46.
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES
I
Page 3. _This airy monster, this half-natural changeling._
Monsters and changelings were pointed to by Locke with a certain
controversial relish: they proved that nature was not compressed or
compressible within Aristotelian genera and species, but was a free
mechanism subject to indefinite change. Mechanism in physics is favourable
to liberty in politics and morals: each creature has a right to be what it
spontaneously is, and not what some previous classification alleges that
it ought to have been. The Protestant and revolutionary independence of
Locke's mind here gives us a foretaste of Darwin and even of Nietzsche.
But Locke was moderate even in his radicalisms. A human nature totally
fluid would of itself have proved anarchical; but in order to stem that
natural anarchy it was fortunately possible to invoke the conditions of
prosperity and happiness strictly laid down by the Creator. The
improvidence and naughtiness of nature was called to book at every turn by
the pleasures and pains divinely appended to things enjoined and to things
forbidden, and ultimately by hell and by heaven. Yet if rewards and
punishments were attached to human action and feeling in this perfectly
external and arbitrary fashion, whilst the feelings and actions
spontaneous in mankind counted for nothing in the rule of morals and of
wisdom, we should be living under the most cruel and artificial of
tyrannies; and it would not be long before the authority of such a code
would be called in question and the reality of those arbitrary rewards and
punishments would be denied, both for this world and for any other.
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