Locke's Desire

Jonathan Brody Kramnick

Among the categories examined by the enlightenment, few were so elusive as desire. Then as now, the term lent itself to an equal balance of meanings and vagaries. What did seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers intend when they sought to demarcate the nature of motivation and name the experience of wanting? One answer is that they endeavored to bring sexuality into a new culture of expertise. "Desire" became one of several areas of knowledge laid bare for the separate disciplines of moral philosophy and experimental science. But enlightenment theorists also summoned the category to help explain institutions that dwelled outside the realm of the personal, such as the market, civil society, and the aesthetic. The erotic seemed to have this special feature: it accounted for one's habits of mind and gave form to the grand systems of a secular culture. Often at the same time. Witness Bernard Mandeville's Search into the Nature of Society (1723): the "sociableness of man," he there argues, "arises from these two things, viz. the multiplicity of desires and the continual opposition he meets with in his endeavours to gratify them." ¹ The social order initiates a longing from which it also takes shape, hence the "search" turns from the realm of public life to the inner world of the self: "I beg of my serious reader that he would for a while abate a little of his gravity and suffer me to examine these people separately, as to their inside and the different motives they act from." ²

In the lair of feeling lies the map of society, and in the form of society reside the springs of affection. But that is not to say that the enlightenment found it easy to navigate between the two. One way that we can get a sense of the effort that went into naming desire and to tracking it within the new, secular institutions of market and culture is to follow closely the changing meaning of the term. The following pages thus attempt something like a comparative philology of the erotic at the close of the British seventeenth century; they place the word "desire" in what was arguably its most significant array of philosophical use and speculative meaning. Lexical shifts create a pattern that is intelligible within some of the leading tensions of the age. We may state these briefly as follows. According to many, the modernity of modern society lay in the differentiation of its parts: politics from commerce, art from science, religion from reason. ³ Each was a separate discipline of thought or an independent domain of value. No single system of faith inhibited the cultivation of knowledge or the accumulation of capital. Yet the advent of modern, disciplinary culture cast a certain shadow. The same sharpness of focus that provided new levels of expertise appeared to estrange intellectual concerns from the habits and language of daily living. ⁴ The imagined fluidity of public or intimate life unmoored [End Page 189] from tradition entailed new varieties of risk. The resulting strain placed on the concept of "desire" was unique: it criss-crossed the subjective and the social, the personal and the disciplinary, at their most sensitive points of contact and so became inseparable, as we shall see, from a certain "uneasiness." ⁵

This configuration will become clearer by turning now to our example. Few writers bring into bolder relief the contrary aspirations of their period than John Locke. A philosopher of mind and political theorist, medical doctor and economist, Locke shows by his example the enlightenment's ambivalent regard to the very disciplines it cultivated. ⁶ Nowhere is this more evident than in his effort to name desire and calculate its provenance. In the first edition of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke describes an inner drive toward the good, a direction of the will by the moral sense. The second edition (1694) has a more forbidding cast. When we desire something, Locke there argues, we anxiously covet its presence. Between the first and second edition, Locke engages in a fervent correspondence with the Irish scientist William Molyneux. Their letters often reach a peak of tonal intensity--with resonant declarations of convivial emotion--precisely when they discuss the limits of the will and the nature of wanting. Looking at the letters alongside the revisions, I hope to show how the naming of desire (absent as a term in the first edition), and the separation of it from the domain of religion or ethics, raised to philosophical abstraction the conditions of affect first encountered in the new cultures of expertise. It is a familiar tactic of modern philosophy to speculate from experience. For this reason, we should not be surprised to find that Locke's final theory of desire is similar in shape and bearing to the feelings first evoked by the letters and that both reflect the new discipline's peculiar mixture of anomie and intimacy.

Locke's theory of desire is spelt out in the twenty-first chapter of Book II of the Essay, entitled "Of Power." This chapter was evidently important to Locke. He revised it more than any other part of the Essay (almost doubling its length in the process) and discussed it obsessively in his correspondence. "Of Power" introduces a number of significant themes: free will versus determinism, the psychology of motives and action, and the ethics of human conduct. ⁷ In the first edition, the argument ran something like this: moral agents are drawn toward the greater good, but they sometimes mistake present pleasure for later happiness and so, freely, act against their long-term interest. Locke begins with the novel claim to have put to rest "that long agitated and, I think, unreasonable, because unintelligible, question viz. whether man's will be free or no." ⁸ The question misunderstands the nature of willing as an action. It is "as insignificant to ask, whether man's will be free, as to ask, whether his sleep be swift, or his vertue square" (119). With this droll assertion, Locke means to argue that liberty is not an attribute of the will but a condition of the agent. People are free or confined to the degree to which they can exercise their wills, but the will itself cannot be free because it cannot act alone. Locke calls this exercise "volition . . . the actual choosing, or preferring forbearance to the doing, or doing to the forbearance, of any particular action in our power, that we think on" (119). "And what is the will," he continues, "but the faculty to do this?" (119). The will enacts our choices. It is here that the idea of free will is, on Locke's reckoning, [End Page 190] demonstrably antithetical. Agency enslaves the will. Freedom entails that the will always serves one's choice to do or forbear from doing: "The will . . . is determined by something without itself" (123). Put this way, Locke's concerns may seem far from what we would recognize as the erotic. Up to a point this is so, and we will want to watch how the chapter takes up the question of desire over the years of revision. But it is important to see this process underway already in the first edition, where Locke is concerned to delimit the aleatory field of wants and passions.

Reading these pages, Locke's friend William Molyneux described the thread of the argument as "wonderfully fine spun," and it is not hard to see why. Locke appears to accept the spirit of the argument for free will (agents are not predetermined in their thoughts and actions) while splitting hairs on its terms. The principal incentive behind the unusual separation of agency from willing is apparently to move the discussion from simple freedom to "actual choosing" and so to dwell at greater length on affective and emotional complexity. Consciousness takes form out of an ambivalent tissue of preferences: "it is the mind, or the man, that operates, and exerts these powers; that does the action, he has the power, or is able to do. That which has the power or not the power to operate, is that alone, which is, or is not free; and not the power itself" (121). Willing is not as interesting a topic, Locke seems to say, as the variable thoughts that cause people to do or not to do something. The question ought not to be is the will free, but rather, given freedom to choose, what shapes our motives? What causes moral agents to select one action over another, to do or forbear doing, when faced with multiple options? Locke's answer in the first edition is plain: "Good, then, the greater good is that alone which determines the will" (124). In this simple inducement lies an important thesis about the nature of motivation; "pleasure and pain are produced in us, by the operation of certain objects, either on our minds, or our bodies; and in different degrees: therefore what has an aptness to produce pleasure in us, is that we labour for, and is that we call good" (124). Locke's notion of the object will undergo significant revision in the second edition. We might simply note here that "labour" for the good is not yet termed desire. Locke uses that word only once in the first edition, in a dismissive (if revealing) aside. Explaining that "preference" is a better word for his purposes than "choice," he writes that the latter is of "a more doubtful signification, and bordering more upon desire, and so is referred to things remote" (124). Desire resides only in what is doubly murky, remote and doubtful in turns. It confounds rather than expresses our preferences among the objects we confront.

