What are the motifs in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke?

Free will is a recurring idea. Throughout the history of philosophy, philosophers have debated the problem of free will. The natural world of things all around us seems to operate on regular, necessary causal laws. In the natural world, effects follow naturally from causes. From our point of view, though, we seem to somehow have escaped this natural world of causes and effects and we seem to have a will that we determine rather than previous causes. Determinists argue that this appearance of a free will is just an illusion while libertarians argue that freedom necessitates some lack of causal determinism. Locke, however, rejects both of these lines of argument and claims that freedom is possible even in a deterministic world.