John Locke was an English philosopher and the founder of empiricism. He was born in 1632 at Wrinton in Somerset, and was the son of a Puritan attorney. He was educated at Westminster by Puritans, and studied mathematics and medicine at Christ Church College at Oxford. In 1666 he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first earl of Shaftesbury. Later on he became an advisor to the Whig's first earl of Shaftesbury where he lived in 1667. He held …showed first 75 words of 623 total…

…showed last 75 words of 623 total…in touch with reality. He said that the most important responsibility that the government has is to protect the rights of life, liberty, and to safeguard property. Locke's essay also proposed that the human mind is born a blank and knowledge is inscribed into it by experience. "He distinguished the primary qualities of things from the secondary qualities, which he held to be produced by the direct impact of the world on the sense organs."