Contemplating one's options, the mind is drawn toward the object that appears to present the greatest pleasure. Locke spends the rest of the chapter attempting to demonstrate that on this basis we are ethical beings: "This is not an imperfection in Man, it is highest perfection of intellectual natures" because goodness, in the last instance, is always defined in terms of the "future state" of our souls (124). The recourse to the doctrine of the "future state" situates Locke's argument, at this stage, well within the parameters of normative Anglicanism. "Future state" was the increasingly prominent term, in late-seventeenth-century discourse, for the condition of our souls after we die, when our past conduct is judged and our eternal condition sealed. ⁹ Locke's version of the argument was both typical and bland: [End Page 191]

To him, I say, who hath a prospect of the different state of perfect happiness, or misery that attends all men after this life, depending on their behaviour here, the measures of good and evil that govern his choice, are mightily changed. For since nothing of pleasure and pain in this life, can bear any proportion to endless happiness or exquisite misery of an immortal soul hereafter, actions in his power will have their preference, not according to the transient pleasure, or pain that accompanies, or follows them here; but as they serve to secure that perfect durable happiness hereafter. (127)

The flat style of these sentences is oddly matched with their distended content: hellfire in plain language. Yet the moderation of tone reveals an important point. Locke wants to argue that all reasonable people calmly incline toward the good. A turbulent psychology of preferences gives way to a rational calculation of benefits. Accordingly, wrongdoing is a fault not of the will but of the understanding; "when we compare present pleasure or pain with future, we often make wrong judgments of them" (127). The will passively follows the misperception of the understanding; we are defeated by "the weak and narrow constitutions of our minds" (128). In the switch from passions to the intellect, Locke absolves the will of any guilt in the pursuit of this-worldly pleasures, as he had earlier denied the will any capacity for freedom. We are always only after what we think will give us maximum delight; our failure to see what will bring us long-term pleasure is a failure of rationality and not of feeling.

The argument that we are drawn insuperably toward the good is radically revised in the second edition. One reason may lie in the unexpected company the early argument kept. In the conventional history of the enlightenment, Locke's epistemology seeks to break with its metaphysical forbears, devotees of Platonic essences and innate ideas alike. ¹⁰ The initial version of "Of Power" demonstrates that this break is as yet incomplete. Compare Locke's language to that of the great "Cambridge Platonist" himself, Henry More, as the latter describes the nature of desire in his influential work The Immortality of the Soul (1659). Here is a precursor vision of the "greater good" conceived in a rather different form:

There is nothing more certain than that the love of God and our neighbour is the greatest happiness that we can arrive unto, either in this life or that which is to come. And whatever things are there described, are either the causes, effects or concomitants of that noble and divine passion. Neither are the external incitements thereto, which I there mention, rightly to be deemed sensual, but intellectual: For even such is the sensible beauty, whether it show itself in feature, musick or whatever graceful deportments or comely actions. And those things that are not properly intellectual, suppose odours and vapours, yet such a spirit may be transfused into the vehicles of these aerial inhabitants thereby, that may more than ordinarily raise up into their intellectual faculties. (14)

The contrast to the tranquillity of Locke's prose registers a larger split between the two systems of thought. On More's vivid account of things, bodies pulse with the motion of "incorporeal substance." ¹¹ An "intellectual" and "sensual" blend daubs the ashen world of extension with the ethereal pleasures of the good. "Spirits do act really upon the senses, by acting upon matter that affects the senses"; they produce what More calls "desire," a "harmless and momentary ablegation of the soul from the body" in which "the power of fancy may carry the soul to the place intended" [End Page 192] (56, 169). The distance of this animated tableau from Locke's becalmed portrait is instructive. We are enspiraled in the "diversity of impulsions from objects"; our desire for these objects is an imaginative and ecstatic "ablegation" (casting out or dispatching) that eludes the calm interdiction of judgment (88). Even in its early form, the Essay's sober balance of preference and forbearance is far from this lurid portrait, but the subdued account of moral judgment does bear a certain resemblance: we are drawn to the goodness of certain objects.

Locke's halting evocation of the "greater good" betrays a residual affinity to a tradition of thinking with which he is otherwise uncomfortable. ¹² Closer even than More is John Norris's The Theory and Regulation of Love (1688). A fellow of All-Souls College, Norris was an important interlocutor of Locke's throughout the 1690s. ¹³ His "theory" was that all ethics could be reduced to the question of love, which he defines as "a motion of the soul towards good" (10): "This moral gravity of the soul will be its connaturality to all good, or good in general, that is God as its primary and adequate object, and to particular goods only so far as they have something of the common nature of good, something of God in them" (11). By "object" Norris means both goal and thing. God is the direction toward which all desire leans and the reality that lies under all substance; he is the "great and supreme magnet" (20). As it searches out this magnetism, Norris's erotics cast a wide net. "Concupiscence or desire" has God as its primary object, but also finds God in all that we want or crave; "our desire has many subordinate and secondary objects, which it tends to with more or less inclination according as the marks or footsteps of the universal good appears in them" (38). The novel latitude of this eroticism lies in the ardency of mediation; objects track the deeper reality of a spirit whose pull on us is concupiscence unbound.

We are invited to imagine the world as one common object of our desire. Underlying this solicitation is a problem of increasing importance for the enlightenment: what if not traditional hierarchy or revealed religion brings together the composite order of civil society? Norris's answer is that society is the name we give to the manifold bonds of concupiscence. "The pulsation of the heart," he writes, "is the great pulse of the body politic":

'Tis love that begets and keeps up the great circulation and mutual dependence of society, by this men are inclined to maintain mutual commerce and intercourse with one another, and to distribute their benefits and kindnesses to all the parts of the civil body, till at length they return again upon themselves in the circle and reciprocation of love. (28)

Since desire is the pull of the good, it may be no surprise that its cadence is fundamentally civil. The destiny of the erotic is to stitch together the aggregate of displaced individuals into a community whose fictive harmony has otherwise been dissolved. Norris presents this tailoring in two overlapping metaphors: circularity and penetration. The ostensibly antithetical pair blend into one positive image--"circulation" and "dependence," "commerce" and "intercourse," "circle" and "reciprocation"--with marked preference given to the first term. Penetration bends like a circle, even at the formal level in which Norris's sentence distends and then curves back into a sphere: love clasping to love. According to this round view of things, [End Page 193] society is an amiable compound of desires, desire an ideal reciprocity of feeling, and sexuality a sanguine form of reenchantment. All the puzzles of modern living--the division of labor, the bonds of law, the exchange of commodities--may be explained by a concupiscence leached of opacity or tension.

