tle perceived the
psychological foundations of politics. What he did was rather to fasten
upon the great institutional necessity of his time--the provision of
channels of assent--and emphasize its importance to the exclusion of all
other factors. The problem is in fact more complex; and the solution he
indicated became so natural a part of the political fabric that the
value of his emphasis upon its import was largely forgotten when men
again took up the study of foundations.

John Locke was born at Wrington in Somerset on the 29th of August, 1632.
His father was clerk to the county justices and acted as a captain in a
cavalry regiment during the Civil War. Though he suffered heavy losses,
he was able to give his son as good an education as the time afforded.
Westminster under Dr. Busby may not have been the gentlest of academies,
but at least it provided Locke with an admirable training in the
classics. He himself, indeed, in the _Thoughts on Education_ doubted the
value of such exercises; nor does he seem to have conceived any
affection for Oxford whither he proceeded in 1652 as a junior student of
Christ Church. The university was then under the Puritan control of Dr.
John Owen; but not even his effort to redeem the university from its
reputation for intellectual laxity rescued it from the "wrangling and
ostentation" of the peripatetic philosophy. Yet it was at Oxford that
he encountered the work of Descartes which first attracted him to
metaphysics. There, too, he met Pocock, the Arabic scholar, and Wallis
the mathematician, who must at least have commanded his respect. In 1659
he accepted a Senior Studentship of his college, which he retained until
he was deemed politically undesirable in 1684. After toying with his
father's desire that he should enter the Church, he began the study of
medicine. Scientific interest won for him the friendship of Boyle; and
while he was administering physic to the patients of Dr. Thomas, he was
making the observations recorded in Boyle's _History of the Air_ which
Locke himself edited after the death of his friend.

Meanwhile accident had turned his life into far different paths. An
appointment as secretary to a special ambassador opened up to him a
diplomatic career; but his sturdy commonsense showed him his unfitness
for such labors. After his visit to Prussia he returned to Oxford, and
there, in 1667, in the course of his medical work, he met Anthony
Ashley, the later Lord Shafte