John Locke: A Complete Biography

John Locke stands among the most consequential thinkers in the history of Western civilization, a philosopher whose ideas shaped the way modern people understand the mind, knowledge, government, religious freedom, and the rights of the individual. To ask who was John Locke and why is he called the father of liberalism is to open a door onto the entire intellectual world of the Enlightenment, for Locke did more than any single writer to give that movement its characteristic confidence in reason, experience, tolerance, and human equality. He was an Englishman of the seventeenth century, a quiet, cautious, secretive man who lived through civil war, regicide, plague, fire, restoration, exile, and revolution, and who distilled the lessons of that turbulent age into a body of work that still underwrites the political vocabulary of free societies more than three centuries after his death.

The breadth of Locke's achievement is difficult to overstate. In philosophy proper he became the founder of British empiricism, the doctrine that all human knowledge derives ultimately from experience rather than from ideas planted in the mind at birth. His great book on this subject, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, set the agenda for the theory of knowledge for the next two centuries and provided the starting point for George Berkeley, David Hume, and, by a longer route, Immanuel Kant. In political thought he produced, in the Two Treatises of Government, the classic statement of the idea that legitimate political authority rests on the consent of the governed, that human beings possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property which no government may justly violate, and that a people whose rulers betray their trust retain the right to resist and replace them. In the field of religion he wrote the most influential early defense of toleration in the English language, arguing that the state has no business coercing the conscience and that faith compelled is no faith at all. He wrote with authority on education, on economics and money, on the interpretation of scripture, and on the proper conduct of the understanding. Few writers in any century have ranged so widely or left so deep a mark in so many separate fields.

Yet the man behind this enormous influence was, by temperament, anything but a flamboyant revolutionary. Locke was reserved, watchful, and habitually discreet, a man who guarded his privacy, kept his most dangerous opinions to himself, traveled with coded notes and concealed manuscripts, and published the boldest of his books anonymously, denying his authorship of the Two Treatises of Government to the end of his life. He came late to fame. The works that made him immortal all appeared within a few months of one another in 1689 and 1690, when their author was already fifty-seven years old, a sober physician and civil servant who had spent decades as the trusted adviser of a great political magnate and had only recently returned from years of nervous exile abroad. The flowering of John Locke's mind was slow, deliberate, and hard-won, the product of a long life of observation, reading, conversation, illness, danger, and patient revision.

This account follows that life from its beginning in a Somerset village in the year before the outbreak of England's constitutional struggles, through the schoolrooms of Westminster and the lecture halls of Oxford, into the household of the Earl of Shaftesbury and the dangerous politics of the Restoration, across the Channel into exile and back again in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, and finally to the quiet country house in Essex where the most celebrated philosopher in Europe spent his last years reading scripture and corresponding with admirers across the continent. It is a story of how a cautious and bookish man, working through one of the most violent centuries in his nation's history, came to articulate the principles on which the modern liberal order was built.

England in the Year of His Birth

John Locke was born on the twenty-ninth of August, 1632, in a small thatched cottage near the parish church of Wrington, a village in the county of Somerset in the west of England. The house belonged to his mother's family, and the choice of birthplace was a matter of convenience rather than residence, for the family home lay some miles away. The infant was baptized the same day in the parish church, the entry in the register recording the arrival of a son to John Locke the elder and his wife. Within a few years the family settled in the village of Belluton, near the market town of Pensford, a few miles south of the city of Bristol, in a comfortable but unpretentious rural house surrounded by the modest landholdings that supported them.

To understand the world into which Locke was born it is necessary to grasp the condition of England in 1632. The country was ruled by King Charles the First, a monarch convinced of the divine right of kings and increasingly at odds with his Parliament over questions of taxation, religion, and the limits of royal authority. In 1629 Charles had dissolved Parliament and embarked on the years of personal rule, governing without that body and raising revenue by expedients that many of his subjects regarded as illegal. The religious settlement of the nation was bitterly contested. The established Church of England, under the rising influence of Archbishop William Laud, was moving toward a ceremonial and hierarchical form of worship that the large and growing party of Puritans regarded with horror, seeing in it a betrayal of the Protestant Reformation and a covert return toward Rome. Beneath the surface calm of the personal rule, the tensions were accumulating that would, within a decade of Locke's birth, erupt into open civil war.

The Locke family stood firmly on the Puritan and parliamentary side of these divisions. They were not aristocrats or even gentry of the first rank but solid, respectable, middling people of the sort that formed the backbone of the parliamentary cause in the west of England. Locke's father, also named John Locke, was a country attorney, a practitioner of the law in the local courts, and a small landowner who also served as clerk to the justices of the peace in his part of Somerset. He was a man of strict Puritan conviction, sober, frugal, and serious, devoted to the reformed religion and to the cause of parliamentary liberty against the encroachments of the crown. Locke's mother, born Agnes Keene, came from a family of tanners in the nearby area; she was some years older than her husband and is remembered, in the few traces that survive, as a pious and affectionate woman. She bore several children, of whom only two sons survived infancy: John, the elder, and a younger brother, Thomas, born about five years later.

It was a household of modest means, of careful economy, and of intense religious and political earnestness. The young John Locke grew up breathing the atmosphere of Puritan Somerset, a world in which the reading of scripture, the keeping of the Sabbath, the suspicion of bishops, and the defense of the ancient liberties of the subject were articles of daily faith. The values absorbed in that house, the seriousness about religion combined with a deep distrust of religious coercion, the respect for law, the belief that authority must be answerable to those over whom it is exercised, would never entirely leave him, even as his mature philosophy refined and transformed them.

Early Life and the Coming of CIVIL War

Locke was nine years old when the long-deferred crisis of the English state finally broke. In 1642 the quarrel between King Charles and his Parliament passed beyond the possibility of compromise, and in August of that year the king raised his standard at Nottingham, plunging the nation into the first of the civil wars. The west of England, where the Locke family lived, became one of the principal theaters of the conflict. Somerset and the surrounding counties were fought over repeatedly, their towns garrisoned and besieged, their fields trampled by marching armies, their people forced to choose sides in a struggle that divided neighbors, congregations, and families.

The elder John Locke did not stand aside. When the war came he took up arms for Parliament, accepting a commission as a captain of horse in a regiment raised by Alexander Popham, a wealthy and powerful local member of Parliament who became the family's patron and protector. Captain Locke's military service was not particularly distinguished, and the parliamentary forces in the west fared badly in the early years of the war, but his commitment to the cause was real, and it brought the family into the orbit of Popham, a connection that would prove decisive for his son's future. The experience of growing up in a county torn by war, in a family whose father had ridden out to fight for the parliamentary side, left its mark on the boy. He came of age in a country where the most fundamental questions of political obligation, the source of legitimate authority, the conditions under which subjects might resist their rulers, were not abstractions debated in books but matters of life and death argued out with sword and musket.

The first civil war ended in 1646 with the defeat of the king. The years that followed brought a second war, the trial of Charles the First, and, in January 1649, an event without precedent in English history: the public execution of the reigning monarch, condemned by a court acting in the name of the people of England. The monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished, and England was declared a commonwealth, a republic governed without a king. Locke was sixteen when the king was beheaded, a student at school in London, old enough to understand the magnitude of what had occurred. He lived, in short, through the most radical political upheaval his country had ever known, and the memory of that upheaval, of the dangers of disorder as well as the dangers of tyranny, shaped the cautious, balanced, and deeply serious quality of his later political thought.

It was the patronage of Alexander Popham that opened the door to the boy's education. Popham, grateful for Captain Locke's service and impressed, perhaps, by reports of the son's promise, used his influence as a member of Parliament to secure for young John a place at one of the finest schools in the country. In 1647, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, John Locke left rural Somerset for the first time and traveled to London to enter Westminster School. He would not return to the west country to live; the path that led from the Puritan farmhouse near Pensford to the libraries of Oxford, the courts of great noblemen, and the philosophical fame of Europe began with that journey to the capital.

Westminster School

Westminster School, situated in the shadow of Westminster Abbey in the heart of London, was among the most prestigious schools in England, a nursery of scholars, clergymen, lawyers, and statesmen. Its headmaster during Locke's years there was the famous and formidable Richard Busby, a royalist in sympathy and a believer in the disciplinary virtues of the rod, who nonetheless presided over an education of genuine rigor and who managed, with remarkable agility, to keep his post through all the political convulsions of the age. It was a curious feature of Locke's schooling that he was educated, in the very heart of revolutionary London, by a staunch supporter of the monarchy.

The Westminster curriculum was overwhelmingly classical. Boys were drilled, hour upon hour, year after year, in Latin and Greek grammar, in the composition of Latin verse and prose, in the memorization and imitation of the ancient authors. Hebrew and some Arabic were added for the more advanced. The regime was harsh, the days long, the discipline severe, and Locke in later life looked back on this kind of education with a notably critical eye. His own writings on education would argue forcefully against the brutal and mechanical methods he had endured, against the pointless drilling in the composition of Latin verses, against the reliance on fear and corporal punishment, and in favor of a gentler, more rational approach that engaged the child's interest and cultivated character and judgment rather than mere verbal facility. The very vehemence of his later criticism testifies to how deeply the experience of Westminster had impressed itself upon him.

A particularly striking episode connects Locke's schooldays to the great public drama of the age. In January 1649, while Locke was a pupil at Westminster, King Charles the First was tried and executed on a scaffold erected outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall, only a short distance from the school. The boys of Westminster were deliberately kept away from the spectacle by their royalist headmaster, who held a service of mourning within the school instead. Locke was thus within a few hundred yards of the most shocking political act of the century, yet shielded from the sight of it. The detail is emblematic of his whole life: present at the center of great events, yet observing them at a careful remove.

Whatever its cruelties, the Westminster education was effective in its own terms, and Locke prospered under it. He was a diligent, able, and conscientious student, and in 1650 he was elected to the position of King's Scholar, a distinction reserved for a select group of the most promising boys, which carried financial support and, more importantly, marked the holder out for advancement to one of the ancient universities. In 1652, at the age of twenty, John Locke was elected to a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford, the largest and most distinguished of the colleges of that university. He left Westminster for Oxford, and Oxford would be his intellectual home, in one form or another, for the next thirty years.

