IT is impossible to overestimate the extent of the influence which ideas defined by John Locke have exerted on the civilization of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. No American of our colonial period had more to do than he did with forcing the revolution which separated the North American colonies from England and created the United States. During the Middle Ages the Schoolmen and others who were left unnoticed by their sovereigns as learned triflers discussed, with all the niceties of scholastic method, the question of whether or not one man has ever really derived from heaven the right to render its decrees for the control of others, without their consent and against their will. All the arguments which slowly accumulated on the negative side of this question Locke mastered and co-ordinated,—advancing beyond his predecessors with the confidence which belonged only to the highest genius. His treatise “Of Civil Government” and his “Letters concerning Toleration” bore their ripe fruit in the American Declaration of Independence, the constitution of the United States, and the gradual cessation of “religious” persecutions, through the use of the political machinery of the State. The worst and the almost only reproach against Locke is that when he attempted to draw a Constitution which would make his ideas practical, he was absurdly inconsistent with his own high ideals. But nothing less was to have been expected. The men who drafted and adopted the Constitution of the United States were consciously or unconsciously moved by the same ideals, but their collective wisdom in what is rightly pronounced the greatest success of its kind in history did not free it from inconsistencies so gross that radical differences of interpretation due to them resulted in the bloodiest civil war of modern times. It is not desirable to attempt to vindicate Locke against any charge of inconsistency, crudity, or absurdity which may be reasonably based on isolated facts of his life and writings. There is scarcely a page in the greatest work of Bacon which does not present similar contrasts. Every genius of the highest order becomes so by virtue of triumphing once or twice only over the iron laws of tradition and environment which govern his generation. In most things he must belong to his generation, or he could not exist in it. In a few things which constitute his governing idea and are the result of the Titanic triumph of individuality in its struggle with the governing mind and impulses of the mass, he belongs to the whole past and future of the human race. This itself is an inconsistency; but only in the measure in which it exists and appears does genius exist as the governing influence in the life and work of any man. Locke’s great genius showed itself most effectively and usefully in his assertion of fundamental political principles, but it is in his “Essay concerning Human Understanding” that he develops his greatest power of connected thought. It occasioned one of the most protracted controversies in the history of modern philosophy,—a controversy concerning which it needs only to be said here that in declaring “sensation” to be the “great source of most of the ideas we have,” Locke stops with the “understanding” as a mode of interpreting facts. With the faith “which is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen,” he does not deal as a part of the understanding. Whatever may be the shortcomings of his philosophy, he has written, without doubt, in a single sentence, more than the majority of philosophers succeed in putting in a volume. That sentence, “Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished?” is one of the most celebrated and the most pregnant in the history of thought. Locke was born in Somerset, England, August 29th, 1632. His father was a lawyer who had been a captain in the Parliamentary army during the civil wars; so that Locke came in his youth directly under the control of the same influences which had educated Pym and Hampden. He completed his scholastic education at Christ’s Church, Oxford, in 1656, and for some time afterwards continued to reside at the University as a lecturer on Greek and Rhetoric. He studied medicine, but did not take a degree, though when he entered the family of the Earl of Shaftesbury he served as family physician, as well as the Earl’s confidential agent. It was through this connection that Locke made his celebrated failure as a constitution maker. His patron, being at that time one of the “proprietors” of the Carolinas, induced him to attempt to have a model government for the colony. After the fall of Shaftesbury, Locke was compelled to go into exile, and he lived abroad, chiefly in Holland, until 1688, when he returned to England as the favorite of William of Orange, who wished to promote him to high rank in the diplomatic service. Locke declined, however, and became Commissioner of Appeals,—a modest office with light duties, which enabled him to pursue his studies. The “Essay concerning Human Understanding” appeared in 1690, Locke receiving £30 for the copyright. Professor Fraser recalls the fact that this is almost exactly the sum that Kant received for his “Critique of Pure Reason,” the only philosophical work written since Locke’s “Essay,” which is generally admitted to belong to the same class with it. Locke’s health began to fail in 1690, but, in spite of asthma and other infirmities, he continued to write vigorously until 1700, when his accumulating weaknesses checked, but did not suppress, his activity. His last years were spent in the study of the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul. He began his fourth letter on “Toleration” in 1704 and on the twenty-eighth of October in that year, leaving his work in the middle of a sentence, he declared himself “in perfect charity with all men” and died. He is buried in the parish church of High Laver in a tomb which attracts few visitors, but his mind is omnipresent as a part of the “perfect charity with all men,” which, as it imperfectly governs the lives of individuals and enables them to tolerate each other, constitutes the world’s civilization.