Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

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.