[Footnote 8:  Cf. also Coleridge’s apt remark. Table Talk, Jan. 3, 1834.]

Here, indeed, as elsewhere Locke is the true progenitor of Benthamism, and his work can hardly be understood save in this context.  Just as in his ethical enquiries it was always the happiness of the individual that he sought, so in his politics it was the happiness of the subject he had in view.  In each case it was to immediate experience that he made his appeal; and this perhaps explains the clear sense of a contempt for past tradition which pervades all his work.  “That which is for the public welfare,” he said, “is God’s will”; and therein we have the root of that utilitarianism which, as Maine pointed out, is the real parent of all nineteenth century change.  And with Locke, as with the Benthamites, his clear sense of what utilitarianism demanded led to an over-emphasis of human rationalism.  No one can read the Second Treatise without perceiving that Locke looked upon the State as a machine which can be built and taken to pieces in very simple fashion.  Herein, undoubtedly, he over-simplified the problem; and that made him miss some of the cardinal points a true psychology of the State must seize.  His very contractualism, indeed, is part of this affection for the rational.  It resulted in his failure to perceive how complex is the mass of motives imbedded in the political act.  The significance of herd instinct and the vast primitive deeps of the unconscious were alike hidden from him.  All this is of defect; and yet excusably.  For it needed the demonstration by Darwin of the kinship of man and beast for us to see the real substance of Aristotle’s vision that man is embedded in political society.

V

Once Locke’s work had become known, its reputation was secure.  Not, indeed, that it was entirely welcome to his generation.  Men were not wanting who shrank from his thoroughgoing rationalism and felt that anything but reason must be the test of truth.  Those who stood by the ancient ways found it easy to discover republicanism and the roots of atheistic doctrine in his work; and even the theories of Filmer could find defenders against him in the Indian summer of prerogative under Queen Anne.  John Hutton informed a friend that he was not less dangerous than Spinoza; and the opinion found an echo from the nonjuring sect.  But these, after all, were but the eddies of a stream fast burying itself in the sands.  For most, the Revolution was a final settlement, and Locke was welcome as a writer who had discovered the true source of political comfort.  So it was that William Molyneux could embody the ideas of the “incomparable treatise” in his demand for Irish freedom; a book which, even in those days, occasioned some controversy.  Nor is it uninteresting to discover that the translation of Hotman’s Franco-Gallia should have been embellished with a preface from one who, as Molyneux