202, 221
Montaigne, Michel de, 48, 61, 81, 116--17, 131--2, non-natural entities, 30, 113, see also mixed modes
134, 142, 144, 164, 166, 204, 210, 212, 231 Norman, Buford, 144
moral linguistic contract, 167, 257, 277, 287, 300 Nuchelmans, Gabriel, 14, 19, 20, 22, 25, 32
morality Nuovo, Victor, 259
constituted by language, 179--82, 265--7, 284
free-floating words, 85--7, 142 Oakley, Francis, 244
invented by men, 137--8, 225--7, 282, 284 oaths, 170, 287, 292
knowledge of, 192, 248, 278, 281--5 Ockham, William of, 18, 27, 29, 34, 95
made by God, 226 Olivecrona, Karl, 286
merely conventional, 147, 226, 227, 244, 260, Ong, Walter, 13, 32, 34, 36, 42, 82, 154
284, 298 original sin, 259, 270
obscure, 248--50, 283--4 Osler, Margaret J., 20, 118
partiality, 142, 148, 229--33, 297 Ott, Walter, 3, 14, 15, 21, 187, 196, 197, 219, 221
a relation, 222 Ovid, 113
relation of true to merely conventional Oxford, 25
morality, 226, 267, 297 Christ Church, 14, 245
relation to interest, 226, 297
relativism, 225, 260, 299 Padley, G. A., 3, 42, 50, 54, 55, 92, 110, 191
semantic fixity, clarity and accessibility, 138--9, Panaccio, Claude, 27, 53, 54
158, 162, 243, 244--6, 281--3, 284 paper credit, 288
semantic instability, 130, 138, 142--3, 146--7, paradiastole, see rhetoric
148, 225--7, 229 Parish, Richard, 54, 118
threatened by language, 85, 130, 138, 179--80, Park, Katherine, 93
250, 265--6 Parkin, Jon, 245
Moriarty, Michael, 108, 144, 169, 176, 294 particles, 187, 256
Muldrew, Craig, 289 Pascal, Blaise, 117, 143--7, 162, 165, 168--9, 172,
Murphy, James Bernard, 15 175--6, 210, 235
Murphy, James J., 64, 66 passions, 65, 83, 138, 142, 143, 147, 148, 230, 231,
249, 260, 299, 304
Nadler, Stephen, 110, 191 social, 174--6, 268, 272--4, 298, 303
naked truth, 109, 159 Passmore, J. A., 22, 23, 270
names, 7, 51, 157, 187, 256 Paul, St, 216, 231
nature Paxman, David B., 227
Aristotelian ontology, 30--5, 92--6 Peacham, Henry, 69, 73, 75, 77, 78, 86, 220
constituted and betrayed by language, 1, 9, Perez-Ramos, Antonio, 244
176--9, 197, 209, 263--5, 280--1 Perkins, William, 174
identical with mind, 94, 95, 98 Peter of Spain, 29, 30, 35, 37
limits and shapes language, 206--7, 224, 265 Phemister, Pauline, 28, 95
linguistic, 101, 103 Philipps, Jenkin, 47, 49, 52, 56, 60
mirrored by language, 7, 24--35, 52, 92--111, Phillips, Edward, 93, 157, 158
121, 124 pictorial dictionary, 51, 156, 247
not mapped by mind and language, 7, 8, 34, 97, Pinborg, Jan, 28, 29, 38, 54
104, 112--28, 176--9, 186--209, 275, 279--80 pineapple, 221, 241, 295
see also reality plain speech, 65, 66--7, 70--4
Neoplatonism, 96 Plato, 18, 82, 93, 96--7, 120, 171, 197, 204--5, 228
Nerney, Gayne, 142, 175 Cratylus, 102
new philosophy, 34, 35, 91, 97--128, 136, 186, 193, Plutarch, 134
see also relevant authors Pocock, J. G. A., 138, 229
natural light, 67, 109, 162, 166 political judgement, 9, 230, 260, 277, 282, 283,
Newton, Isaac, 105, 217 284, 285, 293, 303, 304
Index 357
political legitimacy, 282, 292 rationalism, 8, 92, 160, 186
Poole, Joshua, 68 use of intellect not sense, 108
Poole, William, 99 Ray, John, 107
Popkin, Richard H., 91, 149 reality, formal/objective, 108, see also nature
Porphyry, 32, 106, 204 Reedy, Gerard S. J., 149, 180
Port-Royal Reeve, Andrew, 292
additional signification, 180 reflection, 189
advertised focus on ideas not words, 23 reform, 5, 22, 48, 49--51, 102--7, 199, 238, 271--2,
ambiguous words, 38--9, 130 275, 299--303
Aristotle’s categories, 35, 178 relativism, 39, 115, 130, 225, 260, 299
Cartesian substances, 30 religious/political unrest, 168, 170, 171, 190, 213,
common use, 16 258