In all of its zesty exuberance, The Theory and Regulation of Love may be taken to represent the extreme version of an argument that Locke moves steadily away from over the course of writing the Essay. In the first edition, he accepts the notion of the greater good but shies away from the related concept of desire, insofar as the latter carries with it the sundry mysteries of "innate" dispositions that his plain-speaking empiricism seeks to vanquish. As he thinks about these matters, Locke slowly builds a new model of desire against the model he found in writers like More and Norris. The early version of the Essay agrees that we are moved by the idea of the greater good, but presents this as an act of logical calculation, not ecstatic feeling. More and Norris argued that desire led us to the good because it discovered the spiritual latency of objects. In what will later become a hallmark of empiricist method, the Essay consistently suggests that we have little access to this essential core of things. In the first edition, objects are simply matters of preference that test our rationality. But even this conception eventually seems too close to Norris's argument; as we shall see, rewriting the chapter leads to a notable recession of the object. The first edition had objects but no desire, the second desire but no objects. What is the upshot of this reversal? On the face of it, Locke appears to diminish the libidinal cast: ablegation and concupiscence give way to judgment; the colored lights of the universal good fade to a monochromatic gray. Yet to understand the two-part change simply in these terms would be significantly misleading. Locke's difficulty with abiding models of desire does not so much reject the sexual as unfurl one erotics against the antecedent pressure of another. He fits desire to modern, secular uncertainty. Objects are no longer pre-given vehicles of the good; they are shaped by a wanting whose temper and timbre are difficult to predict. The targets of our longing are not set in advance but must constantly be invented.

During the years in which these erotics began to take shape, Locke conducted an extensive correspondence with the Irish scientist William Molyneux. The letters began when Locke stumbled upon Molyneux's book Dioptrica Nova (1692) and read that "the incomparable Mr. Locke . . . in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, has rectified more received mistakes, and delivered more profound truths, established on experience and observation, for the direction of man's mind in the prosecution of knowledge . . . than are to be met with in all the volumes of the ancients." ¹⁴ Although they had not yet met, Locke's thankful response introduces an exchange of escalating intimacy; he writes on 16 July 1692 that he is pleased "those who can be extreme and rigorous and exact in the search of truth, can be as civil and as complaisant in their dealing with those whom they take to be lovers of it," to which Molyneux responds on 27 August: "I find by yours to me, that my ambition is not fallen short of its designe; but that you are pleased to incourage me by assuring me that I have made great advance of friendship towards you; give me leave to imbrace the favour with all joy imaginable. And that you may judge of my sincerity by my open heart, I will plainly confess to you, that I have not in my life read [End Page 194] any book with more satisfaction, than your essay; Insomuch that a repeated perusal of it is still more pleasant to me." ¹⁵ As the letters continue, Locke and Molyneux focus on problems that had vexed the chapter on power: ethics, will, objects, and (eventually) desire. As the initial exchange would suggest, these are addressed in the register of convivial affection. ¹⁶ Alone among Locke's letters, the Molyneux correspondence radiates a sense of incipient and filial closeness: the "complaisancy" of the one and "incouragements" of the other; the shared quest for truth; the confessed joys of a satisfied heart. So much could have been said by Achilles to Patroclus. What gives these declarations their specificity are two interrelated facets of enlightenment culture: in broad terms, the mediation of print and the division of knowledge. The plangent avowals of communion and like-mindedness occur between two writers whose only acquaintance is having read the other's published work. The pleasure Molyneux feels upon the receipt of Locke's letter leads him to recall the initial satisfaction he had in reading the Essay and to claim that rereading the book is perpetual delight. Desire, if we may call it that, is continually routed back to words on a printed page. Meanwhile, Locke only comes across the dedication because he and Molyneux share an interest in empirical philosophy and the natural sciences. He reaches out to the civility of a thinker who is as "extreme and rigorous and exact" as he imagines himself to be. In this appeal lies an important variation in the wide course of the early-modern print market. The community brought together by publication is limited to the virtuosos of natural philosophy; Locke and Molyneux have, above all, a disciplinary familiarity.

Consider the reply of 20 September to Molyneux's solicitation, where Locke further warms the dialogue with what Maurice Cranston, in the standard biography, calls "terms of unusual cordiality." ¹⁷ The billet-doux is worth quoting at length:

There being nothing that I think of so much value as the acquaintance and friendship of knowing and worthy men, you may easily guess how much I find my self obliged, I will not say by the offer of, but by the gift you have made me of yours. That which confirms me in the assurance of it is the little pretence I have to it. For, knowing myself, as I do, I cannot think so vainly of my self as to imagine that you should make such overtures and expressions of kindness to me for any other end, but merely as the pledges and exercise of it. I return you therefore my thanks, as for the greatest and most acceptable present you could have made me; and desire you to believe, that since I cannot hope that the returns which I make you of mine should be of any great use to you, I shall endeavour to make it up, as well as I can, with an high esteem, and perfect sincerity. You must therefore expect to have me live with you hereafter, with all the liberty and assurance of a settled friendship. For meeting with but a few men in the world whose acquaintance I find much reason to covet, I make more than ordinary haste into the familiarity of a rational enquirer after, and lover of truth, whenever I can light on any such. There are beauties of the mind, as well as of the body, that take and prevail at first flight; and wherever I have met with this, I have readily surrender'd my self, and have never yet been deceived in my expectation. (522)

What are we to make of these perfervid sentences? It is all too easy, I suppose, to reduce them to our modern categories of personal or sexual identity: on this account, the life-long bachelor attempts to imagine a communion with his new friend, whom he had not yet met but who still prompts, within the relatively safe environs of personal correspondence, a fantasy of genial cohabitation set apart from [End Page 195] the impediments of law and custom. As tempting as this reading may be, we would be closer to the amorous springs of the epistle if we consider it within the intimate context of expertise. On this reading, Locke's "unusual cordiality" attempts to gild the pallid mural of enlightenment with the hue it has apparently lost. Imaginative friendship and passionate collegiality compensate for the split of science from the subjective flux of social meaning. This wished-for end would then explain the excess of affect, unmatched as it is elsewhere in Locke's correspondence or in his published work. The chill of extremity and rigor leaves a proportionate warmth of affiliation. The result is a vertiginous swirl of feeling: your friendship must be genuine because I can return nothing but friendship of my own; so coupled, we will live together, for I will hastily join with one who shares my sober habits of mind, a mind which, after all, has its own ineffable and insuperable beauty. Each precipitous capture of the other leaves a breathless cession of the self: "I hope you will see, by the freedom I have here taken with you, that I begin to reckon my self amongst your acquaintance. Use me so, I beseech you" (524-25).

Remarkable as these declarations are, they take their cue and shape from the cultures of expertise. Witness this important interlarding: "Wonder not therefore, if having been thus wrought on, I begin to converse with you with as much freedom as if we had begun our acquaintance when you were in Holland; and desire your advice and assistance about a second edition of my Essay, the former being now dispersed" (522). ¹⁸ The intimate salutation leads to a plea for help in emending his published work. But this is not to say that the letters are stripped of affect after they turn to the back-and-forth of revision. To be sure, the correspondence can hardly sustain the first epistle's purple passage. Still, the collaborative venture allows Locke to imagine relations of idealized transparency. ¹⁹ Shared vocation breeds like minds:

I should be loath to differ from any thinking man, being fully persuaded that there are few things of pure speculation, wherein two thinking men who impartially seek truth can differ if they give themselves the leisure to examine their hypotheses and understand one another. I presuming you to be of this make, whereof so few are to be found (for 'tis not every one that thinks himself a lover or seeker of truth who sincerely does it) took the liberty to desire your objections, that I might correct my mistakes. (609)

