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How Matter Might at First be Made

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jonathan Bennett  and
Peter Remnant
Jonathan Bennett
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
Peter Remnant
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

In the fourth book of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke hints that he could explain how God may have created matter exnihilo, but refrains from doing so. Leibniz, when he came upon this passage, pricked up his ears. There ensued a sequence of personal events which are not without charm and piquancy, and a sequence of philosophical events which are of some interest. In this paper we tell the tale.

Locke has been discussing the view that the creation of matter out of nothing is so inconceivable — it is so utterly impossible to think of how it might be done — that not even omnipotence could bring off such a feat, and matter must therefore be co-eternal with God.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 4: New Essays on Rationalism and Empiricism , 1978 , pp. 1 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1978

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References

1 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding IV.x.18. What does Locke mean by 'so far as grammar it self would authorize'? We have not been able to conjecture a satisfactory explanation.

2 Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain IV.x.18, our translation. Of the two quoted phrases, the former is explained by a detail in the French translation of the Essay on which Leibniz was relying, together with some re-arranging of words by Leibniz. The second reflects a misunderstanding by Coste, the French translator: Locke wrote ‘in this place’ meaning ‘in this place in my book', but Coste put ‘dans cet endroit de la Terre'. Neither point matters much for the rest of the story.

3 Letter to Thomas Burnett, August 2, 1704. In Gerhardt, C. I. (ed.), Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Berlin, 1875-1890), vol. Ill, pp. 297-8.Google Scholar Our translation from the French, as with Leibniz's letters to Lady Masham.

4 Ibid., p. 364.

5 Ibid., p. 365.

6 Ibid., pp. 367-8.

7 A later reprinting, which omits the description of the English lord as ‘plein de vie’ and the reference to ‘l'etendue de ses lumieres', has a marginal note identifying him as ‘the late Count of Penbrocke, who died in February of the present year, 1738'. If we allow for a certain confusion as to English names and titles and for a mix-up over the date— no Earl of Pembroke died between 1733 and 1751 — it seems likely that the lord was Locke's long-time friend, Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembroke and President of the Royal Society, to whom he dedicated the Essay, and who died on 22 January 1733.

8 From the second edition of Coste's translation of Locke, Essai philosophique concernant I'entendement humain; our translation.

9 See Alexander, G. H. (ed.), The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (Manchester, 1956),Google Scholar Leibniz's third letter, Sec. 5.

10 The manuscript was brought to our attention by John Yolton. Ostensibly ‘on the the gravity and equilibrium of fluids', but really about many things, it is published in Latin and English by Hall, A.R. and Hall, M.B. (eds.), Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1962).Google Scholar The English text is on pp. 121-156, and the part which concerns us on pp. 138-145. Our quotations from the manuscript are all from pp. 139f. If it was written before 1672, as the Halls think it probably was, then ‘the thought’ of Newton's proposal cannot have ‘come to him’ when in conversation with Locke and the Earl of Pembroke, since 1672 is too early by several years for Locke to be in conversation with either Pembroke or Newton.

11 For what seems to be a contemporary instance of Coste's kind of mistake, see Strawson, P. F., The Bounds of Sense (London, 1966), p. 184;Google Scholar and for a discussion of it see Bennett, J., Kant's Dialectic (Cambridge, 1974), p. 172.Google Scholar