(a) =The Negative Side――Locke and Scholasticism.= Locke issued an avowed defiance to scholasticism in the introduction of his _Essay_. Of the four books into which the _Essay_ is divided, the first was composed last and added as an introductory declaration of independence. If it had been the only part ever written, the anarchism of the eighteenth century would have been right in finding its justification in the _Essay_. To a modern mind this first book looks harmless enough, but in Locke’s time it had a deep sociological and political meaning. It expresses his practical moral defiance of traditional mediævalism. “There exist no innate ideas,” says Locke. Innate ideas mean to him the tyranny of tradition――unexamined and unsubstantiated beliefs, conceptions unverified by fact. They stand for church dogma imposed upon the unthinking masses, the absolutism of monarchy and the divine right of kings, the inherited superstitions about nature. Spinoza had deduced his entire philosophy from the innate idea of substance; Descartes had found at least three innate ideas; Leibnitz believed all ideas innate. Locke pleads for the personal right to examine all ideas. Locke’s critics have claimed that no philosopher ever maintained the existence of innate ideas in the sense in which Locke attacked them. Locke was aiming at something more vulnerable than innate ideas themselves――he was attacking the mediæval habit of the individual who takes a thing as true because the thing has the weight of traditional authority. (b) =The Positive Side――The New Psychology and Epistemology.= If inherited ideas have no weight for Locke, he was bound to show the kind of ideas upon which we can rely. The mind enters upon life with no stock of ideas in trade; how do they arise? The logical outcome of Locke’s disclaimer of scholastic psychology obliged him to construct a new psychology and theory of knowledge. He must offer a psychology as a constructive programme for the individualism of the Enlightenment. In his second book Locke states the positive side of his doctrine by saying that the mind is like a white paper without any original markings; that it gets its markings from the impressions made upon it. Thus to deny innate ideas and to affirm that all ideas are empirically aroused, are the negative and positive sides of the same doctrine of individualism. They are two ways of saying that the mind of the individual is free to judge for itself of the truth or falseness of its experiences.