FIRST EDITION of Locke's collected works, including his canonical Essay Concerning Human Understanding. This First printing further includes works by Locke acknowledged only in his will and the earliest to put his name to: Two Treatises on Government as well as the letters on Toleration and The Reasonableness of Christianity.

"Locke was the first to take up the challenge of Bacon and to attempt to estimate critically the certainty and the adequacy of human knowledge when confronted with God and the universe" (PMM 164). A landmark in Enlightenment thought, encapsulated in "the first modern attempt" to analyze human knowledge (PMM 193, 194) Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding: "To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues."

The influence Locke exerted upon Jefferson and other Founding Fathers cannot be overestimated. Indeed some of Jefferson's contemporaries claimed that he borrowed central ideas in the Declaration of Independence directly from the writings of John Locke. Doubtless, the political philosophy Locke bequeathed to America's Founding Fathers gave rise to the spread of freedom across the civilized world and the birth of the freest country in history, the United States of America.

London: for John Churchill and Sam. Manshhip, 1714. Folio, contemporary full calf, rebacked in period style by Bernard Middleton. Complete with and exquisite copper-engraved frontispiece portrait by George Vertue in Volume I and full-page memorial plate engraved plate of Locke's funeral monument. General light wear to bindings; text extremely clean with large margins. A very handsome set. Book #Bv1205. $10,000.

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