Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of His Friends

Six years of letters to a Dublin friend whom Locke met only once, written while he revised his main book.

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1708(published posthumously)
Original language: English

Overview

After six years of letters the two correspondents met once. William Molyneux crossed from Dublin in 1698 and spent five weeks with Locke in London and at Oates, the house in Essex where Locke lived. He went home and died on 11 October, aged forty-two. Molyneux was a scientist and a member of the Irish parliament. In 1692 he had published a treatise on optics and praised in it the author of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, whom he had never seen, and that praise began the correspondence. Locke's letters to him show the Essay being revised. Molyneux proposed changes for the second edition, and Locke reports what he has done with them. In March 1693 Molyneux sent the puzzle that now carries his name: whether a man born blind, who knows a cube from a sphere by touch, could tell them apart by sight alone if he were suddenly able to see. Locke agreed with him that the man could not, and printed the question in the Essay in 1694. Molyneux pressed for a treatise on morals, which Locke never wrote. He also found a translator, Ezekiel Burridge, to put the Essay into Latin for readers abroad. Locke tells him about work he is keeping back: a paper against the French philosopher Malebranche in 1695, and a new chapter on the conduct of the understanding in 1697. The correspondence ends after Molyneux's death, with Locke's letters to Burridge and to the dead man's brother Thomas, a physician Locke had come to know in Holland. Locke's own publishers printed the letters in 1708, four years after he died, in a volume of his correspondence with several friends.

Key concepts

What does Locke mean by a “lover of truth”?

A lover of truth is someone who wants to have the truth and does not mind who found it. Locke’s mark of the real thing is a readiness to be corrected: such a person asks for objections before publishing and changes his text when they hold. He adds a caution, that not everyone who thinks himself a seeker of truth sincerely is one.

How do the letters distinguish will from desire?

Will, or volition, is the mind’s ordering of an action by thought: deciding to do this or leave it. Desire is the unease felt at lacking something. In the scheme Locke sends Molyneux in 1693, the two must be kept apart, because a person can will what he does not desire and can suspend acting on a desire while he examines it. That power to suspend is what leaves room for a considered choice.

Does Locke deny that there are kinds in nature?

No. Answering an objection from Molyneux, he says he never claimed there are no such creatures as birds. Things have real inner constitutions, and those constitutions really differ. His claim is narrower: when people sort things into species and give them names, they go by the combinations of qualities they observe, because the inner constitutions are not what they have access to.

What does Locke clarify about matter and thought?

Molyneux had found two passages of the Essay that seemed to clash. Locke explains that they answer different questions. Matter cannot be the first, eternal thinking being, because thought could never arise from senseless matter by itself. But once an all-powerful thinking being exists, there is no contradiction in his giving some arrangements of matter a degree of sense and thought. Locke rewrites both passages to make this plain.

Themes of the book

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

A Book Put to a Friend’s Correction

What does an author owe a reader who finds fault with his book? Locke treats every objection from Molyneux as a gift, and the letters show which of his own doctrines he was least sure of.

Locke asks Molyneux to mark what is mistaken or superfluous in the Essay, since a man’s own thoughts judge his own thoughts poorly. Truth, he writes, is gold whoever dug it. The exchange touches the hardest places. On liberty he admits he cannot reconcile human freedom with God’s omnipotence and omniscience, though he is sure of both, and he sends a new account of what moves the will. On morals he still thinks demonstration possible and doubts he is the man for it. He declines to recast the Essay as a university logic, and he keeps his paper against Malebranche unprinted, having little love of controversy.

truth
criticism
intellectual humility
knowledge
empiricism
free will
desire
authorship
publication
scientific method
observation
controversy
medicine

Enter a dialogue

A Friendship Founded on Truth

What can two people who have never met build on a shared love of truth? The letters record a friendship carried on by post for six years, one meeting, and a death.

Locke begins by saying that he hastens into the acquaintance of any rational lover of truth, since there are beauties of the mind that prevail at first sight. What follows is practical affection. He looks for a tutor for Molyneux’s son, answers his worries about the book on education, and frets over his friend’s health and the sea between them. They met once, in 1698. After Molyneux’s death that October Locke writes that a true friend is to be preferred to every other sort of treasure, and offers the son whatever service he can, to show that his friendship did not die with the father.

friendship
affection
mortality
education
parenting
health
gratitude
correspondence
care
pursuit of truth

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 143
distinct concepts: 236
by passages held, corpus-wide: #429

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: “criticism” and “intellectual humility”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 73 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
criticism	intellectual humility	8
intellectual humility	truth	7
friendship	truth	6
criticism	truth	5
friendship	intellectual humility	5
authorship	criticism	3
authorship	intellectual humility	3
education	knowledge	3
education	language	3
criticism	friendship	2
authorship	education	1
authorship	friendship	1
authorship	truth	1
criticism	knowledge	1
criticism	language	1
education	friendship	1
education	intellectual humility	1
education	truth	1
friendship	knowledge	1
intellectual humility	language	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
From the volume of unpublished papers that Locke's executors issued in 1706: a critique of Malebranche from the 1690s and a short discourse on miracles from 1702. Both extend arguments begun in the Essay.
EN
1708 Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of His Friends you are here 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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