Locke, Travel, and Toleration
摘要
John Locke’s interest in ‘travel literature’ is a datum in the scholarship of his life and thought. A perusal of his writings from the 1660s onwards reveals an increasing inclination to invoke examples of foreign practices when surveying a moral, ecclesiological, or political problem. The impetus of Locke’s interest in these matters is typically attributed to a mixture of his intellectual taste, a polymathic attitude to scholarly matters, and the intellectual tasks that he confronted after he joined the Ashley household in 1667. Yet a separate impetus is less often considered: Locke’s direct experience of foreign practices as a traveller himself. The focus of this chapter is on Locke’s experience of religious toleration as a traveller and how it shaped his tolerationism; it draws a general, if confined, picture of the role that travel played in Locke’s advocacy of religious toleration.