Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Locke's Essay was begun some twenty years before it was published, and it went through various drafts. It embodies and draws together many of the thought-currents that were commonplace in the latter half of the seventeeth century: negative ones, such as anti-Aristotelianism, and positive ones, such as that of the mechanical philosophy and the new experimental philosophy. A hint of these themes is given in the ‘Epistle to the Reader’ of the Essay, where Locke contrasts the impediments to knowledge thrown up by Scholastic philosophy (chapter 24), with the lasting monuments produced by contributors such as Robert Boyle (1627–91) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727), to ‘the commonwealth of learning’. The chemist Robert Boyle was a founder member of the Royal Society of London for the Advancement of Experimental Knowledge, and the mathematician and theoretical physicist Isaac Newton was one of its first presidents. Locke was elected a Fellow to the Society in 1668, not long before he began work on the Essay.Besides thus being a product of its century, the Essay had a great influence on the Enlightenment of the next century, whose Rationalism (chapter 26 and chapter 27) wears the colours of the individualism which pervades both Locke's expression and his explicit doctrine. Running through the Essay is an insistence that opinions are carefully to be weighed, impartially considered and judged ... log in or subscribe to read full text