ABSTRACT
The theory of ideas and knowledge presented in the Essay apparently sprang from disparate concerns linked by a common attitude: first, a conviction arrived at early in Locke's life, and natural enough in the circumstances, that dogmatic and arbitrary claims to divinely instilled religious and moral knowledge constitute a danger to political stability and order; second, an active interest in medicine and corpuscularian science, pursued under the influence and guidance of such distinguished mentors as Boyle and Sydenham, which evidently confirmed and broadened his hostility towards dogmatism and his respect for experience. His preference for reason over inspiration directed his earliest extended epistemological argument, which dates from the early 1660s and is incorporated in the work now known as Essays on the Law of Nature. In this he claimed that knowledge of our duty to God and our fellows lies within the reach of a human intellect employing concepts and
premises derived from sense-experience. His anti-dogmatism in natural philosophy, however, came to follow a more sceptical, if similarly 'empiricist' line: the senses give knowledge of no more than the sensible qualities and powers of particular substances, while the intrinsic properties underlying these appearances and powers remain beyond the reach of our faculties. The 'corpuscularian' or atomic theory is no more than the best available hypothesis.
