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BOOK REVIEWS 291 deliberations of the Society. Or again, one might want to loosen the ties between religion and science that she attributes to the Baconian heritage of the Society, and instead give more credence to Professor Fulton Anderson's insistence that Bacon rejects the divine in nature and that he "repudiates pantheism, theism, immanence and transcendentalism." But in a work so well tempered and solid, even if such objections were sustained, they could not diminish more than a picayune the wealth of insight Miss Purver has provided. BERTRAM MORRIS University o/Colorado Boulder John Locke: Two Tracts on Government. Ed. (with introduction, notes, and translation) Philip Abrams. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Pp. x -t- 264. $7.50) Among Locke's papers are two tracts-one in English and the other in Latin--occasioned by Edward Bagshaw's The Great Question Concerning Things Indifferent in Religious Worship (1660). The English tract is dated December 11, 1660, whereas the Latin tract was written later, probably in 1661 or 1662. Philip Abrams reprints both tracts together with an English translation of the Latin one and a few brief items from other Locke manuscripts bearing on them. The editor judiciously uses footnotes for identifications, brief comments , and references to other contemporary works. Textual problems are clearly set out, sources are suggested, and Locke's reading is noted. The most important feature of this volume, besides its printing of the two tracts, is Abrams' introduction (pp. 3-111). In it the editor discusses in a sensitive, scholarly, and illuminating way the many important philosophical and political issues these early writings of Locke raise. These tracts are contemporary with Locke's early Essays on the Law oJ Nature; the concept of law and its foundation is one of the basic issues in both sets of writings. Another question re-opened by this new publication is to what extent the young Locke is an authoritarian and a conservative--how large a break is there between Two Tracts and Two Treatises ? One parallel between them is that the second halves of both deal with the broader, more theoretical issues. The first half of Two Treatises is a line by line refutation of Filmer's patriarchalism; the first of Two Tracts is a close refutation of Bagshaw's claim that matters of religious dress, ceremonies, and practices are outside civil law. On the question of Locke's liberalism, Abrams finds "no evidence that Locke was a liberal prior to 1660" (p. 8), as some commentators have suggested. Abrams sees the young Locke as skeptical and timorous, a seeker of law and order. "To be safe, as Locke saw the world, was to discover an authority that could override private men's judgement" (p. 8). Liberty and law go together. Were there general, unlimited freedom, we would have only general bondage; "were every indifferent thing left unlimited, nothing would be lawJul" (p. 120). The "freest condition" imaginable for man is "to owe no subjection to any other but God alone" (p. 125), but that freedom would dispense with civil society and its protective laws (p. 121). Without government there would be "no peace, no security, no enjoyment, enmity with all men and safe possessions of nothing" (p. 156). This Hobbesian sentiment should not be surprising, given the correlative nature of law and liberty to which Locke was committed and given that "The Hobbesian account of the conditions of masterless men was itself something of a platitude of the age by 1660" (p. 76). Abrams finds "the business of spotting verbal parallels inconclusive." The conceptual proximity of Locke to Hobbes is, Abrams suggests, nothing more than fortuitous (p. 77). The quest for a safe world is a form of Stoic withdrawal , traceable to the influence of Seneca on Locke in these early years (p. 53). "Whatever use Locke may have made in the Tracts of the sociological arguments for strong government devised by seventeenth century materialists, his commitment is ultimately to this older idealist tradition" of Cicero, Aristotle, and Plato (p. 67). The putative tIobbesian influence upon Locke has its strongest case with the voluntarist concept of law found in these Tracts and never absent from Locke's later...

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