What John Locke Actually Said About Action
All 4 John Locke passages on action, in full — what each one claims, what holds them together, and who argues the other way.
John Locke returns to action four times in thinkr's library — more often than to almost anything else. English empiricist and political theorist. Argued the mind begins as a blank slate and that legitimate government rests on consent.
What follows is every one of those passages, in full, with what each is actually claiming. The language is of its period, but the question underneath is not: what is action for, and what does it ask of you?
Every John Locke passage on action
“This life affords no solid satisfaction, but in the consciousness of having done well, and the hopes of another life.”
“I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.”
“Children (nay, and men too) do most by example.”
“Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.”
What holds these together
Read in sequence rather than one at a time, the passages stop being separate aphorisms. John Locke is not offering four opinions about action; the lines are facets of one position, and the repetition is the argument. The shortest of them — “Children (nay, and men too) do most by example” — is the version you can carry, and the longer ones are what it unpacks into.
John Locke applied to a real decision
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what the position actually does when it meets a situation where every option costs something. thinkr puts two such cases to John Locke.
You notice a loophole that benefits you and hurts no one visibly.
Argued as civic virtue: You are treating trust as a shared structure, not a private feeling. The risk is expecting institutions to reward integrity fairly.
You open your phone for one minute and lose twenty.
Argued as civic suspicion: You are noticing that choice is shaped by architecture. The risk is letting structure erase your agency.
Work through these yourself
- You notice a loophole that benefits you and hurts no one visibly. — argued from civic virtue and several competing positions
- You open your phone for one minute and lose twenty. — argued from civic suspicion and several competing positions
Who disagrees
Plato, Seneca, Mahatma Gandhi and Lao Tzu all address action too, and they do not converge. Reading John Locke alone gives you a coherent position; reading John Locke against Plato shows you what the position is actually choosing against.