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Book Review: Locke, Science, and Politics1 8 9than they do from individuals nominally of another species,” as the exampleof monstrosities shows (86).If so, how does Locke found a morality on any of this? 1 Some of the complex“ideas” assembled from the simple ones are what Locke calls “modes.”Unlike the other kind of complex idea, exemplified by the tree trunk, modesare at three removes from physical reality; the tree trunk is our mentalabstraction from a number of simple ideas or sense impressions. A moderefers not to any physical object—they are not ideas of things; “they carryno implication that they correspond to real objects” (87). When forming asimple mode, the mind “conceptualizes modifications of a single idea.” Forexample, the mind takes the simple idea of space and modifies it to conceiveof extension, distance, shape; it takes the simple idea of motion and modifiesit to conceive of sliding, rolling, rising. It takes the simple idea of thought andconceives of memory and contemplation; the simple ideas of pleasure andpain “include love, hatred, joy, sorrow, hope, fear, and many others.” “Noneof these notions is innate; they are all the product of mind working on thesimple ideas of sense.” Mixed modes are “more complex versions of the samemental abstraction and combination,” a combination of two or more simplemodes. Wrestling and fencing serve as Locke’s examples: “complex formsof physical activity, the parts of which have no natural connection to oneanother, whose unity exists only in the term and the mental concept describingit,” concepts “constitut[ing] the activity as a whole” (88). The mixed modegives the constituent parts “a meaning they do not possess inherently.” Mostsuch activities “exist by convention and not by nature” (89).“All moral concepts are mixed modes” (88). “Murder” consists of a set ofacts that have no intrinsic moral significance; the “moral meaning” of suchacts as murder and rape, rescue and liberation, “is given to them, or imposedupon them, only by the application by mind of the moral code.” “After all,has not the line between killing and ‘murder’ been drawn very differently atdifferent times and places?” “Locke draws attention to the immense powerthat would accrue to one who succeeded in defining or redefining mixedmodes for a culture or civilization. It is past doubt that he aspires to play thisrole himself, with his new understanding of natural law, natural rights, limitedgovernment, religious toleration, and the like” (89). One is reminded ofMachiavelli’s musings on such great lawgivers as Moses and Romulus, which1Additionally, remaining on the “epistemological” level, one might wonder why, or at least how, themind tends to assemble sense impressions into concepts. Locke might have recourse to Boyle’s differentlyshaped and sized corpuscular “givens” as an explanation of brain function.