John Locke's Method of Organizing Common Place Books

p90

The chart on this page appears to be that of John Locke's indexing system from 1685 and is here being re-published in 1689.

Fascinating that within a section or prose about indexing within MiddleMarch (set in 1829 to 1832 and published in 1871-1872), George Eliot compares a character's distinguished appearance to that of John Locke!

Mr. Brooke asks for advice about arranging notes as he has tried pigeon holes but has the common issue of multiple storage and can't remember under which letter he's filed his particular note. Mr. Casaubon indicates that he uses pigeon-holes.

Dorothea Brooke mentions that she knows how to properly index papers so that they might be searched for and found later. She is likely aware of John Locke's indexing method from 1685 (or in English in 1706) and in the same scene compares Mr. Casaubon's appearance to Locke.

Locke, John. The fundamental constitutions of Carolina, ... 1682, 1682. http://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_the-fundamental-constitu_locke-john_1682.

Did some of Locke's Two Treatises of Government stem from influence of Lord Shaftesbury's argument in favor of Thomas Culpeper?

Cross reference Dawn of Everything and "state of nature" / primitive man.

freedom?? really?

we often conveniently ignore Locke on slavery...

• for: good explanation: empiricism, empiricism - knowledge gap, quote, quote - Dan Robinson, quote - philosophy, quote - empiricism - knowledge gap, Critique of Pure Reason - goal 1 - address empiricism and knowledge gap

• good explanation : empiricism - knowledge gap

• quote

  • on the traditional empiricist account
    • we do not have direct access to the facts of the external world
    • that is we do not experience externality directly but only MEDIATELY, not immediately but MEDIATELY
      • because between us and the external world are those what do you call them oh yes, sense organs
    • and so the question is how faithfully they report what is going on out there
    • To raise the question how faithful is the sensory report of the external world
      • is to assume that you have some reliable non-sensory way of answering that question
    • That's the box you can't get out of and so there is always this gap between
      • reality as it might possibly be known by some non-human creature and
      • reality as empirically sampled by the senses
        • whose limitations and distortions are very well known
          • but not perfectly classified or categorized or or measured

• Comment

  • Robinson contextualizes the empiricist project and gap thereof, as one of the 4 goals of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
  • Robinson informally calls this the "Locke" problem, after one of the founders of the Empiricist school, John Locke.
  • Robinson also alludes to a Thomas Reed approach to realism that contends that we don't experience reality MEDIATELY, but IMMEDIATELY, thereby eliminating the gap problem altogether.
  • It's interesting to see how modern biology views the empericist's knowledge gap, especially form the perspective of the Umwelt and Sensory Ecology

• for: adjacency, adjacency - John Locke - Isaac Newton

• adjacency

  • between
    • John Locke
    • Isaac Newton
• adjacency statement
  • Locke was the elder, Newton was the younger
  • When Robinson describes Locke as conceptualizing an "ultimate reality", he means that Locke was thinking of Newton's corpuscular (atomic) theory

https://archive.org/details/13925922180LockeCommonplaceBook/mode/2up

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Notebook E, #46, 1775–1776

In this single paragraph quote Lichtenberg, using the model of Italian bookkeepers of the 18th century, broadly outlines almost all of the note taking technique suggested by Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes. He's got writing down and keeping fleeting notes as well as literature notes. (Keeping academic references would have been commonplace by this time.) He follows up with rewriting and expanding on the original note to create additional "explanations" and even "connections" (links) to create what Ahrens describes as permanent notes or which some would call evergreen notes.

Lichtenberg's version calls for the permanent notes to be "separated and ordered" and while he may have kept them in book format himself, it's easy to see from Konrad Gessner's suggestion at the use of slips centuries before, that one could easily put their permanent notes on index cards ("separated") and then number and index or categorize them ("ordered"). The only serious missing piece of Luhmann's version of a zettelkasten then are the ideas of placing related ideas nearby each other, though the idea of creating connections between notes is immediately adjacent to this, and his numbering system, which was broadly based on the popularity of Melvil Dewey's decimal system.

It may bear noticing that John Locke's indexing system for commonplace books was suggested, originally in French in 1685, and later in English in 1706. Given it's popularity, it's not unlikely that Lichtenberg would have been aware of it.

Given Lichtenberg's very popular waste books were known to have influenced Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Andre Breton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Reference: Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000). The Waste Books. New York: New York Review Books Classics. ISBN 978-0940322509.) It would not be hard to imagine that Niklas Luhmann would have also been aware of them.

