PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 599 
drawn from observation of actual savages. In Chapter IV., for example, he gives 
a long list of tribes whose members are devoid of the idea of God. ‘ Besides the 
atheists taken notice of among the ancients, and left branded upon the records 
of history, hath not navigation discovered, in these later ages, whole nations at 
the Bay of Soldania (in South Africa), in Brazil, in Boranday, and in the Caribbee 
Islands, &c., amongst whom there was to be found no mention of a God, no 
religion ?” He goes on to quote further evidence as to the Caiaquas of Paraguay, 
the ‘ Siamites ’ (which ‘ will I doubt not be a surprise to others, as it was to me’), 
and the Chinese. His authorities in this passage are ample: Sir Thomas Roe, 
the hard-headed English ambassador to the Great Mogul, and his French editor, 
Thévenot ; de Choisy, for Siam; La Loubére, for Siam and China; Navarette 
and the Jesuit Relations, for China ; Ovington, for Surat ; Martinicre, de Léry, 
and Nicholas del Techo. For South Africa, of course, he quotes Terry, and 
through Terry, the educated Hottentot Coore or Courwee, who came to England 
for a time, and of whom Heylin, too, has a quaint story to tell. And these are 
no mere gleanings from other people’s fields. Few of Locke’s contemporaries 
had a better right to an opinion in the department of knowledge which now we 
should call anthropology, and which formed already a principal department of 
geography. And he had the highest opinion of its importance, for in his 
‘Thoughts concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman’ he recommends a 
list of original books of travel which occupies more than a page. His own reading 
was enormous, and set him wholly free of compendia like those of Heylin and Moll, 
which indeed he could compare and criticise as an expert. By a comparison of 
the libraries of Christ Church, of the Bodleian, and of the Royal Society, it is easy 
to verify the general conclusion that if the English gentleman, as Locke feared, 
did not think it worth while to bestow much pains on geography, it was not for 
want of available books or of examples of distinguished publicists who were also 
good geographers. And this is of some importance to my general thesis, for it 
shows that in Locke’s time still, as in the days of Hobbes and before, inductive 
anthropology and inductive politics were greatly in the air and were being 
studied together ; and consequently that political philosopher, no less than a 
psychologist, was addressing a public which knew about savages and expected 
a thinker to take account of them. 
It is time now to turn to the ‘Two Treatises on Government.’ Their form 
was, of course, mainly dictated by that of Sir Robert Filmer’s ‘ Patriarcha, or 
the Natural Power of Kings,’ in which the patriarchal theory of society, main- 
tained with a thoroughness which would have delighted Aristotle, anticipates 
almost verbally the orthodox criticism which was levelled two centuries later 
at Maclennan and Lewis Morgan. Filmer’s attitude in fact is exactly that of 
the Aristotelian and classicist thinkers castigated by Edward Grimstone. He 
can quote Athens, Sparta, Rome, and the Jewish patriarchs; he is learned 
about Nimrod and Codrus; but from beginning to end he writes as if America 
and the Cape route to India were still unknown. Locke has arguments enough, 
of a more relevant kind, to bring against Filmer, and makes no direct comment 
upon the narrowness of his experience of mankind ; but implicitly his reply is 
precisely in that form. It is an appeal to experience against authority; to 
modern discovery in the new worlds beyond the oceans, against traditional 
accounts of ancient societies in the Mediterranean and the Semitic East. To 
refute Filmer’s claim that Patriarchal rule is natural, he recalls the systematic 
fattening and eating of children by the Peruvians,' and quotes a long passage 
from de la Vega’s * History of the Yneas.* On the question of the authority of 
the law over an alien, the ‘ Indian’ is his typical example, ‘ The legislative 
authority by which they are in force over the subjects of the commonwealth 
hath no power over him. Those who have the supreme power of making laws 
in England, France, or Holland, are, to an Indian, but like the rest of the world— 
men without authority.’ ? 
Locke himself, indeed, was before long to be confronted with this question in 
a very practical shape ; for it was he who was deputed to draw up a constitution 
for the new settlement of Carolina, the first British settlement which came into 
Gh, 1.67, Ch II. 13. 