Christ Church, Oxford

Locke entered Christ Church in the autumn of 1652, during the period of the Commonwealth, when England was a republic and Oliver Cromwell was rising toward the supreme power he would hold as Lord Protector. The university had been purged of royalists and reorganized under parliamentary and Puritan control, and the Dean of Christ Church was John Owen, a leading Independent divine and a man of relatively tolerant religious views, whose influence on the atmosphere of the college may have done something to encourage the young Locke's later commitment to liberty of conscience. The studentship Locke held was, in effect, a lifelong fellowship; unless he forfeited it by marrying or by failing to proceed to holy orders within a set period, he could retain it, with its accompanying rooms and income, indefinitely. Locke held his Christ Church studentship for thirty-two years, until it was stripped from him by direct royal command in 1684, and the college remained the fixed point of his existence through all his travels and employments.

The education Locke received at Oxford was, to his lasting frustration, founded on the scholastic philosophy of the medieval schools, a system built on the logic and metaphysics of Aristotle as interpreted and elaborated by generations of commentators. Undergraduates were trained in formal disputation, in the syllogistic manipulation of abstract terms, in a vocabulary of substances and accidents, forms and essences, that struck the impatient Locke as so much empty verbiage. He completed the prescribed course, taking his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1656 and his Master of Arts in 1658, and he was elected to a senior studentship and given college teaching duties, lecturing in Greek and in rhetoric and serving for a time as censor of moral philosophy. But he never disguised his low opinion of the scholastic training. He told a friend in later years that the disputations of the schools had been so much useless ingenuity, and that he had found little at the university in his student days that was worth the learning. The disdain for the empty abstractions of scholasticism, for words mistaken for knowledge and verbal subtlety mistaken for understanding, became one of the permanent themes of his philosophy.

If the official curriculum left Locke cold, the wider intellectual life of Oxford in the 1650s offered something far more exciting. These were the years of the scientific revolution, and Oxford was one of its principal centers. A remarkable group of natural philosophers, experimenters, and physicians had gathered in the city, men who would shortly form the nucleus of the Royal Society, and who were pioneering a new way of investigating nature: not by deducing conclusions from the authority of Aristotle, but by observation, measurement, and experiment. Among them were the chemist Robert Boyle, the architect and polymath Christopher Wren, the anatomist Thomas Willis, and others of comparable distinction. It was through contact with this circle, and above all through his friendship with Robert Boyle, that Locke discovered the intellectual current that would carry him forward and away from the dead world of the schools.

The Turn to Medicine and Natural Philosophy

Locke's escape from the scholastic curriculum led him toward medicine and experimental science, and these interests would occupy him for the better part of two decades. By the late 1650s he had begun to study medicine seriously, attending lectures, reading the medical authorities, keeping detailed notebooks of remedies and observations, and immersing himself in the practical, empirical study of the human body in health and disease. He never took the formal Oxford degree of Doctor of Medicine, a fact that would later cause him some difficulty, but he acquired a genuine and substantial medical competence, and for much of his life he was known to those around him as much as a physician as a philosopher.

The decisive intellectual influence of these Oxford years was Robert Boyle. Boyle, a few years older than Locke and already famous as the leading experimental chemist of the age, had settled in Oxford and made his lodgings a center of scientific activity. Locke became his friend, his assistant, and his disciple. From Boyle he absorbed two things of permanent importance. The first was the experimental method itself, the conviction that knowledge of the natural world must be built up patiently from careful observation and controlled experiment rather than spun out of abstract principles. The second was a particular theory about the ultimate constitution of matter, the so-called corpuscular philosophy, which held that the bodies we perceive are composed of tiny, imperceptible particles, and that the qualities we observe in things, their colors, tastes, smells, and warmth, are produced in us by the arrangement and motion of these particles. This corpuscular view of nature lay at the foundation of the distinction Locke would later draw, in his great philosophical work, between the primary qualities that genuinely belong to bodies and the secondary qualities that exist only as powers to produce sensations in a perceiving mind. Locke's philosophy, for all its originality, grew directly out of the scientific worldview he learned in Boyle's Oxford laboratory.

Equally important was Locke's friendship and collaboration with Thomas Sydenham, the most distinguished English physician of the seventeenth century, often called the English Hippocrates. Sydenham practiced medicine in London, and Locke worked closely with him during the 1660s, accompanying him on his rounds, observing his methods, and assisting in the composition of his medical writings. Sydenham's approach to medicine was rigorously empirical and notably modest. He distrusted grand theoretical systems and elaborate speculations about the hidden causes of disease, and he insisted instead on the patient, careful observation of the actual course of illnesses, the precise description of symptoms, and the cautious testing of remedies by their results. This medical empiricism, this preference for the close study of particulars over the construction of imposing but unfounded theories, reinforced everything Locke had learned from Boyle and became a model for his philosophical method. When, in the great Essay, Locke described his own role as that of an under-laborer clearing away rubbish that lay in the way of knowledge, he was applying to philosophy the same humble, observational, anti-speculative spirit that Sydenham brought to the bedside.

In 1668 Locke was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the institution that had grown out of the Oxford and London scientific circles and had received its royal charter a few years earlier. He was now formally a member of the community of the new natural philosophy, though he was never among the most active of the Society's experimenters, and his contributions to its proceedings were modest. His real importance to the scientific revolution lay elsewhere: not in any particular discovery, but in the philosophical account he would give of what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and what its limits are, an account designed to make sense of, and to provide the theoretical underpinning for, the experimental science that Boyle, Sydenham, Newton, and their colleagues were creating.

A further dimension of Locke's Oxford years deserves attention, because it bears directly on the political philosophy of his maturity. While still a young don, in the years around 1660, Locke wrote two short works, never published in his lifetime and now known as the Two Tracts on Government, in which he took a position on the question of religious toleration startlingly opposed to the one he would later make famous. In these early tracts the young Locke argued that the civil magistrate, the governing authority, had the right to determine and impose the outward forms of religious worship, the so-called things indifferent, matters not settled by scripture, in the interest of public order. The England of 1660, exhausted by two decades of revolution, civil war, and religious strife, had just recalled the monarchy in the person of Charles the Second, and the young Locke, like many of his contemporaries, was at that moment more frightened of anarchy and sectarian chaos than of governmental overreach. The conservative, order-loving Locke of 1660 had to travel a long intellectual road before he became the great theorist of toleration and of the right of resistance. That journey, and the experiences and the friendship that drove it, form the central drama of his middle life.

The Meeting with Lord Ashley

In the summer of 1666 an apparently minor event set the course of the rest of Locke's life. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley, one of the most powerful politicians in England, came to Oxford to take the medicinal waters in the hope of relieving a persistent ailment. Through a mutual acquaintance, the task of obtaining the waters for the noble visitor fell to John Locke. The arrangements miscarried in some small way, and Locke called on Lord Ashley to apologize. The two men fell into conversation, and Ashley, a shrewd judge of ability, was so taken with the quiet Oxford physician that he invited him to dine the next day and pressed him to consider entering his service. Within a year, in 1667, Locke had left his rooms at Christ Church for a position in Lord Ashley's grand London residence, Exeter House on the Strand, joining the household as physician, confidential secretary, intellectual companion, and trusted man of business. He retained his Christ Church studentship, and would continue to draw on Oxford for the rest of the period, but the center of his life had shifted from the university to the household of a great political magnate.

The man who had thus drawn Locke into the world of high politics was one of the most remarkable and controversial figures of the age. Anthony Ashley Cooper, raised over the following years to the title of Earl of Shaftesbury, was a politician of extraordinary energy, intelligence, and adaptability, a survivor who had taken arms first for the king and then for Parliament in the civil wars, had served in Cromwell's councils, had helped to engineer the restoration of the monarchy, and had risen under Charles the Second to the highest offices of state, including, eventually, the post of Lord Chancellor. He was a man of liberal religious views, a friend of toleration for Protestant dissenters, a defender of the rights of Parliament, and a believer in trade and the colonies as the foundations of national strength. He would end his career as the relentless leader of the opposition to the court, the organizer of the first true political party in English history, and a man condemned by his enemies as a dangerous and unprincipled demagogue. To Locke, however, Shaftesbury was a patron of unswerving loyalty, a protector, a political educator, and, in time, a genuine friend, and the bond between the cautious philosopher and the brilliant, daring statesman became the central relationship of Locke's public life.

The most dramatic moment of their early association came in 1668. Lord Ashley was suffering from a serious and worsening illness, a tumor or abscess in the region of the liver, a hydatid cyst, which caused him great pain and threatened his life. Locke, drawing on his medical knowledge and consulting with the leading physicians of London, supervised a bold and dangerous surgical operation to drain the abscess. The procedure was a success. The abscess was opened, and to keep it draining a small silver pipe or tap was installed in Ashley's side, which he wore for the rest of his life and which his political enemies, with the cruel wit of the age, would later mock unmercifully. Whatever the satirists made of it, the operation almost certainly saved Ashley's life, and it bound patron and physician together with a tie of gratitude and confidence that nothing afterward would break. Locke had come into the great man's service almost by accident; the saving of his life made him indispensable.

Service in Shaftesbury's household transformed Locke. The shy, bookish Oxford don, absorbed in medicine and natural philosophy, was drawn into the practical business of government, politics, commerce, and colonial administration. He read the dispatches, drafted the papers, attended to the correspondence, and listened to the conversation of one of the ablest political minds in the kingdom. He met the statesmen, courtiers, merchants, and men of affairs who passed through Exeter House. He was given responsible public employment in the bodies that Shaftesbury, as a great officer of state, helped to direct. And he watched, at the closest possible range, the workings of power, the management of Parliament, the intrigues of the court, and the slow gathering of the constitutional crisis that would, in the next decade, drive both patron and philosopher into danger and exile. The education Locke received in Shaftesbury's service was the practical complement to everything he had learned in the schools and laboratories of Oxford, and without it the author of the Two Treatises of Government could never have existed.