Open questions: <br /> - did Lichtenberg number the entries in his own waste books? This would be early evidence toward the practice of numbering notes for future reference. Based on this text, it's obvious that the editor numbered the translated notes for this edition, were they Lichtenberg's numbering? - Is there evidence that Lichtenberg knew of Locke's indexing system? Did his waste books have an index?

"The educational ideas of John Locke" -- but where they actually his ideas though?

See: Graeber & Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything.

Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi (1746-1827) developed a holistic teaching philosophy in How Gertrude Teaches Her Children based on John Locke's ideas and used it to open his own schools.

See copies at https://archive.org/details/texts?query=How+Gertrude+Teaches+Her+

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Heinrich_Pestalozzi

‘who seldom reason at all, but do and think according to the example of others, whether parents, neighbours, ministers...for the saving of themselves the pains and trouble of thinking and examining for themselves’ (p. 169).

Is there a better direct quote from Locke for this indirect one?

Oddly, large portions of the religious right and Republican right are highly subservient to authority while simultaneously espousing the idea of "freedom".

Apparently the base definition of "freedom" on the right has shifted in large portions of American culture.

We could say first, though I highly suspect that his ideas came from somewhere else...

Locke stressed the need for regular bowel movements in children in his book Some Thoughts Concerning Education and presupposed a link between the looseness of one's stool and the weakness of their bodies. This seemed to be a moralism rather than a question of general health and eating habits which continued into even my own childhood.

John Locke provides some intellectual foundation in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) for Rousseau's Émile (1762) progressive and empiricist perspectives of teaching and learning.

Krótka historia nie tylko samej metody commonplace-book, co także informacje na temat książki Johna Locka (zob. Locke et al. 1706; Locke 1812) oraz dodatkowe informacje, zaczerpnięte z Roberta Darntona (Darnton 2000; zob. też: Darnton 2009). Na końcu są też informacje na temat porównania tej metody i prowadzenia notatek oraz strony przez samego autora, czyli Jeremy'ego Normana.

https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:13925922

A specific reference to the commonplace book tradition and in particular the practice of segmenting note books into pre-defined segments with particular topic headings. This practice described here also ignores the practice of keeping an index (either in a separate notebook or in the front/back of the notebook as was more common after John Locke's treatise)

Watch closely to see how Allosso's description of an index comes to the advice of John Locke versus the practice of Niklas Luhmann.

Alternately, is it closer to a commonplace indexing system or a shallowly linked, but still complex zettelkasten indexing system?

In shared digital systems, I still suspect that densely indexed notes will have more communal value.

Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/nrk0vgoCEe2y3CedssHnVA

Come be a part of my sales funnel!!!

ugh... This should generally be sacrilege, but it's even worse when having a solid index (which is roughly the purpose that tags support) is an important part of any commonplace book, especially since John Locke, which a resource Forte has cited elsewhere in his book.

Coming back to the beginning of this section. He talks about tags, solely after-the-fact instead of when taking notes on the fly. While it might seem that he would have been using tags as subject headings in a traditional commonplace book, he really isn't. This is a significant departure from the historical method!! It's also ill advised not to be either tagging/categorizing as one goes along to make searching and linking things together dramatically easier.

How has he missed the power of this from the start?! This is really a massive flaw in his method from my perspective, particularly as he quotes John Locke's work on the topic.

Did I maybe miss some of this in earlier sections when he quoted John Locke? Double check, just in case, but this is certainly the section of the book to discuss using these ideas!

Why footnote this instead of giving it a nod and an actual reference as sententiae?

https://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/the-scope-and-nature-of-darwins-commonplace-book/

Erasmus Darwin's commonplace book

It is one of the version(s?) published by John Bell based on John Locke's method and is a quarto volume bound in vellum with about 300 sheets of fine paper.

Blank pages 1 to 160 were numbered and filled by Darwin in his own hand with 136 entries. The book was started in 1776 and continued until 1787. Presumably Darwin had a previous commonplace book, but it has not been found and this version doesn't have any experiments prior to 1776, though there are indications that some material has been transferred from another source.

The book contains material on medical records, scientific matters, mechanical and industrial improvements, and inventions.

The provenance of Erasmus Darwin's seems to have it pass through is widow Elizabeth who added some family history to it. It passed through to her son and other descendants who added entries primarily of family related topics. Leonard Darwin (1850-1943), the last surviving son of Charles Darwin gave it to Down House, Kent from whence it was loaned to Erasmus Darwin House in 1999.

The addressing system that many digital note taking systems offer is reminiscent of Luhmann's paper system where it served a particular use. Many might ask themselves if they really need this functionality in digital contexts where text search and other affordances can be more directly useful.

