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PARTISAN REVIEW
but yet is of capacity to understand its meaning; might he not without
any absurdity ask a reason why? And were not he that proposed it
bound to make out the truth and reasonableness of it to him?
It is puzzling after all of this to turn to his
Second Treatise of
Government
and to find Locke saying that there is
((nothing more
evident
[my italics] than that creatures of the same species and rank,
promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature and the
use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another."
Now clearly this is a moral or practical principle: the tell-tale word
"should" indicates that. Therefore, according to the doctrine of the
Essay
many things are more evident than this natural law of equality;
indeed, as we have seen,
all
self-evident
speculative
principles are
more evident than it is.
If
it should not be obvious that Locke is
contradicting himself we have only to read a little further on where
he says with approval: "This equality of men by nature the judicious
Hooker looks upon as ...
evident in itself
[my italics], and beyond
all question." What more do we need to show that the Locke of
the
Essay
contradicts the Locke of the
Second Treatise of Govern–
ment
which appeared in the same year? The charge is simple: he
at once affirms and denies that moral principles are self-evident.
7.
((They all go into the dark."
Mr. Lippmann is eager to revive
the notion of self-evident natural law and to put it in the hands of
wise statesmen who will not be so tied to the demands of the people.
Presumably with the approval of Mr. Mortimer
J.
Adler, who is
thanked in the preface of
The Public Philosophy
and who has ex–
pressed similar views in a less winning way, Mr. Lippmann chastises
positivist professors who have subverted natural law through a re–
fusal to recognize that there is a realm of essences in addition to a
realm of existence. It is ironical, therefore, that positivists like Rudolf
Carnap have in recent times been the most active defenders of the
notion of analyticity (the sister notion of self-evidence, as we have
seen) as well as supporters of the view that meanings and universals
exist. Positivists, of course, have used the notions of analyticity and
meaning quite differently. They are mainly interested in showing
that mathematical propositions are analytic, that is to say, true by
virtue of the meanings of their component terms, and they vehemently
(and laudably) deny that the principles of morality may be so viewed.
