not until the sceptical intelligence of Hume was such freedom possible.
But it is clear enough that Locke was shifting to very different ground
from that which arrested the attention of his predecessors. He is
attempting, that is to say, a separation between Church and State not
merely in that Scoto-Jesuit sense which aimed at ecclesiastical
independence, but in order to assert the pre-eminence of the State as
such. The central problem is with him political, and all other questions
are subsidiary to it. Therein we have a sense, less clear in any
previous writer save Machiavelli, of the real result of the decay of
medieval ideals. Church and State have become transposed in their
significance. The way, as a consequence, lies open to new dogmas.

The historical research of the nineteenth century has long since made an
end of the social contract as an explanation of state-origins; and with
it, of necessity, has gone the conception of natural rights as anterior
to organized society. The problem, as we now know, is far more complex
than the older thinkers imagined. Yet Locke's insistence on consent and
natural rights has received new meaning from each critical period of
history since he wrote. The theory of consent is vital because without
the provision of channels for its administrative expression, men tend to
become the creatures of a power ignorant at once and careless of their
will. Active consent on the part of the mass of men emphasizes the
contingent nature of all power and is essential to the full realization
of freedom; and the purpose of the State, in any sense save the mere
satisfaction of material appetite, remains, without it, unfulfilled. The
concept of natural right is most closely related to this position. For
so long as we regard rights as no more than the creatures of law, there
is at no point adequate safeguard against their usurpation. A merely
legal theory of the State can never, therefore, exhaust the problems of
political philosophy.