ABSTRACT
It is not the case, be it noted, that the empiric tradition was limited to the Anglo-Saxon world with its pioneering background in the experiences told of by Hakluyt and Raleigh and its philosophy in the pages of Francis Bacon. Vesalius and Paracelsus were not of this nation. Cromwell has the stain on his shield of Drogheda. The belief in liberty of expression, liberty of writing, liberty from spying, liberty from arrest for reason of state, by lettres de cachet or otherwise, is no mere Parliamentarian eccentricity. Liberty guarded by consent. Consent, because government was not for the sake of the governors but of the governed. The notions, however, of "the free state" and that "to be commanded we do consent" persisted; nor could all the sophistry of that keen, extravagant mind, Thomas Hobbes, dislodge them.
