cessors. Occasional side-glances show recent phases of philosophical or theological thought, to which the development through controversy of what was latent in the Essay may have contributed. The corresponding portions of the Nouveaux Essais are often quoted, in the interest of the contrast, and of the speculative insight of the German philosopher. In the Prolegomena Locke's individuality, and the circumstances by which it was modified are presented in their relation to the Essay; this is followed by constructive criticism of the Essay itself, as a 'historical plain' account of a knowledge that, being finite and human, is at last determined by faith; and in the end attention is invited to two opposite directions into which the Essay helped to divert the main current of philosophical thought, in Berkeley and in Hume. The portrait of Locke presented in this work is reproduced from the picture in Christ Church, so long Locke's home.

Locke's person

ality a key to the interpretation of

(4.) BIOGRAPHICAL.

I. WHAT GAVE RISE TO THE ESSAY (1670).

To interpret the Essay one must remember the personality of Locke and the circumstances of his life, for the book is in a singular degree the reflex of its author. It has been well said that all Locke's published writings, including even his Essay. the Essay, were 'occasional,' being intended to overcome prevailing obstacles to civil, religious, and intellectual liberty. The seventy-two years of his life coincide at first with some of the stormiest and most momentous in the history of England, and then with the compromise and peaceful settlement in which he bore an influential part. The Essay itself was the issue of an accident, and in preparing it he was throughout moved by the sober moral purpose that animated his life.

A memor. able meeting of 'five or six

friends.'

Here is his own explanation of the way in which, when nearly forty years of age, he engaged in the intellectual enterprise that occupied him at intervals until he had entered on his fifty-eighth year: Were it fit to trouble thee with the history of this Essay, I should tell thee that five or six friends meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the difficulties that arose on every side. After we had a while puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course; and that before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with. This I proposed to the company, who all readily assented; and thereupon it was agreed that this should be our first inquiry. Some hasty, undigested

thoughts, on a subject I had never before considered, which I set down against our next meeting, gave the first entrance into this Discourse; which, having been thus begun by chance, was continued by entreaty; written by incoherent parcels; and, after long intervals of neglect, resumed again, as my humour and occasions permitted; and at last, in a retirement, where an attendance on my health gave me leisure, it was brought into that order thou now seest it.' Locke does not mention the subject which, on this ⚫ memorable occasion, puzzled the assembled friends, and led him to make an inquiry into the constitution and limits of human knowledge the chief work of his life. But we are not left quite in the dark. James Tyrrell, one of the party, not unknown afterwards as a political and historical writer, has recorded it, in a manuscript note on the margin of his copy of the Essay, now in the British Museum. The difficulties, according to this record, arose in the course of a discussion about the 'principles of morality and revealed religion.' This subject is indeed not far removed from the theory of human knowledge, which inevitably mixes itself up with all profound ethical and religious thought; and Locke's undertaking was thus associated from the first with the mysteries of existence of which religion promises a practical solution.

circumstances

when this meeting

took place.

At the time of this fruitful reunion Locke was living in Locke's London, in the house of the first Earl of Shaftesbury, as his confidential secretary and friend, a sharer in the public work of the most remarkable statesman in the reign of Charles the Second. How came it about that now, in middle life, in the vortex of politics, this man of affairs entered a region that is occupied for the most part by those who devote their lives exclusively to abstract speculation? A summary retrospect of the preceding history of Locke's mind may help to explain how Lord Shaftesbury's secretary became the author of the Essay concerning Human Understanding.

Locke's

birth and boyhood in a Puri

tan family.

II. PREPARATION FOR THE ESSAY: LOCKE'S

EARLY LIFE IN SOMERSET, OXFORD,

AND LONDON. (1632-70.)

Information about Locke's early history is scanty. That he was the elder of two sons, in a respectable Somersetshire family, of Roundhead and Puritan sympathies—that he was born on August 29, 1632, at Wrington, under the shadow of the Mendip hills-that his boyhood was spent at Beluton, the rural home which he afterwards inherited from his father, a short distance from the little market town of Pensford, in the fertile valley of the Chew, six miles southeast from Bristol, and ten west from Bath-that his mother was several years older than his father, 'pious and affectionate,' whose early death left her sons in childhood without a mother's care-that his father, a small country attorney, 'kept his eldest son, when he was a boy, in much awe and at a distance, but relaxing still by degrees of that severity as he grew up to be a man, till he, being become capable of it, lived with him as a friend till his death,' when that son was almost thirty years of age-that the home training at Beluton must have been often interrupted, inasmuch as the father joined the army of the Parliament, in which, after two years' service, he rose to be captain, and in the end so suffered in those troubled times that he left a reduced estate to his son:-these are the chief recorded incidents of the boyhood of John Locke. We see a slender and delicate youth, living through the turbulent drama in which his father was for a time an actor. As Locke wrote in the year of the Restoration: 'I had no sooner perceived myself in the world but I found myself in a storm, which has lasted almost hitherto.' The Parliamentary patrons of the father found a place for the boy, when he was fourteen, on the foundation of Westminster School. He spent six years at Westminster. Little that is significant has been recorded about his Westminster life, unless the absence in the scanty record of signs of that genius for scholarship and literature which marked South and Dryden, who were among his schoolfellows. It was in those Westminster

years that the assembly of Puritan divines was debating Calvinistic theology in the Jerusalem Chamber; and in one of the years Locke may have witnessed the tragedy at Whitehall in which the Puritan revolution culminated.

In 1652 Locke gained a scholarship at Christ Church and for fifteen years Oxford was his home. The picture now becomes more distinct. We see him in Cromwellian Oxford, 'under a fanatical tutor,' as Anthony Wood tells us, Cromwell Chancellor of the University, with John Owen, the famous Puritan divine and apostle of a political toleration of religious differences, Dean of Christ Church and ViceChancellor. The idea of toleration professed by Owen and the Independents was probably not without influence on the young scholar from Westminster. But his hereditary sympathy with the Puritans seems to have abated at Christ Church, as a consequence of the 'storm,' and in the larger experience which opened at Oxford. He discovered that 'what was called general freedom was general bondage; and that the popular asserters of liberty were the greatest engrossers of it too, and not unjustly called its keepers.' It was true that even in Cromwellian Oxford the Aristotle of the Schoolmen still determined the studies of the place, which were uncongenial to Locke, because 'perplexed with obscure terms and useless questions.' He thus early showed his love for facts rather than abstractions, and preferred intercourse with persons to intercourse with books. I have often heard him say,' Lady Masham reports, 'that he had small satisfaction in his Oxford studies, as finding very little light brought thereby to his understanding; that he became discontented with his manner of life, and wished that his father had rather designed him for anything else than what he was there destined to.' He sought the company of pleasant and witty men, whom he delighted to meet, and 'in conversation and correspondence much of his time was then spent.' Anthony Wood, one of his college contemporaries, representing the spirit of the past, afterwards described 'John Locke of Christ Church, now a noted writer,' as in his undergraduate days 'a man of turbulent spirit, clamorous and discontented. While the rest of our club took notes deferentially from the mouth of the master,

Locke at

satisfied.

Oxford dis