LOCKE 753 which has made his name memorable in history ; for it was there that "five or six friends" met one evening in his rooms, about 1671, and discussed " principles of morality and religion " which seemed remote from questions about " human understanding." They "found themselves quickly at a stand by the difficulties that arose on every side." Locke suggested a careful examination of the exact limits of man s power to know the universe as the proper way out of their difficulties. The results of the reflexion to which these difficulties thus gave rise, he thought, when lie set to work, might be contained on "one sheet of paper." But what was thus " begun by chance was continued by entreaty, written by incoherent parcels, and after long intervals of neglect resumed again as humour and occa sions permitted," till at last, at the end of nearly twenty years, it was given to the world as the Essay on Human Understanding. This work gave intellectual unity and a purpose to his life as a man of letters and philosophy. The fall of Shaftesbury in 1675 enabled Locke to escape for four years from the centre of English politics to a retreat in France, where he could unite the study of "human understanding" with attention to health. He spent three years partly at Montpellier and partly in Paris. His journals and commonplace books of this period show the Essay in process of construction. The visits to Paris were times of meeting with men of letters and science, among others Guenellon, the well-known Amsterdam physician ; Ro mer, the Danish astronomer ; Thoynard, the critic; Thevenot, the traveller; Justel, the jurist; and Bernier, the expositor of Gassendi. There is no mention of Malebranche, whose Eecherche de la Verite had appeared three years before, and who was then at the Oratoire, nor of Arnauld, his illustrious rival at the Sorbonne. Locke returned to London in 1679. A reaction against the court party had for a time restored Shaftesbury to power. Locke resumed his old confidential relations. A period of much-interrupted leisure followed. It was a time of plots and counterplots, when England seemed on the brink of another civil war. In the end Shaftesbury was committed to the Tower, tried, and acquitted. More insurrectionary plots followed in the summer of 1682, after which, isolated at home, he escaped to Holland, and died at Amsterdam in January 1683. In these two years Locke was much at Oxford or at Beluton. The last movements of Shaftesbury did not recommend themselves to the sage caution of his secretary. Yet the officials of Government kept their eyes on him. "John Locke lives a very cunning unintelligible life here," Prideaux reported from Oxford in 1682. "I may confidently affirm," the dean of Christ Church afterwards wrote to Lord Sunder- land, " there is not any one in the college who has heard him speak a word against, or so much as censuring, the Government ; and, although very frequently, both in public and private, discourses have been purposely introduced to the disparagement of his master, the earl of Shaftesbury, he could never be provoked to take any notice, or discover in word or look the least concern ; so that I believe there is not in the world such a master of taciturnity and passion." Some unpublished correspondence with his Somerset friend, Edward Clarke of Chipley, describes his daily life in these troubled years, and refers to inter course with the Cudworth family, who were intimate with the Clarkes. The commonplace books and letters about the same time allude to toleration in the state and compre hension in the church, and show an indifference to ques tions on which theological disputers lay stress, hardly consistent with a strict connexion with any organized body of Christians, notwithstanding his gravitation towards the Church of England as the most liberal community. In his fifty-second year, in the gloomy autumn of 1683, Locke retired to Holland in voluntary exile. It was then the asylum of eminent persons who were elsewhere denied civil and religious liberty. Descartes and Spinoza had meditated there ; it had been the home of Erasmus and Grotius ; it was now the refuge of Bayle. Holland was Locke s sanctuary for more than five years ; but it was hardly a voluntary retreat. His (unpublished) letters from thence represent a man of tender feelings, on whom exile sat heavily. Amsterdam was his first Dutch home. For a time he was in danger of arrest at the instance of the English Government. After anxious months of conceal ment in the houses of friends, he escaped ; he was, however, deprived of his studentship at Christ Church, and Oxford was finally closed against him by order of the king. But Holland introduced him to new friends. One of these, ever after an intimate correspondent, was Philip van Lim- borch, the successor of Episcopius as Remonstrant professor of theology, lucid, learned, and tolerant, the friend of Cudworth, Whichcote, and More. Limborch attached him to Le Clerc, then the youthful representative of letters and philosophy in Limborch s college, who had escaped from Geneva and Calvinism to the milder atmosphere of Holland. The Bibliotheque UniverseUe of Le Clerc, com menced in 1686, soon became the chief organ in Europe of men of letters. Locke was at once united with him in the work, and contributed several articles. It was his first appearance as an author, although he was now more than fifty-four years of age, and afterwards produced so many volumes. This tardiness in authorship is a signifi cant fact in Locke s mental history, in harmony with the tempered wisdom and massive common sense which reign throughout his works. The next fourteen years were those in which the world received the thoughts which observa tion of affairs and reflexion had so long been forming in his mind. They were taking shape for publication while he was in Holland. The Essay was finished there, and a French epitome of it appeared in 1688, in Le Clerc s journal. Locke was then at Rotterdam, where he lived for more than a year in the house of a Quaker friend, Benjamin Furley, a wealthy merchant and collector of books. The course of affairs in England at last opened a way for his return to his native country. At Rotterdam he was the confidant of the political exiles, including Burnet and Mordaunt, afterwards the famous earl of Peterborough, as well as of the prince of Orange. William landed in England in November 1688 ; Locke followed in February 1689, in the same ship with the princess of Orange and Lady Mordaunt. It was after his return to England that through author ship Locke emerged into European fame. Within a month he had declined the embassy to Brandenburg, and taken instead the modest office of commissioner of appeals with its almost nominal duties. The two years, 1689 and 1690, during which he lived at Dorset Court, in London, were memorable for the publication of his two chief works in social polity, and also of the most popular and widely influ ential book in modern philosophy, which expresses in a generalized form the principles that lie at the root of all his political and other writings. The first of the three to appear was the defence of religious liberty in the state, in the Epistola de Tolerantia, addressed to Limborch. It was published at Gouda in the spring of 1689, and translated into English in autumn by William Popple, a Unitarian merchant in London. The Two Treatises on Government, in defence of the sovereignty of the people, followed a month or two after. The Essay concerning Human Understanding saw the light in the spring of 1690. He received .30 for the copyright, which was nearly the same as Kant afterwards got for the first edition of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft. He had carried the manuscript XIV- - 95