In the Service of Shaftesbury

For roughly fifteen years, from 1667 until the early 1680s, Locke's life was bound up with the fortunes of Anthony Ashley Cooper. Those years carried Shaftesbury to the summit of power and then plunged him into opposition, conspiracy, and flight, and they carried Locke with him through every stage of the descent. To follow Locke through this period is to watch a contemplative scholar serve a long apprenticeship in the hardest school of practical politics, and to see the experiences accumulate that would eventually find expression in the most influential work of political theory in the English language.

Locke's duties in Shaftesbury's service were remarkably varied. He continued to act as the family physician, attending not only the earl himself but his household, and he played a notable part in a matter of dynastic importance: when Shaftesbury's only son and heir proved sickly and his marriage childless, Locke involved himself in arranging a suitable match and in overseeing the medical care that led, in time, to the birth of grandchildren, including the boy who would grow up to be the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the moral philosopher whose education Locke would later supervise. Beyond medicine, Locke served as a secretary and adviser on a widening range of public business. As Shaftesbury rose through the great offices of the Restoration government, becoming a member of the inner council, then a commissioner of trade, and finally, in 1672, Lord Chancellor of England, Locke followed him into official employment, holding a succession of government posts connected with trade, with the colonies, and with the administration of the kingdom.

The most substantial of these was his work on colonial and commercial affairs. In 1668 and the years following, Locke served as secretary to the Lords Proprietors of the new colony of Carolina, a vast tract of land on the Atlantic coast of North America that Charles the Second had granted to a group of eight noble proprietors, Shaftesbury foremost among them. From 1673 to 1675 Locke held the salaried post of secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations, a government body charged with overseeing England's commerce and its growing empire. In these capacities he handled an enormous volume of administrative business, drafting documents, conducting correspondence, gathering and digesting information about trade, navigation, colonies, and the resources of distant lands. The work gave him a detailed practical knowledge of economics, of empire, and of the machinery of government, and it left him, as will be seen, with one deeply problematic connection that has cast a long shadow over his reputation.

These were also the years in which Locke first formulated, in writing, the questions that would occupy the rest of his philosophical life. In 1671, in Shaftesbury's London house, a small group of friends, Locke among them, fell into a discussion of a difficult subject, most probably a question concerning morality and revealed religion. The conversation, as Locke later recalled, ran quickly into difficulties and confusions, and the company found themselves at a loss. It struck Locke that the discussion had gone wrong because they had set off in the wrong direction; before they could hope to settle such questions, they needed first to examine the instrument with which they were attempting to settle them, namely the human understanding itself, and to determine what objects it was, and was not, fitted to deal with. He undertook to write down some thoughts on this preliminary question for the next meeting of the group. Those thoughts, hastily set down on a single sheet, were the seed of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The work that began as a brief contribution to a friendly discussion would grow, over nearly twenty years of intermittent labor, into a treatise of several hundred thousand words. Two surviving drafts from the year 1671, known to scholars as Draft A and Draft B, record the earliest stages of that long development.

The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and the Question of Slavery

No aspect of John Locke's career has provoked more discomfort, or more searching modern debate, than his involvement with the colony of Carolina and, through it, with the institution of slavery. The facts must be stated plainly, because they sit in painful tension with the philosophy of natural freedom and human equality for which Locke is justly honored.

As secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, Locke was closely associated with the drafting of the founding document of that colony, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, issued in 1669 and revised in subsequent years. This elaborate constitutional scheme set out a hierarchical social order for the new colony, complete with a hereditary nobility and a carefully graded structure of ranks. It also contained a notorious provision declaring that every freeman of Carolina should have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves. The document, in other words, gave explicit legal sanction to racial slavery in the colony whose constitution Locke, in his official capacity, helped to prepare. Beyond this, Locke personally invested money in the Atlantic slave trade. He held stock in the Royal African Company, the English corporation that dominated the trade in enslaved Africans, and he had an interest in another colonial venture, the company of the Bahama Adventurers. Locke, the philosopher of liberty, was for a time a shareholder in, and an administrator connected to, the apparatus of human bondage.

Historians and philosophers have debated long and hard how to understand this contradiction, and the debate is not settled. Several points are generally agreed. The exact extent of Locke's personal authorship of the Fundamental Constitutions is uncertain; he was the secretary who prepared and copied the document, and the degree to which the slavery clause reflects his own initiative, as opposed to the wishes of the proprietors he served, cannot be established from the surviving evidence. Some scholars hold that Locke actively shaped a pro-slavery framework; others argue that he functioned chiefly as a clerk recording the decisions of his employers, and note that he was involved in later revisions of the document. It is also relevant that Locke sold his Royal African Company stock in 1675, well before the period of his greatest philosophical productivity. None of these qualifications, however, dissolves the basic problem.

The problem is sharpened, not eased, by Locke's own political philosophy. In the Two Treatises of Government, Locke opens with one of the most ringing condemnations of slavery in the whole literature of political thought, declaring slavery so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it. He grounds his entire political theory on the proposition that all men are naturally free, equal, and independent, and that no one may rightfully be subjected to the political power of another without his own consent. He does, it is true, allow for one narrow and carefully bounded form of legitimate servitude: the case of a captive justly taken in a just war, who, having forfeited his life by his own aggression, may be kept in a condition of bondage as a kind of suspended death sentence. But this theoretical exception, hedged about with conditions, cannot be stretched to cover, and was plainly never designed to justify, the hereditary, racial, commercial slavery of the Atlantic system, in which men, women, and children who had committed no aggression at all were bought, sold, and held in perpetual bondage along with their descendants.

The honest conclusion is that there is a genuine and unresolved contradiction at the heart of Locke's life and thought. He articulated, more powerfully and more influentially than any writer of his century, the principles of universal natural freedom and equality that would, in later generations, supply the abolitionist movement with its most potent weapons. And he was, at the same time, personally entangled with the colonial slave system in ways that those very principles condemn. Modern readers are right to confront this contradiction squarely rather than to explain it away, and right also to recognize that the emancipatory power of Locke's ideas ultimately outran, and was turned against, the compromises of the man who first set them down. The story of how the language of natural rights was used, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by enslaved people and by abolitionists to indict the very system Locke had served, is one of the most striking examples in history of ideas escaping the limitations of their authors.

Travels in France

In 1675 the political tide turned against Shaftesbury. He had fallen out decisively with the court of Charles the Second, lost his office of Lord Chancellor, and moved into open and increasingly dangerous opposition. With his patron out of power and the political climate uncertain, and with his own health troubling him, Locke left England in November 1675 for an extended stay in France, where he would remain for nearly four years, until the spring of 1679. The French sojourn was partly a search for a milder climate to ease his chronic respiratory complaints, partly a withdrawal from a political scene in which his association with the disgraced Shaftesbury made his position awkward, and partly the long, leisurely intellectual journey of a scholar of independent mind.

Locke spent much of his time in the south of France, in and around the city of Montpellier, which was famous for its university, its medical school, and its agreeable climate. He also passed long periods in Paris. Throughout his travels he kept the detailed journals that have survived to give posterity an unusually intimate record of his daily observations: notes on the weather, on prices, on agriculture and viticulture, on roads and inns, on the customs and conditions of the French people, on the works of art he saw and the books he read, and, threaded through all of it, the continuing development of his philosophical ideas. In France Locke read widely and thought hard. He encountered at first hand the intellectual world of French Catholicism and French science, and he came into contact, directly or through their writings and disciples, with the legacy of René Descartes, the great French philosopher whose rationalist system Locke admired for its clarity even as he rejected its central doctrine of innate ideas. The Cartesian philosophy was, in a sense, the great rival against which Locke would define his own empiricism, and his years in France deepened his engagement with it. He also met French Protestants, the Huguenots, whose precarious position under an increasingly intolerant Catholic monarchy gave him a vivid object lesson in the evils of religious persecution, a lesson reinforced when, a decade later, Louis the Fourteenth revoked the Edict of Nantes and unleashed a wave of repression that drove the Huguenots into exile across Protestant Europe.

The French years were, in their quiet way, immensely productive. Locke did not publish during this period, but he read, observed, reflected, and wrote in his notebooks, and the drafts of his philosophical work continued to mature. He returned to England in 1679 a more seasoned, more widely traveled, and more intellectually prepared man than the secretary who had left four years before. He returned, however, to a country sliding rapidly toward a new and acute political crisis, and to a patron who stood at the very center of the storm.

The Exclusion Crisis and the Writing of the Two Treatises

The crisis that gripped England between 1679 and 1683, known to history as the Exclusion Crisis, was the most serious constitutional convulsion the country had experienced since the civil wars, and it forms the indispensable background to Locke's masterpiece of political theory. At its heart lay a single, explosive question: the succession to the throne. King Charles the Second had no legitimate children, and his heir was therefore his younger brother, James, Duke of York. James, however, was an open and avowed Roman Catholic, and to a large part of the English political nation, in which fear and hatred of popery ran deep and was bound up with the memory of religious persecution and with anxieties about absolute monarchy on the French model, the prospect of a Catholic king was intolerable. A powerful movement arose, with Shaftesbury at its head, to exclude James from the succession by act of Parliament, to alter the hereditary line so as to keep a Catholic from the throne.

Shaftesbury threw himself into the exclusion campaign with all his formidable energy. He organized his supporters into a disciplined political force, the first recognizably modern political party, soon to be known by the nickname of the Whigs, and he mobilized petitions, pamphlets, parliamentary maneuvers, and popular agitation in the cause. The struggle convulsed the nation for several years. Parliaments were summoned and dissolved, exclusion bills were introduced and defeated, and the country divided into two great parties, the Whigs who sought to limit the monarchy and exclude the Catholic heir, and the Tories who upheld the hereditary principle and the prerogatives of the crown. It was in the white heat of this conflict, and as a weapon within it, that Locke composed the Two Treatises of Government.

The dating of the Two Treatises is a matter on which modern scholarship decisively overturned an older view, and the correction matters greatly for understanding the book. For a long time it was assumed that Locke wrote the Two Treatises after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, as a retrospective justification of a revolution already accomplished. The painstaking research of the historian Peter Laslett, published in the twentieth century, established that the bulk of the work was in fact written earlier, during the Exclusion Crisis itself, around 1680 to 1683. This means that the Two Treatises of Government was not a comfortable after-the-fact apology for a settled order, but a revolutionary tract, composed in conditions of mounting danger, intended to justify resistance to a king before such resistance had succeeded, indeed at a time when it had not yet even been openly attempted. Locke was writing not to explain a revolution but to argue one into being.

