"Locke's prose style is the best index of his mind, and the mind of the age as well. Like Wren's architecture, it is harmonious, lucid and severe, rising occasionally into the dome of manly eloquence....In reading Locke we are conscious of being in the presence of a mind which has come to rest in the 'philosophic' world-view. There is no more of the metaphysical flicker from world to world, none of the old imagery struck out in the heat of struggle or in the ardour of discovery. Locke writes philosophy in the tone of a well-bred conversation, and makes it his boast to have discarded the uncouth and pedantic jargon of the schools. His air is that of a gentleman who, along with a group of like-minded friends, proposes to conduct a disinterested enquiry into truth. The very ease of his prose betokens a mind at rest on its own assumptions, and reveals how fully Locke could count on these being also the assumptions of his readers. His vocabulary is almost wholly abstract and uncoloured; what he offers us is always the reasoning of a grave and serious man, not the visions of enthusiasm or the fictions of poetry."
-- The Seventeenth Century Background: The Thought of the Age in Relation to Religion and Poetry, Basil Willey, 1934, p. 266-267.
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