Tilly: Locke's sphere of influence and theological influence

Locke's teachings became the starting point of many schools of thought, and his influence, like Descartes, crossed the boundaries of his time and country. The words that Schiller once used to evaluate a great man also applied to him: the essence of his bones could last for many centuries. His Treatise on Human Reason was the first attempt in the history of contemporary philosophy to comprehensively study the theory of knowledge and pioneered a movement that produced Berkeley and Hume, with Kant as its pinnacle. His empirical psychology became the source of Brown and Hartley's British associativism, and Condiac and Altes in France also drew nourishment from it. His ethical philosophy was inherited and revised by the works of Shaftesbury, Hutchison, Ferguson, Hume and Adam Smith. His theory of education influenced the great French writer Rousseau and, through Rousseau, the whole world. His political ideas, brilliantly detailed in Voltaire's work and Montesquieu's On the Spirit of the Law, acquired a radical new look in Rousseau's Social Contract, and his whole intellectual spirit promoted the deist religious movement in England and France. More than any of his previous thinkers, Locke reflected more faithfully and intensively on the power of the Enlightenment. He represents the spirit of the contemporary, the spirit of independence and criticism, the spirit of individualism, democracy, the spirit of the Reformation, and the spirit of the political revolutions of the 16th and 17th centuries, which culminated in the Enlightenment of the 18th century. No contemporary thinker has been more successful in leaving the imprint of ideas on the hearts and institutions of the people than he has. We will examine Locke's influence in the following areas: (1) religion, (2) theory of knowledge, (3) ethics, and (4) economics.

Deism, as a dynamic movement, began with Locke's book The Rationality of Christianity (1695). Locke set reason as the ultimate test of revelation; there is no doubt that the truth of the apocalypse is absolutely certain; but human reason is the yardstick of revelation itself. Locke agreed with Cherbury's Herbert to accept certain propositions of natural theology or rational theology as true; but he did not consider them to be innate. Deists applied Locke's ideas and placed revelation under rational standards, searching for God's true revelation in natural law. On this basis, Christianity was shaped as a religion of reason; it was no longer mysterious, but as old as creation. In 1696, John Toland wrote Christianity Is Not Mysterious, which was condemned by the Church of England. In his Letter to Selena (1704) and Pantheism (1720), he embraced a natural religion, which he called pantheism (a new word of his own creation). A. Collins, the author of Dialogue of Free Thought (1713), opposed church intervention through a critical discussion of the Bible. Other deist works include Tindal's Christianity As Old as Creation (1730); Woolston's Six Miracles of the Messiah (1727–1730); Chubb's The True Gospel of Jesus Christ (1738); and Morgan's The Moral Philosopher (1737). Conybeare (1732) and Joseph Butter (1736) defended the religion of revelation against the rationalist theology of deism.