With the Essays on the Law of Nature more interesting developments begin. The shift from a polemical to a more academic purpose allows a greater speculative freedom. It is no longer necessary to subsume all conceptual possibilities under a single practical precept, and the resulting relaxation generates a more dispassionate and discriminating inquiry. It becomes easier, too, to pick out the more idiosyncratic features of Locke's picture of the world, his own peculiar balance of assurances and anxieties, and to sense how this constricts or enhances his thought. The movement of the pieces is internal, a development from a conventional muddle to a more poised and differentiated intellectual confidence. They are exploratory, moments in the activity of thinking, and not merely apodictic. They do, that is to say, actually develop a position, instead of merely embellishing a single argument. In fact, in the course of their composition, Locke changes his mind about an issue which was to become one of the major themes of his thought—indeed, precisely to set him that general problem which his later works were predominantly attempting to resolve. The foundation of the law of nature in the general consent of men, while difficult to reconcile with the thrust of Locke's thought from the beginning, does make an appearance in the rather off-hand listing of its grounds at the beginning of the Essays.