The first of the two treatises is a detailed and now largely forgotten refutation of a book called Patriarcha, by Sir Robert Filmer, a recently republished defense of absolute monarchy that grounded the authority of kings in the supposed grant of dominion that God had made to Adam, an authority handed down, in theory, through the patriarchs to the kings of the present day. Filmer's patriarchal theory had become a favorite weapon of the defenders of the crown, and Locke devoted the entire First Treatise to demolishing it, point by point, arguing that there was no scriptural warrant for Adam's supposed political authority, that even if there had been, it could not possibly be traced to any living monarch, and that the whole theory, taken seriously, would make every government on earth illegitimate. The First Treatise is a work of polemical demolition, and once Filmer's theory had ceased to be taken seriously, it lost most of its interest.

The Second Treatise is another matter altogether. Having cleared away the patriarchal theory, Locke uses the Second Treatise to construct a positive account of the origin, the purposes, and the limits of political power, and it is this work, the Second Treatise of Government, that became one of the foundational texts of modern political thought. Its argument will be examined in detail later in this account; here it is enough to note the circumstances of its composition. Locke wrote it as a participant in a desperate political struggle, in the household and the cause of a man who was, by the early 1680s, moving from constitutional opposition into actual conspiracy. When the exclusion campaign failed in Parliament, Shaftesbury and his more radical associates began to contemplate armed rebellion, and plots were laid, of uncertain seriousness and uncertain coordination, to raise an insurrection or even to seize or assassinate the king and his brother. The most notorious of these schemes became known as the Rye House Plot.

In 1681 Shaftesbury was arrested and tried for treason; a London grand jury, packed with his Whig supporters, threw out the charge, and he was freed, but his position was crumbling. In late 1682, with the political and legal machinery of the crown closing in on him, Shaftesbury fled the country, escaping to the Dutch Republic, where he died, ill and broken, in January 1683. The collapse of the Whig cause and the discovery of the Rye House Plot in the summer of 1683 unleashed a wave of repression. Leading Whigs were arrested; some, including Lord William Russell and the republican theorist Algernon Sidney, were tried and executed. The university of Oxford publicly burned books deemed seditious. For John Locke, the close confidant of the dead earl, a man known to have been at the center of the Whig circle and suspected, rightly or wrongly, of knowledge of the conspiracies, England had become a place of acute personal danger. He had in his possession, or knew himself to be the author of, a manuscript arguing that subjects might lawfully resist and overthrow a tyrannical king, the very doctrine for which other men were even then being sent to the scaffold. In September 1683 John Locke quietly left England and crossed the sea to the Dutch Republic. He would not return for more than five years.

Exile in the Dutch Republic

The five and a half years that Locke spent in the Dutch Republic, from the autumn of 1683 to the early months of 1689, were among the most fruitful of his life, and they were also a period of real danger, of concealment, and of nervous watchfulness. The United Provinces of the Netherlands were, in the late seventeenth century, the most prosperous, the most commercially advanced, and the most religiously tolerant society in Europe, a haven for refugees, dissenters, freethinkers, and exiles of every description, and a great center of printing and of the trade in books and ideas. For an English Whig fleeing the repression of the early 1680s, it was the natural place of refuge, and Locke found there a congenial intellectual atmosphere and a circle of remarkable friends. But the long arm of the English government reached into the Dutch Republic. In 1684, on a direct order from King Charles the Second, Locke was formally expelled from his studentship at Christ Church, stripped of the Oxford position he had held for more than thirty years. In 1685, after the failure of the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion against the new King James the Second, the English authorities pressed the Dutch government to arrest and hand over a list of suspected traitors, and Locke's name was on it. For a period he was obliged to live in hiding, under an assumed name, moving between the houses of trusted friends, his whereabouts concealed even from his correspondents.

Despite these anxieties, the Dutch years were a time of intense and concentrated intellectual work. Free from the official duties that had consumed so much of his time in Shaftesbury's service, Locke was able at last to bring his long-maturing projects toward completion. He revised and very substantially expanded the manuscript of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, carrying it close to its finished form. In 1686 he sent a digest of the work to be published, in French translation, in one of the learned journals of the Dutch Republic, which gave the European intellectual public its first taste of his philosophy. He worked on his thoughts about education, drafting in the form of letters to a friend the material that would become Some Thoughts Concerning Education. And in the winter of 1685, prompted by the alarming news from France, where Louis the Fourteenth had just revoked the Edict of Nantes and was driving hundreds of thousands of Protestants into exile, Locke wrote, in Latin, his Epistola de Tolerantia, the Letter Concerning Toleration that would become one of the classic statements of the principle of religious liberty.

The friendships of the Dutch years were important to Locke both personally and intellectually. He became closely attached to a group of liberal-minded theologians and scholars, men associated with the Remonstrant or Arminian wing of Dutch Protestantism, which stood for a rational, undogmatic, and tolerant form of Christianity. Foremost among them were Philipp van Limborch, a Remonstrant professor of theology who became one of Locke's dearest friends and the dedicatee, in effect, of the Letter Concerning Toleration, and Jean Le Clerc, a brilliant scholar and editor of learned journals who did much to make Locke's ideas known to the continental public. In the company of these men Locke found an intellectual home, a community that shared his conviction that genuine Christianity was a matter of a few simple and reasonable beliefs rather than of elaborate dogma and coercive uniformity. The tolerant, rational, scripturally grounded Protestantism of the Dutch Remonstrants left a deep mark on Locke's own religious writing of the following decade.

The Glorious Revolution and the Return to England

While Locke worked and waited in the Dutch Republic, the political situation in England moved toward a climax. Charles the Second had died in 1685, and his Catholic brother had succeeded him as King James the Second, the very outcome that the whole exclusion campaign had been designed to prevent. James proceeded, over the next three years, to alienate almost every section of the English political nation. He maintained a standing army, promoted Catholics to high office in defiance of the law, claimed and exercised a sweeping power to suspend the operation of statutes, and pursued policies that convinced a growing majority of his subjects, including many who had once been the staunchest defenders of monarchy, that he aimed at the establishment of Catholicism and of an absolute, French-style royal power. The birth of a son to James in the summer of 1688, raising the prospect of a permanent Catholic dynasty, brought matters to a head.

A group of leading Englishmen, drawn from both the Whig and the Tory parties, invited William of Orange, the Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic and the husband of James's Protestant daughter Mary, to intervene. In November 1688 William landed in England with a Dutch army. James's support melted away; his own officers and his own family deserted him; and in December, after a failed first attempt, he fled to France. The throne was declared vacant, and in early 1689 it was settled jointly upon William and Mary, who accepted it on terms set out in a Declaration, soon enacted as the Bill of Rights, that affirmed the rights of Parliament and the subject and condemned the abuses of the previous reign. This largely bloodless transfer of power, which decisively established the principle that the crown of England was held subject to law and to the consent of Parliament, became known as the Glorious Revolution, and it created, at last, the political order under which Locke's mature ideas could be published openly and would be welcomed as the philosophy of the new establishment.

In February 1689 Locke crossed the sea from the Dutch Republic to England, traveling in the company of the princess who was about to be crowned Queen Mary the Second. After more than five years of exile, the disgraced Whig adviser returned to his country as a respected friend of the new regime. He was offered a diplomatic post abroad, the ambassadorship to one of the German courts, but declined it, partly on grounds of his uncertain health and partly, one suspects, because his temperament was unsuited to the ceremony and the conviviality of diplomatic life. He accepted instead a modest and undemanding government office, a commissionership of appeals, which gave him a small income without consuming his time. For the great task that now lay before him was not the holding of office but the publication, at long last, of the works on which he had been laboring, in some cases, for the better part of twenty years. The years 1689 and 1690 saw the appearance, in rapid succession, of the books that made John Locke one of the most famous philosophers in Europe.

The Publication of the Major Works

The concentration of Locke's great publications into a span of barely more than a year is one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of authorship. In 1689 there appeared, first in the original Latin and then in an English translation, the Letter Concerning Toleration. In the same year, dated 1690 on its title page in the manner of the time, came the Two Treatises of Government. And also bearing the date 1690, though available before the end of 1689, came the massive An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Within months, a man who had published almost nothing of consequence under his own name in fifty-seven years of life had laid before the public three works, any one of which would have secured his reputation, and which together constitute one of the most influential bodies of writing produced by any thinker of the early modern age.

Locke's attitude toward these publications was, characteristically, a study in contrasts. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding he acknowledged proudly and openly; his name appeared on its title page, he superintended its successive editions with care, and he defended it vigorously against its critics. The Two Treatises of Government and the Letter Concerning Toleration, by contrast, he published anonymously, and the anonymity of the Two Treatises in particular he maintained with extraordinary persistence for the rest of his life. He never admitted authorship of it in public; he discussed it in his letters only with the greatest circumspection; and only in a codicil to his will, opened after his death, did he formally and finally acknowledge that the Two Treatises of Government and several other anonymous works were his. The contrast tells us much about the man and about his age. To have written a celebrated work on the human understanding was an honor; to have written a work arguing that subjects might lawfully depose their kings was, even after the Glorious Revolution, a thing that a prudent man preferred not to confess. Locke's lifelong caution, his instinct for self-protection, his refusal ever to be wholly candid about his most dangerous opinions, persisted to the very end and beyond it.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is Locke's philosophical masterpiece and one of the central documents of modern thought. It is a long, patient, sometimes repetitive, often profound investigation into a single great question: what is the nature, the origin, and the extent of human knowledge? What can the human mind know, how does it come to know it, and what are the boundaries beyond which it cannot reach? In pursuing that question across four substantial books, Locke laid the foundations of the philosophical tradition known as British empiricism and set the terms of debate in the theory of knowledge for generations to come.

