"usury." Thus natural law came to be differently conceived, but no one doubted there being such a
thing.
Many doctrines which survived the belief in natural law owe their origin to it; for example,
laissez-faire and the rights of man. These doctrines are connected, and both have their origins in
puritanism. Two quotations given by Tawney will illustrate this. A committee of the House of
Commons in 1604 stated:
"All free subjects are born inheritable, as to their land, and also as to the free exercise of their
industry, in those trades whereto they apply themselves and whereby they are to live."
And in 1656 Joseph Lee writes:
"It is an undeniable maxim that every one by the light of nature and reason will do that which
makes for his greatest advantage.... The advancement of private persons will be the advantage of
the public."
Except for the words "by the light of nature and reason," this might have been written in the
nineteenth century.
In Locke's theory of government, I repeat, there is little that is original. In this Locke resembles
most of the men who have won fame for their ideas. As a rule, the man who first thinks of a new
idea is so much ahead of his time that every one thinks him silly, so that he remains obscure and is
soon forgotten. Then, gradually, the world becomes ready for the idea, and the man who proclaims
it at the fortunate moment gets all the credit. So it was, for example, with Darwin; poor Lord
Monboddo was a laughing-stock.
In regard to the state of nature, Locke was less original than Hobbes, who regarded it as one in
which there was war of all against all, and life was nasty, brutish, and short. But Hobbes was
reputed an atheist. The view of the state of nature and of natural law which Locke accepted from
his predecessors cannot be freed from its theological basis; where it survives without this, as in
much modern liberalism, it is destitute of clear logical foundation.
The belief in a happy "state of nature" in the remote past is derived partly from the biblical
narrative of the age of the patriarchs, partly from the classical myth of the golden age. The general
belief in the badness of the remote past only came with the doctrine of evolution.
The nearest thing to a definition of the state of nature to be found in Locke is the following: