Clerc’s journal, the forecast of the larger work. Locke was then
at Rotterdam, where he lived for a year in the house of a Quaker
friend, Benjamin Furley, or Furly, a wealthy merchant and
lover of books. At Rotterdam he was a confidant of political
exiles, including Burnet and the famous earl of Peterborough,
and he became known to William, prince of Orange. William
landed in England in November 1688; Locke followed in
February 1689, in the ship which carried the princess Mary.
After his return to England in 1689 Locke emerged through authorship into European fame. Within a month after he reached London he had declined an offer of the embassy to Brandenburg, and accepted the modest office of commissioner of appeals. The two following years, during which he lived at Dorset Court in London, were memorable for the publication of his two chief works on social polity, and of the epoch-making book on modern philosophy which reveals the main principles of his life. The earliest of these to appear was his defence of religious liberty, in the Epistola de Tolerantia, addressed to Limborch, published at Gouda in the spring of 1689, and translated into English in autumn by William Popple, a Unitarian merchant in London. Two Treatises on Government, in defence of the right of ultimate sovereignty in the people, followed a few months later. The famous Essay concerning Human Understanding saw the light in the spring of 1690. He received £30 for the copyright, nearly the same as Kant got in 1781 for his Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In the Essay Locke was the critic of the empirical data of human experience: Kant, as the critic of the intellectual and moral presuppositions of experience, supplied the complement to the incomplete and ambiguous answer to its own leading question that was given in Locke’s Essay. The Essay was the first book in which its author’s name appeared, for the Epistola de Tolerantia and the Treatises on Government were anonymous.
Locke’s asthma was aggravated by the air of London; and the course of public affairs disappointed him, for the settlement at the Revolution fell short of his ideal. In spring, 1691, he took up his residence in the manor house of Otes in Essex, the country seat of Sir Francis Masham, between Ongar and Harlow. Lady Masham was the accomplished daughter of Ralph Cudworth, and was his friend before he went to Holland. She told Le Clerc that after Locke’s return from exile, “by some considerably long visits, he had made trial of the air of Otes, which is some 20 m. from London, and he thought that none would be so suitable for him. His company,” she adds, “could not but be very desirable for us, and he had all the assurances we could give him of being always welcome; but, to make him easy in living with us, it was necessary he should do so on his own terms, which Sir Francis at last assenting to, he then believed himself at home with us, and resolved, if it pleased God, here to end his days as he did.” At Otes he enjoyed for fourteen years as much domestic peace and literary leisure as was consistent with broken health, and sometimes anxious visits to London on public affairs, in which he was still an active adviser. Otes was in every way his home. In his letters and otherwise we have pleasant pictures of its inmates and domestic life and the occasional visits of his friends, among others Lord Peterborough, Lord Shaftesbury of the Characteristics, Sir Isaac Newton, William Molyneux and Anthony Collins.
At Otes he was busy with his pen. The Letter on Toleration involved him in controversy. An Answer by Jonas Proast of Queen’s College, Oxford, had drawn forth in 1690 a Second Letter. A rejoinder in 1691 was followed by Locke’s elaborate Third Letter on Toleration in the summer of the following year. In 1691 currency and finance were much in his thoughts, and in the following year he addressed an important letter to Sir John Somers on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money. When he was in Holland he had written letters to his friend Clarke of Chipley about the education of his children. These letters formed the substance of the little volume entitled Thoughts on Education (1693), which still holds its place among classics in that department. Nor were the “principles of revealed religion” forgotten. The subtle theological controversies of the 17th century made him anxious to show how simple after all fundamental Christianity is. In the Reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures (anonymous, 1695), Locke sought to separate the divine essence of Christ’s religion from later accretions of dogma, and from reasonings due to oversight of the necessary limits of human thought. This intended Eirenicon involved him in controversies that lasted for years. Angry polemics assailed the book. A certain John Edwards was conspicuous. Locke’s Vindication, followed by a Second Vindication in 1697, added fuel to this fire. Above all, the great Essay was assailed and often misinterpreted by philosophers and divines. Notes of opposition had been heard almost as soon as it appeared. John Norris, the metaphysical rector of Bemerton and English disciple of Malebranche, criticized it in 1690. Locke took no notice at the time, but his second winter at Otes was partly employed in An Examination of Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing all Things in God, and in Remarks upon some of Mr Norris’s Books, tracts which throw light upon his own ambiguous theory of perception through the senses. These were published after his death. A second edition of the Essay, with a chapter added on “Personal Identity,” and numerous alterations in the chapter on “Power,” appeared in 1694. The third, which was only a reprint, was published in 1695. Wynne’s well-known abridgment helped to make the book known in Oxford, and his friend William Molyneux introduced it in Dublin. In 1695 a revival of controversy about the currency diverted Locke’s attention. Events in that year occasioned his Observations on Silver Money and Further Considerations on Raising the Value of Money.
In 1696 Locke was induced to accept a commissionership on the Board of Trade. This required frequent visits to London. Meantime the Essay on Human Understanding and the Reasonableness of Christianity were becoming more involved in a wordy warfare between dogmatists and latitudinarians, trinitarians and unitarians. The controversy with Edwards was followed by a more memorable one with Stillingfleet, bishop of Worcester. John Toland, in his Christianity not Mysterious, had exaggerated doctrines in the Essay, and then adopted them as his own. In the autumn of 1696, Stillingfleet, an argumentative ecclesiastic more than a religious philosopher, in his Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity, charged Locke with disallowing mystery in human knowledge, especially in his account of the metaphysical idea of “substance.” Locke replied in January 1697. Stillingfleet’s rejoinder appeared in May, followed by a Second Letter from Locke in August, to which the bishop replied in the following year. Locke’s Third Letter, in which the ramifications of this controversy are pursued with a copious expenditure of acute reasoning and polished irony, was delayed till 1699, in which year Stillingfleet died. Other critics of the Essay entered the lists. One of the ablest was John Sergeant, a priest of the Roman Church, in Solid Philosophy Asserted Against the Fancies of the Ideists (1697). He was followed by Thomas Burnet and Dean Sherlock. Henry Lee, rector of Tichmarch, criticized the Essay, chapter by chapter in a folio volume entitled Anti-Scepticism (1702); John Broughton dealt another blow in his Psychologia (1703); and John Norris returned to the attack, in his Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World (1701–1704). On the other hand Locke was defended with vigour by Samuel Bolde, a Dorsetshire clergyman. The Essay itself was meanwhile spreading over Europe, impelled by the name of its author as the chief philosophical defender of civil and religious liberty. The fourth edition (the last while Locke was alive) appeared in 1700, with important additional chapters on “Association of Ideas” and “Enthusiasm.” What was originally meant to form another chapter was withheld. It appeared among Locke’s posthumous writings as The Conduct of the Understanding, one of the most characteristic of his works. The French translation of the Essay by Pierre Coste, Locke’s amanuensis at Otes, was issued almost simultaneously with the fourth edition. The Latin version by Richard Burridge of Dublin followed a year after, reprinted in due time at Amsterdam and at Leipzig.
In 1700 Locke resigned his commission at the Board of Trade,
