All ambitions must be defeated when they ask for the impossible.  The ambition to know is not an exception; and certainly our perceptions cannot tell us how the world would look if nobody saw it, or how valuable it would be if nobody cared for it.  But our perceptions, as Locke again said, are sufficient for our welfare and appropriate to our condition.  They are not only a wonderful entertainment in themselves, but apart from their sensuous and grammatical quality, by their distribution and method of variation, they may inform us most exactly about the order and mechanism of nature.  We see in the science of today how completely the most accurate knowledge—­proved to be accurate by its application in the arts—­may shed every pictorial element, and the whole language of experience, to become a pure method of calculation and control.  And by a pleasant compensation, our aesthetic life may become freer, more self-sufficing, more humbly happy in itself:  and without trespassing in any way beyond the modesty of nature, we may consent to be like little children, chirping our human note; since the life of reason in us may well become science in its validity, whilst remaining poetry in its texture.

I think, then, that by a slight re-arrangement of Locke’s pronouncements in natural philosophy, they could be made inwardly consistent, and still faithful to the first presuppositions of common sense, although certainly far more chastened and sceptical than impulsive opinion is likely to be in the first instance.

There were other presuppositions in the philosophy of Locke besides his fundamental naturalism; and in his private mind probably the most important was his Christian faith, which was not only confident and sincere, but prompted him at times to high speculation.  He had friends among the Cambridge Platonists, and he found in Newton a brilliant example of scientific rigour capped with mystical insights.  Yet if we consider Locke’s philosophical position in the abstract, his Christianity almost disappears.  In form his theology and ethics were strictly rationalistic; yet one who was a Deist in philosophy might remain a Christian in religion.  There was no great harm in a special revelation, provided it were simple and short, and left the broad field of truth open in almost every direction to free and personal investigation.  A free man and a good man would certainly never admit, as coming from God, any doctrine contrary to his private reason or political interest; and the moral precepts actually vouchsafed to us in the Gospels were most acceptable, seeing that they added a sublime eloquence to maxims which sound reason would have arrived at in any case.