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Book Review: Locke, Science, and Politics1 8 7Locke has yet another difficulty to address: the origin of morality. “Thetheory of forms allowed morality to be built into nature, so to speak, by thesame means that the species were built into nature” (69). Subtract the forms asindependent causes, and where does that leave morality? Boyle “simply relieson the presumptive validity of Christian morality and the Christian revelation.”“This is the point at which Locke ceased to be guided by him” (70).Forde turns to Locke’s “moral epistemology” in his second chapter. Inthe Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke argues that “there are nospecies, in the sense of a class of things brought into being according to apattern, each of which shares certain ‘essential’ traits by virtue of being amember of that species”; “monsters” are as natural as any other specimen ofa putative kind. Species are useful concepts “of our own devising,” but particularsare the only beings that actually exist (73). Neither biological sciencenor moral science can regard man as a real being—an essence or template towhich individual specimens may be compared. Our concepts or categories,including man, depend (in the Baconian way) “on the purposes for whichwe are making the distinction” between the thing we are thinking aboutand all the other things we perceive. Analogously, our moral principles are“mixed modes,” “concepts that are not grounded in nature, but, like speciesconcepts…constructs of the mind” more or less useful to whatever our purposesmay be (74). Locke posits no innate moral ideas—no syndaresis with orwithout God. “Locke’s almost macabre fascination with the barbarism thathuman beings, and indeed entire cultures, have displayed puts a point” onthis claim (74–75).The human mind begins as a tabula rasa, or better, a camera obscura: “adark room, into which light can enter only through the portals of sense” (75).Without innate ideas and with no way of transcending these sense impressionsor “ideas” in the direction of forms, the mind receives only the mostelementary signals from outside itself—“hard,” “white,” and so on. “Ourentire mental universe, including ideas seemingly far beyond experience, isconstructed in camera, as it were, using elements acquired only from (internaland external) experience.” Thus Locke’s empiricism actually maintainsthat we cannot really know the empeiria directly; “we begin with sensoryinformation, but we do not know how objects stimulate the senses, nor howthe senses transmit their reports to our minds.” In this, Locke concurs withboth Descartes and Hobbes; “the anti-Aristotelianism of this approach iscomplete” (76). This does not generate skepticism for Locke because “it isnot reasonable, or even psychologically possible, to deny” the existence of