He was
driven to the conclusion that the soul can never stop thinking, by the
desire to placate orthodox opinion, and his own Christian sentiments, at
the expense of attributing to actual consciousness a substantial
independence and a directive physical force which were incongruous with
it: a force and independence perfectly congruous with the Platonic soul,
which had been a mythological being, a supernatural spirit or daemon or
incubus, incarnate in the natural world, and partly dominating it. The
relations of such a soul to the particular body or bodies which it might
weave for itself on earth, to the actions which it performed through such
bodies, and to the current of its own thoughts, then became questions for
theology, or for a moralistic theory of the universe. They were questions
remote from the preoccupations of the modern mind; yet it was not possible
either for Locke or for Descartes to clear their fresh conceptions
altogether from those ancient dreams.
What views precisely did Locke oppose to these radical tendencies of
Descartes?
In respect to the nature of matter, I have indicated above the position
of Locke: pictorially he accepted an ordinary atomism; scientifically, the
physics of Newton.
On the other two points Locke's convictions were implicit rather than
speculative: he resisted the Cartesian theories without much developing
his own, as after all was natural in a critic engaged in proving that our
natural faculties were not intended for speculation.
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