confusion of language and thought, 24 representation, 16, 77
dualism of sign and signified, 43 reputation,
education, 22 made by our words, 42, 64, 82, 176, 274
elision of difference between words and our greatest care, 175, 273, 284
thoughts, 110 resurrection, 224, 232
ideas not images, 20 revolution, 282, 285, 288
language signifies thought, 47, 54--5, 57 rhetoric, 26, 42
meaning of words contingent on use, 60, 63 ambiguous words, 7
probable reasoning, 26 can be used for honest or evil ends, 82
real definitions, 33 character of the discipline, 64--7
reform of logic, 22 dispositio, 66
relationship between written and spoken elocutio, 64, 65--6, 72--4, 78--81, 211, 287
word, 46 free-floating words, 138
scepticism, 117 in utramque partem, 13, 82, 117
second operation of the mind, 20 inventio, 66
self-deception, 169 memoria, 66, 160
semantic individualism, 39 moves the emotions, 65, 83--4
semantic universality, 137, 165 paradiastole, 85, 138, 143, 148, 174, 179, 234,
sensible words, 15, 156 265
sophisms of authority, 269 plainness, 66--7, 70--4
syllogisms, 21 power of words themselves, 8, 74--6
truth, 128 pronuntiatio, 66
verbal circularity, 32 relation to wisdom and goodness, 81
Preston, John, 54 semantic obscurity, 73--4
primary/secondary qualities, 124, 125, 194 superfluity of words, 68
Prinz, Jesse J., 196 to be avoided, 99, 211, 259
private language problem, 2--3, 219, 224 ut pictura poesis, 77, 160
probability, 26, 37, 124, 144, 190, 192, 225, 279 victory rather than truth, 65, 81--7, 154
hypotheses, 124, 186, 194 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 70, 71, 77, 86
property, 213, 285 Rice, Lee C., 148
Protagoras, 115, 127, 143 Richetti, John J., 262
Pufendorf, Samuel, 4, 87, 113, 151--3, 155, 157, 162, rights, 141, 148, 167, 173, 213, 230, 259, 266, 270,
168, 174, 180, 225, 235 280, 286, 287, 304
Putnam, Hilary, 3 Robotham, John, 48, 56, 62
Puttenham, George, 71, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79, 86 Rogers, G. A. J., 91, 191, 192, 197, 244
Romanowski, Sylvie, 110
Quine, Willard, 3 Ronberg, Gert, 132
Quintilian, 59, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 77, Rorty, Richard, 91, 196
81--2, 84, 85, 86, 161, 289 Roseman, Phillip W., 101
Ross, George MacDonald, 111, 140
Rossi, Paolo, 3, 13, 25, 98, 103, 161
Ramism, 19, 21, 25, 26, 34, 66, 154 Royal Grammar, The, 41, 44, 45, 49, 52, 53, 56,
Ramus, Petrus, 19, 66, 84, 106 58, 60
358 Index
Rudavsky, T. M., 99, 149 in grammar, 130
Rummel, Erika, 149 in logic, 37, 130, 211
Rutherford, Donald, 98 intentional/inadvertent, 8, 129, 135--6, 139, 210,
Ryan, Alan, 170 213, 218, 223, 238, 290
‘merely’ semantic, 136--7, 238
need for an arbitrator, 142
Salmon, Vivian, 3, 98, 104, 177
result of ineliminable liberty, 79, 142, 235
Sanctius, Franciscus, 44, 49, 54, 57, 59, 60 result of voluntary composition of ideas, 221,
Sanderson, Robert, 18--19, 20, 25, 26, 31, 32, 35, 235
37, 38 in rhetoric, 130, 211
Savan, David, 164 sense/reference/evaluation, 130--1, 147, 227
Savonius, Sami, 36 spirit/letter distinction, 141, 145, 152, 214
Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 43, 44, 55, 56
semantic universality, 27, 37, 38, 56, 58, 129, 130,
scepticism, 34, 91, 108, 110, 112, 114--28, 131, 186,
134--9, 137--9, 147--8, 210, 214, 217--18, 220
189, 190, 192, 195, 196, 280 Seneca, 59
Schaffer, Simon, 6, 136 sensation, 93, 95, 104, 189
Schmaltz, Ted M., 91, 108 importance and power of, 50--1, 76--8, 159,
Schmitt, C. B., 91 160, 162--3, 185, 240--57
Scholar, Richard, 118
misleading, 108, 109, 115, 116, 119, 121, 127, 159
scholasticism, 13, 19, 35, 101, 165, 256
source of all knowledge, 267
