Posthumous Works

Two papers Locke kept in his desk: a dismantling of Malebranche and a definition of miracles.

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1706(published posthumously)
Original language: English

Overview

A paper against Nicolas Malebranche, a French priest and follower of Descartes, lay among Locke's manuscripts for more than ten years. He told his friend William Molyneux in March 1695 that it would make a small treatise and that he was reluctant to print it: he disliked controversy and felt some regard for the man. Malebranche taught that the human mind does not perceive objects at all. Bodies cannot act on a mind, so the ideas we have of them must be ideas in God, which God lets us see. The doctrine had an English champion in John Norris, a country rector who in 1690 had been the first critic of Locke's Essay to reach print. Locke's "Examination of P. Malebranche's Opinion of Seeing All Things in God" goes through the theory step by step and returns the same verdict each time: it supplies a phrase where an explanation is needed. To be told that we see things in God does not say how seeing happens, and it leaves us no ground for believing that bodies exist. Locke admits plainly that he has no better account of perception. The paper was printed in 1706, when his executors published a volume of what he had left unfinished or unpublished. That volume also gave the first printing of "A Discourse of Miracles", written in 1702 after Locke had read a clergyman's essay on the subject and a reply to it. He defines a miracle from the side of the witness, as an event the onlooker cannot explain and takes to be divine. He grants that this makes one man's miracle another man's natural event, and he rests the proof of a revelation on which side shows the greater power, as Moses did against Pharaoh's magicians.

Key concepts

What does “seeing all things in God” mean?

It is Malebranche’s theory of perception. Bodies, he held, cannot reach a mind, and a mind cannot produce its own ideas of them. God, however, contains the ideas of everything he created and is present to every mind. So when someone looks at a tree, what the mind actually attends to is God’s idea of the tree, which God lets it see.

What is an “occasional cause”?

An occasional cause is something that does not itself produce an effect and only marks the moment at which God produces it. For Malebranche the sun in front of the eyes, or a person’s wish to think of a triangle, is the occasion on which God shows the idea. Locke asks whether calling something an occasion tells us any more about how the effect comes about.

How does Malebranche distinguish “sentiment” from “idea”?

In Malebranche’s account an idea is what the mind sees in God, such as a shape or an extension; a sentiment is a feeling God causes in the mind itself, such as a colour, a smell or a pain. Locke reports the distinction and finds it makes the theory harder to follow, since a single perceived object would then be partly seen in God and partly felt in oneself.

What does Locke mean by the “credentials” of a revelation?

Credentials are the proof a messenger carries that he was really sent. Locke applies the word to anyone who claims to speak for God: the message cannot be accepted as divine unless the messenger shows a sign from the one who sent him. Miracles are those signs. They do not prove the content of the teaching directly; they prove the authority of the one who delivers it.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Does “Seeing in God” Explain Seeing?

When Malebranche says we perceive everything in God, has he explained perception or only renamed the puzzle? Locke tests each step of the theory by asking what a reader actually understands after hearing it.

Malebranche held that bodies cannot act on a mind, so the ideas we have of them must be ideas in God, to whom minds are intimately united. The Examination goes through this claim by claim. “Intimate union” is a picture of bodies touching and means nothing between things without surface. If we see only God’s idea of the sun, no ground is left for believing there is a sun. A violet’s shape, colour and scent are treated differently with no reason given. Locke claims no better: how an image on the retina becomes seeing he understands no more than when told he sees it in God.

perception
ideas
divine ideas
divine illumination
explanation
philosophy of mind
sensation
mind-body problem
representation
vision
external world
skepticism

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What Makes a Miracle a Proof

If a miracle is whatever an onlooker cannot explain and takes to be divine, how can it prove anything? Locke accepts the difficulty and moves the proof from the single wonder to the contest between rival claims.

The Discourse of Miracles defines a miracle from the witness’s side: a sensible operation beyond the spectator’s comprehension, contrary in his opinion to the course of nature, and taken by him to be divine. Locke admits what follows. People differ in what they can explain, so one man’s miracle is not another’s. What settles a claim to speak for God is therefore comparison. Where two parties both show wonders, the greater power marks the true mission, as when Moses’s serpent ate those of the Egyptian sorcerers. And no mission is divine, he adds, that teaches anything against natural religion and the rules of morality.

miracles
divine revelation
religious epistemology
evidence
theology
reason

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Within this work

passages held: 83
distinct concepts: 100
by passages held, corpus-wide: #548

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “ideas” and “perception”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 15 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
ideas	perception	25
divine ideas	perception	9
divine illumination	perception	8
divine revelation	miracles	8
explanation	perception	8
ideas	knowledge	7
divine illumination	ideas	6
knowledge	perception	6
explanation	ideas	5
divine illumination	knowledge	4
divine illumination	explanation	3
divine ideas	explanation	2
divine ideas	knowledge	2
explanation	knowledge	2
divine ideas	ideas	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1689 A Letter Concerning Toleration (Epistola de Tolerantia)
The one statement of his case for religious freedom that Locke made briefly and to a friend. Everything else he printed on the subject defends this text against one of its critics, Jonas Proast.
EN
1689 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
The book Locke's reputation rests on, and the one major work of 1689 that he signed. His quarrel with Bishop Stillingfleet, the unfinished Conduct of the Understanding and the letters to William Molyneux all grow out of it.
EN
1689 Two Treatises of Government
Two parts of a longer manuscript whose middle was lost before printing, as Locke's preface says. The book is his political theory, and it shares a year and a purpose with A Letter Concerning Toleration: each sets a limit on what a ruler may do.
EN
1690 Further Letters Concerning Toleration
A sequel in three parts to A Letter Concerning Toleration: Locke's second and third letters and the fragment of a fourth, each a reply to the Oxford chaplain Jonas Proast. The third is where he tests his case hardest.
EN
1693 Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Written for the household of his friend Edward Clarke and enlarged by Locke through several editions. It is his book of practical advice on raising a child, and it applies the Essay's view that the mind is formed by what it meets.
EN
1695 The Reasonableness of Christianity
His main work on religion, and the opening of the study of Scripture that occupied his last years. He defended it twice against John Edwards, a Cambridge Calvinist, and kept his name off all three books while he lived.
EN
1696 Several Papers Relating to Money, Interest and Trade
Advice written for ministers and for Parliament during the currency crisis of the 1690s, and gathered under Locke's name in 1696. The account of money behind it is sketched in the chapter on property in the Two Treatises.
EN
1697 Letters to the Bishop of Worcester
Locke's own commentary on the Essay, written under attack: three replies to Edward Stillingfleet, issued as separate pamphlets between 1697 and 1699, with a short answer to a second critic, Thomas Burnet, Master of the Charterhouse.
EN
1706 Of the Conduct of the Understanding
An unfinished draft, printed from Locke's papers two years after his death. It is the practical companion to the Essay and overlaps with his advice on education.
EN
1706 Posthumous Works you are here EN
1708 Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of His Friends
Letters to the Molyneux brothers of Dublin — Locke's side of the correspondence — taken from a volume his publishers issued in 1708. It is the closest view of him at work on the later editions of the Essay.
EN
1720 A Collection of Several Pieces
The Carolina constitution of 1669 predates the Two Treatises by ten years or more, and the two are often set against each other. Pierre Des Maizeaux published it in 1720 together with shorter pieces left out of the collected works.
EN

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