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LOC and, according to Le Clerc, he removed from Amsterdam to Utrecht to avoid suspicion. He lived at Utrecht from April, 1685, till May in the following year, the date of Monmouth's departure from the Texel. It was during this secluded residence in the house of M. Veen, Guenelon's father-in-law, that his first "Letter on Toleration" was written, a subject which twenty years before had engaged his attention. This "Letter" was printed in Latin in Holland early in 1689, and was translated into English by Mr. Popple, and also into Dutch and French, in the course of that year. It is in some respects the most important of all his works, being a scientific exposition and defence of lessons he had derived from the English Independents and Quakers, on a subject which had lately employed the pens of Jeremy Taylor, of Bayle, and of Leibnitz. During his residence of six years in Holland Locke was devoted to study, and collected much material for his large authorship on his return to England. He was often in the society of Limborch (Remonstrant professor of theology at Amsterdam), of Le Clerc, and of Guenelon the physician, whom he met at Paris some years before. He formed a society which met weekly at each other's houses, of which Le Clerc and Limborch were members. He had a fondness for such societies, being previously connected with one at Oxford, and afterwards with another in London.

Locke returned to England after the Revolution, the most distinguished literary champion of the principles on which it was virtually founded. He left Holland in February, 1689, in the fleet that conveyed the princess of Orange to our shores. Very soon after his return, partly on the ground of weak health, he declined an appointment as ambassador to one of the great German courts—Vienna or Berlin—which was offered to him by King William's government through the minister, Lord Mordaunt, afterwards earl of Peterborough. He endeavoured, however, to recover his studentship at Christ Church, but that society rejected his claim, as the place was now in possession of another. Thereafter he finally forsook Oxford, and lived till his death chiefly in London and Essex. As a distinguished sufferer for the principles of the Revolution, he might easily have obtained high preferment. He was satisfied with the office of commissioner of appeals, worth about £200 a year. For about three years after the Revolution he lived mostly in London, in familiar intercourse with statesmen and men of letters, and especially with Lord Pembroke and Lord Peterborough. But the air of London always disagreed with him, and he often availed himself of the welcome which awaited him at Lord Peterborough's seat, near Fulham. At last the increase of his asthma obliged him to abandon the metropolis altogether, at least during winter. He had at different times visited Sir Francis and Lady Masham at their seat at Gates, in the parish of High Laver in Essex, about twenty miles from London, where he found the air more agreeable than anywhere else. This, with his great regard for his friend Lady Masham—a person of extraordinary sense and accomplishment, the daughter of Cudworth, and herself a philosophical and theological author—as well as the agreeable society he found at Gates, induced him about 1691 to ask Sir Francis to take him into his family, that he might in quiet and freedom devote himself to his studies and the preparation of his works. He was received on his own terms. At the manor house of Gates he enjoyed perfect liberty and a congenial home. It was in this pleasant retreat that he spent the last fourteen years of his life, varied by occasional visits to London, and correspondence with his friends. His interesting letters to Molyneux, and afterwards to Collins, are dated from Oates. It was probably at this period, or immediately before his retirement to Essex, that he became personally acquainted with Sir Isaac Newton, some of whose correspondence with Locke, chiefly on mathematics and biblical interpretation, has since been published. After 1692 he came to town only for a few months in summer; and if at any time he returned to Gates indisposed, the air of Essex wonderfully restored him. In 1695 he was nominated one of the commissioners of trade and plantations, an office worth £1000 a year, the duty of which he discharged in occasional visits to London, and which he held for five years, when he was induced to resign it by ill health. Locke's life as an author may be said to date from 1689, when he was in his fifty-seventh year. His "First Letter on Toleration," to which almost all his other writings may be regarded as ancillary—for all of them, including the "Essay," were occasional, and meant to counteract contemporary enemies of reason and freedom—appeared, as already said, in that year. It occasioned not a little controversy. It was criticized in a tract which issued from Oxford in 1690, entitled the Argument of the Letter concerning Toleration briefly considered and answered, the author of which, according to Wood, was Jonas Proast of Queen's college. In the same year Locke published "A Second Letter on Toleration," in which he replied to the arguments of Proast, whose rejoinder in the following year produced Locke's "Third Letter on Toleration" in 1692. After a silence of twelve years there appeared a Second Letter to the Author of the Three Letters on Toleration, to which Locke commenced a reply, of which some fragments are published in his posthumous works. The year 1690 witnessed the publication of his "Two Treatises on Government," the former in refutation of the paradox of Sir Robert Filmer, that kings have an absolute divine right to the obedience of their subjects, akin to some modern reasonings in support of slavery, and the other an expository vindication of Locke's own theory of the social compact and the rights of man—of government in the interest and for the sake of the governed. In the "Treatises on Government" he lays the foundations of the civil liberty, and in the "Letters on Toleration" of the religious freedom, of which the subsequent history of the British empire records the gradual application. The "Essay concerning Human Understanding," Locke's most celebrated work, and on the whole the most influential treatise in modern philosophical literature, was also published in 1690. It is the first comprehensive criticism, by the inductive method, of the nature and limits of human knowledge. Its fundamental doctrine forms a broad foundation for that free exercise of individual judgment, which it was the great aim of its author to vindicate in his public and literary life. The problem of this immortal work is essentially that proposed afterwards in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason; and the opening polemic against innate principles is virtually an effort to dispossess the strongholds of prejudice, and to remove the veil of error. The "Essay" was in preparation, at intervals, for twenty years, and the first rough draft in MS. is dated in 1671. It was finished in MS. in 1686, the year in which Newton's Principia was finished. The French abridgment, which appeared in Le Clerc's Bibliotheque Universelle, in January, 1688, raised a general desire for the work itself, which Locke accordingly put to press soon after his return to England. An analysis of this illustrious classic of English philosophy is hardly needed, and at any rate cannot be offered here. It is founded on the negation of innate principles, and of a continuous consciousness in man. Its parts are regulated by the aim of the author to determine, on the Baconian method, our intellectual power and weakness, with the nature and grounds of knowledge and opinion. Having reasoned against the dogma of innate knowledge, independent of experience, maintained in the ancient schools of Pythagoras and Plato, and not alien, in a modified form, from Des Cartes and Lord Herbert, Locke in his second book, propounds his own hypothesis, and endeavours to test it by an inductive comparison of our ideas. His thesis is, that human knowledge may be resolved into external and internal experience, which he vindicates by what Bacon would call the "crucial instances" of our ideas of space, time, infinity, substance, power, identity, and others, apparently the most remote from an empirical origin. On this foundation rest the speculations of the fourth book, on demonstration and belief, and on the grounds of physical, psychological, and theological science. The popular and inexact style of the "Essay," which announced the man of the world rather than the schoolman, has made the interpretation of it the riddle of subsequent philosophical exegesis. Among many other words, the leading terns, "idea" and "experience," have puzzled generations of readers. The "Essay" has been quoted by the most opposite schools. Locke, like Socrates, has moved philosophical thought in the most opposite directions, to the most various results, while both Socrates in Greece and Locke in Europe, by their earnest and unsystematic discourse, have aroused the two most powerful manifestations of reflection which the world has yet seen. It must indeed be owned that the sympathies of the English philosopher were more with ordinary happiness, the prudential virtues, and the methods and spirit of experimental research, than with those loftier faculties and aspirations, which he was apt to associate with mysticism. Very soon after its publication, the "Essay" excited much attention. The author himself prepared six editions for the press, in the course of which he introduced many minor changes, and added some chapters. The