Abstract

HE recent tercentenary of the birth of John Locke, the eminent philosopher whom a modern scholar has described as " the greatest English name in the history of philosophy," was made the occasion of worthy commemoration by students of philosophical enquiry; he will repay further attention by the friends and upholders of freedom in Church and State. His name is historic and his work abides in the splendid but chequered story of Toleration. Locke was born at Wrington, Somerset, of substantial middle-class Puritan parentage, on August 29th, 1632, and he died at Oates, about twenty miles north of London, on October 28th, 1704. • It is important to notice that his life covered one of the most troubled periods in English history, and that he had as his contemporaries some of the most gifted men in the intellectual history of Europe. The seventeenth century has been called " the century of genius," and we are in no mood to dispute that description when we recall some of its greater names: Bacon~ Cervantes, Shakespeare, Harvey, Galileo, Newton, Descartes,. Pascal, Boyle, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Locke himself. Not all of these, of course, were Locke's exact contemporaries, but they all belonged to