- Lived:
- 1632–1704 · England (with six years' exile in Holland)
- Tradition:
- English empiricism; liberal political philosophy
- The Big Idea:
- Everything in the mind comes from experience, and all legitimate government comes from consent — knowledge and power both have to be earned, not inherited.
- In their words:
- "Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: how comes it to be furnished?... To this I answer, in one word, from experience."
- If you remember one thing:
- The fugitive physician who came home from exile with two anonymous books that furnished the modern world — one arguing that your mind is built from experience, the other that your government serves at your pleasure.