Here, in Tristram Shandy (1759–67), Laurence Sterne is playing two competing senses of history against one another. Our modern sense of the word – as the narrative of the past life of a person or nation – had gained ascendancy in Sterne's generation. So when Tristram teases us to say how Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) is a history book, we are at a loss: surely it is not history, but metaphysics. Only when Tristram condescends to tell us that it is ‘a history of what passes in a man's own mind’ do we see he means history in that other sense – a descriptive account of observed phenomena – and that Tristram is just relaying a commonplace. By the 1760s every educated Briton knew that Locke, now a canonized Whig worthy, had set metaphysics on a new, experiential footing. Locke's Essay was the most widely read philosophical book from its publication until well into the nineteenth century, in both the imposing original and the more manageable abridgement for students. And if there inevitably remained a sizeable, if embarrassed, segment of the population who had not read it, the philosophers who followed Locke all felt compelled to write in careful dialogue with his great natural history of human thought.