Schouls, Peter A., 272 see also empiricism
Schuurman, Paul, 1, 14, 17, 21, 22, 23, 25, 194, 256 sense/reference distinction, 29, 130, 227
scientific revolution, the, 91, see also new separation of powers, 274
philosophy Sergeant, John, 28, 95--6, 126, 196
Scioppius, Gaspar, 49, 57 Serjeantson, Richard, 37, 65, 113, 173
Scott, Jonathan, 260
Sessions, W. A., 99
Sedley, David, 21, 29, 96
sexual metaphor for science, 99
self Sextus Empiricus, 113--16, 131, 212, 228
Cartesian, 108, 109 Shanley, Mary Lyndon, 286
divided, 170--1, 259 Shapin, Steven, 6, 91, 136, 137
externalist model of construction, 62, 171, Shapiro, Barbara, 59
231--8, 267--8, 269, 270, 298, 300, 302
Shaw, Samuel, 46, 49, 52, 58, 60, 66, 68, 79,
fashioned by language, 174--6, 267, 298
84--5, 174
focused on others, 230, 272--4, 284, 295, 303 Shell, Marc, 289
fragmented, 133--4, 142--3, 144--5, 148, 152, Sherry, Richard, 66, 69, 70, 72, 73, 77, 78, 86
231--3, 249 Shirley, James, 47, 49, 51, 56, 60
intransigent, 272, 302 Shuger, Debora, 66, 150
partial, 142, 148, 229, 230--1, 249 sight
self-deception, 140, 169--70, 172, 260--2, 264,
and knowledge, 51, 98, 104, 188, 247--8
269--71, 285, 288, 303, 304
and metaphor, 108, 109, 159--60, 163, 166,
self-love, 284, see also interest; passions; self; 246--7, 271
vanity powerful, 46, 77--8, 99, 158--60, 161
semantic contract, 73, 155, 277, 287, 300 signification, 5, 14, 21, 43, 130, 296
fragile, 64, 72, 78, 151--2, 211--14, 234, 287, 290 evaluative, 147, 152
liberty to break it, 213, 227, 234
formal signs, 15
obliges, 235
hearer’s/reader’s meaning, 79, 132, 141, 145--6,
secure, 71, 233--4 153, 215, 216, 219
see also common use; words inferential signs, 21, 118, 278
semantic individualism, 38, 136, 219, 223, 235, instrumental signs, 15
238, 290--3 natural signs, 102, 103--4, 249
a source of hope, 298 sensible and public, 157--60, 246
Locke’s contradictory account, 237, 277, 296
speaker’s meaning, 6, 28, 38, 53, 74, 188--9
semantic instability, 7, 8--9, 16, 62--3, 79, 86, see also words
129--53, 138, 181, 210--38, 249, 257, 275, 290--3 Simmonds, N. E., 179
and scepticism, 131 Simmons, A. John, 294, 295
Index 359
Simon, Richard, 150, 216 Stillman, 3, 98, 104
Simone, Raffaele, 59 Stockwood, John, 43, 47, 53, 58, 66
sincerity, 260, 280 Strasser, Gerhard F., 51
Skinner, Quentin, 3, 64, 65, 66, 77, 85, 127, 130, Strauss, Leo, 149, 171, 294
138, 139, 147, 295 Struever, Nancy, 3, 81, 85, 179
Slaughter, M. M., 3, 104 Suarez, Francisco, 95
Smiglecius, Martinus, 28, 34, 38 Subbiondo, Joseph L., 106
Smith, John, 66, 72, 78, 79, 81 substance
Smith, Nigel, 81, 99 /accident dichotomy, 52
Smith, Samuel, 17 Aristotelian, 30, 94, 105, 106, 197
Snider, Alvin, 98 Cartesian, 109, 110
social ‘contract’, 291--3 complex ideas: could be false, 203
society, complex: made up of simple qualities
disturbed by language, 9, 83, 166, 173, 181, 212, sensations, 100, 106, 125, 200, 203, 222, 263
238, 277, 284--5, 287--8, 290--3, 303 divergent ideas of, 222--4
made by language, 41, 69, 187, 287, 290, 291, ideas of substances: given by nature, 206--7,
295--8 222, 224, 237
makes meaning, 290, 297 ideas of substances: made by men, 125--6,
see also custom; words 198--209
Socinianism, 151 insignificant names of, 252
Socrates, 82, 93 Locke’s deconstruction of, 31, 100, 198--209,
Soles, David E., 196 222--4
Solomon, Julie Robin, 122 simple ideas: cannot be false, 19, 30, 106, 203
Sommerville, Johann P., 168 simply conceived even after Aristotle, 121,
Sorabji, Richard, 111 200
Sorell, Tom, 28, 91, 127 unknown, 117, 198, 199--200, 207, 252, 261,
soul 263, 279, 281
immaterial, 279 supposition, 29, 144, 263--4
