Indeed, the
visible scene did not exhaust the complexity of his problem; for there was
also what he called "the scene of ideas", immaterial and private, but
often more crowded and pressing than the public scene. Locke was the
father of modern psychology, and the birth of this airy monster, this
half-natural changeling, was not altogether easy or fortunate.[2]
I wish my erudition allowed me to fill in this picture as the subject
deserves, and to trace home the sources of Locke's opinions, and their
immense influence. Unfortunately, I can consider him--what is hardly
fair--only as a pure philosopher: for had Locke's mind been more profound,
it might have been less influential. He was in sympathy with the coming
age, and was able to guide it: an age that confided in easy, eloquent
reasoning, and proposed to be saved, in this world and the next, with as
little philosophy and as little religion as possible. Locke played in the
eighteenth century very much the part that fell to Kant in the nineteenth.
When quarrelled with, no less than when embraced, his opinions became a
point of departure for universal developments. The more we look into the
matter, the more we are impressed by the patriarchal dignity of Locke's
mind. Father of psychology, father of the criticism of knowledge, father
of theoretical liberalism, god-father at least of the American political
system, of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedia, at home he was the ancestor of
that whole school of polite moderate opinion which can unite liberal
Christianity with mechanical science and with psychological idealism.
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