Two Treatises Government John Locke - Faculty of Social Sciences ...

38/John Lockesoul, he alone can breathe in the greatly of life. If any one thinks himselfan artist at this, let lain number up the parts of his child’s body will hehath made, tell me their uses and operations, and when the living andrational soul began to inhabit this curious structure, when sense began,and how this engine, which he has framed, thinks and reasons: if hemade it, let him, when it is out of order, mend it, at least tell wherein thedefects lie. “Shall he that made the eye not see?” says the Psalmist,Psalm xciv. 9. See these men’s vanities; the structure of that one part issufficient to convince us of an all-wise Contriver, and he has so visiblea claim to us as his workmanship, that one of the ordinary appellationsof God in Scripture is, “God our maker,” and “the Lord our maker.”And therefore though our author, for the magnifying his fatherhood, bepleased to say, O. 159, “That even the power which God himselfexerciseth over mankind is by right of fatherhood,” yet this fatherhoodis such an one as utterly excludes all presence of title in earthly parents;for he is king, because he is indeed maker of us all, which no parents canpretend to be of their children.§54. But had men skill and power to make their children, it is not soslight a piece of workmanship, that it can be imagined they could makethem without designing it. What father of a thousand, when he begets achild, thinks farther than the satisfying his prey sent appetite? God inhis infinite wisdom has put strong desires of copulation into the constitutionof men, thereby to continue the race of mankind, which he dothmost commonly without the intention, and often against the consent andwill of the begetter. And indeed those who desire and design children,are but the occasions of their being, and, when they design and wish tobeget them, do little more towards their making than Deucalion and hiswife in the fable did towards the making of mankind, by throwing pebblesover their heads.§55. But grant that the parents made their children, gave them lifeand being, and that hence there followed an absolute power. This wouldgive the father but a joint dominion with the mother over them: for nobodycan deny but that the woman lath an equal share, if not the greater,as nourishing the child a long time in her own body out of her ownsubstance: there it is fashioned, and from her it receives the materialsand principles of its constitution: and it is so hard to imagine the rationalsoul should presently inhabit the yet unformed embryo, as soon as thefather has done his part in the act of generation, that if it must be supposedto derive any thing from the parents, it must certainly owe most to