The Itinerary of a Mind: John Locke's Commonplace
We often picture the tools of personal knowledge management as resolutely modern inventions, the digital offspring of a hyperconnected age. Our feeds, our note-taking apps, our elaborate systems of tags and folders—they feel like contemporary solutions to a contemporary problem: the deluge of information. But the human desire to gather, sort, and make sense of the world’s offerings is as old as curiosity itself. And few historical figures systematized this urge with more practical elegance than the 17th-century philosopher John Locke.
Long before the concept of a ‘digital garden’ was seeded, Locke was tending a rigorous, paper-based one. His contribution wasn't merely that he kept a commonplace book; the practice of copying noteworthy passages into a blank volume was centuries old. His genius lay in the index.
In 1685, while in exile in the Netherlands, Locke penned a short treatise in French entitled "Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueuils"—"A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books." His frustration was familiar to any of us who has ever lost a brilliant note in the depths of an app or a chaotic notebook: how do you find something again? His solution was a pre-printed, intricately designed index that transformed a blank book from a linear log into a multi-access database.
The Alphabet as an Algorithm
Locke’s method was simple yet profound. He reserved the first few pages of his notebook for an index, with a page for each letter of the alphabet. Each subsequent page in the main body of the book was assigned a topic (e.g., Theology, Horse-breeding, Money) and, crucially, that topic was logged in the index under its first letter and vowel. For example, the topic ‘Epistle’ would be indexed under ‘E.i.’ This created a granular, findable map of his own collected knowledge.
In essence, Locke was manually building associative links, creating pathways for thought that were not dictated by the chronology of his reading but by the conceptual relationships he defined. His commonplace book was not a diary of intake but a dynamic workspace for output, a silent partner in the construction of his essays and letters. It was a system designed not just for storage, but for retrieval and recombination.
There’s a quiet lesson here for our own digital curation. Locke’s system forced intentionality. You couldn’t just highlight a passage; you had to decide on a category, a heading under which this new fragment of thought would reside for the rest of its life. It was an act of immediate interpretation and integration, a first step in making the knowledge your own. In our rush to capture everything, we often defer this crucial work of categorization, creating vast archives we can no longer navigate. Locke reminds us that the true power of a collection lies not in its volume, but in the thoughtful architecture that makes it useful, that turns information into insight.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: