And now I learn that the Reverend Fathers Gerbillion and Bouvet, French Jesuits, along with four others, who are mathematicians from the Academie des Sciences, have been sent to the Orient to teach the monarch, not only the mathematical arts, but also the essence of our philosophy. But if this process should be continued I fear that we may soon become inferior to the Chinese in all branches of knowledge. I do not say this because I grudge them new light; rather I rejoice. But it is desirable that they in turn teach us those things which are especially in our interest: the greatest use of practical philosophy and a more perfect manner of living, to say nothing now of their other arts. Certainly the condition of our affairs, slipping as we are into ever greater corruption, seems to be such that we need missionaries from the Chinese who might teach us the use and practice of natural religion, just as we have sent them teachers of revealed theology. And so I believe that if someone expert, not in the beauty of goddesses but in the excellence of peoples, were selected as judge, the golden apple would be awarded to the Chinese unless we should win by virtue of one great but superhuman thing, namely, the divine gift of the Christian religion.
IC17 John Locke (1632–1704) ‘Of Property’, from Two Treatises of Government
Locke’s Two Treatises on Government were first published in the wake of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in late 1689, though dated 1690. The text is now believed to have been composed earlier in the 1680s and thus to amount to a case for revolution against absolutism rather than a justification of it. In Section 49, at the end of Chapter 5 of the Second Treatise, Locke famously remarks that ‘in the beginning, all the World was America’. This comes at the end of a long argument in which he tries to establish that the institution of private property marks an advance over the holding of land in common. Looked at in one light, this is the founding statement of philosophical liberalism and the still‐widespread ideology of possessive individualism (which later came to stand inter alia as a model for the persona of the modernist artist). It is also one of the key moves by which is established the legitimacy of the plantation and colonization of the rest of the world by European nation states. A second important aspect of the argument is that it anticipates the ‘stadial’ theory of human social development of the eighteenth century. In the terms of this theory, human society is seen as having progressed through a series of stages (the ‘state of nature’/hunter‐gatherers, pastoralism, settled agriculture), finally emerging into then‐contemporary bourgeois commercial society (cf. IIC 8). In effect, the societies of Western Europe, England in particular, are held up as the model not just of technical, and soon‐to‐be industrial, progress but also of the cultural dimension of that progressive, liberal society: in a word, of civilization. We have used the text as published in John Locke: Two Treatises of Government, a critical edition by Peter Lazlett, rev. edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1963, pp. 328 [Section 26], 329–30 [Section 28], 331 [Section 30], 333 [Section 34], 336 [Section 37], 341 [Section 45], 343 [Sections 48 and 49].
26. God, who hath given the World to Men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of Life, and convenience. The Earth, and all that is therein, is given to Men for the Support and Comfort of their being. And though all the Fruits it naturally produces, and Beasts it feeds, belong to Mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of Nature; and nobody has originally a private Dominion, exclusive of the rest of Mankind, in any of them, as they are thus in their natural state: yet being given for the use of Men, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other before they can be of any use, or at all, beneficial to any particular Man. The Fruit, or Venison, which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no Inclosure, and is still a Tenant in common, must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his Life.
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28. He that is nourished by the Acorns he pickt up under an Oak, or the Apples he gathered from the Trees in the Wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. No Body can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, When did they begin to be his? When he digested? Or when he eat? Or when he boiled? Or when he brought them home? Or when he pickt them up? And ’tis plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between them and common. That added something to them more than Nature, the common Mother of all, had done; and so they became his private right. And will any one say he had no right to those Acorns or Apples he thus appropriated, because he had not the consent of all Mankind to make them his? Was it a Robbery thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in Common? If such a consent as that was necessary, Man had starved, notwithstanding the Plenty God had given him. […]
30. Thus this Law of reason makes the Deer that Indian’s who hath killed it; ’tis allowed to be his goods who hath bestowed his labour upon it, though before, it was the common right of every one. And amongst those who are counted the Civiliz’d part of Mankind, who have made and multiplied positive Laws to determine Property, this original Law of Nature for the beginning of Property, in what was before common, still takes place; and by vertue thereof, what Fish any one catches in the Ocean, that great and still remaining Common of Mankind; or what Ambergriese any one takes up here, is by the Labour that removes it out of that common state Nature left it in, made his Property who takes that pains about it. […]
34. God gave the World to Men in Common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest Conveniencies of Life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational, (and Labour was to be his Title to it;). […]
37. […] To which let me add, that he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind. […]
45. Thus Labour, in the Beginning, gave a Right of Property, where‐ever any one was pleased to imploy it, upon what was common, which remained, a long while, the far greater part, and is yet more than Mankind makes use of. Men, at first, for the most part, contented themselves with what un‐assisted Nature Offered to their Necessities: and though afterwards, in some parts of the World, (where the Increase of People and Stock, with the Use of Money) had made Land scarce, and so of some Value, the several Communities settled the Bounds of their distinct Territories, and by Laws within themselves, regulated the Properties of the private Men of their Society, and so, by Compact and Agreement, settled the Property which Labour and Industry began; and the Leagues that have been made between several States and Kingdoms, either expressly or tacitly disowning all Claim and Right to the Land in the others Possession, have, by common Consent, given up their Pretences to their natural common Right, which originally they had to those Countries, and so have, by positive agreement, settled a Property amongst themselves, in distinct Parts and parcels of the Earth: yet there are still great Tracts of Ground to be found, which (the Inhabitants thereof not having joyned with the rest of Mankind, in the consent of the Use of their common Money) lie waste, and are more than the People, who dwell on it, do, or can make use of, and so still lie in common. […]
48. And as different degrees of Industry were apt to give Men Possessions in different Proportions, so this Invention of Money gave them the opportunity to continue to enlarge them. For supposing an Island, separated from all possible Commerce with the rest of the World, wherein met there were but a hundred Families, but there were Sheep, Horses and Cows, with other useful Animals, wholsome Fruits, and Land enough for Corn for a hundred thousand times as many, but nothing in the Island, either because of its Commonness, or Perishableness, fit to supply the place of Money: What reason could anyone have there to enlarge his Possessions beyond the use of his Family, and a plentiful supply to its Consumption, either in what their own Industry produced, or they could barter for like perishable, useful Commodities, with others? Where there is not something both lasting and scarce, and so valuable to be hoarded up, there Men will not