Locke twice presents differing as a threat to transparent relations between thinking men. In this way, his letter may be said to typify an ideal often accorded to print culture writ large: the building of relations of radical similarity among readers who, as they peruse identical texts, are disembedded from the particulars of region, idiom, and personality. ²⁰ The speculative purity and impartial truthfulness that the two men share is made evident by their common response to what lies between them: a book, a set of problems. At the same time, the separation of empirical philosophy from other modes of analysis shapes a special closeness that is set apart from the larger amalgam of the print market. "You are so desirous to hear the sense of others," Molyneux responds, "you are so tender in differing from any man, that you have captivated me beyond resistance" (648). Shared habits of mind are removed from the multitude (alas, "so few are to be found"). [End Page 196]

Within this irresistible and captivating sense of minority lies an important paradox. The same configuration that enables affective relations also thwarts them. In a subsequent letter, Locke returns to the image of Molyneux as, so to speak, a domestic partner--"you have given me those marks of your kindness to me, that you will not think it strange that I count you amongst my friends, and, with those, desiring to live with the ease and freedom of a perfect confidence, I never accuse them to my self of neglect or coldness"--only to note with some sadness the expanse of geography that blocks their privacy. "That request you press earnestly upon me," he responds to an appeal for manuscripts, "makes me bemoan the distance you are from me, which deprives me of the assistance I might have from your opinion and judgment, before I ventur'd any thing into the public" (664). Publication draws attention to distance in the very act of overcoming it. Conversely, intimacy takes form within public life by the act of shaping it, the "speaking freely and candidly ones opinion upon the thoughts and compositions of another intended for the press" (664). Each view makes recourse to print as the public condition in or against which intimacy is patterned: a colorless anonymity that proceeds "after" personal relations; a necessary lineament of those relations. ²¹ Locke and Molyneux are brought together by the circuits of philosophical publication and debate, yet they enjoy the bond of a correspondence whose privacy is made all the more charged by its eventual disclosure. ²² Here is one further example. In this same letter, Locke promises to send Molyneux the draft pages of what will eventually become Some Thoughts Concerning Education, but cautions "I know not yet whether I shall set my name to this discourse, and therefore shall desire you to conceal it. You see I make you my confessor, for you have made your self my friend" (665). Confessor to penitent, friend to friend, colleague to colleague, so names the cross-hatch of intimacy over the enlightenment cultures of expertise.

We have been speaking, thus far, about desire in two ways: a conceptual absence in the first edition of the Essay, an affective presence in the letters. These may be brought together by considering the process in which desire is called out and named as such. Molyneux responded to Locke's request for help in preparing the second edition, as I mentioned earlier, by drawing attention to the "finely spun" thread of chapter twenty-one. He was particularly concerned with that most curious aspect of Locke's early argument: "you seem to make all sins to proceed from our understandings, or to be against conscience; and not at all from the depravity of our wills. Now it seems harsh to say, that a man shall be damn'd, because he understands no better than he does" (601). This two-part reproach is concise: the authority given to judgment overlooks the agency of the will; failures of intellect should not damn our souls. On either side, Molyneux complains, the will is insufficiently developed as a concept. There must be something that runs below conscious deliberation and rational calculation that will allow us to understand human motivation and evaluate moral conduct. Molyneux here nervously lights on what is still only nascent in Locke's theory: the separation of ethics from what is not yet called desire. In the first edition of the Essay, blame lies with the great steering faculty of the understanding; the undercurrents of emotion and feeling are inculpable. For this reason, perhaps, [End Page 197] Molyneux requests that Locke compose another book, "the second member of your division of the sciences, the Ars Practica or Ethics," one that would presumably be concerned with managing the will (602). He had been after Locke to write such a book since his first letter and would repeat his appeal frequently. ²³ This time the plea is worked up into an entire program for sociable ethics. Please compose for us a system, Molyneux asks, one that would bring morality down from the heights of the intellect into the give-and-take of the everyday: "believe me Sir 'twill be one of the most useful and glorious undertakings I can implore you. . . . Be as large as tis possible on this subject, and by all means let it be in English" (602). The practicality of the Ars Practica should lie in an expansion of the last section of chapter twenty-one, in which rational apperception of the future state guides daily choice-making. The problem with the present version of the argument is that it remains in the inhospitable form of a "mathematical formula." ²⁴ Much more "useful" would be a full discursive treatment of the subject in the vernacular, whereby moral instruction could assist social integration.

For whatever reason, Locke never wrote such a book. But he did respond, after a fashion, to the larger complaint. Ethics remain the property of the understanding. The infirmity of the will was to be compensated for by other means. "I got into a new view of things," Locke writes to Molyneux during the summer of 1693, "which if I mistake not, will satisfie you, and give a clearer account of humane freedom than hitherto I have done" (700). He then lists twelve new sections, couched among which is the startling assertion that "the greater good in view barely considered determines not the will, the joys of heaven are often neglected" (700). Although Locke doesn't say as much, this scholium promises nothing less than a mirror inversion of his earlier position, a switch that would appear to widen rather than close the divide between desire and ethics. Writers like Norris had attempted to build a system in which individual goodness and social harmony were indelibly matched to desire. A committed empiricist, Molyneux would hardly have wanted so much from Locke; but he might not have expected the chapter to take the opposite direction and cleave the good from motivation tout court. ²⁵ In place of the good, Locke avowed the importance of two novel terms, uneasiness and desire. According to the skeletal form presented by the correspondence, the argument was to run like this: when we desire something we are uneasy in its absence and consequently will its presence. Desire determines the will, but at the same time is subject to the rule of the understanding. ²⁶ Freedom therefore lies in the ability to "suspend the execution of our desires" (700). Within this fateful joining of liberty and repression lie the germs of Locke's elaborated theory of the erotic. The emphasis on rationality that Molyneux had queried is reinforced by the "suspension" of wants and cravings, while attraction to the good transforms into a morally neutral appetite that Locke christens, for the first time, as desire.

Alongside the latter is the most enigmatic category of all. The cryptic charm of "uneasiness" was not lost on Locke's readers. For many, the term was a fit response to the state of things at the beginning of the eighteenth century, one that captured the modern experience of risk and uncertainty. ²⁷ But Molyneux might have been slightly puzzled to see the word raised to such prominence. As with desire, the dominion [End Page 198] of uneasiness promises to be a significant addition to the chapter; in fact, the word does not appear at all in the first edition. But where desire's pedigree stretches back to the origins of philosophy itself (reworked as it may be by Locke) uneasiness brings no semantic tradition. In fact, Locke never defines the word in the letters and gives no clue of its derivation. He even left Molyneux unsure if it is desire's synonym or cause: "That which in the train of our voluntary actions determines the will to any change of operation, is some present uneasiness, which is, or at least is always accompanyed with that of desire" (722). Is uneasiness the same as desire or does it produce desire, and what does it mean to lack ease in the first place? These unanswered questions will remain into the second edition. Locke appears to introduce the equivocal word in order to strip the mystery from desire. One riddle steps in to replace another. The result is that desire is no longer "doubtful" or "remote" but set to become an integral faculty in the operations of the mind, presided over only by the sovereign act of judgment.

