The Commonplace Rebellion: On Locke's Method Against the Flood

Before the deluge of browser tabs and the endless scroll of the feed, the problem of too much to read was a problem of paper and ink. In the 17th century, the proliferation of printed matter—pamphlets, sermons, scientific tracts, and letters—created its own kind of information anxiety. The feeling is familiar: how to hold onto the fleeting insight from a book, how to retrieve a half-remembered argument weeks or years later? The tools of the day were the commonplace book, a blank volume where one would copy out passages, and memory, that faulty and finite vessel. But a young physician and philosopher named John Locke saw a deeper problem. The issue wasn't just storage; it was retrieval.

Locke, who would later meticulously argue for the mind as a blank slate, first turned his analytical eye to the blank pages of his own notebooks. He grew frustrated with the traditional method of arranging excerpts under broad, moral headings like 'Virtue' or 'Fortune.' Finding a specific note later was a matter of luck or exhaustive rereading. It was an arbitrary taxonomy, a drawer where everything was filed under 'Miscellaneous.' In response, between 1652 and 1675, he developed and refined his own 'Method.' This was not merely a personal hack; he published it in French in 1686, and it became a seminal text in the history of personal knowledge management.

His innovation was radical in its simplicity: an index. But not an index of subjects; an index of the alphabet. Locke’s method involved assigning each two-page spread in his notebook a number. Then, he reserved the final pages for an alphabetical index. When he wanted to save a passage, he would identify its key subject and then reduce that subject to its most essential noun. For example, a passage about the migration of birds would be filed not under 'Travel' or 'Nature,' but under 'Bird.' The real genius was the next step: he would then give that noun an 'adjectival' index key based on the first vowel after the first consonant. So, for 'Bird,' the first vowel after 'B' is 'I'. The index key became 'Bi'. He would then write the page number of his note next to 'Bi' in the index.

This system, which seems almost algorithmic, was a rebellion against the vagueness of subjective categorization. It was a formal structure designed to offload the cognitive burden of organization from the fallible human memory to a reliable, external mechanism. To find his note on birds again, he didn't have to remember what he was thinking when he wrote it; he only had to follow the rule. It removed the guesswork, the friction of retrieval. In our terms, he replaced a messy, tag-based system with a strict, keyword-based search function, all executed by hand.

We are all, in a way, managing our own digital commonplace books, wrestling with the same core challenges Locke identified. The allure of a perfect app, the endless tweaking of folders and tags—these are modern echoes of the 17th-century struggle. Locke’s lesson isn't that his specific vowel-and-consonant method is the ultimate solution. The lesson is the value of designing a system so robust and rule-based that it works even when your own mind is tired, distracted, or forgetful. It is an argument for building an infrastructure for thought that isn't dependent on the mood of the thinker. In an age of overwhelming inflow, that is a quietly revolutionary act.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: