The restraints of a professional career were not suited to Locke.
There is a surmise that early in his Oxford career he contemplated
taking orders in the Church of England. His religious disposition
attracted him to theology. Revulsion from the dogmatic temper
of the Presbyterians, and the unreasoning enthusiasm of the
Independents favoured sympathy afterwards with Cambridge
Platonists and other liberal Anglican churchmen. Whichcote
was his favourite preacher, and close intimacy with the Cudworth
family cheered his later years. But, though he has a place
among lay theologians, dread of ecclesiastical impediment to free
inquiry, added to strong inclination for scientific investigation,
made him look to medicine as his profession, and before 1666
we find him practising as a physician in Oxford. Nevertheless,
although known among his friends as “Doctor Locke,” he never
graduated in medicine. His health was uncertain, for he suffered
through life from chronic consumption and asthma. A fortunate
event soon withdrew him from the medical profession.
Locke early showed an inclination to politics, as well as to theology and medicine. As early as 1665 he diverged for a short time from medical pursuits at Oxford, and was engaged as secretary to Sir Walter Vane on his mission to the Elector of Brandenburg. Soon after his return in 1666 the incident occurred which determined his career. Lord Ashley, afterwards first earl of Shaftesbury, had come to Oxford for his health. Locke was introduced to him by his physician, Dr Thomas. This was the beginning of a lasting friendship, sustained by common sympathy with liberty—civil, religious and philosophical. In 1667 Locke moved from Christ Church to Exeter House, Lord Ashley’s London residence, to become his confidential secretary. Although he retained his studentship at Christ Church, and occasionally visited Oxford, as well as his patrimony at Belluton, he found a home and shared fortune with Shaftesbury for fifteen years.
Locke’s commonplace books throw welcome light on the history of his mind in early life. A paper on the “Roman Commonwealth” which belongs to this period, expresses convictions about religious liberty and the relations of religion to the state that were modified and deepened afterwards; objections to the sacerdotal conception of Christianity appear in another article; short work is made of ecclesiastical claims to infallibility in the interpretation of Scripture in a third; a scheme of utilitarian ethics, wider than that of Hobbes, is suggested in a fourth. The most significant of those early revelations is the Essay concerning Toleration (1666), which anticipates conclusions more fully argued nearly thirty years later.
The Shaftesbury connexion must have helped to save Locke from those idols of the “Den” to which professional life and narrow experience is exposed. It brought him into contact with public men, the springs of political action and the duties of high office. The place he held as Shaftesbury’s adviser is indeed the outstanding circumstance in his middle life. Exeter House afforded every opportunity for society. He became intimate among others with the illustrious Sydenham; he joined the Royal Society and served on its council. The foundation of the monumental work of his life was laid when he was at Exeter House. He was led to it in this way. It was his habit to encourage informal reunions of his intimates, to discuss debatable questions in science and theology. One of these, in the winter of 1670, is historically memorable. “Five or six friends,” he says, met in his rooms and were discussing “principles of morality and religion. They found themselves quickly at a stand by the difficulties that arose on every side.” Locke proposed some criticism of the necessary “limits of human understanding” as likely to open a way out of their difficulties. He undertook to attempt this, and fancied that what he had to say might find sufficient space on “one sheet of paper.” What was thus “begun by chance, was continued by entreaty, written by incoherent parcels, and after long intervals of neglect resumed again as humour and occasions permitted.” At the end of nearly twenty years the issue was given to the world as Locke’s now famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
The fall of Shaftesbury in 1675 enabled Locke to escape from English politics. He found a retreat in France, where he could unite calm reflection upon the legitimate operations of “human understanding” with attention to his health. He spent three years partly at Montpellier and partly in Paris. His journals and commonplace books in these years show the Essay in preparation. At Paris he met men of science and letters—Peter Guenellon, the well-known Amsterdam physician; Ole Römer, the Danish astronomer; Thoynard, the critic; Melchisédech Thévenot, the traveller; Henri Justel, the jurist; and François Bernier, the expositor of Gassendi. But there is no mention of Malebranche, whose Recherche de la vérité had appeared three years before, nor of Arnauld, the illustrious rival of Malebranche.
Locke returned to London in 1679. Reaction against the court party had restored Shaftesbury to power. Locke resumed his old confidential relations, now at Thanet House in Aldersgate. A period of often interrupted leisure for study followed. It was a time of plots and counterplots, when England seemed on the brink of another civil war. In the end Shaftesbury was committed to the Tower, tried and acquitted. More insurrectionary plots followed in the summer of 1682, after which, suspected at home, the versatile statesman escaped to Holland, and died at Amsterdam in January 1683. In these two years Locke was much at Oxford and in Somerset, for the later movements of Shaftesbury did not commend themselves to him. Yet the government had their eyes upon him. “John Locke lives a very cunning unintelligible life here,” Prideaux reported from Oxford in 1682. “I may confidently affirm,” wrote John Fell, the dean of Christ Church, to Lord Sunderland, “there is not any one in the college who has heard him speak a word against, or so much as censuring, the government; and, although very frequently, both in public and private, discourses have been purposely introduced to the disparagement of his master, the earl of Shaftesbury, he could never be provoked to take any notice, or discover in word or look the least concern; so that I believe there is not in the world such a master of taciturnity and passion.” Unpublished correspondence with his Somerset friend, Edward Clarke of Chipley, describes Locke’s life in those troubled years. It also reveals the opening of his intimate intercourse with the Cudworth family, who were friends of the Clarkes, and connected by birth with Somerset. The letters allude to toleration in the state and comprehension in the church, while they show an indifference to theological dogma hardly consistent with an exclusive connexion with any sect.
In his fifty-second year, in the gloomy autumn of 1683, Locke retired to Holland, then the asylum of eminent persons who were elsewhere denied liberty of thought. Descartes and Spinoza had speculated there; it had been the home of Erasmus and Grotius; it was now the refuge of Bayle. Locke spent more than five years there; but his (unpublished) letters show that exile sat heavily upon him. Amsterdam was his first Dutch home, where he lived in the house of Dr Keen, under the assumed name of Dr Van der Linden. For a time he was in danger of arrest at the instance of the English government. After months of concealment he escaped; but he was deprived of his studentship at Christ Church by order of the king, and Oxford was thus closed against him. Holland introduced him to new friends. The chief of these was Limborch, the successor of Episcopius as Remonstrant professor of theology, lucid, learned and tolerant, the friend of Cudworth, Whichcote and More. By Limborch he was introduced to Le Clerc, the youthful representative of letters and philosophy in Limborch’s college, who had escaped from Geneva and Calvinism to the milder atmosphere of Holland and the Remonstrants. The Bibliothèque universelle of Le Clerc was then the chief organ in Europe of men of letters. Locke contributed several articles. It was his first appearance as an author, although he was now fifty-four years of age. This tardiness in authorship is a significant fact in his life, in harmony with his tempered wisdom.
In the next fourteen years the world received through his books the thoughts which had been gradually forming, and were taking final shape while he was in Holland. The Essay was finished there, and a French epitome appeared in 1688 in Le
