Eighteenth-century British architectural theory, while always taking heed of artistic developments in France, at the same takes a very different tack. To understand why and how this divergence of ideas came about, it is important to understand the different philosophical basis of Anglo-Saxon thought as well as unique circumstances affecting it, such as its novel ideas regarding garden design.

If French philosophical traditions are often characterized as rationalist and deductive (a reliance on reason, conclusions deduced from pre established premises), British philosophy is often said to be empirical or inductive. Empiricism, in its most general sense, argues that sensory or practical experience has primacy in human knowledge (over that of reflective reason). In its purest form, it opposes the notion of ‘‘innate ideas,’’ as espoused by such earlier philosophers as Descartes, and it argues that the mind is essentially a blank slate (tabula rasa) at birth, one that subsequently fills out, as it were, by the recordings of the senses. The strict dependence of all mental states on sensations (and the mental ‘‘associations’’. they give rise to) is known as ‘‘sensationalism,’’ yet not all empiricists are sensationalists. John Locke, for instance, emphasized the primacy of sense experience, but he also argued that the mind’s reflections on its own mental operations were another source of ideas.

Empiricism, by its very premises, stands in opposition to the aesthetic norms of classicism. When Alberti argued that judgments of beauty were formed from ‘‘a reasoning faculty that is inborn in the mind,’’ he was equating beauty with universal and innate ideas essentially of divine origin; objects are beautiful to the extent to which they mirror perfectly these preordained ideas. When Winckelmann insisted that Greek artists had attained the most perfect beauty possible, he too was establishing an idealized norm against which all subsequent artistic efforts should be measured. Empirical thought, however, essentially deprives art of any such norms. As we are born without innate ideas of beauty, we can only make judgments of beauty from the sensations of pleasure or displeasure that arise from the objects we contemplate. When we try to penetrate the cause of this pleasure or displeasure, we can only point to certain attributes or qualities associated with objects and our perception of them – often culturally ingrained. Therefore some empiricists argue that judgments of beauty are relative or lack any other standards than our own subjectivity, while others argue that the correctness of these judgments, while intrinsically subjective, is universal because people share common experiences and judgments as human beings.

We can see how these philosophical distinctions might translate into architectural theory by considering garden design. One might view a Renaissance or French classical garden and judge it beautiful, because nature is arrayed in a mathematical order and displays such attributes as symmetry, regularity, and hierarchy of forms. These attributes are aesthetic premises that the gardener brings to the design in the desire to create something beautiful. Someone else, however, might come upon a natural stream or wooded glen and judge it beautiful precisely because it lacks such attributes. Here the judgment is made intuitively on the scene or ‘‘picture’’ one sees, and not on the presence of preconceived mathematical rules. The development of the so-called English garden exploited nature in the latter sense, and as we shall see this innovation in garden design also carries with it major aesthetic implications.

JOHN LOCKE from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

Although several earlier thinkers – such as William Ockham (c.1285–1347), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) – developed models of empirical thought, John Locke was the first modern philosopher to raise it into a coherent and logical system. A friend of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, Locke originally studied scholastic philosophy at Oxford in the 1650s, but chose medicine and science as a profession. He became an avid defender of civil and religious freedom, and this interest attracted him in 1666 to the politician Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury. The next year Locke moved into the lord’s household as both his physician and personal secretary; he tutored Ashley’s children, among them the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Locke’s political sympathies proved dangerous, however. When the first Earl of Shaftesbury fell from power in 1675, Locke was forced to join him in exile in Paris. And although Locke returned with Ashley to Londo four years later, another charge of insurrection in 1682 led both men once again into political exile, this time to the Netherlands. It was here in Holland (as with Descartes earlier) that Locke wrote the first draft of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which he published shortly after his return to England in 1689. The two passages below, taken from the beginning of Books 1 and 2, outline his system. Book 1 opens with his rejection of innate ideas, which Locke follows by arguing that all ideas (knowledge) come from sensation (the senses) and reflection (mental operations). The remainder of the two books, as well as Books 3 and 4, develop in great detail the arguments for and implications of such a model.

No Innate Speculative Principles

1. It is an established opinion amongst some men,1 that there are in the understanding certain innate principles; some primary notions koinad _nnoiai, characters, as itwere stamped upon the mind ofman; which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into theworld with it.

2 It would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced readers of the falseness of this supposition, if I should only show (as I hope I shall in the following parts of this Discourse) how men, barely by the use of their natural faculties, may attain to all the knowledge they have, without the help of any innate impressions; and may arrive at certainty, without any such original notions or principles. For I imagine any one will easily grant that it would be impertinent to suppose the ideas of colours innate in a creature towhom God hath given sight, and a power to receive them by the eyes from external objects: and no less unreasonable would it be to attribute several truths to the impressions of nature, and innate characters, whenwemay observe in ourselves faculties fit to attain as easy and certain knowledge of them as if they were originally imprinted on the mind. [ . . . ] the constant impressions4 which the souls of men receive in their first beings, and which they bring into the world with them, as necessarily and really as they do any of their inherent faculties.

3. This argument, drawn from universal consent, has this misfortune in it, that if it were true in matter of fact, that there were certain truths wherein all mankind agreed, it would not prove them innate, if there can be any other way shown how men may come to that universal agreement, in the things they do consent in, which I presume may be done.

4. But, which is worse, this argument of universal consent, which is made use of to prove innate principles, seems to me a demonstration that there are none such: because there are none to which all mankind give an universal assent. I shall begin with the speculative, and instance in those magnified principles of demonstration, ‘Whatsoever is, is,’ and ‘It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be’; which, of all others, I think have the most allowed title to innate.

Of Ideas in General, and their Original

1. EVERY man being conscious to himself that he thinks; and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there,6 it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas, – such as are those expressed by the words whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others: it is in the first place then to be inquired, How he comes by them?

I know it is a received doctrine, that men have native ideas, and original characters, stamped upon their minds in their very first being. This opinion I have at large examined already; and, I suppose what I have said in the foregoing Book will be much more easily admitted, when I have shown whence the understanding may get all the ideas it has; and by what ways and degrees they may come into the mind; – for which I shall appeal to every one’s own observation and experience.

2. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: – How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety?

Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.

3. First, our Senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them. And thus we come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities; which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call SENSATION.

4. Secondly, the other fountain from which experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas is, – the perception of the operations of our own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got; – which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from things without. And such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own minds; – which we being conscious of, and observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings as distinct ideas as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source15 of ideas every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other Sensation, so I call this REFLECTION, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself. By reflection then, in the following part of this discourse, I would be understood to mean, that notice which the mind takes of its own operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof there come to be ideas of these operations in the understanding. These two, I say, viz. external material things, as the objects of SENSATION, and the operations of our own minds within, as the objects of REFLECTION, are to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings. The term operations here I use in a large sense, as comprehending not barely the actions of the mind about its ideas, but some sort of passions arising sometimes from them, such as is the satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought.

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