ABSTRACT
Gilbert Ryle once gruffed, ‘Oh, yes, Locke — a two-two.’ He had just awarded Locke the Oxford equivalent of a North American B minus. Certainly, Locke failed to abide by the formula — have few ideas and small ones, and make them elegant. As he himself admitted, he was not ‘nice in the use of phrases’. Still, it is likely that Locke will survive such an assessment since he survived being read at Oxford and elsewhere for fifty years in that assassin’s abridgement — the Pringle-Pattison edition of the Essay.