The starting point of the Essay, and the target of its powerful opening book, is the doctrine of innate ideas, the view, widely held in Locke's day and associated especially with the rationalist philosophy descended from Descartes, that the mind comes furnished from birth with certain ideas and principles, stamped upon it by God or by nature, prior to and independent of all experience. Against this doctrine Locke mounted a sustained and systematic assault. If there were truly innate principles, he argued, principles universally assented to by all human beings, then we should expect to find them present in the minds of children, of the mentally disabled, and of peoples in remote and primitive parts of the world; yet observation shows no such universal assent. The supposedly self-evident principles of logic and morality are unknown to infants and to many adults, and the moral beliefs of mankind vary enormously from one society and one age to another. The appearance of universality, where it exists at all, is far better explained by the common experience and the common reasoning of human beings than by any supposed innate stamp. With this critique Locke swept away, to his own satisfaction and that of many of his readers, the foundation of the rationalist theory of knowledge.

In place of innate ideas, Locke advanced the doctrine that has ever since been associated with his name: the doctrine that the mind, at birth, is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, an empty cabinet, a sheet of white paper void of all characters, and that every one of its ideas, and therefore every scrap of its knowledge, is derived ultimately from experience. How, then, asked Locke, does the mind come to be furnished with that vast store of ideas which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it? To this he answered, in one word, from experience; in all that knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. Experience, he explained, supplies the mind with its ideas through two distinct channels. The first is sensation: the five senses convey into the mind the ideas of external objects, of colors, sounds, tastes, smells, textures, shapes, and motions. The second is reflection: the mind, turning its attention inward upon its own operations, perceives itself perceiving, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, willing, and so acquires the ideas of these mental activities. Sensation and reflection, the outer sense and the inner, are the only two fountains of knowledge, and from the simple ideas they furnish, the mind, by its own powers of combining, comparing, and abstracting, builds up the entire complex furniture of human thought. Nothing can be in the understanding that did not enter, in the first instance, through one or the other of these doors.

From this foundation Locke developed, across the long second and third books of the Essay, an elaborate analysis of the contents and the workings of the mind. He distinguished simple ideas, which the mind receives passively and cannot itself manufacture or destroy, from complex ideas, which the mind actively constructs by compounding simple ones. He drew his famous and consequential distinction between primary and secondary qualities. The primary qualities of a body, its solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number, are qualities genuinely inherent in the body itself, and our ideas of them resemble the qualities that cause them. The secondary qualities, by contrast, the colors, sounds, tastes, smells, and the like, are not, properly speaking, in the bodies at all; they are nothing but powers in the objects, arising from the arrangement and motion of their insensible primary particles, to produce sensations in us. The sensation of redness or of warmth exists only in the perceiving mind; in the object there is only a particular texture of corpuscles with the power to cause that sensation. This distinction, inherited from the corpuscular science of Boyle, carried large and unsettling implications about the relation between the world as it appears to us and the world as it is in itself, implications that Locke's successors, especially Berkeley, would press hard.

Locke also undertook, in the third book of the Essay, a pioneering examination of language, of the way words function as the signs of ideas, and of the confusion and error that arise when words are used carelessly, when they are taken to stand for things rather than for ideas, or when men dispute endlessly over terms to which they attach no clear meaning. Much of the empty wrangling of the schools, he argued, sprang from the abuse of language, and a careful attention to the meaning of words was one of the chief remedies for intellectual error. And in the fourth and final book he turned to knowledge itself, defining it as the perception of the agreement or disagreement of our ideas, classifying its degrees and kinds, and, with a candor unusual among philosophers, marking out the narrow limits within which genuine certainty is possible. Human knowledge, Locke concluded, is in fact extremely limited. Of the real inner constitutions of substances we are almost wholly ignorant; much of what passes for knowledge is in truth only probability, only judgment, only faith. But, he insisted, this modest portion is enough. The candle that is set up in us, he wrote, shines bright enough for all our purposes. We were not given understanding sufficient to know all things, but sufficient to know what concerns our conduct and our salvation, and the recognition of our limits, far from being a counsel of despair, is the beginning of intellectual honesty and of a proper humility.

The Essay Concerning Human Understanding was an immediate and enduring success. It went through four editions, each carefully revised and enlarged, in Locke's own lifetime, and a fifth appeared shortly after his death. It was translated into French and Latin, carrying its author's fame across Europe. It became a standard text in the universities, eventually even at the Oxford that had once expelled him. And it set the philosophical agenda for the eighteenth century. The whole subsequent tradition of British empiricism, the philosophy of George Berkeley and of David Hume, took its rise directly from Locke's Essay, accepting his starting point in experience while pushing his conclusions in directions Locke himself had not foreseen and would not have welcomed. Even the great rationalist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz paid Locke the compliment of composing an entire book, the New Essays on Human Understanding, as a chapter-by-chapter reply. And Immanuel Kant, who would attempt in the next century to reconcile the rival claims of experience and reason, framed his own critical philosophy as a response to the problems that Locke, and the empiricist tradition he founded, had brought into focus. To understand what did Locke contribute to philosophy is, in large part, to trace the immense influence of this single, patient, groundbreaking book.

Two Treatises of Government

If the Essay made Locke the founder of modern empiricism, the Two Treatises of Government made him the founder of modern liberalism, and it is the Second Treatise, the constructive half of the work, that has had by far the greater and more lasting influence. In it Locke set out, with a clarity and a force that have never been surpassed, a theory of the origin, the purpose, and the proper limits of political power, and that theory became the intellectual charter of the constitutional, rights-based, consent-founded state.

Locke begins, as the social contract theorists characteristically did, with a thought experiment: the state of nature, the condition of human beings considered prior to, or apart from, the existence of government. Locke's state of nature is markedly different from the famous version offered a generation earlier by Thomas Hobbes, who had portrayed the natural condition of mankind as a war of all against all, a state of universal fear and violence in which life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Locke's state of nature is not a state of war. It is a state of perfect freedom and of equality, in which all men are free to order their actions and dispose of their possessions as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, and in which no one has any natural authority over any other. Crucially, this natural freedom is not lawless. The state of nature, Locke insists, has a law of nature to govern it, a moral law, accessible to human reason, which teaches all mankind that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. Human beings in the state of nature are bound by this moral law, and each of them, in the absence of any common judge, has the right to enforce it, to punish transgressions and to seek reparation for injuries.

To this account of natural law and natural freedom Locke joins one of the most influential and most debated portions of his whole philosophy: his theory of property. In the state of nature, Locke argues, the earth and its fruits were given by God to mankind in common. How, then, does any individual come to have a rightful, exclusive property in any particular thing? Locke's answer is the labor theory of property. Every man, he writes, has a property in his own person; the labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his. When a man mixes his labor with something that nature has provided, when he gathers the acorns, draws the water, tills the field, he joins to it something that is unquestionably his own, and thereby makes it his property, removing it from the common stock. Labor, the labor that is each person's own, is the origin and the title of private property. Locke hedges this principle with provisos, that one must leave enough and as good for others, and that one must not let what one takes spoil unused, though he also argues that the invention of money, by which durable wealth can be stored without spoiling, and the immense increase in productivity that the cultivation of land brings about, together transform the situation and permit the legitimate accumulation of unequal estates. The labor theory of property would prove enormously influential, shaping economic and political thought, in different directions, for centuries to come.

Why, then, given that the state of nature is a state of freedom governed by a knowable moral law, do human beings ever leave it and submit themselves to government? Because, Locke answers, the state of nature, for all its freedom, has grave inconveniences. There is no established, settled, known law, recognized by common consent; there is no known and indifferent judge to settle disputes; and there is no power reliably able to enforce just sentences. In the state of nature every man is judge in his own case, and self-love, passion, and partiality make such judgment unreliable, so that the enjoyment of natural rights is uncertain and constantly exposed to the invasion of others. To remedy these inconveniences, to secure their lives, their liberties, and their estates, which Locke gathers under the general name of property, men consent to leave the state of nature and to unite into a political society, a commonwealth. They do so by a contract, an agreement, in which each lays down his individual right of enforcing the law of nature and entrusts it to the community, which thereafter acts, through its government, as the common judge and the common power.

From this account of the origin of government, Locke draws the conclusions that constitute the heart of his political legacy. First, all legitimate political authority rests on consent. No man can be subjected to the political power of another without his own consent; government derives its just powers from the agreement of those who are governed. Second, government is limited, and limited by its very purpose. It is established for one end, the preservation of the natural rights of its members, their lives, liberties, and properties, and it possesses no rightful authority beyond what that end requires. The power of government is held in trust. Third, Locke insists on what later ages would call the separation of powers. He distinguishes the legislative power, the supreme power of the commonwealth, which makes the law, from the executive power, which puts the law into effect, and he warns that it is dangerous for the same hands to hold both, for those who make the law should not also be those who execute it, lest they exempt themselves from obedience to it. Fourth, and most explosively, Locke affirms the right of resistance and the right of revolution. Because government is a trust held for the people's good, a government that systematically violates that trust, that invades rather than protects the rights it was instituted to secure, that places itself, in Locke's phrase, in a state of war with its own people, has thereby forfeited its authority. When this happens, when there is a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, that makes the design of tyranny visible to the people, then power reverts to the community, and the people have the right to resume their original liberty and to establish a new government such as they shall think fit. The dissolution of a government that has betrayed its trust is not the dissolution of society, and it is not rebellion; the true rebels, Locke argues, are the rulers who break the trust, and the people who resist them are only reclaiming what was always theirs.

It is difficult to exaggerate the historical importance of this argument. Composed, as modern scholarship has shown, in the dangerous years of the Exclusion Crisis as a justification of resistance to the Stuart monarchy, published after the Glorious Revolution as the philosophy of the new settlement, the Second Treatise of Government became, in the century that followed, the single most important theoretical source for the constitutional and revolutionary movements of the modern world. Its doctrines, that men possess natural rights prior to government, that legitimate government rests on consent, that its powers are limited and held in trust, that a people may justly overthrow a ruler who betrays that trust, passed into the common stock of Western political thought and supplied the language in which free peoples have argued for their liberties ever since.

A Letter Concerning Toleration

The third of the works that Locke published in 1689 was, in physical bulk, the slightest, but in moral force and historical consequence it stands beside the other two. The Letter Concerning Toleration, written in Latin in the Dutch Republic during the winter of 1685 and published, with an English translation by Locke's friend William Popple, in 1689, is one of the foundational documents of the modern principle of religious freedom, and it represents the culmination of a journey that had carried Locke from the cautious authoritarianism of his early, unpublished tracts to a position of principled, reasoned, and eloquent support for liberty of conscience.

