of Hegel and lived to become the parent of theories he would have doubtless been the first to disown.  Nor was Locke aided by his philosophic outlook.  Few great thinkers have so little perceived the psychological foundations of politics.  What he did was rather to fasten upon the great institutional necessity of his time—­the provision of channels of assent—­and emphasize its importance to the exclusion of all other factors.  The problem is in fact more complex; and the solution he indicated became so natural a part of the political fabric that the value of his emphasis upon its import was largely forgotten when men again took up the study of foundations.

John Locke was born at Wrington in Somerset on the 29th of August, 1632.  His father was clerk to the county justices and acted as a captain in a cavalry regiment during the Civil War.  Though he suffered heavy losses, he was able to give his son as good an education as the time afforded.  Westminster under Dr. Busby may not have been the gentlest of academies, but at least it provided Locke with an admirable training in the classics.  He himself, indeed, in the Thoughts on Education doubted the value of such exercises; nor does he seem to have conceived any affection for Oxford whither he proceeded in 1652 as a junior student of Christ Church.  The university was then under the Puritan control of Dr. John Owen; but not even his effort to redeem the university from its reputation for intellectual laxity rescued it from the “wrangling and ostentation” of the peripatetic philosophy.  Yet it was at Oxford that he encountered the work of Descartes which first attracted him to metaphysics.  There, too, he met Pocock, the Arabic scholar, and Wallis the mathematician, who must at least have commanded his respect.  In 1659 he accepted a Senior Studentship of his college, which he retained until he was deemed politically undesirable in 1684.  After toying with his father’s desire that he should enter the Church, he began the study of medicine.  Scientific interest won for him the friendship of Boyle; and while he was administering physic to the patients of Dr. Thomas, he was making the observations recorded in Boyle’s History of the Air which Locke himself edited after the death of his friend.

Meanwhile accident had turned his life into far different paths.  An appointment as secretary to a special ambassador opened up to him a diplomatic career; but his sturdy commonsense showed him his unfitness for such labors.  After his visit to Prussia he returned to Oxford, and there, in 1667, in the course of his medical work, he met Anthony Ashley, the later Lord Shaftesbury and the Ahitophel of Dryden’s great satire.  The two men were warmly attracted to each other, and Locke accepted an appointment as physician to Lord Ashley’s household.  But he was also much more than this.  The tutor of Ashley’s philosophic grandson, he became also his patron’s confidential counsellor.  In 1663 he became part