Locke, John

Locke, John (1632–1704), philosopher. He was secretary to Lord Shaftesbury; on his fall in 1683 Locke fled to the Netherlands. He returned to England after the accession of William and Mary.

Locke was the foremost defender of free inquiry and toleration in the later 17th cent. In the Letters concerning Toleration (1689, 1690, and 1692) he pleaded for religious liberty for all except atheists and RCs, whom he excluded as a danger to the State. His ideal was a national Church with an all-embracing creed that made ample allowance for individual opinion, on the ground that human understanding was too limited for one man to impose his beliefs on another. His famous Essay concerning Human Understanding (‘1690’; in fact published in 1689) attacks the Platonist conception of ‘innate ideas’. The human mind is a tabula rasa and all ideas come from experience. Pure reality cannot be grasped by the human mind; consequently there is no sure basis for metaphysics. The spirituality of the soul, though not certain, is at least probable; the existence of God, on the other hand, can be discovered with certainty by reason, and His law gives men their rule of conduct. In The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) Locke maintains that the only secure basis of Christianity is its reasonableness.