An imagined gathering
1690 · London, England
Locke, newly returned from exile, explains the Essay and the Treatises to Newton and Leibniz at his own table.
Locke has returned to England after the revolution and published both the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Government in the same year. He has invited Newton, whose Principia he has been reading, and Leibniz, whose metaphysics he cannot quite accept.
The table talk is about where ideas come from and where authority comes from. Locke argues that the mind begins empty and that government begins in consent; Newton, who has his own reasons for distrusting speculation, agrees about the first more readily than the second; Leibniz, who believes in innate ideas and in a pre-established order, disputes both. They eat a roast goose, buttered peas, and an apple tart, and the disagreement is as amiable as such things get.
Host: John Locke
Isaac Newton — President of the Royal Society and the most famous natural philosopher in England.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — Hanoverian court counsellor, in London on diplomatic business.
a period dish
First course
a period dish
John Locke
Life, liberty, and property as claims that precede government and that government exists to protect.
John Locke
Locke's account of government as a trust held from the people, revocable when it fails them.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The mathematics of change and accumulation, invented independently by Newton and Leibniz and the subject of a bitter priority dispute.
This gathering is an editorial recreation grounded in the biographies of those present; it did not necessarily take place as described.