I attribute the little I know to my not having been ashamed to ask for information, and to my rule of conversing with all descriptions of men on those topics that form their own peculiar professions and pursuits.

But he did not deny the reality of evil. Michael Zuckert has argued that Locke launched liberalism by tempering Hobbesian absolutism and clearly separating the realms of Church and State. However Locke never refers to Hobbes by name and may instead have been responding to other writers of the day.

He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy he maintained that we are born without innate ideas and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception. John Locke FRS (pron.