The case Locke makes for toleration rests on a fundamental separation: the separation of the business of civil government from the business of religion, of the commonwealth from the church. The state, the commonwealth, Locke argues, exists for one purpose and one purpose only, the protection and advancement of what he calls civil interests, namely life, liberty, health, freedom from bodily pain, and the possession of outward things such as land, money, and goods. The whole jurisdiction of the magistrate, of the governing power, reaches only to these civil concerns; it does not, and cannot, extend to the care of souls. A church, by contrast, is, in Locke's definition, a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord for the public worship of God in the manner they believe will be acceptable to him and effectual for the salvation of their souls. The two institutions are different in their origin, their purpose, and their means, and to confound them, to give the magistrate authority over religion or the church authority over civil affairs, is the source of endless persecution and bloodshed.

Locke supports this separation with several distinct arguments. The first turns on the nature of belief itself. The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, Locke argues, because the magistrate's power consists entirely in outward force, in compulsion, in penalties and punishments, and true religion consists in the inward, sincere persuasion of the mind, and such persuasion cannot possibly be produced by force. Penalties can compel a man to profess a creed with his lips, but they cannot compel him to believe it in his heart, and an outward profession unaccompanied by inner conviction is, by the standards of religion itself, worthless, indeed an offense to God. Persecution can make men hypocrites; it cannot make them believers. The second argument turns on uncertainty and on consistency. There are many magistrates and many states, holding many different and incompatible religions; if the magistrate's power to impose religion were granted, it would lead, in different countries, to the imposition of contradictory faiths, so that the same argument would prove every religion true, which is absurd, and men's eternal salvation would depend on the accident of where they happened to be born. The third argument is one of practical wisdom. It is not the diversity of opinions, which cannot be helped, Locke contends, but the refusal of toleration to those of differing opinions, which could have been granted, that has produced most of the disorders and wars that have troubled the Christian world. Persecution, not difference, is the true cause of civil strife in matters of religion.

Locke's toleration, it must be said honestly, was not unlimited, and modern readers should understand its boundaries. He excluded from toleration two groups. The first was atheists, on the ground, characteristic of his age, that those who deny the existence of God cannot be trusted to keep their promises and oaths, since promises and oaths, the bonds of human society, have, in his view, no hold upon an atheist. The second was a particular kind of religious adherent whose loyalty was owed to a foreign prince or power, a category aimed, in the context of the time, principally at Roman Catholics insofar as they were thought to owe a political allegiance to the Pope. These exclusions were limitations of Locke's vision, products of the fears and assumptions of seventeenth-century England. But it is important not to let them obscure the magnitude of what Locke achieved. The Letter Concerning Toleration established, with unprecedented clarity and rigor, the principle that the coercion of conscience is both wrong and futile, that the state has no competence in matters of the soul, and that religious belief must be left to free persuasion. From that principle, once granted, the later and fuller extension of toleration, to Catholics, to Jews, to atheists, to every variety of belief and unbelief, followed by an irresistible logic. Locke set the wheel in motion, and it has not stopped turning.

Some Thoughts Concerning Education

In 1693 Locke published Some Thoughts Concerning Education, a work that grew out of a series of letters he had written, years before, to his friend Edward Clarke, advising him on the upbringing of his son. It became one of the most widely read and influential treatments of education in the English language, reprinted and translated again and again throughout the eighteenth century, and it shaped the practice of child-rearing and schooling, especially among the educated and propertied classes, for generations.

The book is addressed, frankly, to the education of the son of a gentleman, and its assumptions are those of its time and class; Locke does not write of universal schooling or of the education of the poor. But within its frame it is a humane, observant, and remarkably modern work. Its governing aim is the formation of character. The great business of education, for Locke, is not the cramming of the head with Latin and learning but the cultivation of virtue, wisdom, good breeding, and a sound judgment, the making of a person who is rational, self-disciplined, honest, and useful. Learning, he says bluntly, must be made secondary to virtue; a man may be a great scholar and yet a worthless human being, and it is the human being that education must above all attend to.

From this principle Locke draws a series of practical recommendations, many of them in pointed reaction against the methods he had himself endured at Westminster. He argues against the heavy reliance on corporal punishment, the beating of children into learning, which he believed produced either a broken, slavish spirit or a sullen and lasting hatred of the things that had been forced upon them. He argues against the rote drilling and the artificial exercises, the endless making of Latin verses, that filled the conventional curriculum, and in favor of methods that engaged the child's natural curiosity and made learning, so far as possible, a kind of play and pleasure. He emphasizes the early formation of good habits, which become, he says, a second nature, far more reliable than rules and precepts laboriously remembered. He insists on the importance of the body as well as the mind, opening the book with a discussion of physical health, of fresh air, plain food, plenty of exercise, and hardy habits, and giving currency to the ancient ideal, which he quotes, of a sound mind in a sound body. He stresses the formative power of example over precept, observing that children learn far more from what they see those around them do than from what they are told, and he urges that the tutor and the parents must themselves model the conduct they wish to instill. And he stresses, throughout, the need to study the individual child, to observe each one's particular temper and disposition and to adapt the method of education to the nature of the pupil, rather than forcing all children through an identical mold. Some Thoughts Concerning Education is, in its way, an application of Locke's empiricism to the practical art of upbringing: if the mind is a blank sheet shaped by experience, then nothing matters more than the careful and intelligent management of the experiences, especially the early experiences, of the child.

The Reasonableness of Christianity and the Religious Writings

In 1695 Locke published, again anonymously, The Reasonableness of Christianity, As Delivered in the Scriptures, a work of religious reflection that occupied much of his attention in the last decade of his life and that drew him into prolonged controversy. Locke was, throughout his life, a sincere if undogmatic Christian, and the religious dimension of his thought, easily underestimated by readers who come to him only for the political and epistemological writings, was central to his sense of his own purpose.

The argument of The Reasonableness of Christianity is, in keeping with its title, an attempt to show that Christianity, when stripped of the accretions of centuries of theological dispute and read directly in the plain words of the New Testament, is a reasonable religion, accessible to ordinary understanding and free of the contradictions and obscurities that the warring sects had loaded upon it. Locke argued that the essential message of the gospel, the message necessary for salvation, was strikingly simple: that one believe Jesus to be the Messiah, the Christ promised by God, and that one accept him as lord and live a life of sincere repentance and obedience to his commands. The elaborate systems of doctrine over which Christians had persecuted and slaughtered one another, Locke suggested, were largely beside this saving core. His aim was irenic, to lower the temperature of religious conflict by showing how few and how plain were the things truly required for faith, and it was of a piece with his lifelong commitment to toleration. But the very simplicity of his account exposed him to attack. Critics charged that by reducing the essentials of Christianity to so spare a creed Locke had quietly omitted central doctrines, and in particular that he had said nothing of the Trinity, and they accused him, in the polemical language of the day, of Socinianism, of a heretical denial of the full divinity of Christ. Locke defended himself in two long Vindications, but the suspicion that his private theology was unorthodox, perhaps closer to Unitarianism than to the creeds of the established church, has never been wholly dispelled, and the precise nature of his personal religious belief remains a matter of scholarly debate.

Locke's religious labors did not end there. He devoted the last years of his life to a close and patient study of the scriptures, and especially of the letters of the apostle Paul, the famously difficult texts of the New Testament. The fruit of this study, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul, was published only after his death. In it Locke applied to the sacred text the same principles he had applied to all human discourse: he insisted that each epistle must be read as a whole, in its own context, with attention to the particular situation and the particular audience that the apostle was addressing, rather than mined for isolated proof-texts to be hurled in doctrinal battle. It was a pioneering contribution to the historical and contextual interpretation of scripture, and a fitting last work for a philosopher who had spent his life insisting on the careful, honest, contextual use of words.

The Economic Writings and the Great Recoinage

Among the many fields to which Locke turned his attention, economics has a special place, both because of the intrinsic importance of his contributions and because his economic ideas were, on one notable occasion, put directly to the test in the making of public policy. Locke's interest in money, trade, and value reached back to his years in Shaftesbury's service, when he had handled the business of trade and the colonies, and as early as the late 1660s he had written on the question of interest rates.

In 1691 Locke published Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money. The occasion was a proposal then before Parliament to reduce, by law, the maximum legal rate of interest. Locke argued against the proposal, contending that the rate of interest, like the price of anything else, was governed by the proportion of supply and demand, in this case the quantity of money available to be lent against the demand for it, and that an attempt to fix it by statute below its natural level would not lower the real cost of borrowing but merely drive lending underground, hurt trade, and benefit no one but skilful operators who could evade the law. The argument was an early and influential statement of the view that prices, including the price of money, are best left to find their own level in the market.

Locke's most consequential economic intervention concerned the coinage. By the mid-1690s the silver coinage of England was in a state of crisis. The old hammered coins, irregular in shape and lacking milled edges, had been so extensively clipped, that is, had had slivers of silver illegally pared from their edges, that the coins in circulation contained, on average, far less silver than their face value declared. The currency was, in effect, debased, confidence in it was collapsing, and the question of what to do became one of the great public controversies of the decade. A proposal was advanced, supported by some able men, to recoin the money at a reduced silver content, in effect to devalue the currency and so to acknowledge and accept the depreciation that clipping had brought about. Locke opposed this with all his force. He argued, on grounds that were as much moral and conceptual as narrowly economic, that a fixed quantity of silver was the true and natural measure of value, that the integrity of the currency was a kind of public trust, and that to recoin at a lower standard would be to cheat every creditor and to break faith with all who held the nation's money. The currency, he insisted, must be restored to its full traditional silver weight, whatever the cost.

Locke's view prevailed. The decision was taken to carry out a full recoinage at the old, undebased standard, and in 1696 the Great Recoinage was set in motion, a vast and difficult operation in which the entire clipped and worn silver currency of the kingdom was called in and replaced with new, full-weight, milled coin. The man charged with the practical execution of the recoinage at the Royal Mint was, by a striking conjunction of intellectual history, none other than Isaac Newton, who had recently been appointed Warden of the Mint. The recoinage was carried through, though not without hardship and a painful shortage of money while it was in progress, and the principle Locke had defended, the maintenance of a sound currency of fixed metallic standard, became settled English policy for centuries. Locke's stand on the recoinage shows the practical, public side of his genius: the philosopher of the understanding and of government was also a working expert on money who shaped, at a critical moment, the financial foundations of his country.

