Biography:Locke was born in Wrington, England. His father was a rural lawyer and had fought on the side of Parliament early in the Civil Wars. Locke attended the prestigious Westminster School thanks to the sponsorship of his father’s commander, who had become a Member of Parliament. Locke was named a King’s Scholar and attended Oxford’s Christ Church College. After graduation he stayed on as a faculty member teaching Greek, and later, rhetoric. At Oxford he received the traditional scholastic education but fell in with a group of scientists—John Wilkins, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke—all who later became founding members of the Royal Society. They taught him how to study nature and exposed him to their atomic theory. After, Locke read Descartes and Bacon and met Newton; he and Newton became lifelong friends.
Contributions: Locke’s life changed dramatically after he met Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury. They became friends and Locke began to work for him as his secretary. Shaftesbury was a member of the Board of Trade, the agency responsible for governing the American colonies. Shaftesbury and Locke drafted the constitution for the Carolina colonies in America; Locke learned much about government from Shaftesbury and later published books on the relationship of the people to their government. Locke also began to work on his most famous work, An Essay on Human Understanding, while he was working for Shaftesbury. After Shaftesbury left the government, Locke returned to Oxford and obtained his medical degree. He then visited France for nearly a year and a half. There he visited with French Protestants (the Huguenots) during the time when the Edict of Nantes was still in force. That law provided for religious toleration of Protestants in Catholic France. Later, and after Locke was no longer in France, Louis XIV would repeal that law and persecute the Huguenots.
Religious problems awaited Locke upon his return to England as well. Shaftesbury had become one of the leaders of a movement to deny James, Charles II’s son, from the line of royal succession because James wished to reintroduce Catholicism to England. Parliament’s House of Commons voted that measure in but the House of Lords did not, so it failed. Eventually, Charles’s son took the throne as James II. Before then, Shaftesbury, and later, Locke, fled for Holland to avoid arrest for treason. Locke spent five years in Holland and finished writing his Essay on Human Understanding. He returned to England in 1688 after the Glorious Revolution. From that point on, he was, and continues to be, one of England’s most famous thinkers. He again served on the re-established Board of Trade and helped govern the American colonies. Interestingly, much of the language contained in the American Declaration of Independence is Lockean. Many of the founding fathers had read his books.
Locke claimed that the idea for his famous essay came to him one night back when he was working for Shaftesbury. Locke and some friends had been debating long into the night when he realized that he could not answer the questions they were asking him about human knowledge. He decided:
"that before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with (Locke, 1975/1689, p. 7)."
In his essay, Locke attempted to bring human understanding into the realm of natural philosophy. Quite consciously, Locke was trying to put together a science of psychology. Ultimately, he failed and was criticized by later philosophers over the inconsistency of some of his ideas. Berkeley and Hume, fellow empiricists, especially questioned some of Locke’s assumptions and conclusions. Despite those objections, Locke’s essay helped transform England and, later, the world. Ryle (1967, p. 3) emphasized Locke’s influence when he wrote:
"If we could fly back in a time-rocket to England in 1700, we could already breathe its air, and we could already converse with our new acquaintances without feeling lost. In the England of, say, 1600, we should gasp like fishes out of water."
Obviously, Locke had helped to completely transform the intellectual landscape of his time. Billig (2008, p. 28), too, argued:
"The idea of Locke as the founder of modern psychology is simultaneously modern and non-modern. The intellectual parent must be distinct from the children. Had Locke been totally modern, he would have been a ‘proper psychologist’, rather than ‘the father of psychology’. Present psychologists will supposedly recognize parts of their own activities in the distant parent’s work."
As a proto-psychologist Locke first argued against Descartes’s notions of innate knowledge, while admitting for limited forms of pre-existing knowledge such as the existence of God and geometric theorems. But, the rest of knowledge had to be acquired through experience. Here is where he invoked his famous metaphor of the tabula rasa, the blank slate. Experience, Locke argued, is like the chalk marks that eventually fill and cover the slate that is our mind. The mind is full of ideas, Locke maintained. Simple ideas come directly from sensation and can be combined by association into complex ideas by reflection and memory. Nowhere, however, did Locke ever provide mechanisms for his theory. Many philosophers after Locke also invoked associationism as a mechanism to explain their own theories. Ivan Pavlov, early in the 20th century, was the first person to provide a successful mechanistic account for associationism through his work on the conditioned reflex and classical conditioning.
Locke also discussed the differences between primary and secondary qualities of objects. Primary qualities pertained to properties of objects such as mass, location, movement, texture, and degree of solidity, or qualities that belonged to the objects themselves. Secondary qualities such as color, taste, and smell came from the act of perception and could differ from individual to individual For example, tennis ball containers are marked “optic yellow” but not everyone perceives the balls as yellow. Some will perceive then as green, others as in between green and yellow. Those perceptual differences are what Locke would call a secondary quality. But, no one would perceive a tennis ball as anything other than a sphere. That shape is a Lockean primary quality.
Locke divided knowledge into three categories: intuitive, demonstrative, and sensitive. Intuitive knowledge included knowing of one’s own existence as well as God’s. Thus Locke, the archetypal empiricist, admitted that some knowledge was pre-existent. Demonstrative knowledge included the theorems of mathematics. There, however, Locke argued that although the theorems existed, they still had to be learned. Once learned, of course, they were unchangeable. So, a child must learn that triangles have three sides and, once learned, accept that definition as a fact. Sensitive learning was Locke’s largest category and it consisted of all of the ideas that come to fill the blank slate of our minds.
Unlike Descartes, Locke was willing to accept less-than-certain empirical knowledge from the environment. In other words, he possessed a probabilistic view of reality. Locke looked at language too. He equated words with ideas and differentiated between particular and abstract ideas. Locke examined how the mind classified words and ideas, examined the limits of knowledge, and the relationship between reason and faith. Since Chomsky’s (1957) review of Skinner’s analysis of language learning, the structure of language and how it is learned has been cited as the best known example of a built-in cognitive learning mechanism. Most psychologists believe that language learning does not follow Locke’s tabula rasa metaphor. Locke believed he had swept aside the “rubbish” of Scholasticism, countered Descartes’s rationalism, and prepared the ground for an empirically based science of psychology. However, in his political writings he was also revolutionary.
When he returned to England in 1689, Locke published another important book, The Second Treatise of Government. In it, he set forth a very different understanding from Hobbes of the relationship between people and their government. In Locke’s political thinking, people choose to form communities and their government. The main difference was that Locke maintained that people need not transfer all of their rights to the government. Instead, they may transfer some of their rights and keep others to themselves. It is no accident that the American and French revolutions invoked Locke’s political thinking. Locke also wrote about religious toleration. He believed that the government should have no say or role in private religious choice. That, too, became the basis for the doctrine of separation of church and state in the American Constitution.
Locke’s writings were a major step forward in the soon-to-emerge science of psychology. He was the first to clearly link the evolving empirical ideas of his time to the possibility of a psychological science. In doing so, he rejected the rationalistic Cartesian model and substituted a radical empiricist model instead. Locke’s model, however, would receive criticism from later empiricists and rationalists alike. George Berkeley and David Hume were early empiricist critics. George Berkeley, an Anglican bishop, criticized Locke’s division of primary and secondary qualities and provided an idealist alternative to Locke’s ideas.