  As Locke is concerned, it is by now well established that he may have read Gassendi directly, and almost certainly read Bernier. The evidence of influence shows up in some central Lockean theses: the corpuscularian philosophy (here he follows Boyle as surely as he does Gassendi), primary and secondary qualities distinction (a view also held by Boyle, Descartes, Galileo, and others still), and broad commitment to empiricism, including the negative thesis against innate ideas and the positive thesis identifying sensory data as the primary source of ideas. We also see Gassendi's likely inspiration in Locke's probabilist embrace of an understanding of natural philosophy through less-than-certain claims about the world, though his sub-par ranking of ‘sensitive apprehension’ of the world is a rejection of the Gassendist picture of sensory knowledge as the best for which we might hope. Locke's theory of language, too, reveals Gassendi's influence: the notion of nominal essences resonates with the proposal in the Institutio Logica that the meaning of general terms is a function of our sensory-based ideas, which contribute to our picture of the properties we typically associate with the objects of those terms. Finally, in regard to ethics, Locke offers a perfectly Gassendist linkage between good and evil on the one hand and pleasure and pain on the other, and like Gassendi celebrates the notion of personal autonomy, though he locates the seat of moral judgment in external norms (most prominently, the natural law) rather than any internal ideals or virtues such as Gassendi upholds.