Or so Locke hints in the précis he sends to Molyneux, the only person with whom he shares his thinking on these matters prior to publication. The peculiar blurring of genres at this moment is consequential. Locke is not simply exchanging thoughts with his friend, nor is he presenting finished ideas in print; rather, he is furnishing, in epistolary form, what he plans for the revised edition of the published Essay. Desire is midway in its passage from experience to concept. This birth seems on first glance to deliver a concept that is at a considerable remove from the breathless passion of which Locke demonstrates himself quite capable. Viewed within the model of enlightenment we have been tracing, however, this may not be such a surprise: Locke refuses to establish desire as a mode of reenchantment and chooses instead to delimit its place within the division of knowledge. The concept presents neither a consoling retreat from a universe scoured of value nor a spring of social cohesion; it spells out, instead, a specific set of relations and type of longing. The severity of this blueprint matches the warmth of the letters; each is one side of a process that differentiates the erotic: an intimacy shaped by disciplines, an "uneasiness" within the self.

The move from the letters back to the Essay, in any case, brings a significant change in altitude. Ardor gives way to precision, friendship to solitude. Yet the difference is not entirely stark. The language of the correspondence survives, in altered form, the shift in medium. This survival may be clarified by turning now to the 1694 Essay. In this version, "Of Power" contains some twenty-six new sections and, as was promised to Molyneux, a new thesis. The opening discussion of the will and the concluding discussion of judgment and the future state each remain (although with several important modifications), while the middle section on the "greater good" is replaced by a longer reflection on desire. The changes Locke introduces early on in the chapter are subtly indicative of the larger transformation to come. The 1690 version of section five defines the will as follows: "we find in our selves a power to begin or forbear, continue or end, several thoughts of our minds, and motions of our bodies, barely by the choice or preference of our minds. This power the mind has to prefer the consideration of any idea, to the not considering; or to prefer the motion of any part of the body, to its rest is that, I think, we call the will" (117). [End Page 199] The 1694 version is the same up until the final clause of the first sentence, where it reads, "barely by a thought or preference of the mind ordering, or as it were commanding the doing or not doing such or such a particular action." ²⁸ The second sentence is also revised and expanded, and now reads: "This power which the mind has, thus to order the consideration of any idea, or the forbearing to consider it; or to prefer the motion of any part of the body to its rest, and vice versâ in any particular instance is that we call the will" (2d ed., 125-26). As Locke rewrites himself, the prose takes a dilatory form uncharacteristic of the first edition: each sentence wrangles into a multiple devolution of subordinate clauses. (Sentence-level pleonasm is recapitulated at a higher level, we soon discover, by the steady accretion of new sections to the chapter.) Once desire is in the wings, it would seem, there's no easy way to stop talking. Yet, not for the first time, content eddies against form. Locke grants little agency to things beyond our conscious reckoning. His writing may get quite ahead of itself, but what he has to say is that our mental operations are far more under control than he had first let on: we don't "choose," we "think"; we don't "prefer," we "order" or "command." Locke has a great deal of difficulty saying that it is very easy to direct one's will.

With this tension, we arrive at an entirely new discussion of desire and uneasiness in sections twenty-nine through forty-seven. These present the several themes Locke had sketched to Molyneux: the coupling of wanting and anxiety, freedom and repression, and the final dominion of judgment. The new material begins by separating the will from desire. Locke represents this difference as an important philosophical distinction, one that draws attention to the rigor of his thinking and the specificity of his categories: "I find the will often confounded with several of the affections, especially desire; and one put for the other, and that by men, who would not willingly be thought, not to have had very distinct notions of things, and not to have writ very clearly about them" (133). In language besotted with compound negatives, Locke affirms clearly that doing is distinct from, and subject to, wanting. "The will is perfectly distinguished from desire"; or, in other words, desire flows beneath and gives form to all actions (133). But that is not to say that desire resides within what we would now call the unconscious; Locke is no precocious Freudian. On the contrary, the tremors of wanting lie on the surface of our daily experience. We are all too aware of what we fancy, especially when it is out of reach or in competition with other desiderata and so makes us uneasy.

The first appearance of desire and uneasiness is thus fairly simple. They are the feelings that exist before the will and summon the will to action. This initial simplicity sets the stage for Locke's most dramatic revision: "To return then to the enquiry, what is it that determines the will in regard to its actions? And that upon second thoughts I am apt to imagine is not, as is generally supposed the greater good in view: But some (and for the most part the most pressing) uneasiness a man is at present under. This is that which successively determines the will, and sets us upon those actions, we perform. This, uneasiness we may call, as it is, desire" (134). These are truly "second thoughts." Contrary to the stated opinion of the first edition, Locke draws the curtain on the greater good: we are not pulled toward it, we simply try to assuage the uneasiness caused by its absence. Locke is well aware of the fineness [End Page 200] of this distinction and it takes several declarations for him to clarify the point. Here is an early one: "Good and Evil, present and absent, 'tis true, work upon the mind: But that which immediately determines the will, from time to time, to every voluntary action, is the uneasiness of desire, fixed on some absent good" (134-35). The second half of this formula gives back what the first half takes away: absent good does and does not determine the will. There are at least two ways of making sense of this apparent paradox. The first is that, unlike More and Norris, Locke distinguishes between moral and hedonic goodness. On this account, the subject is not motivated by an abstract sense of proper behavior but does pursue what he or she declares to be good. The second is that Locke distinguishes between the object of goodness itself and the effect of that object's absence. We are not moved to act or forbear from acting by any given object; rather, we are made anxious by the absence of objects that we feel would be good if they were in our presence.

I'm inclined to think that the importance of Locke's chapter lies in the conjuncture of these two arguments. The new version of the good that is attached to an absent object of uneasiness has an earthly cast. Locke nearly says as much in the third restatement of his thesis, which is more emphatic than ever about his process of self-revision. Where he had earlier written that the determination of the will by the greater good was "the highest perfection of intellectual natures," he now writes:

It seems so establish'd and settled a maxim by the general consent of all mankind, that good, the greater good, determines the will, that I do not at all wonder, that when I first publish'd my thoughts on this subject, I took it for granted; and I imagine, that by a great many I shall be thought more excusable, for having then done so, than that now I have ventur'd to recede from so received an opinion. But yet upon a stricter enquiry, I am forced to conclude, that good, the greater good, though apprehended and acknowledged to be so, does not determine the will, until our desire, raised proportionately to it, makes us uneasy in the want of it. (135)

Locke repeats himself. Moral goodness does not motivate the subject, only wanting some absent object that we declare to be good does. What is important about this repetition is not just that it brings together the hedonic and anxious dimensions to Locke's argument; it is also that the point is made in the idiom of progress. Locke's desire stages a break with the past, a split from the traditional way of conflating eros and ethics that had still dominated his thinking in the first edition. This intrepid division is bound to be unpopular, he claims, as the precise distinction that it proposes militates against received opinion. Yet, he continues, the lonely venture is worth taking since it opens the new continent of "our desire" for future speculation. This gesture will be familiar to students of the enlightenment: past ways of thinking are beholden to the mysteries; modern science has stripped the veil of superstition and provided fine distinctions for the future. On this basis, it is often said, were erected many of the categories by which we understand the modern world, from science to literature, the market to the public. ²⁹ Where might Locke's revisionary terms stand in this list? It would surely be presumptuous to argue that we here witness the "invention" of desire (with sufficient dexterity this could be placed at nearly any time or place). Yet it would not be too much, I think, to say that Locke's definition is an important moment within the ongoing division of knowledge: a turning inward toward the classification of feeling itself. [End Page 201]

