Socrates, who spoke initially for common sense, even
thought the moral interpretation of existence the whole of philosophy. He
would not have seen anything comic in the satire of Moliere making his
chorus of young doctors chant in unison that opium causes sleep because it
has a dormitive virtue. The virtues or moral uses of things, according to
Socrates, were the reason why the things had been created and were what
they were; the admirable virtues of opium defined its perfection, and the
perfection of a thing was the full manifestation of its deepest nature.
Doubtless this moral interpretation of the universe had been overdone, and
it had been a capital error in Socrates to make that interpretation
exclusive and to substitute it for natural philosophy. Locke, who was
himself a medical man, knew what a black cloak for ignorance and villainy
Scholastic verbiage might be in that profession. He also knew, being an
enthusiast for experimental science, that in order to control the movement
of matter--which is to realise those virtues and perfections--it is better
to trace the movement of matter materialistically; for it is in the act of
manifesting its own powers, and not, as Socrates and the Scholastics
fancied, by obeying a foreign magic, that matter sometimes assumes or
restores the forms so precious in the healer's or the moralist's eyes. At
the same time, the manner in which the moral world rests upon the natural,
though divined, perhaps, by a few philosophers, has not been generally
understood; and Locke, whose broad humanity could not exclude the moral
interpretation of nature, was driven in the end to the view of Socrates.
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