3. _The Scientific Influence._ As a fellow-countryman of Ockam and the two Bacons, Locke shows the same anti-mystical and positivist tendencies. He was a thorough Englishman in taste and temperament. When the “new philosophy” was finding its way into the Oxford circle, he was one of the first to welcome it. It came to the University through books; the lecturers were still true to Aristotle. Descartes, Hobbes, and Bacon were widely read, as was also Gassendi’s exposition of Epicurus. Locke himself writes concerning the influence of Descartes upon him. He gave up all thought of becoming a clergyman; and his personal friendship for Bayle, a famous chemist, and for Sydenham, a no less famous physician, interested him in the empirical method as they applied it to chemistry and therapeutics. He owed his philosophical awakening to Descartes and the Port Royal logic. The lucidity of Descartes came to him as an inspiration of intellectual liberty; although he afterwards used the principles that Descartes had taught him to controvert his teacher’s doctrine. During the first period of Locke’s life (1632–1666) he was nothing more than a student of medicine and a meteorological observer. He was the retired scholar who led so placid a life that it portended nothing noteworthy. He was a creditable scholar and teacher, but his life was negative in character. He had passed through stirring times, and they did not stir him. 4. _The Political Influence._ Locke’s interest in politics began when he was thirty-four years old――when he met Lord Ashley at Oxford. For fifteen years he shared the home and fortune of this most remarkable man of affairs in the reign of Charles II. This Lord Ashley (Earl of Shaftesbury) fled to Holland in 1682, and died there the next year. After the death of his patron Locke left England for exile in Holland until 1689, when he returned to England with William and Mary. In Holland he found a brilliant company, exiled from all countries; and he formed an intimate friendship with Limborch, the leader of liberal theology in Holland. Some of the time he lived with a Quaker. Locke’s friendship with Shaftesbury and his residence in Holland confirmed him in his belief in political liberty. So when William entered England and needed literary justification for the Revolution, he got it in Locke’s two _Treatises on Government_. Locke thus became the philosophical defender and intellectual representative of the Revolution that now after fifty years had reached its culmination.