One might expect that as desire takes center stage objects would have a proportionately greater role. What is desire, after all, if not a drive toward an object? Quite the opposite seems to be the case in Locke's emphasis on absence. The retirement of the greater good takes with it the objects in which the good was incubated. If desire is the experience of uneasiness and uneasiness is the anxiety of loss (in the empiricist lower-case, not psychoanalytic capitals), then the classification of desire necessarily entails a certain waning of the object. To see this more clearly, we should look again at the micro-level in which Locke revises himself. We observed earlier that the twenty-ninth section of the first edition postulates that "pleasure and pain are produced in us, by the operation of certain objects" and "therefore what has an aptness to produce pleasure in us, is that we labour for, and is that we call good" (124). In the revised version of the section, "the great motive that works on the mind" is not the apprehension of good objects; rather, "the motive to change, is always some uneasiness" (2d ed., 133). In the first account, the qualities of the object itself "produce" the pleasure or pain that determines the will. In the second, the will is guided by a trepidation that there might be an object out there that could have such qualities. This anxiety, Locke is now able to argue in section thirty, should be understood as desire: a wanting that precedes its target. The mind is free to fabricate whatever object it can imagine will bring it ease, a condition that is by definition always at some remove. In More, Norris, and elsewhere, objects had solicited cravings that were naturally and ecstatically drawn to goodness. The circuit of desire and object was bound by an overarching sense of the ethical. Locke's response unfolds slowly: first he deliberately forswears the term desire and writes that the choice of the "greater good" is rational, then he introduces desire in the very place of our moral "perfection" and divides it from the object of longing.

The result is a benchmark in the enlightenment's production and differentiation of categories. Desire is distinct from the will and so free from the antecedent penumbra of morality. It has become a centerpiece of philosophical expertise and experimental inquiry. How are we to understand the related loosening of the object? The answer lies partly in the wider strains of Locke's thinking. From the beginning chapters on innate ideas to the final pages on reason, the Essay remains suspicious of our ability to divine the "real essence" of objects. We have little access to the inner structure of things whose "nominal essence" we construct by reflecting on experience. ³⁰ He strikes this resounding theme in the conclusion to both versions of the chapter: "I shall not, contrary to the design of this essay, set my self to enquire philosophically into the peculiar constitution of bodies, and the configuration of parts, whereby they have the power to produce in us ideas of their sensible qualities" (1st ed., 131; 2d ed., 152). The skeptical perspective has a special bearing on Locke's revisions. His shift from assuming that objects solicit longings to postulating that we are uneasy about objects we fabricate adjusts the chapter to the Essay's wider nominalism. ³¹ The outcome is an object thrown into an unexpected instability. Now that "the power of preferring" is no longer "determined by the good," Locke is free to multiply and expand the variety of items that fall into the orbit of wanting: "We are seldom at ease, and free enough from the solicitation of our natural or adopted desires, but a constant succession of uneasiness out of that [End Page 202] stock, which natural wants, or acquired habits have heaped up, take the will in their turns; and no sooner is one action dispatch'd, which by such a determination of the will we are set upon, but another uneasiness is ready to set us on work" (140). The subject does not confront an array of libidinal artifacts; rather, he or she finds a lack within him- or herself and then projects its imagined relief on the outside world. Objects are replaced by the process of their making. Once more, the result is of considerable moment. Locke's desire vacates the object, but it also initiates the process of what we would now call objectification. ³² Cut loose from traditional relations, desire's unease is at once assuaged and prolonged by the ability to imagine that gratification can take concrete form in some absent thing.

The waning of the object and the construction of a subject founded on absence may seem overly familiar, even contemporary. ³³ Speculation on this affinity should nevertheless abide placing Locke's vocabulary within the context in which it took on meaning. While Locke strives to retain the philosophical purity of his categories, his idea of uneasy inwardness was still a profoundly "outward" development. Readers familiar with the Second Treatise of Government (1690) will recall the important argument that civil society precedes the state: individuals are lured to commerce without the threat of force and cede to the state the legitimacy to govern within set bounds. I draw attention to this turning point in the history of liberalism because it should guard against conceiving of Locke's subject in overly privatizing terms. For the Locke of the Second Treatise, the subject freely joins to the social order and also bears rights that are essentially private (including the right to property). This momentous fusion of our public and private selves provides the most recognizable version of the enlightenment dialectics I have been adducing for the Essay and the letters. ³⁴ The splitting off of the cultures of expertise from those of daily living replays in miniature the grand scission between state and civil society that forms the essential dynamic of Locke's political theory. ³⁵ As we have seen in the Molyneux correspondence, erotic relations form one way of imagining a mixture of public and private life within the delimited sphere of the philosophical community. In the Essay, this socio-sexual dynamic is disguised by the necessarily abstract register of the discourse--the establishment of "desire" as a philosophical category inescapably occurs without reference to institutions and peoples--but it is not entirely obscured. "Uneasiness" provides one bridge between the individual subject of desire and the social order in which that individual is placed. Not because society makes us anxious. Rather, anxiety makes society: "uneasiness is the spur to action" (138); it is always "ready to set us on work" (140). Desire is the cause of labor and labor the foundation of society: "When a man is perfectly content with the state he is in, which is when he is perfectly without any uneasiness, what industry, what action, what will is there left, but to continue in it?" (135).

Locke's question takes him to matters well outside the pristine language of the Essay, and so it is not surprising that the relation among desire, labor, and society is largely unexplored. (It is taken up in the Second Treatise and later glossed at length by Mandeville.) The Essay appears to suggest this: our desires are uneasy because it is no longer simple to assign the place of their objects. Once fused by traditional religious and social forms, the origins and ends of wanting are set loose on an uncertain [End Page 203] world. The result is a restlessness that founds modern society. We get a readier sense of this unease in the letters, where the exasperated pleasure of expertise is posed in informal terms. Yet the Essay's concern to describe our longing for fabricated objects is not entirely removed from the relations spelt out in the correspondence. The development of empirical philosophy into an expert culture produced in Locke and Molyneux a sense of intimacy that was both bred and thwarted by that culture's differentiation from the wider currents of exchange. Enlightenment patterned an impassioned and idealized closeness braced against the solitude of the scientific vocation. The psychic model put forward by the second edition of the Essay has a similarly dual structure: a wanting subject serially imagines an end to anxiety. ³⁶ In this sense, when Locke writes of the uneasiness we feel for absent objects he raises to a level of theoretical abstraction the relations that had animated his correspondence during the very years of the Essay's major revision.

