the more we are impressed by the patriarchal dignity of Locke’s mind.  Father of psychology, father of the criticism of knowledge, father of theoretical liberalism, god-father at least of the American political system, of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedia, at home he was the ancestor of that whole school of polite moderate opinion which can unite liberal Christianity with mechanical science and with psychological idealism.  He was invincibly rooted in a prudential morality, in a rationalised Protestantism, in respect for liberty and law:  above all he was deeply convinced, as he puts it, “that the handsome conveniences of life are better than nasty penury”.  Locke still speaks, or spoke until lately, through many a modern mind, when this mind was most sincere; and two hundred years before Queen Victoria he was a Victorian in essence.

A chief element in this modernness of Locke was something that had hardly appeared before in pure philosophy, although common in religion:  I mean, the tendency to deny one’s own presuppositions—­not by accident or inadvertently, but proudly and with an air of triumph.  Presuppositions are imposed on all of us by life itself:  for instance the presupposition that life is to continue, and that it is worth living.  Belief is born on the wing and awakes to many tacit commitments.  Afterwards, in reflection, we may wonder at finding these presuppositions on our hands and, being ignorant of the natural causes which have imposed them on the animal mind, we may be offended at them.  Their arbitrary and dogmatic character will tempt us to condemn them, and to take for granted that the analysis which undermines them is justified, and will prove fruitful.  But this critical assurance in its turn seems to rely on a dubious presupposition, namely, that human opinion must always evolve in a single line, dialectically, providentially, and irresistibly.  It is at least conceivable that the opposite should sometimes be the case.  Some of the primitive presuppositions of human reason might have been correct and inevitable, whilst the tendency to deny them might have sprung from a plausible misunderstanding, or the exaggeration of a half-truth:  so that the critical opinion itself, after destroying the spontaneous assumptions on which it rested, might be incapable of subsisting.

In Locke the central presuppositions, which he embraced heartily and without question, were those of common sense.  He adopted what he calls a “plain, historical method”, fit, in his own words, “to be brought into well-bred company and polite conversation”.  Men, “barely by the use of their natural faculties”, might attain to all the knowledge possible or worth having.  All children, he writes, “that are born into this world, being surrounded with bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them” have “a variety of ideas imprinted” on their minds.  “External material things as objects of Sensation, and the operations of our own minds as objects of Reflection, are to me”,