Locke's Commonplace Book Method
The Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils, published by John Locke in French in 1685 and translated into English in 1706 as A New Method of a Common-Place-Book, laid out an indexing system of extraordinary specificity. Locke's method assigned each entry to a heading based on the first letter of the keyword and the first vowel that followed it, creating a two-dimensional index that allowed rapid retrieval from a commonplace book of any size. Locke considered the method important enough to publish as a freestanding treatise — a detail that reveals how seriously the early modern intellectual tradition took curatorial technology. The work is now cited by Blair as a paradigm case of the kind of deliberate, technical response to information abundance that the AI era needs but has barely begun to develop.
In the AI Story
The method was a response to a practical problem. Locke had accumulated so many excerpts from his reading that he could no longer find what he needed without a navigational apparatus. The apparatus itself became an intellectual artifact — a theory of organization embodied in a set of rules that reflected Locke's understanding of how knowledge was structured and how his own mind worked.
The specificity of Locke's rules is striking. Each keyword was assigned to a combination of its initial letter and the first vowel following it: "Justice" went under Ju, "Patience" under Pa, "Humility" under Hu. The two-dimensional index (letter x vowel) produced about a hundred possible slots, enough to distribute a large commonplace book's entries without overloading any single slot but not so many as to fragment the collection.
The publication of the method as a standalone treatise reveals a cultural orientation the contemporary AI moment has largely lost. Locke understood that the technology of knowledge management was itself an intellectual domain worthy of theoretical elaboration. He did not merely use his method privately; he published it for others, treating the technique as shared intellectual property with its own standards of excellence.
The contemporary parallel would be a culture that treats prompt-craft, AI workflow design, and evaluative practice with the same seriousness — publishing methods, teaching them systematically, and developing them collectively through published criticism and refinement. This is not yet happening at the scale the situation requires. The improvisational culture of contemporary AI practice is closer to Gessner's Bibliotheca Universalis than to Locke's method: individual efforts in the absence of collective methodological development.
Origin
John Locke (1632–1704) had kept commonplace books since his Oxford student days and refined his indexing method across decades of use. The method was published in the Bibliothèque universelle et historique in 1685 and was widely influential in the eighteenth-century English learned world.
Key Ideas
Technique as intellectual domain. Locke treated the method of commonplace book indexing as worthy of theoretical elaboration and public contribution.
Two-dimensional indexing. The vowel-letter combination produced enough slots for distribution without fragmentation.
Developed through use. The method emerged from decades of practical commonplace-book keeping, not from abstract design.
Published for others. Locke's willingness to publish the method reveals a cultural orientation that treated curatorial technology as shared intellectual property.
Precedent for AI methodology. The contemporary development of AI practice needs an equivalent culture of method publication and refinement.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- John Locke, A New Method of a Common-Place-Book (1706).
- Lucia Dacome, "Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of the Self in Eighteenth-Century Britain," Journal of the History of Ideas 65 (2004).
- Ann Blair, Too Much to Know (Yale, 2010).