The Board of Trade and the Last Public Service

In 1696 the English government established a new and important body, the Board of Trade and Plantations, charged with supervising the nation's commerce, its fisheries, its colonies, and related matters such as the relief of the poor. John Locke, now in his sixties and internationally famous, was appointed one of its commissioners, and despite his age and his persistently poor health he became, by common account, the most active, most diligent, and most influential member of the board. For four years, until his retirement in 1700, he gave a great deal of his remaining strength to this work, traveling to London for its meetings when his lungs and the climate allowed, and dealing with a wide range of practical questions of trade policy, colonial administration, currency, and the management of the poor.

This last phase of public service is a reminder of how thoroughly Locke's life combined the contemplative and the active. He was never merely a study-bound theorist. The same man who wrote the most abstract pages on the human understanding sat on a government board wrestling with the price of wool, the conduct of colonial governors, the regulation of trade, and the hard, unglamorous business of administration. His writings on the poor and on the relief of poverty, produced in connection with this work, contain proposals that strike many modern readers as harsh, reflecting the severe attitudes of his age toward idleness and dependency, and they form part of the complex and not always comfortable record of his engagement with the social questions of his time. But the central point stands: Locke held that the philosopher had a duty to the public business of his country, and he discharged that duty, on the Board of Trade, until failing health at last compelled him to lay it down. In June 1700, a sick man no longer able to bear the London air, Locke resigned his commissionership and withdrew from public life for good.

The Years at Oates

The final and in many ways the most serene chapter of Locke's life was spent in the Essex countryside, at a manor house called Oates, the home of Sir Francis Masham and his wife, Lady Damaris Masham. Locke had first taken up residence with the Masham family in 1691, after his return from exile, and Oates became, in effect, his home for the last fourteen years of his life, the fixed and quiet center from which he conducted his correspondence, oversaw the revision of his works, received his visitors, and lived out his old age.

The presence at Oates that meant most to Locke was Lady Damaris Masham herself. Born Damaris Cudworth, she was the daughter of Ralph Cudworth, one of the most eminent of the group of philosophers known as the Cambridge Platonists, and she was, in her own right, a woman of exceptional intelligence, learning, and philosophical ability, the author of works on theology and on the conduct of life and a thinker of real originality. Locke had first come to know her in the early 1680s, before his exile, when she was a young, unmarried woman, and the two had formed an intense intellectual friendship, conducted partly in a correspondence of considerable warmth and even, on the evidence, of romantic feeling, in which they wrote to one another, in the fashion of the time, under pastoral pen-names. Damaris Cudworth subsequently married Sir Francis Masham, a widower with a large family, and became the mistress of Oates; but the friendship with Locke endured and deepened, transformed now into the settled companionship of two philosophical minds sharing a household. It was an arrangement without exact parallel: the most famous philosopher in Europe spending his last years as a permanent and honored member of the household of a married woman who was herself a philosopher, the two of them reading, discussing, and corresponding, she managing the affairs of the house and the education of her son with Locke's advice, he supervising, in some measure, the intellectual life of the family. Locke never married, and he left no children; the household at Oates, and above all the friendship with Damaris Masham, supplied, in his old age, something of what family supplies to other men.

Oates in these years became a place of intellectual pilgrimage. Locke's correspondence stretched across England and the continent, and a stream of visitors made their way to the Essex manor to consult, or simply to meet, the celebrated author of the Essay. He kept up his friendships, by letter and in person, with leading figures of the age. He came to know, and to admire greatly, the young Isaac Newton, whose Principia Mathematica had transformed natural philosophy and whom Locke regarded as the supreme genius of the age; the two men corresponded, on physics, on theology, on biblical chronology, with mutual respect, though their temperaments were very different. He took a particular and characteristic interest in the education of the young, supervising from a distance the upbringing of the grandson of his old patron, the boy who became the third Earl of Shaftesbury and a notable philosopher of moral sentiment, and advising the Masham family on the schooling of Damaris's son. He revised his published works for their successive editions, conducted his theological studies, and carried on, to the very end, the controversies that his writings had provoked, including a long and wearing dispute with the Bishop of Worcester, Edward Stillingfleet, who had attacked the Essay as dangerous to religion and to the doctrine of the Trinity.

Final Years and Death

Locke's health, never robust, declined steadily through the last years of his life. He had suffered, since at least his Oxford days, from a chronic respiratory condition, almost certainly a form of asthma, aggravated by the smoky air of London, which was one of the reasons he found the capital increasingly impossible to endure and clung to the cleaner air of the Essex countryside. In his final years his breathing grew more and more labored, his strength ebbed, his legs swelled, and he became progressively weaker, though his mind remained, by every account, perfectly clear and his intellectual interests perfectly alive to the last.

He faced the approach of death with composure, a calm that his friends attributed to his philosophy and his religion alike. He set his affairs in order. He made his will, and in a codicil to it he at last performed the act of acknowledgment he had withheld for so long, formally confessing himself the author of the Two Treatises of Government and the other works he had published anonymously, so that the truth, suppressed for prudence during his life, should be known after it. He arranged his papers and his great library, which passed in part to his relatives and in part, eventually, into the keeping of scholars, where it has remained a precious source for the study of his mind.

On the twenty-eighth of October, 1704, at Oates, John Locke died. He was seventy-two years old. The accounts that survive of his last day describe a peaceful end. He had risen and been carried to his study; in the afternoon, as his strength finally failed, Lady Damaris Masham sat with him and, at his wish, read aloud to him from the Psalms, and it was while she was reading the sacred words that the philosopher quietly died. He was buried, a few days later, in the churchyard of the parish church of High Laver, the village near Oates, where his grave may still be seen against the south wall of the church. He had composed for himself a Latin epitaph, modest and characteristic, which asks the passer-by not to praise him, describes him as a man content with his modest lot, who lived for truth, and which directs the reader, for a true account of his character, not to any monument but to his writings.

The Character of the Man

Across the long record of Locke's life there emerges a consistent and distinctive personality, and it is worth pausing to describe it, for the character of the man is woven into the character of his thought. Locke was, first of all, a person of extraordinary caution and reserve. He guarded his privacy, kept his deepest opinions to himself, published his most dangerous works anonymously and denied them, and conducted even his ordinary correspondence with a wariness, sometimes with codes and concealments, that reflected both his temperament and the genuine perils of the age through which he lived. This secretiveness can seem, to a modern eye, excessive, even faintly cold; but it was the secretiveness of a man who had seen friends and associates go to the scaffold for opinions not very different from his own, and it was inseparable from the prudence, the moderation, and the hatred of fanaticism that mark his philosophy.

He was, at the same time, a man of deep and lasting friendships and of genuine warmth toward those admitted to his confidence. The roll of his friends, Robert Boyle, Thomas Sydenham, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Philipp van Limborch, Isaac Newton, Damaris Masham, Edward Clarke, and many more, is a roll of remarkable people, and the loyalty of these friendships, sustained over decades and across the divisions of exile, testifies to a capacity for steady affection beneath the cautious exterior. He was a delightful companion to those who knew him, by their accounts, courteous, even-tempered, full of shrewd observation and quiet humor, a good listener, careful and exact in conversation as in writing. He was methodical to a high degree, a lifelong keeper of notebooks, journals, and commonplace books, into which he entered, under careful headings, the harvest of his vast reading and his ceaseless observation; he even devised an improved system for indexing such books. He was practical and observant, interested in gardens and weather, in trade and prices, in remedies and recipes, in the ten thousand particular facts of the world, and this attention to the concrete and the particular is the very signature of his empiricism. He was frugal but not mean, careful with money, generous to those he cared for. He never married, and the reasons can only be guessed at, his health, his caution, his absorption in his work, the disappointment, perhaps, of the early attachment to Damaris Cudworth; he lived, in the end, a life centered on friendship, on study, and on the public good rather than on a family of his own. And he was, throughout, a sincere Christian of an unusually rational, undogmatic, and tolerant kind, a man for whom religion was a matter of a few plain truths and a life of conduct, not of elaborate dogma and certainly not of persecution.

The Philosophical Legacy

The influence of John Locke on the subsequent course of philosophy is so vast that it can be described only in outline. In the theory of knowledge, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding founded the tradition of British empiricism, and that tradition, working out the consequences of Locke's starting point, dominated philosophy in the English-speaking world and powerfully shaped it elsewhere. George Berkeley, the next great figure in the line, accepted Locke's principle that all our ideas come from experience but pressed it to the startling conclusion that matter, the material substance Locke had retained, was an unnecessary and unintelligible supposition, and that to be is to be perceived. David Hume, the third of the great British empiricists, carried Locke's empiricism to its most rigorous and most skeptical conclusion, subjecting the ideas of causation, of the self, and of the external world to an analysis so searching that it seemed to threaten the very possibility of knowledge, and it was Hume's development of the empiricist program that, by his own famous testimony, awakened Immanuel Kant from his dogmatic slumber and provoked the critical philosophy that sought to reconcile experience and reason. The whole vast argument of modern epistemology, from the late seventeenth century to the present, takes its rise, in large measure, from the questions Locke first posed and the framework he first built. To ask what was the philosophy of John Locke and why does it still matter is to ask about the origin of the modern philosophical conversation itself.

Locke's influence ran far beyond the technical discipline of philosophy. His insistence that the mind is shaped by experience, that character and understanding are formed by the impressions and associations and habits of a life rather than fixed by nature at birth, had immense consequences for psychology, for education, and for social and political thought. If human beings are made, not born, then the conditions of their making, their upbringing, their schooling, their environment, become matters of the highest importance, and the improvement of those conditions becomes a rational hope. The reforming, environmentalist, optimistic strand in Enlightenment thought, the belief that humanity could be improved by improving its circumstances, drew deeply on the Lockean picture of the mind. His analysis of personal identity, his account of what makes a person at one time the same person as at another, locating it in the continuity of consciousness and memory rather than in the persistence of a soul-substance or a body, opened a debate that is still vigorously alive in philosophy today. His attention to language, to the way words can clarify or corrupt thought, anticipated concerns that would become central to philosophy in the twentieth century. By any measure, Locke is one of the small number of thinkers whose work permanently altered the direction of human reflection.