immortal, 193 Swynnerton, Thomas, 66, 80
South, Robert, 135, 157, 180--2 Sydenham, Thomas, 124, 232, 247
Southgate, B. C., 91, 95 syllogism, 21, 26, 36
Spade, Paul Vincent, 13, 18, 29
Spellman, W. M., 271 tabula rasa, 62, 135, 229, 240, 267
Spencer, Thomas, 6, 23 Talon, Omar, 66
Spinoza, Benedict de, 4 Tarcov, Nathan, 294, 303
arguments about words not things, 137 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 228
biblical hermeneutics, 147--51 Taylor, Charles, 293, 294, 299
censorship and free speech, 170--1, 174 Terence, 65
clear and distinct ideas, 159--60, 256 Terminism, 29, 263
ethics of understanding, 22 textual exegesis, 132, 141, 148, 214--18, see also
language as a source of error, 164 biblical exegesis; legal exegesis
power of words, 178 Thiel, Udo, 191, 232
reform of logic, 22 Thomas, Ivo, 22
sensible and treacherous words, 156 Thomas, Keith, 116
social passions, 174 Thomas of Erfurt, 43, 54, 55, 56
substance, 110 Thomism, 25, 30, 94, 295
thought without language, 23 Thune, Nils, 103
Sprat, Thomas, 68, 87, 107 Tipton, Ian, 195
Spruit, Leen, 19 toleration, 9, 190, 228, 230, 238, 258, 277, 279,
Stanford, P. Kyle, 206 280, 287, 303
state of nature, 230, 249, 282, 283, 285--6 Towerson, Gabriel, 218
state of war, 148, 283 travel literature, 206, 227
Steadman, John M., 68, 98 trinity, the, 191, 232, 279
Stewart, M. A., 191 tripartite paradigm of word--concept--thing, see
Stillingfleet, Edward, 198, 200, 201 words
360 Index
trivium, the, 7, 13, 42, 129, 134, 199, 210, 275 Ward, John, 168
bedrock of early-modern education, 4 Ward, Seth, 104--5
Troyer, John, 206 Waswo, Richard, 3, 49, 97, 114
True Method of Learning the Latin Tongue, The, Webb, John, 102
45, 54 Webbe, Joseph, 48, 59, 60, 61, 62
trust, 9, 166, 167, 168, 234, 268--9, 277, 285--90, Webster, Charles, 51
303, 304 Webster, John, 36, 103
truth Weimann, Robert, 149
clear and distinct understanding, 109 Westerhoff, Jan C., 101
disrupted by language, 5, 8, 35, 38, 61, 81--7, White, Thomas, 36, 95
109, 168, 169, 173, 179, 288 Wilkins, John, 5, 47, 55, 58, 59, 73, 81, 106--7, 135,
indeterminate, 146 155, 201
Locke redraws line where truth/falsity begins, will, 156, 165, 265, 273
203 William III, 258, 266
love of, 270 Williams, Bernard, 96
manifest in language, 31, 34, 94, 105--7, 111 Wilson, Thomas, 14, 21, 26, 32, 36, 66, 68, 69,
moral/logical truth, 167, 257 70, 71, 78, 83
only an attribute of language, 128 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 126, 140, 219, 276
simple concepts incapable of truth/falsity, 30, Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 300
94, 106, 203 Wood, Neal, 122, 294
see also lies; logic; maxims; nature Woodward, Hezekiah, 51, 62
Tuck, Richard, 69, 91, 127, 179, 191 words
Tuckness, Alex, 244, 248 abstract terms, 20, 194, 256
Tully, James, 151, 192, 193, 227, 244, 259, 260, abuses of, 78, 140, 167, 211--13, 234, 263,
270, 272, 293, 295, 299, 300, 303 264
Twells, John, 43, 45, 53, 56, 57, 58 as deeds, 173--4, 266
Tyrrell, James, 232 autonomy and power of words alone, 1, 5, 8,
9, 74--6, 81--7, 154--7, 160--82, 239--76
understanding, the, see mind banish from thought, 156, 158, 243, 246
unitarianism, 259, 279 categorematic and syncategorematic terms,
universal language, 50, 53, 58, 59, 102--7, 134 20, 187, 256
Locke’s ridicule of, 238 circularity, 32, 45, 117, 164, 241--2, 254
universals/particulars, 19, 30--1, 93, 95, 120, 202, see communicative, 15, 37, 45, 69, 129, 141, 155,
also abstraction; essences of substances 186, 220, 221, 235, 251, 287, 295, 302
Utz, Richard J., 94 communicative: possibly not, 3, 9, 16, 73, 141,