Frequently missed by many, perhaps because they're befuddled by the complex branching numbering system which gets more publicity, Luhmann's paper-based system had a highly useful and simple subject heading index (see: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_SW1_001_V, for example) which can be replicated using either #tags or [[wikilinks]] within tools like Obsidian. Of course having an index doesn't preclude the incredible usefulness of directly linking one idea to potentially multiple others in some branching tree-like or network structure.

Note that one highly valuable feature of Luhmann's paper version was that the totality of cards were linked to a minimum of at least one other card by the default that they were placed into the file itself. Those putting notes into Obsidian often place them into their system as singlet, un-linked notes as a default, and this can lead to problems down the road. However this can be mitigated by utilizing topical or subject headings on individual cards which allows for searching on a heading and then cross-linking individual ideas as appropriate.

As an example, because two cards may be tagged with "archaeology" doesn't necessarily mean they're closely related as ideas. This tends to decrease in likelihood if one is an archaeologist and a large proportion of cards might contain that tag, but will simultaneously create more value over time as generic tags increase in number but the specific ideas cross link in small numbers. Similarly as one delves more deeply into archaeology, one will also come up with more granular and useful sub-tags (like Zooarcheology, Paleobotany, Archeopedology, Forensic Archeology, Archeoastronomy, Geoarcheology, etc.) as their knowledge in sub areas increases.

Concretely, one might expect that the subject heading "sociology" would be nearly useless to Luhmann as that was the overarching topic of both of his zettelkästen (I & II), whereas "Autonomie" was much more specific and useful for cross linking a smaller handful of potentially related ideas in the future.

Looking beyond Luhmann can be highly helpful in designing and using one's own system. I'd recommend taking a look at John Locke's work on indexing (1685) (https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685 is an interesting source, though you're obviously applying it to (digital) cards and not a notebook) or Ross Ashby's hybrid notebook/index card system which is also available online (http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index.html) as an example.

Another helpful tip some are sure to appreciate in systems that have an auto-complete function is simply starting to write a wikilink with various related subject heading words that may appear within your system. You'll then be presented with potential options of things to link to serendipitously that you may not have otherwise considered. Within a digital zettelkasten, the popularly used DYAC (Damn You Auto Complete) may turn into Bless You Auto Complete.

https://indexhistory.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/boswells-commonplace-book-and-lockes-index/

James Boswell had a commonplace book in which he created index pages not only similar to John Locke's method, but he actually copied out a passage from Locke about how to draw it up. Beyond this there were only a few pages of the volume that were actively used.

Reference: Folger M.a.6

At the end of the 18th century, John Bell (1745–1831), an English publisher published notebooks with the title Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke. The notebooks commonly included 550 pages, of which eight pages included instructions on John Locke's indexing method.

Link to: - Didn't Erasmus Darwin use one of these?!

Indices are certainly an old construct. One of the oldest structured examples in the note taking space is that of John Locke who detailed it in Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as A New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706).

Previously commonplace books had been structured with headwords done alphabetically. This meant starting with a preconceived structure and leaving blank or empty space ahead of time without prior knowledge of what would fill it or how long that might take. By turning that system on its head, one could fill a notebook from front to back with a specific index of the headwords at the end. Then one didn't need to do the same amount of pre-planning or gymnastics over time with respect to where to put their notes.

This idea combined with that of Konrad Gessner's design for being able to re-arrange slips of paper (which later became index cards based on an idea by Carl Linnaeus), gives us an awful lot of freedom and flexibility in almost any note taking system.

Building blocks of the note taking system

• atomic ideas
• written on (re-arrangeable) slips, cards, or hypertext spaces
• cross linked with each other
• cross linked with an index
• cross linked with references

are there others? should they be broken up differently?

Godfathers of Notetaking

• Aristotle, Cicero (commonplaces)
• Seneca the Younger (collecting and reusing)
• Raymond Llull (combinatorial rearrangements)
• Konrad Gessner (storage for re-arrangeable slips)
• John Locke (indices)
• Carl Linnaeus (index cards)

https://collect.readwriterespond.com/monks-a-polymath-and-an-invention-made-by-two-people-at-the-same-time-its-all-in-the-history-of-the-index/

Great find Aaron. Thanks for the ping.

I've gone back further than this for the commonplace and the florilegium which helped to influence their creation, though I've not delved into the specific invention or general use of indices in the space heavily. I suspected that they grew out of the tradition of using headwords, though I'm not sure that indices became more popular until the paper by John Locke in 1689 (in French) or 1706 (in English).