The Political Legacy

If Locke's philosophical legacy is immense, his political legacy is, if anything, more visible still, written into the constitutions and the public language of free nations around the world. The Two Treatises of Government, and especially the Second Treatise, became the classic text of political liberalism, and its central ideas, natural rights, government by consent, limited and accountable authority, the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the right of a people to resist and replace a government that betrays its trust, passed into the foundations of the modern constitutional state.

The most famous single instance of that influence is the founding of the United States. The American revolutionaries of the 1770s reached, again and again, for the language and the arguments of Locke. When Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence of 1776, wrote that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that governments are instituted among men to secure these rights and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that when a government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, he was giving classic expression, in some passages almost word for word, to the political philosophy of the Second Treatise of Government. Locke's labor theory of property, his account of consent, his doctrine of the trust and of the right of revolution, run through the political writing of the American founding, and his ideas helped shape, beyond the Declaration, the framing of the Constitution of the United States, with its limited and divided government, and the Bill of Rights, with its protection of the individual against the state. Through the American example, and through the parallel ferment in France, where Locke's ideas mingled with those of Montesquieu and Rousseau in the background of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Lockean vision spread across the world.

It is this pervasive and enduring influence that earns Locke the title by which he is most often remembered, the father of liberalism. The whole family of political ideas that we call liberal, the conviction that the individual has rights that precede and limit the state, that government exists to serve the governed and is legitimate only with their consent, that power must be checked, divided, and bound by law, that conscience and belief must be free, and that the purpose of the political order is the protection of life, liberty, and property, finds in Locke its first full and systematic statement. Modern constitutional democracy, the modern doctrine of human rights, the modern principle of the separation of religion from the coercive power of the state, all trace a direct line of descent to the writings that this cautious English philosopher published in the year after the Glorious Revolution. Few thinkers have shaped the actual political institutions under which hundreds of millions of people now live so directly or so deeply.

The legacy is not without its tensions, and an honest account must acknowledge them. The contradiction between Locke's universal language of natural freedom and his personal entanglement with colonial slavery has already been described, and it stands as a permanent reminder that the principles a thinker articulates may indict the thinker's own conduct and the conduct of the thinker's age. Locke's emphasis on property has been read by some as the charter of an acquisitive individualism, and his theory has been criticized from the left as a justification of inequality even as it was used on the right and the center as a defense of liberty. His exclusions from toleration, of atheists and of those thought to owe allegiance abroad, mark the limits of his vision. But the most powerful testimony to the strength of Locke's ideas is precisely that they could not be confined within the limits their author set for them. The language of natural and universal rights, once released into the world, was taken up by the people Locke had not had in mind, by the enslaved, by the colonized, by religious minorities, by women, by all who could point to the principle of natural equality and demand that it be honored in their own case. The history of the modern struggle for freedom is, in no small part, the history of Locke's ideas being held to their full and universal meaning against every attempt, including the compromises of Locke himself, to keep them narrow.

Locke and the European Enlightenment

The spread of Locke's reputation beyond England, and the central place he came to occupy in the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, deserve a section of their own, for it was through this continental reception that the cautious English philosopher became one of the presiding spirits of an entire age. The translation of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding into French and into Latin carried Locke's empiricism to readers who could not read English, and the Latin and French versions of the Letter Concerning Toleration did the same for his doctrine of religious liberty. Within a generation of his death, Locke was being read, debated, and admired across the continent, and his name had become a kind of banner under which the reforming intellectuals of the eighteenth century marched.

Nowhere was his influence more decisive than in France. The young François-Marie Arouet, who would become famous to the world as Voltaire, spent a period of exile in England in the 1720s, and he returned to France a convert to English ways of thinking. In his Letters Concerning the English Nation, Voltaire held up Locke to his countrymen as the model of the modest, rational, observational thinker, the philosopher who, instead of constructing a vast speculative system, had patiently traced the history of the human mind as a naturalist might trace the anatomy of a body, and who had had the wisdom to confess the limits of what could be known. Voltaire contrasted this Lockean modesty admiringly with the grand systems of the rationalist philosophers, and his advocacy did a great deal to make Locke a hero of the French Enlightenment. Through Voltaire, and through the philosophes who came after him, the makers of the great Encyclopédie, the thinkers who prepared the intellectual ground of the age of revolution, Locke's empiricism and Locke's politics became part of the common inheritance of advanced European thought. The doctrine that the mind is shaped by experience was developed, in France, into bold programs for the reform of society through the reform of education and environment, and Locke's political principles mingled with those of Montesquieu and Rousseau in the long debate that preceded the upheavals of 1789.

Locke's European stature was reinforced by the prestige of English science and English liberty in the eighteenth-century imagination. The same England that had produced Isaac Newton, whose physics seemed to have unlocked the very mechanism of the heavens, had produced John Locke, whose philosophy seemed to have done for the human mind what Newton had done for the cosmos. The pairing of Newton and Locke, the one the lawgiver of nature, the other the anatomist of the understanding, became a commonplace of Enlightenment writing, a double symbol of what patient, modest, experimental reason could achieve. And the England whose constitutional settlement of 1689 Locke's political philosophy had articulated appeared, to reform-minded continental observers chafing under absolute monarchies, as the very model of a free and well-ordered state. To admire Locke was, for an eighteenth-century European, to declare oneself for reason against superstition, for toleration against persecution, for liberty against arbitrary power, and for the slow, patient improvement of the human condition against both blind tradition and utopian fantasy. Few philosophers have ever been so completely woven into the self-understanding of an age.

The Conduct of the Understanding and the Rational Life

One further work must be mentioned, because it gathers up, in a short and accessible form, the practical wisdom that underlies the whole of Locke's enormous output. Among the writings published only after his death was a treatise called Of the Conduct of the Understanding, which Locke had originally intended as an additional chapter for the Essay and which had grown too large for that purpose. It is, in effect, a guide to thinking well, a manual for the proper management of one's own mind, and it shows the deeply practical and ethical purpose that animated even Locke's most abstract investigations.

The Conduct of the Understanding begins from the observation that the reason which God has given to every person is, in most people, poorly used, allowed to fall into lazy habits, governed by custom, prejudice, party, and the unexamined opinions absorbed from those around them. Locke's aim is to teach his reader how to take charge of this neglected faculty, how to make the understanding genuinely one's own. He warns against the great enemies of clear thought: the uncritical acceptance of received opinion; the partiality that makes us weigh evidence by our wishes rather than our wishes by the evidence; the narrowness that confines a mind to a single subject or a single set of authors; the haste that snatches at conclusions before the grounds for them have been examined; the tyranny of words used without clear meaning. And he prescribes the remedies: the steady practice of attending to evidence rather than to authority; the habit of considering objections and the views of opponents fairly; the cultivation of breadth, so that the mind is not the prisoner of one discipline; the willingness to suspend judgment where the evidence is insufficient, and to proportion the firmness of one's assent to the actual strength of the proof.

In this small late work the whole spirit of Locke's philosophy stands revealed. For Locke, the examination of the human understanding was never a merely academic exercise. It was undertaken in the service of life. He believed that human beings had been given a reason adequate to the conduct of their affairs and the discovery of their duty, that the misuse of that reason was the source of an immense quantity of human error, conflict, and misery, and that to teach people to use their understanding honestly, modestly, and well was therefore a labor of the highest moral importance. The man who had begun, in 1671, by asking what the human mind was fitted to deal with, ended by writing a practical guide to help ordinary people deal with it better. The thread that runs through it all, from the assault on innate ideas to the defense of toleration, from the theory of government to the advice on education, is a single conviction: that human beings should believe according to evidence, should respect the freedom of other minds as they wish their own to be respected, and should bend their reason, patiently and humbly, to the improvement of the human condition. That conviction is Locke's deepest and most unifying legacy, and it is as needed in every age as it was in his own.

CONCLUSION

John Locke lived seventy-two years, through one of the most violent and transformative centuries in the history of his nation, and he died in his bed in a quiet country house, the most celebrated philosopher in Europe, with the words of the Psalms in his ears. Between the Puritan farmhouse in Somerset where he was born in 1632 and the churchyard at High Laver where he was buried in 1704 lies a life that spanned civil war and regicide, restoration and revolution, plague and fire, exile and return, and that gathered the hard lessons of that experience into a body of thought that changed the world.

He was not, in person, a heroic or a dramatic figure. He was cautious, reserved, secretive, a man who concealed his boldest opinions and published his most revolutionary book without his name. He came to greatness late, and slowly, releasing in his fifty-eighth year the works he had been quietly building for two decades. But the quietness of the man should not disguise the boldness of the mind. In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding he taught the modern world to ask, with a new rigor and a new humility, what the human mind can know and how it comes to know it, and he founded the empiricist tradition that runs through Berkeley and Hume to the philosophy of our own day. In the Two Treatises of Government he gave the modern world the classic statement of the idea that human beings are born free and equal, that government rests on their consent and exists to protect their rights, that power is a trust which may be forfeited, and that a people may justly resist a ruler who turns tyrant. In the Letter Concerning Toleration he taught that the conscience cannot and must not be coerced, and that the freedom of belief is the foundation of civil peace. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education he taught that human beings are shaped by their experience and their upbringing, and that the formation of character matters more than the cramming of the head.

Each of these teachings has become so much a part of the mental furniture of the modern world that it is difficult, now, to feel how original and how daring it once was. That difficulty is itself the measure of Locke's success. The ideas for which he argued, against the entrenched assumptions of his age, with caution and patience and at no small personal risk, have so completely won the field that they seem to us simply obvious, simply the way reasonable people think. When citizens of free countries speak of their rights, of the consent of the governed, of the rule of law, of the limits of government, of liberty of conscience, they speak, whether they know it or not, the language that John Locke did more than any other single person to compose. The father of liberalism has no grander monument than the political vocabulary of the free world, and that monument, three centuries after his death, stands undiminished.

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