Translation of Parents and Children pp. 117-118

Translation of Parents and Children pp. 117-118

Editor’s Note: Pages 117-118 of Charlotte Mason’s Parents and Children (chapter 12) includes a lengthy quotation in French. The quotation is entitled “Madame de Staël upon Locke.” In the first edition of Parents and Children (1897), an official translation of this quotation is provided on page 429. We are pleased to provide the text here, the translation presumably performed by Charlotte Mason herself.

Hobbes followed, to the letter, the philosophy which derives ideas from sense impressions; he did not fear the consequences, and said boldly that the soul was as subservient to necessity as is society to despotism. The cultivation of noble and pure aspirations is so firmly established in England, by political and religious institutions, that speculation moves round these mighty pillars without ever shaking them. Hobbes had few supporters in his country, but Locke’s influence was everywhere felt. He was moral and religious in character, and he never admitted any of the dangerous arguments which naturally follow in the train of his theories; the majority of his fellow-countrymen, in accepting his theories, were inconsistent enough to separate cause from effect, whilst Hume and the French philosophers, admiring his system, have applied it in a much more logical way.

Locke’s system of metaphysics had but one effect on the minds of Englishmen; it dulled their intuitive originality. Even when it parched the sources of philosophical thought, it could not destroy the deeply rooted religious sentiment of the nation. But this system of metaphysics, which was received by all Europe, Germany excepted, has been one of the chief causes of the spread of immorality; in the philosophy of the materialist men found the precepts which give sanction to every immoral practice.