Abstract
HE MOST regularly encountered criticism of the political theory of John Locke concerns the seeming lack of consistency between his epistemology and his practical doctrine, moral and political. This criticism turns on the contrast between the apparent empiricism of his epistemology and the rationalism of his political theory. In the words of Sir Leslie Stephen, one of the leading students of modern English thought, the object of the Essay on the Human Understanding is to destroy the doctrine of innate ideas, and to reduce all knowledge to a generalisation of experience. ... The treatise on Civil Government . . is the very reverse of all this. . . . It is grounded on two conceptions of the state of nature and the law of nature, and it is difficult to see how Locke could arrive at either of these conceptions from experience.
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