PLANTING DREAMS AUDIO GUIDE Richard Aitken on Locke’s ‘An Essay on Humane Understanding’ RICHARD AITKEN: We’re looking here at one of the State Library’s real treasures John Locke’s book An Essay on Humane Understanding it’s a foundational work in the field of human knowledge. Locke was writing in England in the 1680s so we have to imagine the world at a moment of great change, emerging from the seventeenth century into the eighteenth, a period when British, and more specifically English, power and influence was on the rise a period that saw the beginnings of industrialisation, increased global trade, and aspirations of creating great empires. In fact we can glimpse such empires in the depiction of Adam and Eve in an adjoining showcase, with the Garden of Eden in the unfamiliar setting of Brazil, which at that stage was one of the colonies providing Portugal with its wealth But getting back to Locke, in looking at this book it really provides us—if you’ll pardon the pun—with a means of unlocking the exhibits in this section, which we’ve called ‘Gardens of the Mind’. And it also helps our understanding of many later exhibits elsewhere in Planting Dreams. We’ve placed the rare first edition on display, but in all subsequent editions, the title of Locke’s book rendered as ‘An Essay on Human (rather than humane) Understanding’and ‘human understanding’ is a much clearer way of thinking about the book and its meanings in the essay John Locke shares his theory of knowledge he discusses ‘ideas’ or ‘notions’ that are conscious in the mind, and proceeds to analyse ways in which ‘human understanding’ comes to be ‘furnished’ (that’s his term) with these ideas for Locke, rather than having built-in or fixed ideas already programmed, the mind is a organism or receptacle capable of being filled and influenced by personal experience we all need heroes and for many later generations, Locke and this book were a touchstone his essay went through many editions and was widely influential, but we shouldn’t necessarily think that it had an immediate influence on gardens or their design. If we think about gardens of the period when Locke was writing, have a look in the adjacent showcase where we’ve displayed a book of a very similar date containing engravings of French gardens. We’re looking at the Tuileries garden in Paris, but you might also bring to mind Versailles or one of the other grand courtly gardens. In such gardens, reasonably fixed ideas about subduing nature were prominent and these gardens were grand displays of wealth and power. In the face of dominant forces of church, state, or aristocracy, there wasn’t much room for the gardener to display individual thinking! But like Locke, some of the other exhibits in this grouping also reveal gardens or garden imagery where human experience is foremost, what we’ve termed ‘Gardens of the Mind’ Thomas More’s Utopia, written over a hundred and fifty years before Locke, presents an ideal settlement, on an island, not unlike a contained garden, complete with its own language. In fact this book coined the word Utopia to describe such a place. The edition of Virgil’s pastoral poems, rendered here in English by the writer John Dryden at about the same time as Locke’s essay, depicts garden making as a noble pursuit by making associations in the mind with the glorious classical civilisation of Rome. And in the great Encyclopaedia compiled by Denis Diderot, published in France in the mid-eighteenth century, we see the continuing trail of thought unleashed by Locke and the notion of human understanding. Diderot’s Encyclopaedia displays knowledge in a rational array, derived from direct observation, and clearly challenging the kind of fixed thinking that Locke was also exposing From here the way was open for later writers and philosophers to describe aesthetic categories such as beauty, sublimity, and the picturesque, and to gradually accept that personal associations influenced how each of us experience the world, and ways in which might be reflected in our garden making. By the nineteenth century, individual thought was in the ascendant, and the notion of fixed ideas had been well and truly superseded, opening an almost bewildering array of choice to garden maker. Different design styles and the transitory pleasures of fashion henceforth have dominated our gardens in an ever-quickening pace. (ENDS)