IV

Any survey of earlier political theory would show how little of novelty there is in the specific elements of Locke’s general doctrine.  He is at all points the offspring of a great and unbroken tradition; and that not the least when he seems unconscious of it.  Definite teachers, indeed, he can hardly be said to have had; no one can read his book without perceiving how much of it is rooted in the problems of his own day.  He himself has expressed his sense of Hooker’s greatness, and he elsewhere had recommended the works of Grotius and Pufendorf as an essential element in education.  But his 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.