An essay and two treatises

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.