government could be shown to be implicit in the natural badness of men,
while Locke assumed their goodness and made his contract essential to
their opportunity for moral expression. Nor did he, like Rousseau, seize
upon the organic nature of the State. To him the State was always a mere
aggregate, and the convenient simplicity of majority-rule solved, for
him, the vital political problems. But Rousseau was translated into the
complex dialectic of Hegel and lived to become the parent of theories he
would have doubtless been the first to disown. Nor was Locke aided by
his philosophic outlook. Few great thinkers have so little perceived the
psychological foundations of politics. What he did was rather to fasten
upon the great institutional necessity of his time--the provision of
channels of assent--and emphasize its importance to the exclusion of all
other factors. The problem is in fact more complex; and the solution he
indicated became so natural a part of the political fabric that the
value of his emphasis upon its import was largely forgotten when men
again took up the study of foundations.

John Locke was born at Wrington in Somerset on the 29th of August, 1632.
His father was clerk to the county justices and acted as a captain in a
cavalry regiment during the Civil War. Though he suffered heavy losses,
he was able to give his son as good an education as the time afforded.
Westminster under Dr. Busby may not have been the gentlest of academies,
but at least it provided Locke with an admirable training in the
classics. He himself, indeed, in the _Thoughts on Education_ doubted the
value of such exercises; nor does he seem to have conceived any
affection for Oxford whither he proceeded in 1652 as a junior student of
Christ Church. The university was then under the Puritan control of Dr.
John Owen; but not even his effort to redeem the university from its
reputation for intellectual laxity rescued it from the "wrangling and
ostentation" of the peripatetic philosophy. Yet it was at Oxford that