A Full Life: The Works of Charlotte Mason

Locke’s ‘States of Consciousness.’––We need not go further back than Locke, who represents the traditional educational notions in the homes of the upper middle classes. People who bring up their children by ‘common sense,’ according to ‘the way of our family,’ do so more often than they know because their great-great-grandfathers read Locke. He did not concern himself with the mind, or soul of man, but with ’states of consciousness.’ Ideas, images, were for him to be got only through the senses; and a man could know nothing but what he got hold of through his own senses and assimilated by his own understanding. As for choice and selection in these ideas and images, Locke gives a comprehensive counsel––’What it becomes a gentleman to know’ is the proper subject-matter for education. The mind (i.e. the man?) appears to have little colour or character of its own, but has certain powers and activities for the employment of the ideas it receives; and to account for these, Locke invented the pestilent fallacy which has, perhaps, been more injurious than any other to the cause of education––the fallacy of the ‘faculties of the mind.’