When once the genius of Locke was in the ascendant, more spiritual forms of philosophy fell into disrepute.  Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz were considered almost obsolete; More and Cudworth were out of favour:  and there was but scanty tolerance for any writer who could possibly incur the charge of transcendentalism or mysticism.  It is not that Cartesian or Platonic, or even mystic opinions, are irreconcileable with Locke’s philosophy.  When he spoke of sensation and reflection as the original sources of all knowledge, there was ample room for innate ideas, and for intuitive perceptions, under the shelter of terms so indefinite.  Moreover, the ambiguities of expression and apparent inconsistencies of thought, which stand out in marked contrast to the force and lucidity of his style, are by no means owing only to his use of popular language, and his studied avoidance of all that might seem to savour of the schools.  His devout spirit rebelled against the carefully defined limits which his logical intellect would have imposed upon it.  He could not altogether avoid applying his system to the absorbing subjects of theology, but he did so with some unwillingness and with much reserve.  Revelation, once acknowledged as such, was always sacred ground to him; and though he often appears to reduce all evidence to the external witness of the senses, there is something essentially opposed to materialistic notions, in his feeling that there is that which we do not know simply by reason of our want of a new and different sense, by which, if we had it, we might know our souls as we know a triangle.[476] Locke would have heartily disowned the conclusions of many who professed themselves his true disciples, and of many others whose whole minds had been trained and formed under the influences of his teaching, and who insisted that they were but following up his arguments to their legitimate consequences.[477] The general system was the same; but there was nothing in common between the theology of Locke and Toland’s repudiation of whatever in religion transcended human reason, or Bolingbroke’s doubts as to the immortality of the soul, or the pronounced materialism of Hartley and Condillac, or the blank negative results at which Hume arrived.

But though Locke and multitudes of his admirers were profoundly Christian in their belief, the whole drift of his thought tended to bring prominently forward the purely practical side of religion and the purely intellectual side of theology, and to throw into the background, and reduce to its narrowest compass, the more entirely spiritual region which marks the contact of the human with the Divine.  Its uncertain lights and shadows, its mysteries, obscurities, and difficulties, were thoroughly distrusted by him.  He did not—­a religious mind like his could not—­deny the existence of those feelings and intuitions which, from their excessive prominence in that school, may be classed under the name of mystic.  But he doubted