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1 9 0 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 2are not unrelated to his project of mastering Fortuna, a project itself somewhatreminiscent of Bacon’s conquest of nature. But I digress.Having refused the Aristotelian/Scholastic “leap” from “the empiricalworld to the realm of forms” (90), Locke also refuses the Cartesian claimthat our ideas are innate. He agrees that mathematical ideas are certain, butonly because they refer strictly to relations among abstractions and have noempirical content. But—here is the novelty he introduces—this also appliesto moral ideas. Far from producing moral relativism, the purely abstractcharacter of moral mixed modes gives the mind the possibility of attaining“ironclad certainty” about them (92). Mathematics and morality are the mentalrealms of certainty, even as science is the mental realm of empiricism andtherefore of nothing more than probability. “Euclid’s geometrical proofs areparadigms of demonstrative knowledge,” but so, Locke writes, is the existenceof God—“the only being external to ourselves of whose existence we can beabsolutely certain.” Further, God’s commands, the laws of morality, are asnonempirical as God is. If the laws of morality had empirical content, if theywere linked in any way to physical nature, “they could not be absolute,” theycould not be commands at all (93). Morality would indeed look more likewhat Aristotle said it was, a matter of prudential reasoning aimed at securingthe good—that is, the best possible fulfillment of the natural form of a humanbeing, family, or political community. In recommending Cicero’s De officiisas a moral guidebook, Locke does not endorse the ontological foundation ofCicero’s moral philosophy; he endorses the abstract, universal validity of hisideas as abstractions, as “mixed modes” of thought.All of this raises hard questions about how such abstractions relate tothe world, very much including the world of human relations that moralitygoverns. On some level, morality must engage practice. To better understandLocke on this point, Forde considers the writings of Locke’s contemporarySamuel Pufendorf, whose works Locke recommended in Some Thoughtsconcerning Education. What Boyle did with “modes” in the realm of physicalscience, Pufendorf did in moral philosophy. Certain modes, Pufendorfteaches, “added to physical things or motions, by intelligent beings,” directus and “secure a certain orderliness and decorum in civilized life” (98). Suchmodes are not descriptions, as in physical science, but prescriptions, commands,precisely knowable. “Aristotle correctly identified certainty withsciences that proceed deductively from axioms, but incorrectly identifiedethics or morality as a field incapable of such precision,” precisely because hefounded his morality on human nature and not on modes (100). In Pufendorf,