221, 236, 249, 290, 295
concealing, self-reflective, inherently opaque,
Valla, Lorenzo, 59, 81, 114 16, 50, 76, 85, 97, 115, 122, 154, 155, 165, 176,
vanity, 175, 176, 239, 258, 280, 284, 303 178, 212, 215, 234, 239, 241, 242, 249, 250,
vernacular, the, 49--50 257, 262, 277, 281, 284
Vickers, Brian, 3, 64, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 80, concern about empty words, 48--51, 68, 177,
82, 96, 98, 100, 102, 154, 196, 212 181, 239, 257
Virgil, 65 constitutive and deceptive power of, 1, 8, 9,
Vives, Juan Luis, 61, 112 83, 84--7, 121, 154, 155, 166--82, 197, 209,
Vogt, Philip, 270 239--76, 277, 280--1, 284--5
Von Leyden, W., 200, 245, 248 constitutive of thought, 9, 16, 123, 161--6, 239,
Vossius, Gerhardus Joannes, 57 241--2, 250--7, 260, 276, 281
contingent on use, culture and time, 43, 56,
Waldron, Jeremy, 193, 244, 294, 303 59--63, 72, 112, 132, 140, 144, 177, 199, 216,
Walker, Obadiah, 41, 62, 66, 70, 75, 77, 80 227--8, 265, 296, see also custom; cultural
Walker, William, 41, 44, 211, 247 difference; history; time and language;
Wallis, John, 17, 18, 22, 25, 31, 33, 46, 50, 257 semantic instability
Walmsley, Jonathan, 203 conventional, 7, 16, 27, 67, 96, 97, 102, 104,
Walmsley, Peter, 6, 36, 136, 227 112--14, 128, 151, 156, 285
war, 138, 148 dependent on trust, 166--8, 234, 287--8
Index 361
detached, applicable at will, 36, 44--7, 63, 84, res outstrip verba, 73, 104, 116, 199
87, 132, 212, 213--14, 219, 235, 287 secretly evaluative, 152, 180--1, 215, 266
differences between words/concepts/things: seem natural, 268
elison of, 17, 24, 25, 29, 31, 32, 43, 52, 55, 93, sensible, public, and treacherous, 9, 18, 45--6,
102, 107, 126, 129, 156, 186, 197, 256, 257, 64, 74--6, 108, 155--66, 172, 177, 239,
262, 275 240--57, 262, 263, 275, 280, 285
different from concepts/things, 1, 20, 24, 255, signify ideas alone, 6, 8, 28, 49, 105, 123, 126,
262, 275 185--209, 219, 276, 279
dualist paradigm of sign--signified, 16--17, 29, signify/stand for things directly, 27, 28, 29
43--4, 47, 48, 52, 67, 93, 107, 130, 156, 157, signify ideas or things: false distinction, 27, 55,
165, 185 92, 105, 106, 107, 110--11
gulf between sign and signified, 16, 42, 76, simplicity and materiality belies signification,
130, 156, 159, 212, 213, 234, 241 31, 155, 177, 179, 197, 263, 264, 280--1
insignificant, 8, 9, 45, 48--9, 119, 122, 164--5, taken for things, 176, 263--5, 280--1
197, 241, 253--4, 264, 275 theoretically subservient, 99, 158, 255, 275,
learnt before meanings, 253 276, 281
mnemonic, 15, 106, 160--2, 251 tripartite paradigm of word--concept--thing,
natural connection to meaning, 16, 75, 96, 97, 17, 24--5, 26--8, 48, 52, 55, 67, 92, 101, 185,
102, 103--4, 160 196
origin of, 73, 220, 233 unintelligible without experience, 49, 51, 241,
ought not to outstretch thought, 49, 191, 197, 296
279--80, 284
perspicuous, successfully significant, 70--4,
77, 139, 142, 143, 157--60, 249 Yates, Frances, 161
and philosophy, 4--5, 24, 91, 129, 135--6, 160, Yeo, Richard, 201
Yolton, John W., 108, 110, 135, 179, 191, 193,
185--6, 189, 218, 240, 277--304
194, 195, 196, 219, 225, 244, 245, 248, 260,
practically preeminent, 7, 8, 9, 42, 140, 155,
158, 163, 165--6, 186, 240, 241, 250--7, 275, 264
281, 284 Young, B. W., 81
problem of, 1--2, 4--5, 42, 64, 87, 130, 154, 197, Yovel, Yirmiyahu, 170
243, 257, 260--2, 275, 277, 298
quintessentially human, 41, 70, 186 Zagorin, Perez, 166
relationship between written and spoken, 18, Zerilli, Linda, 211
47, 102, 105
IDEAS IN CONTEXT
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1 Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in