The homology between the philosophical intimacy evoked in the Molyneux correspondence and the melancholic object relations of the Essay may help to explain, finally, the somber note struck in the last third of the revised edition. There Locke returns to the faculty of judgment that weighs the future consequences of our pres-ent behavior. The newer version of this particular argument bears the imprint of the larger revision. Where he had earlier described how the understanding steps in to guide our choices, he now postulates that reason must contend with uneasiness. In an uncertain world, we are beset with the uneasiness of desire. How should we respond? Locke's initial answer takes the doleful form of repression, in which he finds the springs of all freedom: "we have a power to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire, as every one daily may experiment in himself. This seems to me the source of all liberty; in this seems to me to consist that which is (as I think improperly) call'd free will. For during this suspension of any desire, before the will be determined to action, and the action (which follows that determination) done, we have opportunity to examine, view, and judge of the good or evil of what we are going to do" (141). Freedom dwells in the mastery of one's desires, a wresting of composure from the realm of uneasiness. Or so it would seem. The negation enjoined on desire is not quite so one-sided. Locke does not let go of his argument that desire determines the will. Rather, the psychic model becomes reflexive. As we rationally perceive the consequences of our actions on the future state of our souls, we create a hitherto nonexistent uneasiness, a desire that (if judgment works correctly) will overtake all others. Locke returns to this notion at the end of his life, leaving one last revision of the chapter for the fifth and posthumous edition of 1706: "a man may suspend the act of his choice from being determined for or against a thing proposed 'till he has examined, whether it be really of a nature in it self and consequences to make him happy, or no. For when he has once chosen it, and thereby it is become a part of his happiness, it raises desire, and that proportionably gives him uneasiness, which determines his will, and sets him at work." ³⁷ The final relation between judgment and desire obeys a now familiar circuit, although in reverse. Where earlier the will was summoned by desire, now desire is "raised" by something outside itself. Reason inscribes desire on our consciousness. In this lapidary movement, we see a second and concluding recurrence of the division [End Page 204] of knowledge that Locke originally finds in the wider world.

The upshot is what we would now call a "split subject," in which the recession of the object and the reign of judgment replay the prior differentiation of society. What does it mean to locate this process in Locke's philosophy? I'll offer, by way of conclusion, three speculative answers to this question. The enlightenment is often taken to be the venue for subjectivity of a most imperious sort: "a proud culture of reflection," as Habermas put it, that builds empirical knowledge on the ruins of religious faith. ³⁸ It has been the task of recent critical theory to disabuse the enlightenment of these pretensions, and thus at least momentarily to will them into being. ³⁹ Our review of Locke has revealed something distinct from this uniform oscillation between subjectivity and its annulment. The differentiated character of the modern pours into the subject, whose newfound texture and depth assembles the precincts of an anxious, libidinal interior that will have a remarkable career in eighteenth-century literary history. In this sense, Locke's texts suggest that we might turn to empirical philosophy to see how the concept of desire was furnished for writers working in the representational genres with which literary critics are typically more comfortable. The establishment of desire, in the letters and over the course of the Essay, happened when that category disengaged from the ethical discourse in which it had previously been enmeshed. Locke is no hedonist, but he firmly divides desire from the process of moral choice-making that resides in the understanding. It seems to me that this is a fundamental differentiation of the enlightenment from which it would be regressive to flinch. One need only glance at the present political context to see the dangers of recombining these separate domains. For Locke, desire was as distinct from the will as philosophy was from religion and civil society was from the state. In this compound division lay the shock and value of the modern age, the tremulous pleasures exhibited by the Molyneux letters. Locke's desire was, in this specific sense, "modern," but that is not to say that it was like our own. This is a point worth emphasizing. Much of even the most interesting work on enlightenment sexuality has endeavored to make it seem familiar, as either the distant precursor or point of origin of sexual identity as we understand it today. ⁴⁰ Our examination of the print relations and terms of debate that gave form to desire at the turn of the eighteenth century, I think, obliges a contrary reticence. The practices and meanings of desire ought to be made unusual to us and our concerns, if only so we may grasp better how they were situated in the conflicts of their time. I would not want to be thought to be saying that our understanding of older forms of sexuality could ever be isolated from current issues and problems. But even the most utopian presentism should be rooted in the negativity of the past. For only by allowing that the past is different from the present can we imagine an uncharted future.

Jonathan Brody Kramnick is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University and author of Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700--1770 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). He is currently working on a book entitled Uneasiness: The Intimate Cultures of Uncertainty, Locke to Cleland.

Notes

1. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 2 vols., ed. F. B. Kaye (Indianapolis: Liberty, 1988), 1:344.

2. Fable, 1:350.

3. Locke makes his own position clear on this matter in the closing section of the Essay, which discusses the "division of the sciences." The equating of modernity with societal "differentiation"--or the multiform division of knowledge and division of labor--is made early on in the Essay when Locke states that what he is doing is working as an "under-laborer" for "science" (4). In other words, "philosophy" is a separate practice from experimental "science"--a novel and, obviously enough, prescient claim to make.

4. The examples are many (consider Book 3 of Gulliver's Travels) and take recognizable form in the enlightenment's stock character of the "pedant," whose expertise is a condition of his futility.

5. My sense of the tensions placed on intimate culture by the "differentiation of society" is informed by the insights of Niklas Luhmann's Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), which analyzes how erotic life changes along with the transformation from a "stratified" (traditional, religious, and hierarchical) society to a "functional" (modern, secular, and liberal) society.

6. Locke reflects on the dilemmas of expertise most explicitly in Book 3 of the Essay, which attempts to define terms that could mediate the necessary difficulty of technical language. The effort is to find precise terms that do not wall off the new disciplines from each other or from the sociable idioms of civil society. The making of disciplines is simultaneous with their wished-for transcendence. Three centuries later this same desire structures the purported "deconstruction" of Locke's linguistics by Paul DeMan in "The Epistemology of Metaphor," Critical Inquiry 5:1 (1978): 14-30. On this account, Locke's attempt to "control figuration . . . stands behind the recurrent efforts to map out the distinctions between philosophical, scientific, theological, and poetic discourse and informs such institutional questions as the departmental structure of schools and universities" (14). The deconstructive insight that figuration cannot be controlled in turn stands behind the effort to overcome disciplinary specialization by means of rigorous, rhetorical reading. Whatever one makes of this effort--surely now something of a museum piece of the intellectual culture of the 1970s--it is far closer to the designs of Locke than it wants to admit.

7. The chapter is typically discussed by Locke scholars as either a question of his ethics, which I will take up below, or his position on free will versus determinism. Most helpful in this regard have been Michael Ayers, Locke: Epistemology and Ontology, vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 1991), 184-202; Stephen Darnwall, The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 149-75; Raymond Polin, "John Locke's Conception of Freedom," in John Locke: Problems and Perspectives, ed. John Yolton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); and Peter Schouls, Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 117-72. My understanding of Locke's position--as reflexive--is closest to that advanced by Vera Chappel in "Locke on Freedom of the Will," in Locke's Philosophy: Content and Context, ed. G. A. J. Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 101-121.

8. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1st ed. (London, 1690), 119, original emphasis. Subsequent quotations are from this edition, unless otherwise identified, and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

9. The canonical statement on these matters was A Practical Discourse Concerning a Future Judgment (1692), written by William Sherlock, Dean of St. Paul's, and reprinted in seven editions over the next fifty years. Sherlock's book shows how the dominant strains of ecclesiastical thought presented, in language stripped of the overweening "enthusiasm" of Puritan rhetoric, knowledge of the everlasting as the guarantor of subjective volition: "a wise being will take care to govern the creatures which he makes and to govern them in such a way as is agreeable to the natures he has given them; and since man, who is a free agent, can be governed only by hopes and fears, God would never have made man, had he not intended to judge him; that is, he would never have made such a creature as can be governed only by the hope of rewards and by the fear of punishments, had he not resolved to lay these restraints upon him, to reward and punish him according to his works" (10).