I'll put Dr. Duncan's book into the hopper and see what he's got to say on the topic.

https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_IgMVAAAAQAAJ/page/n107/mode/2up

Page 90-91 of De arte excerpendi shows the exact same index scheme for commonplace books suggested by John Locke in 1685 (French) and later .published as A new method of making common-place-books (1706, in English).

Jeremy Norman, an antiquarian bookseller, indicates that his website is written in much the same manner as John Locke's commonplace book.

Of course someone has published a zettelkasten notebook for taking notes to be moved into one's zettelkasten at a later date.

It includes space for notes as well as meta data box which includes labels and spaces for the following:

• UID
• Parent UID
• Zettel
• tags
• refs

It's also got (at least one) page for an index in the end titled "tag list" with a two column ruling

This follows the general pattern of pre-printed commonplace books which was common with at least John Locke's index pre-printed.

Other examples include published bullet journals with custom formatting.

One might also suggest the use of John Locke's method here: See: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685

https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/archival_objects/195243

The Bodleian Archives has copies of John Locke's commonplace book(s).

Interesting to see that this one had 531 pages, most of which were blank.

Interesting datum along the timeline of commonplacebooks and memory. Worth logging and following.

Note the difference in the ideas of ordering information versus being able to recall it. How does this step in the evolution figure for the concept of the zettelkasten?

I'm curious what this system was? Was it influenced by systems of John Locke's commonplace book? It could also have been the sort of system which may have inspired Niklas Luhmann.

Whatever it was, it must have been massive and somewhat well thought through if it reached such a tremendous size.

I must do some research into Niklas Luhmann to see if he was aware of Locke's work or the broader idea of commonplace books in general as it seems pretty obvious that his refinesments on their systems brought him to his conceptualization of the zettelkasten.

Might be an interesting source to read.

Also feels in form a bit like the combinatorial method of Raymond Llull, but without as much mixing.

Interesting use of hyperthymesia here. Also Swift using the concept of "supplemental memory" giving at least a historical mile marker of the state of mnemotechy which may have been known at the time.

Short overview of John Locke's commonplace book method. Nothing I haven't seen before sadly.

And probably not a method I would personally use unless I was thinking about paper solutions.

As most humanists of the time may have had incredibly well-trained memories (particularly in comparison with the general loss of the art now), this is particularly interesting to me. Having had a great memory, the real value of these writings and materials is to help their memories dramatically outlive their own lifetimes. This is particularly useful as their systems of passing down ideas via memory was dramatically different than those of indigenous peoples who had a much more institutionalized version of memory methods and passing along their knowledge.

http://enlightenmens.lmc.gatech.edu/items/show/90

• That item is simply a portrait of John Locke. The relation is that the word "mind" is very relevant to all the work accomplished by Locke, as he spent most of his life as a renowned philosopher.

Mowat, Diane, and Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe. Oxford University Press Canada, 2008.

The words conscience and mind bring about ideas that can be noted in John Locke’s text: *An essay concerning Human Understanding.* In book two, Locke explains how thoughts come to be. He believes that “All ideas come from sensation or reflections”. In this specific case, the ideas being expressed in this excerpt are rooted in reflection, as Crusoe is thinking on how and why he dared to actually leave his parents the way that he did. Much of this is seen throughout the whole narrative as it is written in the view of Crusoe. Nonetheless, it demonstrates how this story is evolving from simple story telling in the perspective of an outsider to the actual recount of the person living it in their own words.

John Locke, The Works of John Locke in Nine Volumes, (London: Rivington, 1824 12th ed.). Vol. 1. 2/12/2020. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/761 Mowat, Diane, and Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe. Oxford University Press Canada, 2008.

The Creature's awakening to consciousness follows John Locke's account of how the mind slowly learns to distjnguish the various senses before it can apprehend the world. CITE LOCKE SOURCE

The Creature's awakening to consciousness alludes to accounts of consciousness and maturation by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Locke gives an account of how the mind of a child slowly learns to distinguish the various senses before it can apprehend the world in totu, in Ch. 7 of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Rousseau's Emile, which Mary recorded having read in 1815, also offers an account contrasting the senses of an adult to the senses of a child.

"Creation" points toward popular literary themes, and to the Bible. It also calls into question property rights. John Locke (1632-1704) argued in Two Treatises of Government that applying one's labor to nature made that creation one's property. Shelley seems to call into question the relation of scientific research to the idea of ownership.

This is a difficult reading. Try your best.

Study Questions:

According to Locke, why is “man” willing to give up the natural condition of freedom?

Why does “man” enter into a condition of society and law?