State must seize. His very
contractualism, indeed, is part of this affection for the rational. It
resulted in his failure to perceive how complex is the mass of motives
imbedded in the political act. The significance of herd instinct and the
vast primitive deeps of the unconscious were alike hidden from him. All
this is of defect; and yet excusably. For it needed the demonstration by
Darwin of the kinship of man and beast for us to see the real substance
of Aristotle's vision that man is embedded in political society.

V

Once Locke's work had become known, its reputation was secure. Not,
indeed, that it was entirely welcome to his generation. Men were not
wanting who shrank from his thoroughgoing rationalism and felt that
anything but reason must be the test of truth. Those who stood by the
ancient ways found it easy to discover republicanism and the roots of
atheistic doctrine in his work; and even the theories of Filmer could
find defenders against him in the Indian summer of prerogative under
Queen Anne. John Hutton informed a friend that he was not less dangerous
than Spinoza; and the opinion found an echo from the nonjuring sect.
But these, after all, were but the eddies of a stream fast burying
itself in the sands. For most, the Revolution was a final settlement,
and Locke was welcome as a writer who had discovered the true source of
political comfort. So it was that William Molyneux could embody the
ideas of the "incomparable treatise" in his demand for Irish freedom; a
book which, even in those days, occasioned some controversy. Nor is it
uninteresting to discover that the translation of Hotman's
_Franco-Gallia_ should have been embellished with a preface from one
who, as Molyneux wrote to Locke,[9] never met the Irish writer without
conversing of their common master. How rapidly the doctrine spread we
learn from a letter of Bayle's in which, as early as 1693, Locke has
already became "the gospel of the Protestants." Nor was his immediate
influence confined to England. French Huguenots and the Dutch drew
naturally upon so happy a defender; and Barbeyrac, in the translation of
Pufendorf which he published in 1706, cites no writer so often as
Locke. The speeches for the prosecution in the trial of Sacheverell were
almost wholesale adaptations of his teaching; and even the accused
counsel admitted the legality of James' deposition in his speech for the
defence.

[Footnote 9: Locke, Works (ed. of 1812), IX