So much for the strictly metaphysical part of the empirical doctrine. Let us now consider shortly its application to morals. “Moral principles,” says Mr. Locke (i. 3), “are even further removed than intellectual ones from any title to be innate. Will any one say that those who live by fraud and rapine have innate principles of truth which they allow and assent to?” This question displays in the most vivid manner the extraordinary misconception, not to say wrong-headedness, which possessed the English philosopher as to this whole matter. The nature of innate ideas implies neither universality nor inaccessibility to corruption. A man may be born with an innate sense for music, though all his fellows were as harsh as asses or as deaf as stones. If some men are colour-blind, and others purblind, and others altogether blind, these defects, inadequacies, or total eclipses of vision, do not make light intrinsically a less enjoyable thing, or the healthy eye an organ less marvellously adapted for enjoying it. As with vision so with morals. A whole population given to drunkenness does not make drunkenness a whit less beastly, nor will the general practice of fraud and rapine render the appropriation of my labour by another man’s rapacity a whit more reasonable. Again says Mr. Locke (i. 3, 4), “There cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason,” from which sentence it plainly appears, that, whereas by innate ideas Plato means the necessary expression of reason in a normally developed { 282} mind, Locke understands by them some blind unaccountable impulse independent of and extrinsic to reason. The supplying of a reason for any course of action, say for speaking the truth or keeping a man’s word, does not in the least make that course of action less the product of a truthful instinct in nature, or an innate love of truth. Morality is not the less innate because it is reasonable; but inasmuch as it is an essential element in the universal or divine Reason, in virtue of this it is necessarily an inborn quality in the individual or human reason, always of course with the probability of those large exceptions and defections which the very nature of finite existence implies. But we need not detain ourselves with a chapter of such shallow misunderstandings. The immoralities and follies of men, though a thousand times as many as they are, no more affect the inborn necessity and absolute immutability of the moral law, than the false summing of a class of schoolboys affects the relations of number. Errors are as common in arithmetic as in morals; only men hire those special pleaders, their passions, to justify the moral law, while the arithmetical blunder is exposed by the master of accounts. But though Mr. Locke argues against the existence of innate ideas in morals with even more self-gratulation than in his psychological account of the formation of ideas, we are not to suppose that his ethical theory was in any respect identical with that of the modern Utilitarians. He sowed the seed for their doctrine, no doubt, but himself had his garner well stored with grain from a very different source. He was a Christian, and believed in Divine law; he was a theist and believed in God. The modern Utilitarian believes only in a bundle of { 283} sensations and in an invariable sequence. By denying innate ideas of morality, Mr. Locke, as his illustrations prove, only meant to proclaim the very obvious fact, that, as all men obviously do not agree in their principles of action, it is reasonable to demand of them some reason for accepting one principle of action rather than another. No man can object to such a reasonable demand. But this does not prevent him in another place (ii. 33. 11), from talking, as no modern Utilitarian would, of “the unchangeable rule of right and wrong which the law of God hath established.” This method of speaking, common to Locke I believe with many of the most solid thinkers of his time, would lead me to class his ethical doctrine under the rubric of what might be called THEOCRATIC INSTITUTIONALISM; that is to say, he looks on morality as the result of a law laid down and sanctioned by the ultimate source of all laws, physical as well as moral. This, no doubt, seems to imply something arbitrary, which neither Plato nor Aristotle would allow to be possible in any of the fundamental manifestations of Divine reason; but notwithstanding this preference of the word νόμος, _law_, to φύσις, _nature_, had the English thinker been cross-questioned on the subject, he would probably have said that these institutions or laws which God lays on man flow necessarily from the excellence of the Divine nature; and this would have been pure Platonism.