10. See, e.g., Gerald Cragg, Reason and Authority in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 1-28.

11. The concept of incorporeal substance was essential to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which More here argues against what he takes to be Hobbes's materialism (52-56 and passim): "We have discovered out of the simple phaenomenon of motion the necessity of the existence of some incorporeal essence distinct from matter" (66).

12. Other examples include Ralph Cudworth, whose True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) argued we know that "there is some such absolutely perfect being, which though not inconceivable, yet is incomprehensible to our finite understandings; by certain passions which it hath implanted in us, that otherwise would want an object to display themselves upon" (640).

13. Norris responds to the Essay in Cursory Reflections on a Book call'd An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke declines to respond to Norris in print, although he does deride him in correspondence. The official "Lockean" response to Norris came, rather, from his friend Lady Damaris Masham in A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696). For the intellectual context of Norris's thought, see Charles McCracken, Malebranche and the British Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

14. Quoted in Maurice Cranston, John Locke, a Biography (London: Longmans, 1957), 359. Scholars of the history of philosophy will recall Molyneux's importance to Locke's account of vision, especially after he posed the familiar riddle, would a blind man, familiar with the properties of a cube and sphere from touch and suddenly possessed of sight, be able to discern the difference between the two shapes at a distance? Locke and Molyneux both respond in the negative.

15. The Correspondence of John Locke, vol. 4, ed. E. S. De Beer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 479, 508. All subsequent references are to this volume of this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

16. For a cogent reflection on the antinomies of early-modern friendship, see Alan Bray, "Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England," in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). Bray presents the "friend" and the "sodomite" as twin figures of honor and abuse; importantly for the present essay, he also points to the erotic relations of friendship that were enabled by their not being perceived as sodomy.

17. Cranston, John Locke, 360.

18. The two had noted in their first letters that they were in Holland at the same time but had not met.

19. On "transparency" as the desired end of modern intimacy, see Luhmann, Love as Passion, esp. 173-78.

20. Literary critics will be most accustomed to this as the argument of Benedict Anderson's widely influential study, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). On disembedding as a social process characteristic of "modernity," see Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

21. As for the former, witness the scene which Locke presents as the very genesis of the Essay at the beginning of the essay: "Were it fit to trouble thee with the history of this Essay, I would tell thee that five or six friends meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the difficulties that rose on every side" (1st and 2d ed., b2). A copy of the 1690 edition in the British Museum sheds light on this moment. In it, Locke's friend William Tyrell writes in the margins: "This was in winter 1673 as I remember: being myself one of those that then met there when the discourse began about the principles of morality, and revealed religion."

22. By this I mean disclosure in the published form of Locke's work. Yet it is not without irony in this case that the Locke-Molyneux correspondence would itself be published, posthumously, as Some Familiar Letters Between Mr. Locke and His Friends (1708).

23. E.g., 15 Oct. 1692: "I am wonderfully pleased that you give me hopes of seeing a moral essay from your hand, which I assure you sir with all sincerity is highly respected by. . ." (533). This unrequited plea is repeated in virtually every letter; here is 2 Mar. 1693: "On this consideration of usefulness to mankind, I will presume again to remind you of your discourse of morality; And I shall think my self very happy, if by putting you on the thought, I should be the least occasion of so great good to the world" (649).

24. Molyneux repeatedly chides Locke for having mentioned, in an aside, that morals are "demonstrable according to Mathematical formula" (508).

25. Molyneux's words for Norris and others he decrees as "Platonists" are merciless: "I look upon [Nicolas] Malbranches notions, or rather Platos, [as] perfectly unintelligible; And if you will ingage in a philosophick controversy, you cannot do it with more advantage than in this matter. What you lay down concerning our ideas and knowledge is founded and confirmed by experiment, and observation, that any man may make in himself, or the children he converses with; wherein he may note the gradual steps that we make in knowledge. But Plato's fancy has no foundation in nature, but is merely the product of his own brain" (668).

26. See the enumeration of the sub-sections of the chapter in the letter dated 15 Jul. 1693 (700-701) and the synopsis of the argument in the letter dated 23 Aug. 1693 (722-23).

27. Haywood's widely popular first novel Love in Excess (1719-1720) uses the term frequently, as a description of desire. Mandeville's notorious Fable of the Bees (especially its important chapter on charity-schools) finds "uneasiness" to be the motive of all action, "virtuous" or otherwise.

28. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2d ed. (London, 1694), 125, emphasis added. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

29. See, respectively, Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Jonathan Kramnick, Making the English Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

30. For an incisive discussion of Locke's nominalism, see Nicholas Hudson, "John Locke and the Tradition of Nominalism," in Nominalism and Literary Discourse, New Perspectives, ed. Hugo Keiper, Christoph Bode, and Richard J. Utz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 283-300.

31. In this sense, the post-Foucauldian insight that sexual identity is constituted within "discursive" systems reveals a continuity--a shared nominalism--with the enlightenment epistemology from which it is, typically, concerned to be distant.

32. I say this without the piety that is typically attached to the term.

33. For the classic statement by Freud, see "Mourning and Melancholia," in vol. 14 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, 1953-74); for a deconstruction of this statement see Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 167-98.

34. This dialectic may be found, too, in the linguistic program of the Essay, which attempts to build a language that has both a "civil" and "philosophical" use, one that "may serve for the upholding common conversation and commerce, about the ordinary affairs and conveniencies of civil life, in the societies of men, on amongst another" and at the same time "may serve to convey the precise notions of things, and to express, in general propositions, certain and undoubted truths, which the mind may rest upon, and be satisfied with, in its search after true knowledge" (1st ed., 231; 2d ed., 268-69).

35. Much the same could be said of the relation between private conscience and public religion in the Letter on Toleration (1690).

36. The most vivid example of this dynamic in the Essay is the rather unassuming case of a man crippled with gout who wants relief from his several pains but fears that any one satiation will reproduce the pain elsewhere (250).

37. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 5th ed. (London, 1706), 171-72.

38. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 20. Habermas places against this one-sided development of reason--in science, bureaucracy, capital--the potential for intersubjective communication as the "unfinished project" of the enlightenment.

39. This is a position often attributed to Foucault, who actually had a very different sense of the enlightenment as the process of experimental self-making. See "What is Critique?" in What is Enlightenment?, ed. Steven Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 182-204. It is closer, though, to François Lyotard, who assigned the enlightenment to the same burial as all other so-called "narratives of progress"; see The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

40. The most tireless exponent of the "point of origin" argument has certainly been Randolph Trumbach, whose many essays have culminated in the recent Sex and the Gender Revolution 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Where Trumbach looks to eighteenth-century England to see the beginnings of a homosexual identity (first for men, later for women) evidently drawn from the present--an early essay located in the enlightenment the "birth of the queen"--other scholars have looked to the period for "queer" transgression or subversiveness (see Cameron McFarlane's The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, 1660-1750 [New York: Columbia, 1997] or Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992]). In either case, a particular version of the present is read into the past: the eighteenth century produces identities, as in, say, Trumbach's inventory of types (the "molly," the "sapphist," etc.), or it subverts and renders "performative" these identities.