Locke's political theory has been associated so insistently with a correlation between class or status on the one hand, and differences in rationality on the other, that it may seem perverse of me to attribute to him a democratic view of the human intellect. But that is what I now want to argue.

The gist of my argument in Chapter 3 was that humans are one another's equals, in Locke's eyes, by virtue of their possession of a rather modest intellectual capacity – the capacity to form and manipulate abstract ideas, which enables a person to reason to the existence of God and to the necessity of finding out what if anything God requires of him. The existence of this capacity in a very wide array of the beings we call human is of course compatible with enormous variations in other aspects of their intellect and rationality. And Locke never denies that. But his position seems to be that the capacity to abstract trumps these other differences so far as the establishment of our basic moral status is concerned. Consider the greatest statesman and the most humble day-laborer. Even if they do not differ in their “natural constitutions” (a possibility that Locke leaves open), the first has greater experience and has had more opportunity to exercise his intellectual faculties, while the second “has commonly but a small pittance of knowledge, because his ideas and notions have been confined to the narrow bounds of a poor conversation and employment,” and he is virtually incapable of following a train of argument of any complexity.