nce, demonstration its form, and the realm of knowledge
wider than experience, yet this instrument and this form are dependent for
their content on a supply of material from the senses. The emphasis, it is
true, falls chiefly on the latter half of this programme, and posterity,
especially, has almost exclusively attended to the empirical side of
Locke's theory of knowledge in giving judgment concerning it.

John Locke was born at Wrington, not far from Bristol, in 1632. At Oxford
he busied himself with philosophy, natural science, and medicine, being
repelled by the Scholastic thinkers, but strongly attracted by the writings
of Descartes. In 1665 he became secretary to the English ambassador to the
Court of Brandenburg. Returning thence to Oxford he made the acquaintance
of Lord Anthony Ashley (from 1672 Earl of Shaftesbury; died in Holland
1683), who received him into his own household as a friend, physician, and
tutor to his son (the father of Shaftesbury, the moral philosopher), and
with whose varying fortunes Locke's own were henceforth to be intimately
connected. Twice he became secretary to his patron (once in 1667--with
an official secretaryship in 1672, when Shaftesbury became Lord
Chancellor--and again in 1679, when he became President of the Council),
but both times he lost his post on his friend's fall. The years 1675-79
were spent in Montpellier and Paris. In 1683 he went into voluntary exile
in Holland (where Shaftesbury had died in January of the same year), and
remained there until 1689, when the ascension of the throne by William of
Orange made it possible for him to return to England. Here he was made
Commissioner of Appeals, and, subsequently, one of the Commissioners of
Trade and Plantations (till 1700). He died in 1704 at Gates, in Essex, at
the house of Sir Francis Masham, whose wife was the daughter of Cudworth,
the philosopher.

Locke's chief work, _An Essay concerning Human Understanding_, which had
been planned as early as 1670, was published in 1689-90, a short abstract
of it having previously appeared in French in Le Clerc's _Bibliotheque
Universelle_, 1688. His theoretical works include, further, the two
posthumous treatises, _On the Conduct of the Understanding_ (originally
intended for incorporation in the fourth edition of the _Essay_, which,
however, appeared in 1700 without this chapter, which probably had proved
too extended) and the _Elements of Natural Philosophy_. To political
and po