History
Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy
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2 J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History
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3 M. M. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits
Bernard Mandeville’s Social and Political Thought
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4 Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern
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6 Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit,
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7 Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order
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8 Lynn Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist
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9 Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe
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10 Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology
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11 Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell I. Hanson (eds.), Political Innovation and
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12 Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance
How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life
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13 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream
The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession
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14 David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined
Legal Theory in Eighteenth-century Britain
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15 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration
A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918
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16 Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution
Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century
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17 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance
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18 Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and
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19 Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science
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20 Klaus Christian Kohnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism
German Academic Philosophy Between Idealism and Positivism
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21 Ian Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance
The Case of Law
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22 Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State
The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600
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23 Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt
1555–1590
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24 Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early
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25 James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts
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26 Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651
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27 Richard R. Yeo, Defining Science
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28 Martin Warnke, The Court Artist
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29 Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good
Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain
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30 Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury
A Conceptual and Historical Investigation
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31 E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s ‘Fable’
Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society
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32 Julia Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics
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33 Keith Tribe, Strategies of Economic Order
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34 Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy
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35 David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and
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36 Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political
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37 Philip Ironside, The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell
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38 Nancy Cartwright, Jordi Cat, Lola Fleck and Thomas E. Uebel, Otto Neurath:
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39 Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty
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40 Jennifer Platt, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America
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41 Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion
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42 G. E. R. Lloyd, Adversaries and Authorities
Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science
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50 Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone (eds.), Pedagogy and Power
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54 Richard A. Primus, The American Language of Rights
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55 Robert Alun Jones, The development of Durkheim’s Social Realism
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56 Anne McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I
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57 James Hankins (ed), Renaissance Civic Humanism
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59 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire
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60 Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments
Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany
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61 Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (eds.),
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62 Ian Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance
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64 Geoffrey Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity
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72 David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England
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73 John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment
Scotland and Naples 1680–1760
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74 Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson
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76 Hannah Dawson, Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy
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In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah

