598 TRANSACTIONS OF.SECTION H. 
stands to Newton and the physicists ; his medical studies kept him in close touch 
with the chemists and anatomists, and gave him a rational psychology; and we 
shall see how intimately his psychological analysis is concerned with his general 
anthropology. On the other hand, his interest in exploration and travel was keen 
and continuous. It peeps out in his ‘Two Treatises on Government’; it is evident 
in his ‘ Essay on the Conduct of the Human Understanding’; it is confessed in 
a striking passage of his ‘ Thoughts concerning Reading and Study for a Gentle- 
man’; and it bears remarkable fruit in his Introduction to Churchill’s ‘ Collection 
of Voyages,’ published in 1704, which shows him thoroughly acquainted with 
a wide range of the writers best qualified to inform him of the recent discoveries 
in regard to unsophisticated man. 
Thus the case of John Locke is rather clearer than that of Hobbes. Here, 
too, though what impresses at the outset is the dependence of his political theory 
upon the political needs of his time, yet side by side with this we have the same 
intimate connection between his politics and his psychology as is obvious in the 
case of Hobbes, and it is naturally therefore to his psychology that I turn first 
for indications of his method of work. And we have not to go far into the 
‘Essay concerning Human Understanding’ before we have a good example of 
what I mean. In the third chapter he is following up his contention that there 
are no ‘innate principles’ in the mind by an argument to the same effect as 
regards moral, or, as he calls them, ‘ practical,’ principles. Virtue is generally 
approved, he says, not because it is innate, but because it is profitable ; nor do 
men’s actions betray any such ‘internal veneration of these rules.’ Even 
conscience, which is usually represented as checking us for our breaches of them, 
cannot be distinguished, in the mode of its origin, from any other kind of human 
knowledge, and in many cases it is only ‘from their education, company, and 
customs of their country’ that men are persuaded that morals are binding on 
them ; ‘ which persuasion, however got, will serve to set conscience at work.’ 
Then comes the passage which concerns us now. ‘ But I cannot see how any 
men should ever transgress these moral rules, with confidence and serenity, were 
they innate and stamped upon their minds. Have there not been whole nations, 
and those of the most civilised people, amongst whom the exposing of their 
children, and leaving them in the fields to perish by want or wild beasts, has been 
the practice, as little condemned or scrupled as the begetting them?’ ‘Then 
follows a list, a couple of pages long, of barbarities practised by the Mingrelians 
of the Caucasus; the natives of the interior of Africa; the Caribbees of the 
Orinoco ; a people in Peru (who fattened and ate the children of their female 
captives); and many others. Among the Tououpinambos, another American 
tribe, ‘ the virtues whereby they believed they merited Paradise were revenge 
and eating abundance of enemies; they have not so much as a name for God, 
and have no religion, no worship.’ Among the Turks ‘the saints who are 
canonised lead lives which one cannot with modesty relate.’ ‘He that will 
carefully peruse the history of mankind,’ he concludes, ‘ and look abroad into the 
several tribes of men, and with indifference survey their actions, will be able to 
satisfy himself that there is scarce that principle of morality to be named, or 
rule of virtue to be thought on (those only excepted that are absolutely necessary 
to hold society together, which commonly, too, are neglected betwixt distinct 
societies), which is not, somewhere or other, slighted and condemned by the 
general fashion of whole societies of men, governed by practical opinions and 
rules of living quite opposite to others.’ 
Here, clearly, Locke claims to support, if not to found, his generalisation as to 
the nature of the human mind on a comparison of specific varieties of human 
behaviour. At the same time he makes definite exception of those principles 
which, as he says, ‘ are absolutely necessary to hold society together,’ and these 
he is apparently inclined to regard either as actually innate or at all events as a 
higher order of universality than the ordinary principles of morals. It is the 
beginning of a deep distinction in anthropological theory, which bears fruit, 
long after, in Bastian’s distinction between Universal and Racial Ideas.' 
There are other passages in the ‘ Essay ’ in which the same argument is used, 
' Gemeingedanken and Volkergedanken. 
