The famed philosopher John Locke was born in the English village of Wrington on this day in 1632. He started his career in medicine but became a passionate reader of philosophy in school. Locke then became the personal physician to a British earl who encouraged him to write his ideas down. One of his early essays was the Two Treatises of Government (which he began drafting in 1679), which advocates for a government based on individual consent to be governed as opposed to an absolute monarchy. That work would be deeply influential on the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution.
He fled to the Netherlands after being accused of participating in a plot to kill King Charles II. (He hadn't.) Still, he returned after the U.K. had its own liberalizing Glorious Revolution in 1688. A year later he published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, arguing that all knowledge is based on real-life experiences—an idea fundamental to the scientific method's requirement that hypotheses should be tested in the real world. He died in 1704.
You can read more about Locke at Biography.com.
