 Clearly, Locke seeks in this passage, among other things, to align his work in the Essay with the work of figures such as Newton. Here we find, at the opening of Locke’s magnum opus, the suggestion that he is content to be an “under-labourer”, a thinker who helps to clear the way for the advance of knowledge. But his list of four “master builders”—Boyle, Sydenham, Huygens, and Newton—might strike us as an odd pairing: what do these four have in common exactly? It has recently been argued that Locke regarded the four as representing the new “experimental philosophy”, and that Locke himself should be interpreted as strongly supporting that orientation within natural philosophy more generally (Anstey 2011: 220). This would become a popular conception of Newton’s philosophical approach, one that played a substantial role in the Enlightenment.