John Locke

In studying Bentham’s intellectual character we are reminded that, if he was the follower of Hobbes and of Locke, he was the contemporary of Arkwright and of Watt.

This book, of which the last edition appeared in 1884, carried forward the traditional teaching of English philosophers on the lines originally laid down by Locke, whilst in 1861 the Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy constituted Mill’s final reply to one whom he regarded as the chief representative of the intuitionists.

The Lockeian theory of the origin of Law in a Social Compact scarcely conceals its Roman derivation, and indeed is only the dress by which the ancient views were rendered more attractive to a particular generation of the moderns;

The chief lineaments of such a society, as collected from the early chapters in Genesis, I need not attempt to depict with any minuteness, both because they are familiar to most of us from our earliest childhood, and because, from the interest once attaching to the controversy which takes its name from the debate between Locke and Filmer, they fill a whole chapter, though not a very profitable one …

It was the first attempt to re-erect the edifice of human belief after the purely iconoclastic efforts commenced by Bayle, and in part by our own Locke, and consummated by Voltaire;

Locke and others at length discovered, that sovereignty in governments and passive obedience in nations, far from being natural or necessary principles for civil societies, were arbitrary and pernicious notions, capable of being supplanted by opinions more natural;

Locke has somewhere said, “that no man has a right to that, which another has a right to take from him.

It was not for gain, that Bacon, Newton, Milton, Locke, instructed and delighted the world;

“It would be unworthy such men [as Bacon, Newton, Milton, and Locke], to traffic with a dirty bookseller!

And, in addition, the theory is open to precisely the same objection as the counter-hypothesis of Locke, that it antedates the modern juridical conception of Contract.

France gives the initiative (in Descartes), then England assumes the leadership (in Locke), with Leibnitz and Kant the hegemony passes over to Germany.

We are still at work on the problems which were brought forward by Descartes, Locke, and Leibnitz, and which Kant gathered up into the critical or transcendental question.

Surely it is the absence of all these a priori vapourings, common to Locke, Rousseau;

Locke's pretence that the individual citizens reserved certain liberties when the State was formed is of course the merest allegory, without any more foundation, in fact, than Rousseau's Contrat Social.