INTRODUCTION
The "Father of English empiricism," was born in 1632 at Wrinton in Somerset, son of a Puritan lawyer, and became an Oxford academic and advisor to the Whig first earl of Shaftesbury. His Treatises on Government, in which he denied the Divine Right of Kings, were taken to be incitements to Shaftesbury's plots and the 'Glorious Revolution', leading him to be exiled to France and Holland. When the Prince of Orange become William III of England, Locke returned to become commissioner of appeals, and an advisor on coinage.
The genius of the 'Essay' is in its assertion that men acquire knowledge not through divine revelation or because they possess innate ideas, but because the senses permit him to learn from the external world, and put him in touch with reality. Like Locke's politics, much of this seems accepted wisdom now, but that is what genius makes happen.