hannah dawson is Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University

Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy

Edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully

The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual

Cambridge University Press

© Hannah Dawson 2007

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

ISBN-13 978-0-511-28894-4 eBook (EBL)

ISBN-13 978-0-521-85271-5 hardback

part i language in the trivium 11

part ii philosophical developments of the

part iii locke on language 183

Language was a problem for early-modern philosophers. Not only were a

language reflects the mind

language reflects the world

cracks in the mirror

the concentration on verba not res

redressing the imbalance

rationalising and regularising grammar

Language, as it is presented in grammar, juts out in two opposite

the core linguistic precepts of rhetoric:

elocutio – breaking the contract

speak in g tru th, or winning belief u nder the

The relationships between language,

the ancient marriage between word and essence

The Aristotelian–Platonic traditions do not transmit an immaculately

realist, essentialist hangovers: bacon, universal

realist, essentialist hangovers: rationalist

Given the dependence of language on its epistemological base, words are

Semantic instability: a containable threat

The confident assumption of semantic universality is implicit in early-

scepticism and montaigne

‘the argument is about words, not things’

spinoza and biblical hermeneutics

pufendorf and legal hermeneutics

Under cover of sensible and powerful words

The problems of semantic (un)reality and multiplicity become especially

However, the widespread commitment to the power and necessity of

doing things with words

175 176 177

At the end of this part of the book we are confronted by a proliferation of

183 184 185

Words signify ideas alone

Like the reader, Locke is immersed in the discursive framework that

the subjective, sensible bounds of words

Semantic instability: an inherent imperfection

While some early-modern philosophers had brushed with the problem of

the epistemological roots of semantic instability

the empty appeal to common use

A life of their own

Locke’s profound deconstruction of the signification of words, prosecuted

the rule of sense

the deceitful cover of words

writing our worlds

The way in which we write ourselves with language proves especially

Locke in the face of language

the contamination of the understanding

However, Locke’s account of meaning is not always uncompromisingly