John Locke

I was bred at Westminster and Christ Church, but I learned more from Boyle’s experiments and Sydenham’s bedside than from schoolmen’s wrangling. Serving Anthony Ashley Cooper as physician and adviser drew me from lecture hall to council chamber, where matters of trade, coin, and law pressed as closely as fevers.

In my Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) I denied innate principles and treated the mind as white paper. All our ideas arise from sensation and reflection; assent ought to follow the evidence and no further. Much of error is but impatience; I made it my business to weigh probabilities and to clear words.

My Two Treatises of Government, published anonymously after the Revolution, grounded rightful rule in the consent of the governed, for the preservation of life, liberty, and estate. Laws must be known and settled; power separated and accountable; and a people may resist when trust is betrayed. Property begins in labor, yet with the proviso that enough and as good be left for others.

I pled for toleration in a Letter first printed in Latin (1689): magistrates have no care of souls. Yet I set limits I deemed needful in my age, and earlier, in drafting the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, I helped fix powers that upheld slavery. I knew exile in Holland after the Rye House scare, returned under William and Mary, served at the Board of Trade, and spent my last years at Oates, writing on money’s value and the education of children.