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,