is was a nature which learned more from men
than books; and he more than once insisted that his philosophy was woven
of his own "coarse thoughts." What, doubtless, he therein meant was to
emphasize the freshness of his contact with contemporary fact in
contrast with the technical jargon of the earlier thinkers. At least his
work is free from the mountains of allusion which Prynne rolled into the
bottom of his pages; and if the first Whig was the devil, he is
singularly free from the irritating pedantry of biblical citation. Yet
even with these novelties, no estimate of his work would be complete
which failed to take account of the foundations upon which he builded.

Herein, perhaps, the danger is lest we exaggerate Locke's dependence
upon the earlier current of thought. The social contract is at least as
old as when Glaucon debated with Socrates in the market-place at Athens.
The theory of a state of nature, with the rights therein implied, is the
contribution, through Stoicism, of the Roman lawyers, and the great
medieval contrast to Aristotle's experimentalism. To the latter, also,
may be traced the separation of powers; and it was then but little more
than a hundred years since Bodin had been taken to make the doctrine an
integral part of scientific politics. Nor is the theory of a right to
revolution in any sense his specific creation. So soon as the
Reformation had given a new perspective to the problem of Church and
State every element of Locke's doctrine had become a commonplace of
debate. Goodman and Knox among Presbyterians, Suarez and Mariana among
Catholics, the author of the _Vindiciae_ and Francis Hotman among the
Huguenots, had all of them emphasized the concept of public power as a
trust; with, of course, the necessary corollary that its abuse entails
resistance. Algernon Sydney was at least his acquaintance; and he must
have been acquainted with the tradition, even if tragedy spared him the
details, of the _Discourses on Government_. Even his theory of
toleration had in every detail been anticipated by one or other of a
hundred controversialists; and his argument can hardly claim either the
lofty eloquence of Jeremy Taylor or the cogent simplicity of William
Penn.

What differentiates Locke from all his predecessors is the manner of his
writing on the one hand, and the fact of the Revolution on the other.
Every previous thinker save Sydney--the latter's work was not published
until 1689--was writing wit